Meeting Israeli Michelle

I MET HER online, in the year two thousand, when America Online (AOL) was king of the internet, and folks did their chatting in chatrooms (remember those? Maybe not...), and in private messaging, which AOL called "instant messages". (AOL was forced by the courts to surrender their monopoly on messaging, which, coupled with their disastrous merger with Time Warner, contributed to the company's demise.) Her name was Michelle, she had been born in the nation of Israel in 1972, and had spent the first eight years of her life there, before moving with her family to New Jersey, America. In Joisey, things hadn't gone entirely her way. She had a good job, but had somehow gotten mixed up with the Russian mafia, which had insinuated itself into the American criminal economy following the fall of the Soviet Union. The mob turned her into a prostitute. She had three children by one of them, who beat her often, children who would by now be adults in early middle age. I hope the entire family is still alive. She said she wanted to escape, to get away to some remote place. She mentioned Australia. I suggested Arkansas, where I live. What could possibly be more remote than that? We made plans. She would ge here on the last day of 2000, and I would help her get set up, just as the new century (2001) was beginning. That, of course, never happened. Instead, at the last moment, one of her good friends proposed to her, and she accepted. I hope Michelle Barkman is alive, and doing well. By this time long distance telephone had already become cheap, and we talked for hours, which was and still is to my thinking much preferrable to text messsaging on internet messenger. Some way or another the subject of Israel-Palestine was broached, perhaps inevitably. My view was, and remains, that the establashment of Israel as a nation rather than merely a religion or ethnic entity was ill conceived in violence and poorly executed; a bad idea in general, replacing a perfectly acceptable situation in the middle east with chaos and perpetual war. She begged to differ, and went on to express much more. What become clear is that she hated Palestinians with every fiber of her Jewish being. Yes, she called them "animals", the usual epithet. There are no Palestinian civilians. They are all terrorists, etc.. I countered with my usual parry to this tired argument. If they are animals,what,then,are we? I quoted Bertolt Brecht, which I like to do. "I make friends with people. And I wear a derby on my head, as others do. I say, "They are strangely stinking animals". And I say: "No matter, I am too"". That didn't work. It seldom does, although it should. She was relentless. Palestininas are animals. The rest of us are something entirely different. Angels, perhaps? Nowadays when I think of Michelle, which is not often, I not only wonder how she is doing, and whether she is a grandmother by now, but also, I remember her passionate hatred of Palestinians in context with the world of twenty twenty five. Israel is such a tiny little country, she opined, Why can't they just let us exist? She never mentioned the nuclear bombs or militaristic Israeli national military might, or the fact that Israel, since 1948, has been and remains an aggressive expanionist nation state. I have little doubt that she wholeheartedly supports the current genocide in Gaza, or that she refuses to see it as genocide, incorrectly. Bertolt Brecht wrote: "In the earthquakes to come it is to be hoped I shan't allow bitterness to quench my cigar's glow". And: "There shall remain of our cities but the wind that blew through them." I hope MIchelle is alive and well, and has mellowed, at least somewhat, the way my parents finally, late in their lives, began to see Japanese and Germans as human beings. Today I still despise the aggressive expanionist Israeli nation state more than ever, which is a burden I choose to bear. As for Michelle, assuming she still regards the Palestinains as animals, I hope that she at least has begun to understand that, as Bertolt Brecht reminded us, so are the rest of us.