Thursday, November 04, 2021
Elder of Ziyon
Our weekly column from the humor site PreOccupied Territory.
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Toronto, November 4 - Students and community figures devoted to fighting Zionism and anyone associated with the movement voiced a sense of letdown today upon discovering that this week's anniversary of a 1938 pogrom throughout the Third Reich against Jews, Jewish institutions, and Jewish-owned businesses involves commemoration in a subdued, somber manner, and not, as they had assumed, an occasion to try it again.
Abu Bakr Jabareen, a spokesman for the Free Palestine Coalition at area university campuses and mosques, informed a shocked group of activists that their planned regimen of beatings, lynching, arson, vandalism, and violence targeting Jews, synagogues, Jewish schools, Jewish-owned shops and offices, and other identifiable elements of Jewry, will not in fact take place, because it turns out Kristallnacht has a mournful and didactic character, not a celebratory one.
"We're all disappointed," acknowledged Jabareen, addressing volunteers from Students for Justice in Palestine, If Not Now, Jewish Voice for Peace, and assorted organizations advocating BDS. "I, too, thought that Kristallnacht called for what we've always envisioned we could do if we made the political decisions. But I found out just now that our reenactment of justice against suspected Zionist targets and those who condone them might be illegal. We could get in trouble if we hold it as planned."
The activists decried the discovery. "That's just not fair," declared Louise Hoffman of If Not Now. "How much says Zionists slandered us to the police, who will now be expecting us to go rioting and looting, when in fact we'll be doing something that to the untrained eye might look like rioting and looting, but is actually fighting for justice for Palestinians? What a cynical Zionist ploy."
"Now what are we going to do with all this gear?" wondered Yusef Najjar of SJP. "I can't very well go burning down the Hillel on campus now, or any of the synagogues in the area, much as I want to express my identity and sense of justice."
"But that's not really what the disappointment is about, I guess," he sighed. "Anti-Zionism has long been more about making Jews feel insecure everywhere because they have the temerity to want to feel secure in a place of their own, where dominant cultures dictate whether Jews will be safe, let alone prosperous. Obviously that's not acceptable - it goes against everything we've always known to be true. I hope I'm not to old to enjoy the day when that truth reemerges and we can go kick some Jews to make ourselves feel better. I think today's youth are so troubled precisely because they don't have the reassurance that no matter how bad things are for them, at least they're not as lowly as the Jew. We need that back."
