I met one of my closest friends about 62 years ago, when we were both kindergarten students in a suburban Chicago school. We became buddies quickly and were kept in the same class throughout our elementary school years. We were quite different in our sensibilities, but we were both obsessed by sports and enjoyed a camaraderie based on a certain brightness that we shared.
One of the least important differences at that time was that, by upbringing, he was Jewish and I was Christian. I cannot recall a single time that we even spoke about it, however. I attended his bar mitzvah when we were 13 and I think my reaction was little more than, "That's what you guys do, but we don't do it." I was impressed, however, that he memorized and recited a long stretch of text from the Torah in Hebrew.
Our different religious backgrounds did not figure into anything else as we grew older, drifting away and together and away and together through the years. When we both had spouses and kids, we embarked one year on a summer vacation on Cape Cod—an event which, at this writing, has continued annually for 26 years.
We weathered some political differences for a while. I was at one time a moderate, slightly-to-the-right guy while he was from a liberal, Democratic background. There was always a mutual respect in our interactions, though. As I moved to the left through the years, our conversations became more convivial and energetic, as we looked out together at a Cape marsh over morning coffee.
Then Hamas attacked Israel on October 7.
In late October, he emailed me in a considerable degree of anguish, confessing that it had been a tough couple of weeks for him. He was struggling to understand what he perceived as anti-Israel bias in the media and on college campuses. He forwarded me an essay by Michael Oren called, "A War Against the Jews," which cast the conflict mostly in terms of antisemitism—hatred of Jews.
For better or for worse, I had been reading about the history of the conflict from the Palestinian perspective: Rashid Khalidi's The Hundred Years' War on Palestine and Rev. Dr. Mitri Raheb's Decolonizing Palestine.
I had stepped into a hornet's nest, I knew, but I had enough knowledge now that I could vigorously condemn Hamas' heinous actions but could not in good faith cast Israel only as a victim. I could affirm Israel's right to exist while still decrying the oppression of millions of Palestinians over the decades.
After a couple of exchanges focused mostly on commiserating about the antisemitism arising and now rampant in the U.S. and elsewhere, I sent him "An Open Letter from Palestinian Christians to Western Church Leaders and Theologians."
The letter includes the following: "[W]e categorically reject the myopic and distorted Christian responses that ignore the wider context and the root causes of this war: Israel's systemic oppression of the Palestinians over the last 75 years since the Nakba, the ongoing ethnic cleansing of Palestine, and the oppressive and racist military occupation that constitutes the crime of apartheid."
My friend's impassioned response argued that the letter was itself an example of antisemitism. He vigorously pushed back, for example, on the use of the terms "ethnic cleansing" and "colonization" to describe the treatment of Palestinians. A terrible insult, he wrote, to the memory of 6 million Jews ethnically cleansed in the Holocaust. By contrast, I felt both terms could be used accurately in the proper context.
But to give him due respect for this part of his argument, after no one would take the Jews following World War II, where else would you put a homeland for the Jews if not in their historic Biblical homeland? When it comes to the expulsion of Palestinians to make that happen, he sees this as a necessary part of achieving justice for Jews following the Holocaust. But I also see it, as Palestinians do, as the "Nakba"—the catastrophe.
So, we sat with this—a divide no more solvable on an interpersonal level than on a geopolitical one.
A couple of weeks later, my friend and I met in New York City. Both huge fans of musical theater, we saw three Broadway shows over two days. These included Sweeney Todd with Josh Groban and the incomparable Annaleigh Ashford, and Merrily We Roll Along, starring Daniel Radcliffe and Jonathan Groff.
And what of Israel-Palestine? We did not talk about it at all, remaining respectfully in our own corners. There will come a time when we can talk again about the conflict, when temperatures are cooler, but it wasn't right for then. We were focused on our own 62-year-old history which, for a brief couple of days, was more important than the history of two ancient warring peoples. Perhaps we were living through the closing song of "Merrily":
"It's our time, breathe it in:
Worlds to change and worlds to win.
Our turn coming through,
Me and you, man,
Me and you."
Craig Mindrum, Ph.D., is a writer and business consultant in Chicago. He received his doctorate from the University of Chicago Divinity School.
All views expressed in this article are the author's own.
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About the writer
Craig Mindrum, Ph.D., is a writer and business consultant in Chicago. He received his doctorate from the University of Chicago ... Read more
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