Jews have to keep proving we’re human beings.
We need to wake up to what this really means for the Jewish People, and what it means we will have to do in the years to come.
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This is a guest essay by Ted Goldstein, a Jewish poet and educator.
You can also listen to the podcast version of this essay on Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, YouTube, and Spotify.
One of the biggest mistakes people make when reading history is to assume that, sometimes, people state the obvious.
“We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal…”
We assume that Thomas Jefferson was just stating the obvious.
But if these things were self-evident, then they wouldn’t have to be said at all.
If one looked at the world in 1776, the idea that all men are created equal would not have been self-evident in the slightest. Just like if one were living in England in the past two years and reading the English press, one certainly would not come to the conclusion that Israelis are human beings.
For those of you who have not heard yet, Chris Martin, the world-renowned lead singer of Coldplay, recently invited two young girls on stage at a concert at Wembley Stadium in London.
In front of everyone in the 90,000 seat stadium, he asked the girls where they were from. Nervously, they said “Israel.” The stadium was filled with boos, groans, and some muttered cheering.
As they booed, Martin said: “I’m going to say this. I’m very grateful that you’re here as humans. We are treating you as equal humans on Earth, regardless of where you come from,” Adding, after a moment: “Although it’s controversial, maybe, I also want to welcome people in the audience from Palestine.”
Which caused the crowd to cheer.
Many people have rightly been quick to criticize this heinous display of public humiliation and stagecraft, and many have rightly been quick to point out the Merchant of Venice-like tone of Martin’s remarks.
But Martin actually did something much braver than people realize: He openly told a crowd of Brits that Israelis are human beings.
We would like to believe that we live in a world in which all men are created equal, where no one’s humanity is denied because of the circumstances of their birth. But we don’t. We live in this world. And, in this world, I would wager that between 20 and 40 percent of the audience in that stadium genuinely do not believe that Israelis are human beings.
And that’s a conservative estimate.
In this world, I have seen an entire co-op of college students yell “Bomb Israel!” before taking a shot together. I have seen concert goers chant “Death, Death to the IDF!” as the IDF fights a war to rescue innocent concert-goers not unlike themselves. Really, the only difference between the Glastonbury crowd and the Nova crowd is that one was Israeli and one wasn’t.
Which is actually a very big deal because Israelis aren’t technically people. Technically, they are settler-colonists and, as settler-colonists, they technically have no rights. That’s why every Israeli is a legitimate combatant, including Israeli babies. Israelis are occupiers and settlers; they aren’t people like you and me. At its core, that is the message behind every “anti-Zionist” slogan out there. And their messaging has been very successful.
There’s an old joke that the English definition of antisemitism is “to hate the Jews more than they deserve.” But, like all jokes, there is more truth in it than one would like to believe. The old litmus test for criticizing Israel was, “Do you believe that Israel has a right to exist?” The new litmus test should be, “Do you believe that Israelis have a right to go to concerts?”
At its core, I believe that many people in the West would say no, they do not; Israelis lost the right to go to concerts when they chose to be born in Israel.
For the sake of those girls, I hope the Jews wake up. The Jews need to swallow the hard pill and accept that we are fighting an existential battle for our right to exist again. Not in Gaza, but everywhere else.
Right now, Gaza is probably one of the few places on earth where Israeli lives actually matter. To both Israelis and Gazans. They might not believe that we are human beings, but they do believe that our lives are valuable; that’s why they started this war.
It is the rest of the world that believes that our lives don’t matter. Because, if you had the stomach to look at how everyone else was responding to this event, you might see how appalled they all were that Chris Martin dared to call the Zio-nazis “human.”
Just one comment I saw: “Imagine in 1940, welcoming Nazi officers on stage, congratulating them for their existence, then out of nowhere you mentioned, ‘This might be controversial’ when you tried to say that same word for the Jews, lol. Don’t need to try and imagine it hard, we are literally watching it right now.”
I will spare you the others.
We can chew the fat on a story like this for days, just like we did with the other Coldplay story about the adulterers, but then we will just keep missing the point. We need to wake up to what this really means for the Jewish People, and what it means we will have to do in the coming years.
We are at risk of complete dehumanization, and we must fight an all-out campaign to assert our human worth; otherwise we risk being at the whims of the world.
So, are we human? I wouldn’t want to ask the fans at Wembley, that’s for sure.
Who gives a tinker's damn about what these mouthy troglodytes think? Ignore them and concentrate attention on those who wish to physically kill and eradicate Jews. Stop being apologetic for doing that which is required for survival against these Islamic monsters. Remember. Moslems can lose endlessly but Israel can't even lose once. Let that sharpen your thinking.
I don't think this schmuck from Coldplay, whatever kind of music that is, is brave in the slightest. Yes, you may be right that a sizeable proportion of the audience might not even regard Israelis or even Jews as humans, but that is why bravery would have required unambiguously rebuffing that nonsense. Instead, he spinelessly slinked between admitting these two fans who were brave enough to come up to him in front of a hostile audience were human and then pivoting to welcome Palestinians. This is not bravery in the slightest. The man is a douche bag and he deserved the finger for the way he addressed his fans.