Dick Hubert’s Worldview: Messianic crazies who prefer war over peace. Hard questions. Can we talk about them?

The late comedienne Joan Rivers famously asked before her monologues: “Can we talk?”

It was her way of letting her audiences know she was about to enter delicate territory—in her world, usually scatological.

If she were alive today and asked the same question about the Palestinians and the Israelis, a good part of her audience would walk out on her before she had a chance to open her mouth.

So, with appropriate trepidation, if I may channel Joan Rivers, can we talk?

I‘d like to begin by offering links to a landmark television documentary and what may have been for a large body of NPR listeners a shocking interview by NPR’s Scott Simon on last week’s NPR Weekend Edition Saturday.

First Simon.

He introduced his audience (me in this case, maybe you) to a Palestinian poet I’d never heard of: Mosab Abu Toha. Hs writes, as NPR billboards the interview on its website: “poetry to preserve memory and bear witness to Palestinian life.” (You can find the six-minute segment at: https://www.npr.org/programs/weekend-edition-saturday/. It’s the #6 item on the Oct. 19, 2024 show list.)

Take a listen. Because in it you will hear the agonized voice of grievance of the Palestinian people and why a two-state solution is the only possible way out after decades of wars and killings and madness between Jews and Palestinians.

If you worry about Kamala Harris being able to win the battleground state of Michigan, think about the Palestinian-American votes she needs to do that, and ask: if you were Palestinian-American, would you vote for Harris, vote for Trump, or not vote for President at all?

Then there’s Frontline, which on Oct. 15 ran the nearly 90-minute documentary: “A year of War: Palestinians and Israelis.” It’s available for streaming at: https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/documentary/a-year-of-war-israelis-and-palestinians/

The program is fair to the innocent people on both sides and ultimately leaves me with the sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach that as long as the right wing messianic Netanyahu regime, the messianic Hamas leadership (even post Sinwar), the messianic Hezbollah leadership (what’s left of it), and the messianic Iranians continue in their determination to finish each other off, the rest of the world (including us) will know only violence, economic and population dislocation, and worse.

I use the word “messianic” deliberately. There’s no better adjective to describe those who believe their religion is superior to everyone else’s and non-believers should be destroyed.

Odds are pretty good that you know or know of people who fit this description. Even messianic nationalist Christians.

In my case, I have a cousin who decades ago moved to Israel. In the last telephone conversation we had, I admonished him after he described Palestinians as “vermin.”

I told him no Jew should use the word against a people the way the Nazis used that word to justify the slaughter of Jews in what we now call the Holocaust.

He hung up on me—for good. 

Now we have a Presidential candidate, Donald Trump, who has used the word “vermin” to describe immigrants to this country who are non-White.

Which leads to the question: has the Israeli-Palestinian divide found its way to our shores in a different, ugly form? And how long can this country be an “honest broker” in the Middle East?

Watch that Frontline documentary and listen to Scott Simon’s interview with Mosab Abu Toha.

And tell me where you come out.

Dick Hubert, a retired television news producer-writer-reporter living in Rye Brook, has been honored with the Peabody Award, the DuPont Columbia Award and the Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Journalism Award.

Editor’s Note: This column, written by Dick Hubert, represents his opinion and not that of this newspaper.