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“Western press, Do your f—ing job!”

read the sign carried by a young man walking toward last Saturday’s pro-Palestinian rights rally in downtown D.C. I held up my Post ID and asked whether he had anything to say to me. He smirked and continued toward the White House. It wasn’t a festive gathering on that beautiful autumn afternoon. The crowd was focused on the Palestinian cause and a cease-fire in Gaza.

Thoughts on the Content

Another sign carrier’s poster read “You want Holocaust, turn on your TV.” I got the message. The scenes of death and destruction coming out of Gaza were horrific. Those photos appeared on the heels of Hamas’s 21st-century-style “pogrom” — the word for the organized massacres of Jews that took place during the 19th and early 20th centuries in the Russian Empire, Germany and Eastern Europe.

But this is no time for whataboutisms. Each hell is sufficient unto itself.

While we have lived too long, and seen much too much, to think otherwise.

Personal Experience

During my tour of duty with the State Department in then-West Germany, I visited Dachau. It was the first Nazi concentration camp, where thousands of prisoners died between 1933 and 1945. Untold numbers of Jews spent their last excruciating, horror-filled days in that damnable place.

A few years later, however, I saw another and — for its place and time in history — more banal face of antisemitism when I went to Prague’s Jewish Quarter. I didn’t encounter, as in Dachau, tales of forced labor, medical experiments, firing squads or gas chambers.

Fight Against Racism

Blacks and Jews of centuries departed knew that all too well.

But there’s something else I know. Palestinians also know what unrelieved suffering is like. They also have been libeled. They, too, know what it’s like to be scapegoated and cast down by powerful, pious people.

Conclusion

America — racism notwithstanding — is mine. Israel exists. And Palestinians must have a homeland, too.