What I am saying is that I grew up with a very positive attitude toward Jews and Israel. I thought the Jews deserved a homeland, especially because of the Holocaust. I also thought Jews did not consider themselves any different from other people and that the Jews I had seen considered themselves Danes first and Jews second. In other words, I thought being a Jew was primarily a religious thing and that Jews in Denmark were pretty much like the few Catholics in Denmark—a religious group. I really did not even see being a Jew as a matter of race, as Denmark is such a homogenous country that I did not grow up with a sense of racial division. Race simply wasn’t an issue for me and I couldn’t understand how it could be a source of conflict.
I was also very positive toward the state of Israel, and as a teenager I tended to believe that any criticism of Israeli policies was probably anti-semitism, which was a big no-no. Yet when I was 20 I met a man who had been stationed as a UN soldier in Israel. He told me that he had several times been on post at a checkpoint. A truck had driven up from Israeli territory, had stopped a distance from the checkpoint and the driver had run away. When inspected, they found the bed of the truck filled with dead bodies that were deliberately mutilated to make identification difficult (this was before DNA testing). The dead people were Palestinians, killed by the Israelis. He basically made a pretty good case that Jews were no better than other people and that the policies of the state of Israel were by no means infallible. Especially over the past several years, this has caused me to look at Israeli policy with a bit more discerning eyes, and I have begun to see certain patterns. More on this later.
My main point is that I grew up with no sense of discrimination against Jews, and I still don’t have any. Yet I have also come to realize that Jews deserve to be evaluated based on their actions and that they should be held to the same standard as all other human beings. Consequently, the state of Israel should be evaluated by the same standard as any other nation.
