Opinion: Thumbs Up

Some may scoff at this, but Black Friday is as wonderful as I had always been told. I’m not going to talk much about Black Friday, but I am going to tell a brief story which occurred in the parking lot of an outlet mall in Aurora, Ohio where my girlfriend and I were taking part in the shopping festivities. As we were leaving, there was another couple just arriving who parked their car next to mine. They were, as far as I could tell, a Middle Eastern man and his wife, and the wife immediately walked toward the stores and left her husband to lug their child and car seat out of the back, because I suppose some gender stereotypes are universal. As the husband was pulling out his child, his rear door hit the side of my car.He looked through my window to try and find me in the driver’s seat and gave me something of an apologetic look when we finally made eye contact. I was not very concerned; it didn’t sound that bad and I couldn’t imagine there was even a dent in my door. So to signify that I wasn’t upset, I gave him the “thumbs up” sign. He didn’t react to this in any negative way, but I remembered almost immediately after I’d done it that in the Middle East, the “thumbs up” is a rude gesture on the same level as giving someone the middle finger.I doubt the man in the parking lot was significantly offended by this gesture. Most likely he was born here or had been in this country long enough to know that Americans mean no ill will when they give the “thumbs up.” But in the context of the recent conflict between Israel and Hamas and the continuous intertwined antagonism between the U.S. and many in the Middle East, it occurred to me that perhaps, on a global scale, our nation is making the kind of same mistake I did.According to a 2012 report written by the Congressional Research Service, the U.S. has provided Israel with $115 billion in bilateral assistance to date. The only nation on Earth to receive more than that from our government is Afghanistan. Next year, the U.S. expects to give $3.1 billion to assist Israel’s military. Israel is expected to purchase 19 F-35 stealth fighters from the United States. The F-35 is the most advanced fighter ever designed, capable of taking off vertically from land or aircraft carriers, and Israel will likely pay for these planes with U.S. aid money. It’s hard to imagine the Israeli Defense Forces being as effective as they are today without U.S. aid.These price tags may seem staggering, but they also seem bizarrely natural to us in America. We take it for granted that we will always provide for Israel, that we will always stand with them, even when their treatment of Palestinians ranges from heavy-handed to outright oppressive. In doing so, we become like the wealthy suburban parents who buy their child everything he asks for, despite the fact that the child is the feared school bully.Why do we purchase our own unpopularity in the Middle East? There are strategic and political reasons of course, and Israel remains the proverbial devil we know. But to the average American, like those 57 percent who supported Israel’s strikes on Gaza, according to CNN, it’s more likely that our unflinching support of this misbehaving ally comes from the fact that it took us 12 years to stop the Nazis. Now, with members of Hamas, the president of Iran and other leaders in the Middle East calling for the elimination of Israel, the very notion of abandoning Jews to any and all danger, real or rhetoric, tears at the very soul of the American.So we continue to stand with Israel and support their actions, increasingly through gritted teeth. We provide them with weapons, technology, money and iron domes, and in doing so we infuriate the people of the Middle East and elsewhere who see injustices in the Israeli system of governance. Our support of Israel is insulting to such people and it makes them hate us, but to Americans standing with Israel is normal and natural. It is as commonplace and innocuous as giving someone the thumbs up.