A Letter from Jerusalem – Circa 1972

Henry Srebrnik, [Toronto] Jewish-Tribune

Recently a friend in Montreal mailed me a copy of a letter – one of those old aerogrammes -- that I had sent to him in August 1972, when I spent the summer at the Mount Scopus campus of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, while I was a student at Brandeis University. (No e-mail back then!)

The letter is indeed a piece of history all in itself. I was amazed, given the relatively low cultural state of students today, that I could write to him that I was reading at the time books by the Soviet novelist Mikhail Sholokov, the American writer Sinclair Lewis, and the American Communist supporter Waldo Frank, among others – and not because I “had to,” for a course, but simply out of interest. (Who today even remembers these authors?)

I spoke in the letter about going along on demonstrations with the left-wing Matzpen people, a now defunct and forgotten Israeli socialist organization. They were among those protesting an expropriation that had taken place by the Israeli government back in 1948 of two Arab Christian villages, Birim and Ikrit, whose land near the Lebanese border had later been taken over by kibbutzim.

The inhabitants had not been able to return despite repeated rulings of the Israeli Supreme Court, so in the summer of 1972 they returned to their villages, and police had to use force to remove them. On August 13, a few thousand people in Jerusalem demonstrated on their behalf.

The leftists hung out at the Cafe Ta’amon on King George Street, and I used to spend time there. I looked for it on the Internet and the place still exists, though it looks a lot fancier today.

Well, what can one say about all this? It was a different era; many of us still lived in the zeitgeist of the sixties. It’s all such ancient history now.

In 1972, I could walk by myself down from Mount Scopus through the Old City and into West Jerusalem, even late in the evening, without fear.

Who would do that today? No one had yet heard of al-Qaeda, Hamas, Hezbollah, Islamic Jihad and the host of other groups around the world who are today mortal enemies of Israel.

Between the 1967 Six-Day War and the 1973 Yom Kippur War, we Jews lived in a fool’s paradise -- it was probably one of the few times in our history when we forgot that we are weaker, not stronger, than our enemies.

But when Yasser Arafat spoke to the UN a year later, in 1974, and then when the “Zionism is Racism” resolution was passed by the General Assembly in 1975 (on the anniversary of Kristallnacht, no less), we began to live in today’s “epoch.”

Even the collapse of the Soviet Union and the demise of Communism as an attractive ideology hasn’t really changed things all that much, in terms of the ongoing offensive against Israel.

The “anti-Zionism” these leftists advocated, we now understand, had nothing to do with “socialism,” because all the nonsense peddled by the Soviets, and by China, is history now -- except, of course, for the anti-Israel strand.

And today it’s not the Russians or Chinese who are behind it, but an amorphous worldwide “left,” which has really become little more than an anti-Semitic “Internationale.” I’m sure, for instance, that many leftists will defend the destruction of the Chabad Jewish Centre in Mumbai, India, by terrorists, because it was an “outpost of imperialism.”

So though much has changed in 36 years, even more has not. But as for that 1972 letter, I guess the Jerusalem postmark alone is worth saving it for.