M. and Palestine - Part II

A history of my history with Gaza, continued

1998 was a rough year for me, as I lost a job I loved and was very good at, as a managing editor at Genre magazine. The momentum of my screenplay, which had come quite close to getting greenlit, had never recovered from the loss of one director in 1992 (lung cancer) and then the second in 1996 (AIDS). In need of money, I started picking up a few shifts back at a leather bar, but that felt like I was going backwards. The new drug cocktails had come on line, so I should have been happy and relieved, but I didn’t trust that these new meds would keep working, and was struggling with depression. I was 40 and didn’t know what the hell to do with the future that had just been (maybe) restored to me. And I truly didn’t realize how heavily the burden of collective grief for all those I’d outlived was weighing on me, (when I wasn’t covering up the PTSD with drugs and alcohol, that is.)

In November of that year, I was working at the back bar at the Gauntlet on a fairly quiet night, and a handsome, Mediterranean-looking man ordered a drink. I was no doubt playing Mark the Entertainer, which is what a good bartender does if he wants to get well-tipped, and he seemed to enjoy it. I don’t know why I didn’t recognize him right off, or vice-versa, but we’d last met in such a different context that this one almost constituted a disguise.
I think M. asked first.
“Did you used to live in New York?”
“Sure, did.”
“Mark, it’s M.” (His is an Arab name, so that’s all I needed.)

It was an emotional moment, more happy than sad, but it had only been 3 ½ years since David’s death, and I knew without even asking that the gash in his heart was still fresh and bleeding. I found out that M. had sold the apartment in Washington Heights and moved to a house here, which was closer to most of his film work, although he was still on location a lot. I surmised the bigger reason was probably because New York was inextricably linked to David and it was too painful to stay there. Sunny California was a fresh start.

After a few drinks, he asked what I was doing for Thanksgiving, as he was hosting a dinner for “strays” that Thursday. Sure, I said, as long as I can bring my new dog. I had just adopted a German Pointer mix who had been rescued in a park with a muzzle on. Sure, said M.

The dog was a suggestion of my therapist, who told me I had so much love to give and there was nothing like a dog to absorb every bit of it. (He was a smart man.) I immediately thought my new dog a perfect creature, but was not crazy about the name he’d come with, “Fred,” and wanted to rename him. After meeting a dog on Runyon Canyon by the name of “Banff,” I thought I might also find a place name that I could be sure absolutely no other dog was likely to have.

That morning, the New York Times (delivered to my doorstep in those pre-Internet days) had an article that gave me incredible hope, about an area of the world I always followed more closely than anyone I knew. They’d opened an international airport in the Gaza Strip, and for a moment, the future seemed wide open for the people who lived there.

It seemed a perfect topic of conversation for Thanksgiving at a Palestinian’s, in addition to the question I’d already thrown out, “Anybody have a good idea for a better name for my dog than Fred?”
”Gaza,” suggested M.
It was perfect.

M. and I never became the kind of friends who regularly hang out, but we occasionally run into each other at the gym, or exchange emails, like after I sent him a copy of Ink from the Pen, or my retrieved student film, “1980.” On one occasion, he shared some articles he wrote in college that he’d just rediscovered that were so well written I wondered why he hadn’t pursued a career in journalism. If memory serves, he considered it, as he’s one of those truly hyper-talented humans who could have done anything he put his mind to.

So my readers know the saga of the family in Gaza I have basically adopted, and how it came at a most inopportune time financially, because the company I do most of my work for has completely changed how and when they pay, and I’ve been waiting three months for a check. But as the situation in Gaza has deteriorated, I simply could not turn away from them, credit card debt be damned. So I have gratefully accepted contributions from friends, and decided to ask M. if he might help.

What followed was a very long conversation about our mutual despair over the situation and fury at Israel and the United States. He read me the piece that follows and I pleaded with him to set up a Substack blog, and make it his first foray into social media – he’s seriously thinking of it. I truly believe his acumen with words can move the needle.

