In a recent piece by Times of Israel writer, Talia Lavin, she promotes David Harris-Gershon's forthcoming book, What Do You Buy the Children of the Terrorist Who Tried to Kill Your Wife?
Harris-Gershon is a frequent contributor to the left-leaning American political blog Daily Kos - as was I - and to Michael Lerner's Tikkun Magazine. His wife was injured in a Jihadi attack at Hebrew University in 2002, which left two other people dead. His book is a personal memoir of the soul-searching that he went through following this attack and his efforts to understand what it would take for a young Arab man to commit such violence against perfectly innocent Jewish people sitting in a university cafeteria.
Lavin writes:
After the couple left Israel in 2003 after spending three years living in Jerusalem, Harris-Gershon began suffering symptoms of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, including crippling anxiety attacks. The book delves deeply into his recovery process, including the traditional and innovative forms of therapy he tries.As a former member of Daily Kos, and as a supporter of Israel, I know Harris-Gershon as someone who specializes in criticism of the Jewish State. Although I have yet to read his book, I have read Harris-Gershon enough to tell him that, despite his personal trauma and the injury to his wife, neither the Jewish people, nor the State of Israel, are to blame for it.
For reasons of his own Harris-Gershon has concluded that the reason that an Arab youth sought to kill him, his wife, and all those around them at Hebrew University on that sad day in 2002, is because, in his view, the Jewish State of Israel is guilty of the oppression of the innocent Arab population. Harris-Gershon buys into the post-colonial notion that the Jews of the Middle East are engaged in a vicious, imperial, and racist endeavor to persecute and oppress the allegedly "indigenous" Arab population. It is precisely because of this colonial and racist endeavor that he feels the need to purchase presents for the children of the terrorists who sought to murder himself and his wife.
I, for one, find this exceedingly sad and it seems clear to me that Talia Lavin, and the Times of Israel, has made an unfortunate mistake in promoting this man's work. The Jewish people are so often our own worst enemies and this is very definitely one of those cases, as any pro-Israel Jew on Daily Kos, who is familiar with Harris-Gershon's writings, would readily agree. Even those who strenuously disagree with my politics, and who are familiar with Harris-Gershon's writings, would acknowledge that the man has a toxic voice; a voice that is poisonous to the Jewish people and to the Jewish State of Israel.
Harris-Gershon has the appreciation of Philip Weiss, the editor of the anti-Semitic journal, Mondoweiss. Weiss praises Harris-Gershon for coming out in favor of BDS, the international effort to boycott, divest from, and sanction, the Jewish people of the Middle East. Outside of political Islam in its more violent expressions, the BDS movement is the foremost expression of hostility toward Jews in the world today. It is the foremost expression of the effort to demonize and delegitimize the country of our family and our ancestors.
And, yet, Harris-Gershon favors that movement. He wrote:
...as an American Jew invested deeply in Israel's success and survival -- which in turn drives my investment in stopping one of the greatest moral challenges of my generation: the occupation -- I have no choice but to formally endorse and embrace BDS.What Harris-Gershon seems to have figured out, following people like Peter Beinart, is that there is considerable appeal, and thus a considerable market, within the western left for stories of Jewish / Israel apostasy. It's a simple moral tale and it runs something like this:
I grew up believing in the virtue of the Jewish State of Israel. The Jews of the Middle East, having come through World War II and the Holocaust and the War of Independence, represented a Light Unto the Nations. But now I see that my dreams and illusions were ill-founded and that, in fact, Israel is a colonial aggressor state and the Palestinians are living under Occupation and persecution by my own people. In order to save my Jewish friends and family in Israel I must denounce that country before the world.What is perhaps most galling about this delusion among people such as Beinart and Harris-Gershon is that they honestly believe that blaming the Jews of the Middle East for the conflict takes courage.
It doesn't.
But what I mainly do not understand is why TOI's Talia Lavin did not alert her readership to the fact that Harris-Gershon supports the BDS?
This was an error of the sort that needs to be acknowledged.
