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.
Well put, sir. Thank you for your kindness and courage.
Running Past Selective Outrage
A Response to David Bolling
David Bolling runs past a lot of crumbling buildings at the Sonoma Developmental Center and sees many things. But it turns out he only sees the graffiti he wants to see.
When a 30-foot wall proclaims “I Love Israel,” Bolling is “touched.” He calls it a “simple, sincere proclamation” — a “pleasant surprise.” When someone defaces it, suddenly he’s writing about the Holocaust.
Let’s pause on that for a moment. A political tag supporting a nation currently before the International Court of Justice on charges of genocide is described as “innocent expression of love.” The counter-tag is described as “ignorant hatred” from a “mindless punk” operating in “a vacuum of information and education.”
In Bolling’s world, one person’s graffiti is a touching affirmation. Another person’s graffiti is a return to the darkness of human history. Same wall. Same spray paint. Different feelings, and Bolling has appointed himself the arbiter of which is which.
The irony is that Bolling doesn’t allow this kind of challenge in his own comment section. For a writer so moved by free expression that he can wax poetic about a spray-painted declaration of love, he’s remarkably careful about who gets to respond in print. Dissent that contradicts his thinking doesn’t make it past moderation. One wonders if the “mindless punks” defacing walls might simply be people who got tired of being told their opinions don’t count in the “proper” channels.
Bolling reaches for his childhood in post-war Berlin — peanut butter sandwiches for refugees, playgrounds of rubble, orphans at his door. It’s genuinely moving material. But it’s also a rhetorical trick: he drags the Holocaust into a story about graffiti in Eldridge, California in 2026, so that any disagreement with him becomes disagreement with the memory of the Holocaust itself. You’re not allowed to have a different opinion about a wall in Sonoma Valley because David Bolling once met refugee children in Berlin. That’s not an argument. That’s emotional hostage-taking.
Here’s what Bolling’s column doesn’t mention, anywhere, in its 700-odd words of hand-wringing about hate: the actual genocide. Not the theoretical genocide of memory. The real one. Happening now. In Gaza. Where the state he finds so lovable is currently flattening entire neighborhoods, starving civilians, and killing children by the tens of thousands. The word “Palestinian” appears exactly zero times in his column. “Gaza” gets one passing mention, immediately qualified and softened. The siege that the ICJ found “plausibly” genocidal gets reduced to a parenthetical.
This is the same pattern, over and over. A prominent wall says “I Love Israel” during a genocide, and a columnist calls it innocent. Someone defaces it, and the columnist writes about the Holocaust. Meanwhile, the actual people being slaughtered — and the people in this country furious about it — are invisible. Their graffiti isn’t “expression.” Their protests aren’t “speech.” Their feelings don’t get a column in the paper.
Bolling writes that hating Jews “has been part of the human condition” for 4,000 years. He’s right that antisemitism is real and ancient and ugly. But he deploys that history as a shield against any criticism of a nation-state. Conflating Israel with all Jewish people everywhere — and then declaring any challenge to Israel an attack on a 4,000-year-old people — is a trick designed to end conversation, not start one. It’s exactly the kind of move that makes people so frustrated they reach for a spray can instead of a comment box. Especially when the comment box is closed.
If Bolling genuinely cares about ignorance — about people acting from “a vacuum of information and education” — he might start by examining his own. He might ask why a declaration of love for a state accused of genocide reads as “innocent” to him. He might wonder what kind of information vacuum he’s operating in when an entire ongoing human catastrophe doesn’t rate a single sentence in a column about hatred.
The wall at the SDC has been erased, rewritten, and argued over. That’s what walls are for, when the comment section is closed. Watch for my forthcoming op-ed in these pages for a fuller discussion of the double standards at play — in our foreign policy, our political discourse, and yes, our local papers.