"I have been invited to a neighbor's Seder this year, and in my fantasy I have thought that I would rather sit on a box at home by myself in the dark with my face to the wall for the length of time the Seder lasts, out of a mixture of shame and protest against Israel's denial of freedom to her Palestinian neighbors."

A phrase of my father, "'Siz schwer tsu zein a Yid," comes back to me now, on the eve of this year's Passover.

"'Siz schwer tsu zein a Yid" translates as "It's hard (difficult, painful, burdensome) to be a Jew." My father, like other Russian Jews of his time (he was born more than a hundred years ago) expressed himself as he did about being Jewish because life in his native country was for him, a Jew, indeed hard, and sometimes dangerous. The Jews of his part of Russia, in that time, lived as second-class citizens, barely tolerated, often abused, and subject periodically to attacks by enthusiastic mobs while the police authorities looked the other way. It was a difficult life also because religious Jews were called on to observe 613 commandments,=20not a mere ten. Not surprisingly, Jews spoke of bearing the "Ol," or yoke. Twenty-four hours a day, they were bound, joyfully or dutifully or unthinkingly, to a towering load of ritual and moral obligations.

For myself, in my 33rd year as a resident of Vermont and in the 76th year of my life, I have felt few of the burdens my father did. I have lived in Vermont as an entirely free and equal citizen of the place -- a "freeman " in the fine old sense -- and have suffered none of the slings and cuts my father suffered as a boy and youth in Tsarist Russia. And being free of my father's religious faith, I don't trudge through life wearing the yoke of his religiosity.

But since the outbreak last September of what has become a ceaseless conflict between the Israeli state and the several million neighboring Palestinians who live under Israeli military occupation, there has scarcely been a day when I have been without agitation over the injuries and indignities that my fellow Jews of Israel have been inflicting on the Palestinian people, the Despised and Feared Others, who by the circumstances of history and geography are fated to live beside and with the people of Israel. (It is, by the way, to the bustling Internet and not the traditional media that one must look, for accounts of the comprehensive and inexorable crimping, day by day, of the lives of Palestinians by the Israeli occupying forces.) My politics in this connection are ruled partly by a principle that may be too simple. I am a Jew of another time, the son of my 19th century father. He was born in the last decade of the 19th century, and though he lived most of his 88 years in the United States, a humble and conscientious worker all his life, he never moved far from his 19th century origins. Thanks to the entire demonstration of my father's life, and my upbringing, I, too, have lived with a a foot in the 19th century, and in consequence, like my father before me, I find it hard to think of the Jewish people as other than an underdog. It's at this junction of my mental make-up that my loyalties take on a confused coloration. In the unremitting conflict between Israelis and Palestinians, who is the underdog, and who, by virtue of holding that unhappy position, draws my sympathies? Aided stupendously by the US in arms as well as uniquely generous financial grants, enough to make Israel today the foremost military power in the Mideast, and supported by a mixture of colossal heroism and ingenuity and ruthlessness, the Israelis have bested the Palestinians in the long series of territorial wars they have waged against each other, beginning in 1948, even when the Palestinians enjoyed the backing of neighboring Arab states. And what has been the outcome for the Palestinian people of the last 50 embattled and embittered years? They are a defeated nation, a lost people, whose last recourse, when political struggle fails them, is to throw stones and, with inhumane calculation, to plant occasional bombs, with hideous consequences for Jewish grandmothers and any other innocents who happen to be in the vicinity of one of the exploding devices. I will now say certain harsh things which may wound some of my Jewish friends. The first is that, in my view, the Palestinian people, situated as they are, have strangely become the Jews of our day, even to the shedding of their blood. For every Jew who has died in the course of the current troubles, more than six Palestinians have died. Such a ratio more resembles a massacre than equal combat. Second, the Palestinian people today are pursuing a goal that has an uncanny resemblance to the goal of the Zionists of 1948 who, in the shadow of the then recent Holocaust, sought salvation in the establishment of a national state. The Palestinian people today, wanting no less an opportunity than a sector of the Jewish people gained for themselves when Israel established itself as a nation in 1948, are compelled to live under the close control of the Israeli military and police forces, a control that is often arrogant, sometimes lethal, sometimes malicious, and always maddening in its force and application. Third. Under the claim of military necessity, the Israeli armed forces have imposed a form of captivity on the Palestinian people. They have denied Palestinians the right to build on their own land or to use the water that lies under it, without their permission. In violation of terms of the Geneva Convention to which Israel has subscribed, Israel has permitted and encouraged Israeli settlers numbering in the hundreds of thousands to build communities on great swaths of land in the Occupied Territories, and undertakes to keep troops there for the settlers' protection as long as they deem it necessary. The Israeli authorities have taken control of the right of Palestinians to move within their own territory, including even the right of Palestinian ambulances to move with dispatch in emergencies to Palestinian hospitals. On the claim of military necessity, Israeli forces have blown up Palestinian homes and bulldozed into the earth groves of century-old olive trees. On the claim of who-knows-what apprehension, an Israeli soldier recently tossed a stun grenade into a schoolyard occupied by Palestinian children. Palestinian adolescents, like it or not, daily find frustration and bitterness in their experience as members of a subjugated people, and commence throwing stones at the soldiers who enforce their degradation and oppression. How can we not understand this? How can defenders of Israel's actions against the Intifada say, as some do, that the Palestinian authorities, and Yaser Arafat himself, are responsible for these stonethrowing demonstrations? It was just such upwelling of frustration and bitterness and anger as the youths of the Occupied Territories feel, that impelled the youths of Belgrade to throw stones at the police of Milosevich not many months ago, to American applause, and that impelled the youths of our own South to confront the police dogs of Birmingham, Alabama three decades ago, and that gave the youth of Sharpesville, South Africa, the courage to confront the loose-triggered guns of the South African apartheid police, and that aroused the youth of Peking to demonstrate nonstop in=20Tianamen Square, until the day ordained for their massacre. To say as some have done that Palestinian parents callously put their children in harm's way to gain publicity for their cause, amounts to a racist calumny whose indecency compares with that of the blood libels which afflicted European Jews in past centuries.

I wrote these words two weeks before Passover, one of the three most important holidays of the Jewish year. To my mind, the tale of Passover conveys a most painful irony, this year. Passover is above all a celebration of the miraculous events which brought about the freeing of Jews from bondage in Egypt. Scanning Exodus 13, I find six variants of such expressions as "out of the house of bondage" and "By strength of hand the Lord brought us out from Egypt, from the house of bondage." A commonplace guide to the Passover service=20used in my family for many years, by a Rabbi Berkowitz of Merion, Pennsylvania, reiterates more times than is worth counting, phrases like "the season of our freedom," and sentences like, "May the Jewish people, wherever they are, those of them still deprived of total=20freedom, enjoy that liberty at this time, next year." I have been invited to a neighbor's Seder this year, and in my fantasy I have thought that I would rather sit on a box at home by myself in the dark with my face to the wall for the length of time the Seder lasts,=20out of a mixture of shame and protest against Israel's denial of freedom to her Palestinian neighbors. I will in fact attend the Seder, but with a hyphen in my mind and perhaps on my tongue, to represent the mutuality of the fate of Jews in past times and of Palestinians today. I am that much and in that way connected to the diminution I read in my father's bearing through the years that I knew him. He never got over the hard circumstance of his childhood and youth, nor will, I believe, the Palestinians

* Published by James Rubin in The Times-Argus of Vermont, April 2000. The author can be reached at James@MiddleEast.Org