By MICHAEL DAVIDOW, Radio Free New Hampshire
It was a heartwarming article in the New York Times, which takes pride in being our nation’s newspaper of record. A restaurant in Syria is going out of its way to serve kosher meals to Jewish visitors. Syria’s new government is promoting decency, in other words, and so are the Syrian people.
To help illuminate this particular act of kindness, the Times further noted that Syria once had Jews of its own, explaining that “many left as wars broke out in the years after the state of Israel was established.”
The problem is that Syria’s Jews did not simply leave. They were killed. Their families were attacked. They had their rights taken away, their properties destroyed, their synagogues smashed. They were officially targeted, unofficially terrorized, and today their tragedy gets glossed over in the pages of the New York Times. Jews had lived in Syria for thousands of years. They were part of Syrian history. They belonged there. They’re gone.
The historical imagination is a fragile one. We can’t know the past; we can only imagine it. We draw a best-fit line from the facts at hand and we color in the resulting outline with the emotions of the day. Today’s emotions mandate that innocent Palestinians were robbed of their homes by evil Jews, so we need to fix that wrong by giving them their homes back.
The New York Times contributes to that narrative by flat-out ignoring any data points that complicate it. (And yes, the reporter who wrote that article states in her official biography that her “focus is on Palestinians and how they live under occupation and the culture they have managed to preserve.” But hey. Even in Mamdani’s New York City, a government’s secular bona fides can still be measured by how well it tolerates Jews, so writing about it remains acceptable.)
To clarify one point: why nobody calls for the Jews of Syria to have the right of return, like they do for the Arabs of Palestine. Syria’s Jewish refugees were welcomed by the state of Israel, they built homes for themselves, and they have prospered accordingly. They are no longer victims so they don’t need attention (nobody is asking for ethnic Germans to pry their pre-war homes back from Russia either).
The Arabs of Palestine had no such luck. The Arab countries to which they fled kept them segregated because they all figured Israel wouldn’t last. Bad idea, first disproved by all those wars that broke out (in which Syria played an enthusiastic role), later magnified and made permanent by the cesspool of anti-semitism known as the United Nations, and now raised to gospel by American progressives, who use the New York Times for their history lessons.
The present dominates the past and the here overwhelms the there. Universities teach that white westerners perfected the slave trade, imperialism, and racism; that western ideals are cynical and self-serving; that we own some sinister monopoly on injustice and we have therefore had a unique and malevolent imprint on how our world has evolved. Yet these theories ignore the most basic fact of human existence: none of us are that much better, or that much worse, than any of us. Not only was slavery practiced from time immemorial, but sovereign Africans benefited from it just like westerners did.
Likewise, empires have risen and fallen all across the globe since the dawn of time. Not just the Americans and the British and the French but the Mongols, the Zulu, and the Han have all ridden roughshod over as many of their neighbors as they could. (College kids, pay attention: many countries are still at it.)
We are not just the latest in time for those sins, though; we are also the structure against which our children need to rebel. But thankfully, all who have despised the modern world as guided by America will soon have the chance to see and judge its replacement. Donald Trump’s destruction of the western alliance is giving our competitors all the opportunity they need to improve upon it. Whether the twin western ideals of personal liberty and individual worth survive this transition remains to be seen. Those are also fragile things, sourced from holy scripture – and if anything is suspect to the global left, it’s revelation.
When Trump falls at last and we can survey the wreckage he has left behind, we will need to build anew with a firm and healthy grasp of reality. We may not be able to know the past, but myths and memories nevertheless inform the foundations of our society. And when half-truths and outright lies get incorporated into our basic institutions, we know what happens. They fail.
Davidow writes Radio Free New Hampshire for InDepthNH.org. He is also the author of Gate City, Split Thirty, and The Rocketdyne Commission, three novels about politics and advertising which, taken together, form The Henry Bell Project, The Book of Order, and The Hunter of Talyashevka, Chanukah Land can be found here. And his latest novel Interdiction can be found here.