V’nishmartem me’od lnafshoteichem
“We’re not talking about the past… it is one thing to do something, and another to deny it.” — James Baldwin, National Press Club (December 1986)
“For example, in the ‘50s when I was, we were all there, you know, trying, testing the law, trying to get signs to come down, trying to desegregate the country. You and I, for example, you white, me Black. We would try to get arrested for sitting in front of the bus together. And the mayor of Atlanta would never, never arrest us. He did not want any of those cases to come into court… Do you see what I mean? It was that kind of tension between the city and the state… That's why people... they say ‘I’m from Atlanta, I’m not from Georgia.’” — James Baldwin (with Studs Terkel, November 22, 1985)
“It doesn’t mean anything to be [Israeli]. It doesn’t mean anything to be [Palestinian]. It means something to try to become a human being. It means something you try to create a country, to create a society in which people can live, [Israeli] and [Palestinian], ‘cause if I can’t live in this society, neither can you. What is happening to my children is also happening to yours… And your children and my children are equally sacred.” — James Baldwin, modified and modernized “This country’s never been a [J*wish] country. Never will be, never can be. I’ve been here for more than [1400] years, so this country’s not J*wish… [And] I know much more about [Isr*elis] than they know about me. There’s a reason for that… We are, whether or not we like it, connected, and what happens to me is really also happening to you.” — James Baldwin, modified and modernized
James Baldwin is America’s greatest intellectual. No one will ever come close to the gentle spirit and genius of a man who lived as a triple minority: gay, Black, and physically unassuming—in Muhammad Ali’s time, no less. Of course he supported the Palestinians. He knew history: “You can hold on to nothing, and the past is only useful insofar as you can tell the truth about it and you can use it.” In Isr*el, Likud’s crimes are not only its lies and inhumanity towards our fellow human beings, but its deliberate failure to create a society worthy of emulation.
The Americans have yet to banish racial segregation, but their best and brightest tried. America’s J*ws—including Andrew Goodman and also Michael Schwerner—tried on the federal level, the state level, and whatever other level was necessary. In Singapore, where the Chinese majority was expelled by the morena Malays—the Chinese tried and succeeded in ending racial segregation. The fifties and sixties created more new countries than most Westerners can locate on a map, and the ones that failed to learn to live with each other as equals, including India and Pakistan, now accept the spontaneous possibilities of violence.
Isr*el's story is more complex. Like America, it was founded on terrorism, but against outsiders rather than natives. Its bombing of a hotel was directed at the British, and its bombing of the USS Liberty was directed at Americans. Bombing an empire occupying your land is not unique—the Irish know it, the Algerians know it, and the Vietnamese know it. When successfully evicting a foreign occupier, the mantle of governance passes to you, and your credibility becomes dependent on a list of responsibilities, foremost of which includes preventing racial and religious violence. Quite a paradox, yes? If you use violence to drive out a competitor, your claim it was justified and reasonable depends on your ability to break the cycle. America did it in Japan and Germany, and for decades, no one denied its moral supremacy, the key factor underpinning other nations’ embrace of its currency and culture. Now, after Iraq, Isr*el/P*lestine, and Ukraine/Russia, the question is not who will replace America, but whether responsibilities will be transferred as effectively as they were between the British and Americans.
“[Britain] could consider itself a white country… they still had an empire, and the sun never set on it, they said. [Well,] the sun can’t find it now.” — James Baldwin
In Isr*el, the failure to create a well-governed state is deeply tragic to anyone who understands J*wish history or who has read James Michener’s The Source (1965). Isr*el’s original settlers were idealists, not cynics. They, like Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres, could have been called the best representatives of humanity. In contrast, early Americans, even Quakers, did not have the best Christians—that would be Abyssinia, Assyria, and, later, the African Methodist Episcopalians. Furthermore, America was not founded by idealists—it had businessmen who happened to be intellectuals, and who happened to be thrown into politics. Few nations can say they were founded on some moral principle, and once upon a time, Isr*el could.
“At the tender age of sixteen, I was handed a rifle so that I could defend myself — and also, unfortunately, so that I could kill in an hour of danger. That was not my dream. I wanted to be a water engineer.” — Yitzhak Rabin
When I say America’s moral foundation has cost it an empire, I do not mean its technology and finance will disappear. Innovation, if useful, continues onward. But as of 2025, no forward-thinking person teaching governance will quote George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, or Benjamin Franklin. Nor will they quote Yitzhak Rabin or Shimon Peres. It is tragic to be an American writer today, but more tragic to know that better men than ourselves had power and failed.
© Matthew Mehdi Rafat (June 1, 2025, from Jakarta)
ISSN 2770-002X
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