In the San Francisco region of Jmerica, social situations can get kind of hairy for those of us wearing our Jewish heritage on our sleeves. While we’re too preoccupied with shallow celebrity doings and weird Jewish news items to pretend to be an authority on Israeli policies and the history of the Middle East, we can’t help but get rankled when confronted by well-meaning liberal zealots who want to know how we feel about “the situation.”
These folks see the Palestinians as long-oppressed refugees, and since everyone loves the underdog (especially in the Bay Area, where brit milah is considered baby mutilation in some circles), anti-Israeli (and by ignorant association, anti-Semitic) sentiment taints the fog rolling in through the Golden Gate. We don’t mind being unpopular and we’re happy to let everyone have his or her free speech, but it always helps to have some facts on hand when waiting in line at the health food store behind someone wearing an “End the Colonial Occupation of Palestine” t-shirt. That, and a Xanax to keep us from smacking him in the keppe with a bag of mung beans.
Anyway, there’s a new blog from some folks living out in the territories called Yesha Speaks Out (Judea, Samaria, Gaza and the Jordan Valley all fall into the header “Yesha.”) Again, we may never know enough about politics to go toe-to-toe with the pundits, but we believe in Israel’s right to exist. The Palestinian leadership does not. We want peace as much as our bleeding-heart neighbors, but we won’t succumb to the f’d up rhetoric of people who can’t get their facts straight.