First, a personal history of being bullied. What we called "bullying" on the streets of Brooklyn in the 1960's was at once heartbreaking and frightening, yet strangely benign by modern standards, as no one ever was murdered or committed suicide. But I remember vividly: if you bought French fries at the truck outside school, some kid who seemed twice as tall as you would relieve you of them almost immediately. There were predatory kids who would surge up and take your lunch money without ever showing a weapon. There were kids who would shout insults and then offer to fight you. And I did get punched a lot, gratuitously, in the chest or even the chin, but somehow only once, and never hard enough that I had to go to the hospital-- or even tell anyone.
I remember one antisemitic incident (the amount of antisemitism I have experienced in my 72-year life has been vanishingly small). I was walking home on Ocean Hill Road in Woods Hole, alone, at sunset when a tall kid (bullies were almost all a few years older and a foot taller) surged up and said, "Are you Jewish? I can smell a Jew a mile away". He kept pushing me and waiting for me to run away or to hit him. By now I had learned a tactic which always worked, and which is a variation on the one I use in similar circumstances today: I did not retreat, but folded my hands behind my back, and said calmly: "I am not going to fight you". After another minute or two, not getting either of the reactions he expected, he gave up and left.
After I turned sixteen or so, the bullying magically stopped, overnight. For decades the only people who felt entitled to bully me were cops-- and that's another essay, one which I think I have already written.
Now, these past three years, its happening again, and oddly, even when it is thirty or even fifty year old men, both the mentality and the tactics are identical to what I experienced in the P.S. 193 schoolyard when I was twelve. While older bullies targeting older children are relatively terse, even feral, the younger bully-in-training was loquacious. I remember the kid who would follow you around, posting himself right in your face, exclaiming: "I can stand anywhere I want!" Now older men who presumably graduated from a liberal arts college are using that tactic, standing six inches away, holding their phones an inch from my face and shouting: "I have free speech rights! This is a public street! I can stand anywhere I want!"
Here's the context. Every Sunday afternoon in the town of Sag Harbor, I marshal a vigil for the Palestinian dead, which was started by two Jewish women, and on a given day includes Protestants, Catholics and some Muslim people. We stand in a line alongside the main highway (route 114), holding signs. Someone reads an introduction, then someone else the names of dead Palestinian children for about ten minutes, then we stand in silence for a while, then one of us reads a poem by a Palestinian author. Then we are silent a while longer, then we break the line and stand in a circle, and take turns saying something personal and supportive to each other.
From the very beginning-- and the reason I gravitated to the security role-- was because random passersby would feel entitled to scream threats in our faces, sometimes quite dire. Starting at about age 69, gray-haired and stooped, I have heard it all: people telling me rather convincingly that they were about to beat the crap out of me, take me apart, rip my beard off. I have been struck in the chest with an open palm, and hit with an Israeli flag, never very hard. My security partner, a much shorter woman, has been spat on, and her phone struck from her hand. Some of those people I wasn't very concerned about: men much shorter than me, not physically imposing, and only twenty years younger. On the other hand, there have been many I believed capable: muscular twenty- and thirty somethings much taller than me, liquor-on-the-breath inebriated, or visibly unhinged. I have been doing this almost every Sunday (I have missed only two) for almost three years. It seems a miracle that no one has ever thrown that punch. I believe staying calm has helped, and almost never engaging verbally-- when I look at someone calmly and stay silent, they run out of rhetoric in a few minutes. Being old and white probably helps, though a certain number of the screamers assume I am Arab. A man filming me from inches away narrated, "Here is Hassan, the terrorist of Sag Harbor", and I could not resist replying, though I knew better: "Yes, Hassan, who was bar mitzvahed at Temple Beth Elohim in 1967". From my Jewish interlocutor, a pained gasp I have heard a few times: "You're a Jew?" And then, immediately and inevitably: "You're no Jew/ You're a fake Jew/ You're a traitor/ You're a self hating Jew". Someone even shouted "Prove you're a Jew!" But I had forgotten to bring my yellow ID card with the big Star of David on it issued by the Nazi authorities, so I had to ask the person to take my faith on faith.
About six months in, a man named Mitchell Agoos began to lead a counterprotest on the adjoining corner. His First Amendment right to do so was absolute-- if he stayed on his corner. Agoos quickly began steering the most unhinged and inebriated people who approached him across the street to us, and would stand about ten feet away, grinning, while they screamed threats in my face. After a summer of this (his counterprotest evaporates after Labor Day, we are there year round), it occurred to him that on the day when the violence he tries to incite comes to fruition-- one of his mentees throws a punch, or worse-- he will be an accessory. So now Agoos largely stays on his corner and sends people across the street to me without trailing them.