If this piece get enough “likes,” maybe he’ll be convinced not to keep his light under a bushel.

(The pseudonym he adopted, “Ahad Ha'am” means “one of the people” in Hebrew.)

In "A Strategy for Israel in the Nineteen Eighties" Oded Yinon writes:

"The Moslem Arab World is built like a temporary house of cards put together by foreigners without the wishes and the desires of the inhabitants having been taken into account."

That sentence, written some 40 years ago about the Arabs, describes Israel exactly.

Israel is not a nation, it is an artificial construct held together with spit and chewing gum, whose polity is riven with severe internal fractures: the secular Jews and the Orthodox Jews hate each other; the Arab Jews and other brown Jews are looked down upon and discriminated against by the white European Jews and incur their hostility; the Western European Jews (particularly the Germans) have long considered the Eastern European Jews as nothing but low-class trash. All of these Jews, white and brown, look down upon and discriminate against the black Jews to whom they refer with the Yiddish insult "schwartzes"
(שוואַרz, shvarts), the word a cousin to the “N” word in American English, and whom they herd into a Negev desert ghetto. And any Jew that would try to put a brake on the settler movement would incur the tremendous hostility and armed wrath of the settlers.

All of the racist "chosen people" that populate Israel have nothing but a profound religious contempt for the Muslim and Christian Israelis that are either nominal citizens of the Jewish state or the subjects of a brutal occupation.

The thing that has kept this particular “house of cards” from falling apart is the threat from the outside, the common enemy.

Israel has always claimed to be existentially threatened by the hostility that surrounds it. Exaggerating and aggravating that hostility has kept the polity together and, for 75 years, has gained Israel enormous support through massive moral, financial, and military assistance. When Israel reaches it putative goal of eliminating the threat (a threat that has never really existed), and it becomes clear that it is no longer in danger, it will lose billions of dollars in US weapons aid; it will lose many millions of dollars in donations from world Jewry and Evangelical Christians; and it will lose the interest of many Jews who have supported Israel only out of the fear of the state’s “existential threat.” Israel would no longer be able to trivialize the holocaust by using it as a bludgeon to beat Jews and non-Jews into supporting it. And, most relevantly, these societal fissures will explode.

If Hamas were truly interested in destroying the state of Israel, it should have done nothing but sit on its hands until the Israeli Jews started shooting each other. They were well on the way to doing it. It would have been only a matter of time before the hostile demonstrations about the balance of power between the legislature, executive, and judiciary that were blossoming in Israel, and the fear from the secular left that the state would become a religious tyranny, another Iran, would turn into a shooting match. Recall, Yitzhak Rabin was shot by a Jew.

If Hamas’ goal was indeed to see the state of Israel destroyed, it should have just waited for the Israeli Jews to do it. Israel is another Lebanon waiting to happen. And it will happen.

Israel is Hitler’s great revenge against the Jewish people. He is laughing in his grave.

Ahad Ha'am

P.S.
1) M. did finally meet someone else. It’s been serious for about two years now, I think.
2) The Gaza Airport was destroyed by the Israelis in 2002.
3) My wonderful Gaza died in 2013, at 16. His name prompted many a conversation.
4) My Gazan family had to flee the Israeli offensive and relocate to a tent in the south, taking with them hardly anything at all. Mahmoud carried his disabled brother on his back over 10 kilometers. My generous friends have helped me help them at least buy some bedding and cookware, and though there is practically no food left in Gaza, because they have money, they have been able to get some rice, lentils and zucchini. But they eat once a day, and are malnourished and exhausted in every way you can imagine. Every morning, I note that the IDF killed another 80 -100 people while I slept, and anxiously text to find out if they’re still alive.
As I reread this post, I feel so many parallels between my mindset during the time of AIDS and now. A sense of dread and impending doom permeates every thought. But hope is a stubborn thing. Even when you reject it, it won’t be exiled. It seems to be a necessity.