11 – Washington, D.C.
President Lawrence Quaid saw his chapter in yet-to-be-written history books evaporating. As only the third Democrat reelected to a second term since Franklin Roosevelt, Quaid desperately searched for his opportunity to get more than a paragraph for himself, the ambivalent paragraph he knew in his heart of hearts his first term merited. The bombs that destroyed Tel Aviv and Damascus looked as if they were going to blast away Quaid’s shot at greatness.
Elected with strong Jewish support and financial contributions, Quaid’s decision not to send American troops into the Middle East united Jewish opposition to him. Little rational analysis went into the instant opposition to Quaid. In actuality, events in the Middle East happened so quickly after the Tel Aviv bomb that there was little the United States could have done. In one day Israel ceased to exist as an independent country. American troops sent to restore the existence of the State of Israel would have fought the armies of half a dozen Arab countries, armies stocked with American weapons, trained by American instructors. It was inconceivable that American troops would be sent into battle against Egypt, its second best (and now suddenly its first best) ally in the Middle East.
The Israeli bombing of Damascus shocked Quaid far more than the Tel Aviv bomb. He understood that there were terrorists who hated the United States, he knew that, he hated them, hated their irrationality more than anything else about them, but he appreciated that in this world there were people willing to do crazy, suicidal acts for reasons that seemed almost frivolous to Quaid. He accepted terrorism as a fact of life, as a consequence of irrationality. The United States had seen its share of terror, he thought, although not recently, thank God.
But Damascus was bombed by the government of Israel, or at least everybody assumed it was. Quaid grew up in the generation that hid under its school desks in atom bomb drills. Despite that, he never expected any government to actually use an atomic bomb. As President Quaid saw it, after the bombing of Damascus there were no good guys left in the Middle East. It was one thing for the Israeli government to shoot rock-throwing children, but this, this went beyond any bounds. This was inexcusable. This exhausted any tolerance Quaid felt for Israel. After Damascus, Quaid refused to place America into what commentators warned would be “the next Iraq.”
Most Americans, most non-Jewish Americans at least, shared his view. A plague on both their houses. Americans were numbed by decades of vendettas in the Middle East, of suicide bus bombings revenged with helicopter attacks on Palestinian schools, of restaurant bombings in Jerusalem followed by tanks plowing through West Bank villages. To most Americans, the twin mushroom clouds, the first set off by a terrorist, the second by the vengeful Israeli government, were almost inevitable. Both sides were wrong, neither side deserved American support. Americans refused to place their children between these eternally-warring tribes. Sunni against Shiite. Palestinian against Jew. It was the same hatred, the same Biblical battle. Not America’s fight. That was the lesson of Iraq, people said. Don’t get in the middle of feuds older than the United States.
America’s seemingly-automatic support for Israel turned out to be decades-long but inches deep. American liberals – non-Jewish liberals that is – had been divided between support for Israel and disgust at what they viewed as imperialist oppression of Palestinians. Even before the two bombs, the Harvard faculty had voted to divest the University’s investments from Israeli corporations. The Damascus bomb caused Israel’s last, and most fervent, American supporters to have second thoughts. Evangelicals, who had seen the birth of Israel as the fulfillment of Biblical prophecy, saw Israel’s destruction by fire as a sign that God appeared to be having second thoughts and maybe the Second Coming had been placed on hold.
As it became clear to the Arab armies inside occupied Israel that America was going to let them stay, that America was not going to intervene, they became more willing to show off to the world what they’d done. Television crews were allowed into the refugee camps, although donations from American Jews were redirected to more needy Palestinian refugees, waiting to be relocated onto land stolen from their families in 1948 at Israel’s inception. Or diverted to the even more needy survivors of the Damascus bombing.
Reporters flocked to Palestine.
To American Jews, it was the Holocaust all over again, this time broadcast on the six o’clock television news. Between commercials for Toyotas, erectile dysfunction medicines and laxatives, American Jews watched scenes of United Nations relief workers in barbed wire-surrounded refugee camps stuffed with Hasidic Jews and families that looked frighteningly like their own American families.
The nation of Palestine was declared a week after the bombing. The Egyptian army maintained order throughout most of the country, although the Syrian army occupied the northern third of the nation and the Golan Heights were incorporated back into Syria. Palestine petitioned for and was admitted into the United Nations. Israel ceased to be a member. Israel ceased to exist.
Palestine’s surviving Jewish residents were forbidden to leave the country. Their skills would be needed, at least at first. Jewish property was appropriated by the Palestinian state and, of course, Jews were granted no citizenship rights. It was pay back time in Palestine, pay back in ways large and small. Palestinians who’d sweated for Jewish employers, who were kicked by Jewish police and ignored by Jewish women, would not let their new victims walk away from what was due to them in return.
