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CounterPunch
December
18, 2002
Mis-Perceptions of Palestine:
It's All About Olive Oil
By ADAM ENGEL
The Root of
the Problem
Alright. I've gone a little nuts, but
I'm armed, so it's okay. A cold cartridge laid upon a damp palm--a
talisman of sorts--or snapped into the cylinder, like a slap
to the kisser, promotes alertness and clear thinking. Keeps you
awake, at least, and it's better for the bowels than coffee.
So obvious the cause of this whole mess.
Here in bed with me night after night. No, I'm not talking about
my rifle, but my wife. Italian. Her ancestors were Roman. Roman.
So? So read the Bible, shit head. See the root, the Latin root,
of all this evil. Judas mighta sold out Jesus, but it was the
Romans who strung him up, lynched him, and if you look at what
Jesus was doing, among other things--busy guy--it was inventing
a means to defeat an unbeatable Empire: non-violence. Scared
the crap outta everybody, and not only that, it worked. Render
that which is Caesar's unto Caesar, indeed.
But that's just a Testament, after all,
penned by Greek Platonists and disgruntled Rabbis. I'm talking
about History: Diaspora. The Roman conquest of Palestine. Exile.
The whole kit n' caboodle. The Beginning.
My wife's fault, of course. Her whole
family posing as these kindly, hard-working American types who
merely know how to cook better than anybody else when all along
they had the guilt, the GUILT for this whole mess perched like
mute parrots on their strong, bronze ROMAN soldiers.
Next door, my in-laws where throwing
their annual Christmas party. And what were they celebrating
anyway, under all that Santa Claus mishegas, but the lynching
by their ancestors of yet another loud mouth Jew? A Jew who spoke
out once too often and too candidly. A Jew who didn't know his
place. Started to make more sense then. Their kindly "tolerance"
toward me, the Jew in the family. Worse: the loud mouth lefty
atheist non-aligned Jew, who wouldn't know the meaning of family
if he were a piglet at the teat. Hell I didn't have a decent
conversation with my own mother until at least three years after
she was dead.
Started to make sense that it is all
THEIR fault, not only that Middle East nightmare half a world
away, but the harsh here-and-now reality that I, who want only
to be left the fuck alone, am drafted into Judaism due to anti-Semitism
bread of 2000 years of squatting from one hostile country to
the next, culminating in the Slaughter Of All Slaughters (well,
there were the Armenians, and the Native Americans, and the Africans
who died en route to "democracy" and the Cambodians
and--but hell, you know what I mean) by the Germans. And if you
read Tacitus or any of those Imperial Roman courtier scribes,
or even saw the movie, "Gladiator," you know what the
Romans did to those blond-haired, blue-eyed tree folk (no wonder
they went all starry-eyed and metaphysical and loony; Kant and
Beethoven were only the beginning).
Good god, the Romans fucked up EVERYBODY.
And when they weren't crucifying folks or shuffling populations
hither thither and yon they were inspiring others--yes, even
in DEATH--to do the same (hint, hint Britain; hint, hint, US
of A). We won't even mention the Catholic Church, which took
the bag Paul swiped from Jesus and buried it under a mountain
of neat Roman hierarchy. And where is the Pope located anyway,
Mahwah, New Jersey? Bullshit. It's all the Italians' fault. No
wonder these people overflow with gusto and joie de vivre and
the wine and the food and the whole Fellini Life's-A-Sexy-Freak-Fest
thing. You'd be happy too if you'd spent 20 centuries getting
away with murder and nobody--well, maybe the Greeks--blamed you
for anything except "Rocky IV!"
Nobody's Innocent
So I loaded my rifle with those hollow-point,
banana sized cartridges and went next door and damn if I didn't
mean business.
"Adam. Where were you? Put that
thing down. The macaroni and gravy are ready."
Think they can get out of it with ingenuous
ethnic banter, eh? Calling spaghetti and tomato sauce "macaroni
and gravy" when everybody in the world, from Martha Stewart
to Chef Boy Ardee, knows it's spaghetti and goddam tomato sauce!
"It's your fault!" I raged.
"It's always all everything entirely and to infinity been
your fault. And now you're gonna pay!"
"What are you talking? Put that
thing down, you're frightening the kids."
Oh, right. Yeah. I'd forgotten. My nieces
and nephews, ages one to fourteen years. Innocents. But are they
REALLY? Can we honestly say that a five-year-old Palestinian
is "innocent" of terrorism? Or a six year old Israeli
is "innocent" of racist imperialism (not to mention
killing Jesus--but it was the Italians who did that; the Pope
even admitted it was an inside job)?
"Nobody's innocent," I said,
righteously. "And nobody's getting outta here alive!"
I looked around at all the tschotchkes
the these benevolent folk had collected from various cultures
on their way to World Conquest: Christmas trees, wreathes and
other doo-dads filched from the Celts or Gauls or whatever pagan
tree-huggers were into all that forest-and-pine-cone crap; turkey
and yams from Native Americans; pasta from the Chinese; Frank
Sinatra lifted, bourbon, tux and all, from the Mississippi Delta.
