My workplace is typical of globalised industries: low-paid shift-work with a high employee turnover and a mostly migrant workforce. My daily conversations occur in three languages with people from all kinds of backgrounds, many of whom have clear views about the situation in the Middle East. To say that I frequently rub up against antisemitic ideas is putting it mildly. One Lebanese colleague, who I otherwise get along with, is – or certainly was before the pager operation – proud of Hezbollah. “They are strong,” he says. “They defend our country.” But if you want to hear the full force of the Israelis-are-devils narrative at grassroots level, just share your lunch break with him when he’s on a roll. Everything from coveting the land of Lebanon to killing babies. Once he even said something about paedophilia.

I am not shy about my connection with and support for Israel and Jewish culture. The wisdom of that is debatable, and certainly my Israeli wife worries about it, perhaps more than I do. Perhaps I should worry more. Certainly, I have experienced the freeze, almost like a form of electrocution, that grips some people when I mention it. It would not surprise me to discover that, at some level of unreflecting projection, I am counted among those responsible for Israel’s perceived misdemeanours. At least two people with whom I had cordial relations before the current war are now circumspect around me, one a young man raised here in Switzerland, whose family also comes from southern Lebanon; the other an older man, a Bedu from Tunisia who hated Jews before he knew anything about me, but then, all of a sudden, once the truth about me was out, was keen to stress that there are many Jews in Tunisia and they never have any problems with them. They are in fact good people. I think his ambivalence towards me since then has a lot to do with embarrassment.

The other day I had a conversation with someone with whom I have a genuinely good connection, a Sikh from Punjab who just can’t wait to get out of this airport work, out of Switzerland, to return home and buy a plot of land and devote his life to farming, running his family business and looking after his wife and future children. Like so many people here from all over the world, from Bolivia to Eritrea to Afghanistan, he is here to make money, but at the same time is repelled by what he views as the mean-spiritedness of this corner of the Protestant hemisphere. The apparent contradiction between material success and social efficiency on the one hand, and lack of human empathy and interactivity on the other is enough to break one’s heart if one comes here alone simply to find work.

Our conversation started, like most conversations among baggage handlers and transport drivers, with comments about how the war is affecting our work. There are two opposing jokes about it that converge on the same truth: one is that the airport is unusually quiet and that, as long as Trump keeps bombing Iran, we can take it easy – long may it continue; the other is that the airport is unusually busy because of all the stranded passengers and cancelled flights messing up our schedules and the mountains of bags that need to be processed and rerouted, so could Trump please put a sock in it. The point of convergence being, of course, the inscrutable intentions of D. J. Trump. Side note: for those who want to own the man’s mind, it’s all in the name.

My friend, that day, was working in the left-behind luggage sector. I remarked on how quiet it was for him. Thoughtful to a fault, he laughed off his present state of blessed ease with a comment about the mess everything was in because of the war. Every evening here it gets crazy, he said, the Air Oman and Air India flights are always late and all the bags just end up here. I nodded in placid agreement. Trump needs to stop bombing, I said, unperturbed by the fact that just a week before I had said the exact opposite to someone else. Such conversations follow preordained patterns.

“Yes!”, he went on. “I don’t understand why these two countries keep bombing and making a mess for everyone else.” A red flag appeared in my mind. “America and Israel, you mean?”

“Yes!”, he said. I could almost see the preordained pattern this conversation was about to take, like a path opening up suddenly before my feet.

“Why does America always do what Israel wants it to do?” he cried, apparently addressing the higher powers.

I balked. There was no going back.

“No,” I said. “I’m not buying it. America is not just doing what Israel wants it to do. Nobody really knows what Trump’s real motives are, but America and Israel each have their own agendas. That is media bullshit. The media lie constantly. If you listen to BBC, CNN, Al Jazeera, they’re always lying.”

“Yes, yes,” he concurred. “They always lie.”

We got into a wrangling match. As is so often the case when engaging in such conversations, or writing piquant letters to The Daily Telegraph newspaper, I find myself marvelling at the enormous blindspot in received thinking: MAGA America and the more hawkish end of Republicanism, Israel and any who support them are clearly corrupt, incompetent and evil, and bound to lead us all to perdition. They operate only out of selfish greed and ignorance, believe in nothing but their own brute power, and do not want other worldviews to thrive.

But – and this is my one contention – what about this current Iranian regime? Let’s look at them, let’s put them under the same microscope, and with them their entire proxy network and their sponsors in China and elsewhere. Let’s examine the UN and its various bodies, as well as the vast tribe of foreign correspondents and all the legacy charity organisations that are complicit in the spread of antisemitic sentiment across the globe. Why do our political and media elites express so much seditious interest in the members of the IRGC they hobnob with on the cocktail-circuits of Geneva and New York? Let us have an international inquiry into where the corruption really exists.

My friend clearly wasn’t prepared for this version of me. An international airport can be a stultifying place to work, and for the most part people are just thankful to muddle through the day without mishap. We all deal with it in our own way, each generally gravitating between boorishness and equanimity, managing varying degrees of exhaustion with heavy lashings of humour, reserving all warmth and friendship for chosen individuals. He started to retreat to points of principle.

“What I mean is that when someone does some shit, responding with bombs is not the way forward,” he said. I agreed: war is no good, whichever way you look at it. But if your neighbour exists for one purpose only, and that purpose is to wipe you off the face of the earth, what are you supposed to do?

Then came the shift. Perceiving my care, perceiving that perhaps I actually knew something about what’s going on, he asked another ‘why?’ question, but this time addressed to me directly: “why is there so much war in Israel?” I did my best to summarise what little knowledge I can summon without needing to check my facts, but the gist of it spoke to his own ethnic traditions: since its founding in 1948, Israel has been under constant attack, and yet, despite starting out as little more than a group of refugees with nothing but their own conviction to sustain them, they have consistently defeated their enemies, and, well, just look at them today.

“Like the Punjabis,” I added.

“Like us,” he said at the same time.

Never far from a smile, now he was beaming. “They are strong,” he said, “they fight for their place.”

“You know,” he added, “we say that in my country. We fight for our country – like the Yahudi.”

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)