Now What? Reflections on Israel and the Palestinians

By Spider Kedelsky
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I was six years old. As dawn transitioned into daylight I came up to the top deck of the Marine Carp, a World War 2 freighter now outfitted for passenger travel. We left a New Jersey pier a few weeks earlier. Through the morning’s haze I saw land. It was 1949 and this was not just any land, it was The Promised Land and we had come to live in the new state of Israel.

In 1912, my maternal grandfather, Benjamin Malamud, like many young Russian Jews inspired by the modern Zionist movement of the late-19th century made the perilous journey from his shtetl in Ukraine to Ottoman-ruled Palestine. He left in Ukraine his wife and young daughter, my mother, planning to bring them once he had established a new life in Israel. His stay was not long.

As a Russian citizen, a dubious honor for Jews, he was considered an enemy alien by the Turks once World War 1 began, so he and other young Russians were summarily deported. Benjamin made his way to the New World city of New York where his wife and child eventually joined him after a harrowing trip across Europe. America became their new Promised Land.

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It’s a painful and perilous time to be a Jew with a strong emotional attachment to Israel. This in no way tempers my horror with the slaughter taking place in Gaza. Nothing can justify the killing of thousands of civilians nor the starvation of many others in a war of retribution against an implacable foe. Nor do I believe that any justification exists, certainly not as “an act of armed resistance” as some have called it, for the savage October 7 attack by Hamas slaughtering civilians and taking many hostages.

https://www.postalley.org/2024/03/20/now-what-reflections-on-israel-and-the-palestinians/

Please read the whole thing. This is a very well written editorial.