One memorable incident was a perfect reenactment of a scene which could have happened in Berlin in 1932. Two women in a car slowed down to talk to Agoos, and I saw him point to me: "See that guy? He's a Jew!" The women then drove fifty feet, stopped near me and began to shout insults. I pointed out to them how they were re-enacting a perfectly antisemitic script, and had the slight satisfaction of seeing confusion and doubt. "We're not antisemites!" one said. "We are supporting the Jews!" In a recent letter to the weekly paper, the Star, I pointed out that there are two classes of people insulting me: a relatively small group of brazen, loud liars, in which I include Agoos, who accuse me of antisemitism and of support of terrorism, and know their words are utterly false; and a much larger group, arguably more dangerous to democracy, of people like those women, who have liberal arts degrees but have lost the capacity to think, who are easily conned in a moment to engage in mindless mob action.
For three years, on Sunday afternoons, I have been relentlessly bullied, mainly by Jewish people, and sometimes by others purporting to act on behalf of Jewish people. Lets forget them and concentrate only on the ones I knew to be Jewish, because they said so (and I believed them), because of yarmulkes, or who were Israeli-accented and often wrapped in Israeli flags. There is a group, in my mind likely a small minority, of people I have always been aware of, like Agoos, who regard it as their life's mission to run interference for Israel, for any violence, cruelty, or fraud, and whose central technique is to bully, dox, defame and frighten anyone who speaks up for Palestinians. They know perfectly well, when they shout that I am a "Jew hater", that I am not, and they don''t care. But I suspect that many more of them, are people who under other circumstances would be capable of compassion or normal (normative) decency, but who are easily conned, like the two women in the car-- someone says "antisemitism!" and they join a mob. With some of the people I encounter, like the man who screamed in my face last Sunday for twenty minutes or more that the Jews had inhabited the Holy Land for six thousand years, while the Moslem religion was "invented" in the year 800-- as if that were an excuse for mass murder-- I really would like to see...who they were in fourth grade. Were they the bullies then, or the bullied? I identify Jewish people as the latter, the bullied, through-out history, who through courage, endurance, stubbornness, intellect and culture, have hung on. The awareness of having been targeted, exploited, pushed around, robbed, and chased from place to place (when not murdered) is immanent in Jewish culture, in the way I, a second generation American, was raised to think in the 1960's, in the humor. When someone commented that we had some commonalty through being from Ukraine, I thought, but did not say, that her gentile ancestors on horseback might have chased my frantically pedestrian Jewish ones around. When a Jewish person inexplicably had blue eyes (we don't, usually), the saying went, "Great-grandma was raped by a Cossack". I was ready to attribute to Lenny Bruce a routine about the confusing Jewish holiday calendar being designed to throw off the planners of progroms, but Google Gemini can't find it, so perhaps it was my own.
That said: I do not believe that the majority of the second group, the impulsive, inspired, conned screamers in their forties and fifties, were bullies in the fourth grade. There is a very simple, even at this point trite, explanation for how the victims become killers: identification with the aggressor. I believe that is part of the through-line of Israeli history: the total amorality and viciousness of official policy admits no other comparison.As a political nation-state, Israel excels at murder, being able (as Ronen Bergman reveals in Rise and Kill First), to deploy poison, or beatings to death with vases, as convenient, into hotel rooms, homes and public places around the globe (or more recently, that business with the beepers in Lebanon, of which our more thuggish interlocutors are so proud). A few days ago, I saw a report that israel had bombed a warehouse of medical supplies in Gaza, with no further explanation; Ockham's Razor suggests none is needed, that it was bombed because of the medical supplies. The conned element must shut down, stop listening, disbelieve, much of the time, or do a handwave: "You don't know, there were probably terrorists inside". Yet Gaza has been leveled, more than a hundred thousand-- maybe even a multiple, no one really knows-- have been killed, and the bombing continues.
The IHRA standards of antisemitism, a private speech code being adopted as law in various states and, most dangerously, adopted by the Trump administration in Title VI rulings, includes various criticisms of Israel as antisemitic-- something which should have offended every Jewish person with a college degree, and grossly offends the First Amendment. One of the assertions of the code: calling an Israeli a Nazi is antisemitic, no matter what they said or did.
In the 16,000 page Mad Manuscript, I analyze the phenomenon in which, in a few short years, Woodrow Wilson converted an isolationist and apathetic American public, who couldn't care less about the War in Europe, into a seething mass manifesting "flag kissing mobs" which targeted, beat and sometimes killed anyone they thought had a German accent. The IHRA standards also, most outrageously, call an antisemite anyone who tries to hold Israel to a higher moral standard than anyone else. Go ahead, indict me and the prophet Isaiah: we both thought that Jews were better than that.
I imagine a genocide class in a university five hundred years from now (assuming there are universities and classes in that century) with parallel case studies of Auschwitz and Gaza. That breaks my heart.