My Own Private Israel

There's been some refreshing news from the middle East. No, it's not good news: it's more violence and intolerance. But at least it's small violence and intolerance. No one was even killed this time.

In Israel, a soldier of Ethiopian descent was beaten by police officers. That was a breaking point for Israel's Ethiopian community, and led them to protest their poor treatment. What, you didn't know there were Jews in Africa? Yes, they're everywhere.

This is a depressing situation on many levels. For one thing, this is a country founded to defend a traditionally abused minority, and they've apparently developed a tradition of abusing a minority.

• The Ethiopian Israeli situation is similar to the situation of African Americans: a cycle of poverty, mistrust from the majority, and excessive incarceration.
• Fortunately, Prime Minister Netanyahu has spoken out against the treatment of Ethiopians. That's good of him, but I'm sure I wasn't the only one who read that as, "guy who built his career on demonizing Arabs condemns racism."

I'm not Jewish, so I've never really grasped the place Israel has in people's psyche. You're part of a minority that's poorly understood if not outright hated, but then there's this place far away that you can go to, where everyone is like you. You go there, and the minority culture you've struggled all your life to explain to friends and colleagues is the majority, the expectation.

(As an aside, above when I described Jews as "poorly understood," my phone interpreted that as "porky understood." I think my phone is anti-Semitic.)

As a straight, white, able-bodied, WASPy, cis male, it's hard for me to relate to that. The closest I can get is to relate it to my my geekiness. It would be pretty nice to have a Geekland that I can go to and feel at home. Geekland? Geekistan? I don't know, we'd probably just call it Westeros.

So you get on a plane as an outsider with interests few others share, then get off it on the other side of the world as an accepted member of the majority. One problem with it is that you have lived in the outside world for so long, that you might feel overwhelmed when you go to the homeland and find you aren't geeky enough. I know I'd probably get deported as soon as they found out I only watched three episodes of Firefly. And sure enough, Israel has similar problems: people come from different denominations and different places, then find that it's hard to reconcile the fundamentalist and liberal believers.

Geekistan wouldn't fare much better. I mean, we don't even have to share the same space, and yet the culture is tearing itself apart online on two different fronts. And that's the problem with having a place for your people: even if you have one major thing common, like a religion, there are still so many ways we differ and disagree, and we'll discover them when we're forced to share the same venues and institutions.