Sophie's choice
By Barbara Sofer
Aug. 21, 2003
Say the words "New Zealand" in a crowd of young adult Israelis and you'll see the yearning in their eyes. They might live in Jerusalem or Petah Tikva, but they can describe New Zealand's spectacular scenery, raw beauty and amazing wildlife. They know places with names like Wanganui and Tongariro, and the Kaikoura coast.
Not only is New Zealand exotic and beautiful, but - best of all - it is far, far away. A place to unwind. As the sabras say: "It cleans the head." A song by the popular group Ethnics says it all: "To be in New Zealand, and to hear cannons only on the queen's birthday."
A place to forget the conflict.
Sophie doesn't see it quite like that. You see, she was born in New Zealand. And yes, being young and fit, she certainly appreciates the surf and sand and vistas. But together with her fondness for New Zealand, she heard an ancient melody drawing her in another direction, even while she was in high school, one among a handful of Jews in a school with 1,600 girls.
At 23, she heard about the free trips to Israel offered by birthright israel. Coming all the way from New Zealand for 10 days seemed a little silly. Would it be all right if she came with birthright, but then stayed on? Instead of 10 days, she spent 10 months. Then she went back to New Zealand and returned to Jerusalem as a new immigrant.
As she went through the immigration process - learning Hebrew, making friends, finding housing and work - she kept up on New Zealand by checking the website of her local paper, the New Zealand Herald.
She bonded with Israel in the years of terror. The Hadassah office where she works as a senior secretary is right on the corner of Jaffa and Rav Kook streets - Israel's equivalent of Ground Zero. Her reading taste has changed some. She's been swapping Primo Levi with friends. Somewhere along the line, her "tolerance level for anti-Semitism dropped precipitously." Living in Jerusalem, she now realized how much space was lavished on what was happening around the corner from her. The so-called Kiwi slant on the Middle East.
One political cartoonist, Malcolm Evans, caught her eye for the anti-Israel venom of his pen. A recent cartoon showed a disaster area with the second "A" in "apartheid" rendered as a Star of David. Another recent cartoon on the Internet showed Uncle Sam on a psychiatrist's couch. "I keep having this nightmare in which Arabs and Israel realize they have more in common with each other than with us, and want to renegotiate our access to oil. The balding psychiatrist with a large nose in the chair, thinks, "What do you mean "us," you goy!"
Sophie was offended. "I am a New Zealander living in Israel," she wrote the Herald. "I frequently check the NZ Herald website for news from home, and to see how news from abroad is reported. When I saw Tuesday's cartoon in which a Jewish 'shrink' refers in a thought bubble to Uncle Sam as a 'goy,' something struck me as slightly disturbing: As if it is not enough that Americans seem to consider that, following September 11, suspicion of Arab Americans is now justified, this cartoon suggests that Jews are new enemies inside.
"This kind of depiction only feeds the belief that Jews cannot be loyal members of another society; that Semitic ties will always prevent them from being fully worthy of a nation's trust. I like to think that New Zealanders are above race-based suspicions, pigeon-holing and name-calling; I feel like yesterday's cartoon proved me wrong."
To her surprise, a rapid reply came from Evans himself, to whom the letters editor must have forwarded her epistle.
"Thanks for writing regarding my cartoon in Tuesday's Herald. I'm sorry you took a throwaway line (a common theme of Jewish comedians) as the cartoon's message, especially when its purpose was in fact quite the opposite," wrote Evans.
"Although I have done many anti-Israel cartoons, on this occasion I sought to plant another idea: Far from fomenting racial distrust, my cartoon hypothesized that Israeli Jews and Arabs might someday recognize that, as common descendants of Abraham, they have more in common with each other than with Uncle Sam, and wondered what the ramifications might be.
"Still, if you think people will take an anti-Jewish message from my cartoon, I shudder to think what effect the news of barbaric Israeli occupation and confiscation of land, the uprooting of ancient olive groves, the destruction of villages, the ghettoizing of communities behind a monstrous wall, and the new law barring the marriage of Israeli Arabs do non-Israeli Arabs, might have."
Sophie passed along Evans's reply to rabbis and Jewish community leaders and friends, Jewish and non-Jewish, in New Zealand and elsewhere.
The "goy" line had been cut from the print edition, she was told. "I'm relieved/impressed" said Sophie, "but it's on the Internet, where it will have a much longer shelf-life."
She felt a gap with some of the people she'd left behind.
"I've so far received a few replies from people I initially wrote to about this, most saying they don't bother to do anything about it, or they don't think it's that bad, or that it's anti-Israel but not anti-Semitic, and I've found this extremely disappointing.
"The cartoon is subtle and amusing, and therein lies its power: No one except a Jew would even look twice at it, and even a Jew looking twice obviously doesn't always think it's objectionable. So the message is absorbed into acceptable discourse and vocabulary, and there it stays."
Sophie's words seem to have struck home. The Auckland Jewish Council used Evans's answer to her to lodge a complaint with the Race Relations Office against Evans for inciting racial issues.
And what do you know? Shortly after her letter of complaint, Evans parted ways from the New Zealand Herald, the newspaper confirmed. For legal reasons, it is prevented from saying why.
We don't need a cartoon to spell it out.
Sophie doesn't want to take credit.
"Maybe it was the straw that broke the camel's back," she says.
We are known as the chosen people, but a better name might be the choosing people. You can choose to be an insider in this people, or to assimilate into the pack. How you choose always has ramifications.
Good choice, Sophie.
