Palestine's Future - Children of the Deheishe Refugee Camp, 1995
By Anthony Barnes / July 2010
"We enthusiastically chose to become a colonial society, ignoring international treaties, expropriating lands, transferring settlers from Israel to the occupied territories, engaging in theft and finding justification for all these activities. Passionately desiring to keep the occupied territories, we developed two judicial systems: one - progressive, liberal - in Israel; and the other - cruel, injurious - in the occupied territories. In effect, we established an apartheid regime in the occupied territories immediately following their capture. That oppressive regime exists to this day." -- Former Israeli Attorney General Michael Ben-Yair, 2002
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My boyhood occurred during an era when Jewish delicatessens, not McDonald's or Burger Kings, were the norm in many neighborhoods of Boston, particularly mine – Roxbury – which, until the late 1960’s, was a predominantly Jewish enclave. So, as it turned out, my earliest exposure to persons of the Jewish faith was largely a product of my fondness for the outstanding kosher hot dogs my friends and I regularly devoured at Max Andrews. “Max-Ann’s,” as we called it then, was a Jewish deli located on Blue Hill Avenue in close proximity to the Nation of Islam’s Temple No. 11, whose minister at one time, Louis Farrakhan, graduated from the school I later attended – Boston English, the nation’s oldest public high school.
At that time, even if out of sheer ignorance I accepted a crass, stereotypical description of what Jews looked like – white people with large noses – I was far more clueless as to what a Jew actually is. Perhaps not surprisingly, in that context, Jewish-ness, if you will, sort of flew under the radar. It held little, if any relevancy to me. That is, until Carl Zidel helped make it relevant. But more about that later.
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