I wouldn't be surprised to find on my mother-in-law's bookshelf,
secreted behind the all art and poetry, The Protocols of the
Elders of Milan
Old--too old, in my opinion; so old she's
barely human, more of a metaphysical argument, a lingering dream--Aunt
Delia leaned over and whispered to her slightly younger and more
vigorous brother, Vincent, "Isn't that the nice Jewish boy
who married Maria? Does he have a job yet?"
"Shut up. The nice Jewish boy's
deer rifle is fixed upon the Family Jewels. In case you didn't
notice."
"Adam, you've been drinking again!"
said my wife. "What is this about?"
"What is this about? What is this
ABOUT? About TWO THOUSAND YEARS is what it's about. World conquest!
Empire! The Middle East is burning my brain and it's all your
goddamn fault! Uh...ethnically speaking, honey. Nothing personal."
"Oh, Christ. Is he going on about
one of those commie things he read on the internet again?"
said my brother-in-law. "Why don't you just take that damn
laptop away from the poor guy--it's making him nuts."
"Oh, I get it. I know what all this
is about," said old Uncle Vincent.
"You do?" asked the fifteen
other Conspirators Against Universal Peace And World Stability.
"Yeah, yeah," he sighed, wearily.
"Let me tell you, if I knew it was gonna come to this, I
wouldn't have lived so long. Damn olive oil."
"Red wine too," his sister
piped in. "And Garlic. The Italian diet is -"
"Shut up!" barked Vincent.
Then he turned to me. "Okay. So you put two and two together.
Congratulations, Einstein. You talk about two thousand years
of suffering? Try two thousand years of listening to grievances
and heart-ache. The fruits of Empire are sweet but they rot quick.
Straight to the core. Did we know the wine would turn to vinegar?
Does anyone? We thought we were heeding the Destiny's call and
all that Caesar crap."
"Two thousand years? Vinny, I didn't
know you were that old! If you're my younger brother, that must
make me -"
"Shut up, Delia!" the chorus
screamed.
"So you admit it!" I crowed
triumphantly. "At last! I've hacked these centuries of wilderness
down to their Latin roots! Why don't YOU deal with the fundamentalists
of Abraham and all his batty sons, for a change? Moses said this
and Jesus said that and Mohammed said this other thing. Do I
need to hear this? It's your problem, old man, not mine."
"Look, it was a long time ago,"
said Vincent, lighting a Di Nobili. "So many battles, 'police
actions,' cities put to siege. I can barely even remember conquering
the Jews. All I do remember, and it's very vague, is marching
drunkenly and chanting "Hierusalem est perdita" or
something like that, in Latin. Marching. Marching. Always marching.
Then a lot of hacking and chopping and blood and women screaming
and children crying and badda-bing-badda-boom -- we had Palestine.
We posed for a frieze with one of those, whaddya-call, candelabra
things and some newly minted slaves. I'm not completely sure
what happened next. A lot of bureaucracy, paper work, that kind
of thing. Again, it was a long time ago. I'm not the robust Centurion
I used to be."
"That's it?" I asked.
"Well, it was a heck of a battle.
You people put up a damn good fight. But we were the Empire.
Nobody fucks with the Empire."
"That's not what I mean. That is.
I don't know. I expected HISTORY, I expected -"
"Lights! Cameras! Action! Kaboom!
Like CNN. And all you got was the fuzzy war-story of an old man.
Welcome to the world. I know how it is. Think I wasn't young
too, once?"
My righteous outrage caved in upon itself
like a black hole.
"It's like this," said Uncle
Vincent calmly. "Kind of like what that nice Italian fellow,
the chemist, Levi, said, 'the Palestinians are the Jews' Jews.'
Well, what were the Jews but Rome's Palestinians? Always making
trouble, always clamoring about your 'right' to the land you'd
lived on for generations. Same old stuff about your god as all
the other outposts of the Empire. So, like with everybody else,
we let you have your god or gods or whatever your tribal customs
demanded. Just render your money, loyalty, and when necessary,
your bodies, to Caesar when he needed them, and you were okay.
The others behaved themselves. Why not the Jews? It's not like
we didn't warn you. But you were threatening the stability of
the Empire. What with the suicides at Massada and your guerilla
networks. We were like the Americans in Vietnam. Or the Israelis
in Beirut. Finally, we had to close down the whole show. Break
up the group and disperse you. Nothing personal, just politics.
Good politics, in my opinion. After all, it did, temporarily
at least, for Rome, solve that pain-in-the-ass Palestine problem..."
Cold bummer. Empty reality blues. I
loosened my sweaty grip on the rifle.
"Mommy, why is Uncle Adam holding
that big gun? And why is he sad?" asked my six-year-old,
nephew, Donny.
"He's just playing, Donny. He's
pretending."
"Pretending to be what?"
"I don't know. Some kind of terrorist
or something. Like on TV."
"He doesn't LOOK like the terrorists
on TV."
"Enough talk, Donny. Eat. It's Christmas."
She filled his plate with macaroni.
"More gravy?"
Adam Engel
has lost his mind. Anyone in possession of his mind is kindly
requested to send as text--no attachments, please--to asengel@attglobal.net.
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