Two years ago, shortly after the intifada exploded in the West Bank and Gaza, five Chicago Jews and five Chicago Palestinians met for dinner. They weren’t sure they’d ever meet again, for they knew that the long, brutal conflict in the Middle East had built fear, mistrust, even hatred between their two communities here.
Wheeler’s parents had fled Lithuania when they were young. When she was a child, she heard about the pogroms in Eastern Europe, including one in which most of her father’s family was killed. “My father’s parents were put with all the other Jews living in their small town in the synagogue and burned up. And that was not anything unusual at that time. Only one 14-year-old cousin of ours escaped the town to tell about it.” An aunt and uncle on her mother’s side died in concentration camps during World War II.
She called around Chicago, trying to find out what dialogue groups here were doing. But no one she spoke to had ever heard of a group in the city that had lasted very long. Those that had started had soon dissolved–in part, she believes, because the members were leaders in their communities and didn’t feel free to speak openly. She decided that if she could pull a group together, she wanted people in it who wouldn’t feel constrained by having to answer to a constituency.
After World War I large numbers of Jews emigrated to Palestine, many of them fleeing oppression in Europe. As more and more of them arrived, there were more and more clashes between them and Arabs who feared they were about to be forced out of their homes. In early 1947 the British decided to wash their hands of the mess they had created and turned over to the UN the problem of how to divide Palestine between the two groups. War broke out shortly after the UN General Assembly agreed on a partition plan late that year. In May 1948 Israel declared itself a state.
Yet Beidas admires his uncles’ marriages. “All the differences and all the hate, yet somehow their love just passed everything else and just was stronger. Even after my uncle passed away, or the separation of my other uncle, it’s just like nothing shakes it. It’s something to be envied–somehow you hope you have that universality in you.”
“They want to start when they have the kingdom of Israel in Palestine. Well, how about going back before that, when they came from Egypt as invaders? The thing is, where are you going to start the argument? Then you want to go back before that? It becomes ridiculous. Instead of doing that, I think it’s better to say, how are we going to deal with what we have right now?”
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Becker understood that sticking together as Jews had for centuries been a defense against anti-Semitism. But she gradually came to believe that their justified fear of provoking even more anti-Semitism shouldn’t stop Jews from publicly questioning each other. “Just because I speak critically about some Israeli policies doesn’t mean that all Jews will be hurt. And I can be proud of things Israel has done–even if I acknowledge that serious mistakes have been made.”
