I’m in the habit of taking Albus the dog on a two or three-mile run through the mostly deserted and incrementally disintegrating campus of the Sonoma Developmental Center, five or six days a week. Those frequent, regular visits give me a first-hand, evolving image-capture of the sad decline in the once-vibrant and historically-significant campus, as un-watered trees die, buildings flood and crumble, weeds sprout through asphalt and a needlessly visionless future slowly unfolds.
But there is one ongoing, slightly redeeming surprise I wasn’t expecting – the relative rarity of graffiti. With virtually every building offering an empty canvas for tagging, there’s very little in evidence, although breached buildings are beginning to accumulate tags inside.
But the most prominent graffiti near the start of almost every run was a pleasant surprise. Spread across the face of a 30-foot wall was sprayed the message visible below in photo-1, reading, “I Love Israel.”
I was touched by the simple, sincere proclamation, a message almost every Jew can understand. And while I am not a Jew, I am in fact deeply distressed by Israel’s treatment of Palestinians – which in the case of the Gaza siege bordered on (or crossed the border into) genocide, and while I have witnessed firsthand the heartbreaking repression of Palestinians inside Israel and the West Bank, that doesn’t stop me from believing that Israel has a right to exist, and that Iran’s support for Palestinian terrorism by Hamas and Hezbollah represents the current biggest threat to Middle East peace.
The “I Love Israel” tag sat peacefully on that wall until, about a month ago, the second image shown here appeared. And it changed the visual conversation entirely. It is one thing to protest someone’s support for Israel. Under the tyrannical and corrupt leadership of Israeli Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu, it’s easy to understand hating Israel for its repression of the Palestinian people. But to add a Nazi symbol to the hateful message drags us into the black tunnel of the holocaust, where only blind, ignorant hate, gestating for 4,000 years, continues to fester.
Hating Jews has been a part of human social behavior since long before Moses led the enslaved Israelites out of Egypt. Abraham, the Jewish Patriarch, established the defining difference that separated Jews from the rest of humanity, with what is called the covenant of monotheism – one God, not many, as most of the rest of the world believed. Jews could not therefore accept, submit to, or obey the multitude of gods in the Greco-Roman pantheon, or Roman demands of fealty, or the unfolding belief systems that went in and out of vogue.
But hating and persecuting Jews has ever since been part of the human condition, and continues long after there is any theological rationale. I am not a scholar of Jewish history – far from it – but I have lived in intimate proximity to the catastrophic destruction wrought by Nazi hatred, not only against Jews who paid by far the greatest price for Nazi rule, but against all the “others” not of pure perceived Aryan blood.
As a child in the American Sector of immediate post-war Berlin, I helped my mother make scores of peanut butter sandwiches for the lines of refugees (some of them children even younger than me) who lined up at our kitchen door every day at lunch. My playgrounds were piles of rubble, the world was blown up all around me, I met children my age who lived alone with their slightly older siblings because their parents were dead.
And some mindless punk, utterly ignorant of the history behind the swastika, uses it casually to defame a wall and profoundly insult someone’s innocent expression of love for another country with which they identify.
Part of this message is just me unloading my outrage at ignorant people casually tossing out hateful symbols they only dimly understand, from inside a vacuum of information and education. And part of this message is me accusing the dystopian stupidity, prejudice, racism and digital messaging that flows out of the MAGA mentality with the explicit blessings of an American president who is, himself, pathetically ignorant of the dark history he is tacitly endorsing and shamelessly promoting.
Would there have been a swastika on that wall I run past most days with my dog, if Donald Trump were not president? I’ll never know. But I doubt it.
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