They knew Jewish history well enough to realize that Jews had been thrown out of countries all over the world for virtually all of recorded civilization. Jews always seemed to land on their feet, migrating from one country to the next, setting up their businesses, insinuating themselves into their new nation’s economy.
That was not going to happen this time, the Palestinians decided. We won’t throw them out only to let them drum up support to return in power. This time we will have Jewish laborers, Jewish taxi drivers, Jewish women cleaning our floors and washing our clothes. Jewish prostitutes. Jewish beggars.
It was the Holocaust, Live And In Color With Film at Eleven, for American Jews.
That is what drove Boston stock brokers and school teachers to respond to frantic telephone calls to do something, anything about the ships in the harbor. These American Jews had been brought up on stories of the Holocaust. Photographs of Jews in Nazi death camps, starved to stick figures, formed a part of the Jewish unconscious few people were even aware of until, unbelievably, like something from Hollywood rather than from the Middle East, high definition, cinema format images of Jews behind rolls of barbed wire were seen on 50-inch plasma televisions in American homes.
American Jews had comfortably assumed the Holocaust was history, a tragedy that could never happen again, not now, it was impossible now. Sure they knew it happened in Germany in the last century, it happened in Russia the century before, it happened in Spain, in the Inquisition, in Italy, in England, in Poland. What country, except for America, had not persecuted its Jews? That was history, though, they said. Something you read about in books. Like the Pilgrims. Like the Black Plague.
They didn’t appreciate, however, that to the Spanish Jews, the English Jews, the German Jews, what had happened to them had not been history. It had been their reality.
Those historical events happened before the days of CNN, before nightly television news brought satellite images live from across the globe. Now they saw it with their own eyes. They drove their children to Boston harbor, stood at the shore and showed them the two ships, Jewish children on shore staring through their birdwatching binoculars at Jewish children leaning over the railings on the ships, at Jewish women waving desperately, holding up their children to passing pleasure boats. Lawyers in their 40th floor offices overlooking Boston Harbor looked up from reading purchase and sale agreements to see the two ships swinging from their anchors flying blue Star of David flags, strained to see the crowded decks, the Coast Guard ships circling round and round and round.
The ships touched a chord in many Boston Jews they did not know existed. More than hearts were touched. Memory stirred. Memory of other ships filled with Jews, turned away from America, turned away from Palestine. History and reality inched together, creating a resolve in people who before then had broken no law more serious than a speed limit. The realization rose in the hearts and minds of many American Jews that “never again” meant “not now.”
For most Bostonians, those who were not Jews, the ships were little more than sources of passing guilt, as when you walked past a destitute person asking for spare change, knowing your pocket held the tip you chose not to give at Starbucks but walking past nonetheless, perhaps with a slight shaking of your head, thinking they’d just spend it on alcohol and you really weren’t supposed to give them money, were you. A twinge. Little more. Knowing there were children on the ships, maybe a twinge-and-a-half. But Haitian children had been sent away from America recently. Nigerian children. Chinese children. The news had been full of that. America’s purging of illegals had already hardened millions of hearts. Most Americans simply watched television coverage of the radioactive ruins surrounding Damascus.
Americans watched nightly coverage of the modern Hiroshima in the Middle East, of babies with their skin burned to the bone, of hospitals understaffed by United Nations doctors, of Arab soldiers swearing to avenge this attack but being in the suddenly unfamiliar position of not having an enemy. A United Nations investigation team issued a report clearing Syria of any involvement in the bombing of Tel Aviv. The General Assembly, after voting to condemn Israel as it had so many times in the past, faced the surprising reality that Israel no longer existed.
The final straw was the joint declaration by the Islamic republics of Iran and Iraq, quickly echoed by Saudi Arabia and the other Persian Gulf oil states, that not an ounce of oil would be shipped to any country that gave refuge to Israeli murderers, which they defined as all Jews. The murderers of millions of Arabs, the thieves who kidnapped the Palestinian homeland for fifty years, the butchers of Damascus, were to be returned for trial and punishment, as a nation.
Faced with the threat of another oil and with rioting in the streets by every minority whose members had been deported from this country, who collectively made up the majority of Americans, President Quaid finally acted.
The two ships were to be supplied with food, water and fuel, assuming the Boston Jewish community would raise the funds to pay for them, and sent on their way the following morning. An Egyptian naval cruiser ended its courtesy visit to Baltimore to escort the two ships back to the only country that would accept them, back to the new nation of Palestine.