Alan Kaufman
I had a taste of the Middle East conflict right here in San Francisco last week and of something even more sinister as well. I enter a Palestinian-owned-and-run grocery store, which is staffed at any given time by four young Palestinians in their 20s, wearing service aprons. These men often just lounge about at tables and chairs, under the sun umbrellas they have set out for customers to sit and drink their coffee, and usually the young men laugh and exchange pleasantries with you.
It's a nice establishment that I've been frequenting for years, just around the corner from where I live. The produce section is to the left of the door as you enter, and I've been stopping by here for so long that I can literally pluck items from the bins without really looking: two packs tofu, one head cauliflower, one of broccoli, a bag of baby carrots, two mauve-colored D'Anjou pears for breakfast. (Hmmmmm!)
As I fill my basket I hear from the television monitor suspended over the check-out line (it plays news all day, every day) loud shrieks and shouts and screams, and then gunfire and explosions, and, turning, I see all the young men in their aprons, even the cashier, clustered at the foot of the screen, raised faces transfixed by a special report on the Middle East conflict.
The report is grim: all blow and counterblow.
A Palestinian suicide bomber kills an Israeli policeman. In Gaza, a Palestinian terrorist opens fire on a civilian car and on soldiers. In that attack. an Israeli civilian, two soldiers and the Palestinian gunman are killed.
Then Palestinian marauders kill six Israeli soldiers at a West Bank checkpoint near Ramallah.
The Israelis respond. Nine Palestinian gunmen, including a suicide bomber, are killed in Israeli retaliatory military operations.
Then an Arab marauder opens fire in a Jewish neighborhood in Jerusalem, killing a policewoman.
Whereupon a female Palestinian terrorist blows herself up at an Israeli checkpoint, wounding two policemen.
After which Israeli forces move into two West Bank Palestinian refugee camps, battling gunmen, searching for suspects and weapons. Twelve Palestinian gunmen and associates and one Israeli soldier are killed in clashes in the camps.
There follows a Palestinian suicide bomber's infiltration of an Orthodox Jewish neighborhood of Jerusalem, and his murder of nine Israelis, including children and infants.
And now here comes a Palestinian sniper who murders 10 Israelis - seven soldiers and three Israeli civilians -- at a West Bank checkpoint.
On and on and on...and the young men in aprons now watch rapt as two Palestinian gunmen dressed in tight-fitting sport shirts, designer jeans and Nike sneakers mambo rock in the middle of a burning tire road, spitting death from Kalashnikov assault rifles, when suddenly one gets popped in the head by a well-aimed Israeli bullet and skids and falls.
In one voice, the young men who, but for the aprons, are dressed identical to the gunmen on screen, shout: "Ohhhhhhhhh!" like football fans in some bar groaning over a particularly timely tackle against their favorite team.
Then one of the four angrily spits out something in Arabic. Sounds like a curse.
Now a spokesman for the Palestinian Authority comes on to say that if Israel does not withdraw its presence from the West Bank and Gaza the strife will escalate, followed by a masked spokesman for an aligned militant Palestinian faction who assures the world that regardless of Israel's actions, withdraw or no, they will all perish anyway.
Finally, an Israeli poses in front of the Moment Cafe in West Jerusalem, where a Palestinian suicide bomber annihilated a group of young Israelis who had lounged at tables under sun umbrellas as Jews in white aprons served them. The Israeli asks the West to understand that Israel is fighting for its very life.
Beside me, one of the men in aprons, who bears a close resemblance to the young Frank Sinatra, suddenly hisses: "Bull---t! Just you wait! Hitler is coming!" and storms out, followed by a second man. The two stand outside, lighting up cigarettes. The one who promised Hitler's arrival -- clearly a euphemism for genocidal massacre of all the Jews in Israel and perhaps everywhere else as well -- has long hands that tremble as he cups them about the match struck by his associate. He leans his cigarette into the flame, his face taut, his hunched shoulders tense. The cords in his neck stand out with rage.
I continue my shopping on automatic pilot, an odd little smile on my lips. Let's see: tomato paste, I need...I need...
I can't remember. Oh well, I tell myself, oh well, and bring my purchases to the counter, avoiding the cashier's eyes and wondering, as he alternates ringing up my items with quick glances at the screen, just where I would place a bomb if I had one, perhaps there behind the blue plastic milk crate by his knee, or if just shooting him and his cronies with a gun would work better to eliminate their Hitler remark?
I still wear that odd little unknowable smile -- familiar to those who've had one or both parents in the Holocaust -- a smile of gallows mirth whenever some aspect of contemporary life unwittingly mirrors the very anti-Semitism that led to the mass murder of 6 million Jews, for it lurks about us everywhere, though often concealed behind such pleasantries as white aprons and sun umbrellas.
"Hitler is coming..." The words shake my numbed heart as I drag home. "...Just you wait!" I go upstairs to wait.
Of course, I know that he is right. That despite the arrival of emissaries from the United States, despite the vote of the U.N. Security Council granting the Palestinians statehood (or perhaps because of it), despite the deep-felt desire of Israel and of Jews everywhere for peaceful coexistence, nonetheless Jews in Israel are being slaughtered just as in France they are being murdered and their synagogues and day schools blown up, while in England they are undergoing a campaign of anti-Semitic vilification unlike any witnessed since the days of Oswald Mosley. The Jews of Germany, wise to all this, are treading ever so softly as the shadow of neo-Nazism continues to spread through its old home turf.
"Hitler is coming." Oh, I know, I know, and I know something more, too, that even the young man who hissed these fateful words doesn't, that most Jews and even the Israelis don't yet know. I know it because my mother was there, hunted in the Holocaust, and she fed me her sixth sense of survival about such matters through her terror-tainted breast milk. Hitler is not just coming. He is not just en route. Hitler has already landed among us. He is here, now, today and will be tomorrow, standing outside a grocery store, dressed in a white apron, smoking a cigarette.
The writer is the author of a memoir, "Jew Boy," and editor of the anthology "The Outlaw: Bible of American Poetry."