72 Years of Injustice and Oppression Must Be Addressed

No equal rights under the law. Rights, what rights? Law, what law? The wrong kind of glance, a suspicious movement, a misunderstanding, is all that’s enough for authorities to haul anyone away, to await “trial.” Any excuse is a good excuse to slap on handcuffs. That’s just how things operate. The rest of the world, silent.

Again, well-documented. Seventy-two years of this. What’s worse, the facts bear that these particular people – and you know who I’m talking about – have made this their home for hundreds, perhaps a thousand years.

To the majority, this minority is barely tolerated, looked at as “others,” mistrusted, and their religion makes them a target. And fancy that, the good people who remain complacent shrug, not wanting to be ostracized or lumped with the oppressed.

Seventy-two years of this. Oh, and the government had built a wall as part of their military occupation, for good measure.

Brandishing automatic weapons, the government’s uniformed bullies-for-hire are known to randomly break into homes, on an unsubstantiated “hunch,” looking for any trace of “illegal” activity, real or imagined. Because of “those” people, deemed lesser-than.

Seventy-two years of this brutality; the truth of its wide-ranging effect on millions of people, the sheer hell on Earth that left infinite scars.

If you ask me, so much has been taken away, robbed, that there should be a fundamental right, on a basic human level, that this suffering should be justly compensated.

If you are on the same page as me ideologically, you might have been saying “amen” throughout. Nodding your head? Damn, I hope so.

You empathized, I presumed, because 72 years is admittedly a long time to be living under a boot. Unless you are that indifferent majority, concocting justifications, your compassion was aroused, and I trust that there’s a certain amount of outrage in you, that, with clenched teeth and clenched fist, you’d want to know that justice was finally served.

Thing is,the group I was referring to? It wasn’t Palestinian Arabs.

It wasn’t.

I was talking about Soviet Jews. Millions of whom lived under the iron fist of communism for 72 years, from 1917 to 1989. This is what it took to get your attention, and I’m not ashamed of a little sleight-of-hand.

A little history lesson, lest it slip into our collective amnesia: those who were fortunate and lucky enough flee the grip of Communist Russia, did so with little else but a suitcase, and the clothes on their backs. They were lucky. The remainder? Jews were the “other,” because… Jews. For three generations, in an open-air prison.

Oh, Palestinians cry for what they lost, demanding a price for pain. But where is the compensation for Soviet Jews– for what they left behind, for the struggles they endured?

Where is the justice for seven decades?

What about the tens of thousands of Jews who just… “disappeared”? Those who were sent to the gulag? I speak of this, because I am not aware of anyone who has demanded the Russian government to hold itself to account for the crimes it committed against the Jewish people for seventy-two years.

Yes, many people suffered under communism, but the truth is, the Jews paid the biggest price.

With ever-growing ties between Jerusalem and Moscow, and increasing geo-political cooperation between the two, perhaps it’s time for the Jewish people to let Vladimir Putin know that we’ve been waiting a long time for his country to acknowledge, and own up to, what was done.

Why is no one speaking about this – the wide-scale crimes against the Jewish people, for whose cost we as a nation must bear – but Russia can merely let it slide into the mists of time?