by Barry Goldman
I am an American, a lawyer, and a Jew. That is to say, I’ve been fed a lot of bullshit over the years. I was brought up to believe the United States is a shining city on a hill; Israel is a light unto the nations; and the law is a learned profession and the noblest of callings.
In the wonderful movie Little Big Man, the Dustin Hoffman character explains about the Cheyene, “The name of their tribe was Tsitsistas, which in their language means The Human Beings.” It’s common for tribes to think of themselves as the human beings. My tribes are as susceptible as any other.
When I was a kid they told me Columbus discovered America. The people who lived here at the time quite literally didn’t count. The arrival of Columbus was the arrival of human beings. They told me Israel was “a land without a people for a people without a land.” They didn’t tell us the Palestinians weren’t human, exactly. What they said was they weren’t really a people, just a loose population of nomadic herders. They also told us the Muslim population of Palestine left voluntarily when Israel became a state. Too bad for them, we learned, because their Arab brothers refused to allow the Palestinians to assimilate and instead confined them to refugee camps. If they had stayed in Israel, they would have enjoyed the benefits of Israeli citizenship. I never heard the word nakba until I was an adult.
Israel’s wars, we were told, were purely defensive. All Israel wanted was to live in peace with her neighbors and to make the desert bloom. My mother once showed me a map of the Middle East. She pointed to the tiny sliver that was Israel. The Arab countries were enormous. Why, she asked, can’t they just leave us alone?
To someone raised on that history, the Israeli war in Gaza is hard to grasp. One of the foundational ideas I learned as a kid was that some things are nisht Yiddish. They are things a Jew does not do. We do not eat corned beef on white bread with mayonnaise. We do not kill journalists or torture prisoners. We do not starve babies or blow up hospitals. We do not commit mass murder.
The conclusion necessarily follows: Netanyahu is nisht Yiddish. Israel is nisht Yiddish. But how can this be?
In America anyone can grow up to be president. We don’t have a hereditary ruling class. We believe in the American dream. An immigrant can come to America with no money, no English, no connections, and with hard work and a little luck he can work his way up to a cottage on a lake and an SUV. There is freedom of speech, freedom of religion, and freedom of the press. The judiciary is independent, and the cops don’t take bribes. Corruption, nepotism, and a hereditary aristocracy are un-American.
To someone raised on that mythology, the Trump administration is simply incomprehensible.
And the law? The legal profession? In John Dean’s 1973 testimony before the Senate Watergate Committee he asked, “How in God’s name could so many lawyers get involved in something like this?” It was a real question. As a nation, we expected more from our lawyers. Today, it wouldn’t occur to anyone to ask that question.
With the continuing circus provided by Trump’s lawyers and the blatant corruption displayed by Justices Alito and Thomas, the illusion cannot be maintained. The conservative majority on the Supreme Court no longer even bothers to pretend to be doing legal analysis. Rulings on the shadow docket are proof that arguments don’t matter; precedent doesn’t matter; briefing doesn’t matter. The record doesn’t matter; the facts don’t matter; the law doesn’t matter. The only thing that counts is the result. And the only results that are forthcoming are the ones that are satisfactory to the oligarchy and the Christian right.
The obvious conclusion to be drawn is that we should give up on these illusions of exceptionalism. The time has come to put away childish things. Israel is nisht Yiddish. The United States is un-American. The Supreme Court is lawless. Americans, Jews and lawyers are just like everyone else. That shouldn’t be surprising. We’re all just people. And people are basically greedy shitheads.
And yet…
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