Last week I went to a “National Day of Prayer Interfaith Breakfast.” I persuaded a couple of friends into going with me through promises of gnostic feminist insight and free food.

The U.S. National Day of Prayer happened to coincide with Cinco de Mayo, which wasn’t mentioned at all, and rememberance of the Shoa, the Holocaust, which one Rabbi Marc Rubenstein used to brutally attack the formation of Palestianian identity.

I almost walked out of Rubernstein’s diatribe. He spoke about the Holocaust, then about Hitler’s propagandist, Joseph Goebbels’ famous saying that “if you tell a lie long enough, it becomes truth.” Then he compared this to the formation of Palestinian national identity, and used the Hebrew Bible to support the Jews claim to the land of Israel/Palestine. Keep in mind that this was an interfaith meeting, ostensibly a place to heal wounds and to build bridges of understanding and tolerance between different religious groups.

At any rate, Goebbel’s quote is dead-on in the case of national identity. No matter what sort of truths, myths, or lies are at the root of Palestinian national identity, the fact is, there is such an identity and therefore such a nation today (ironically, persecution by the state of Israel has done as much as anything to solidify this identity). The Rabbi justified Israel’s claims using a book that many regard as mythical.

The net result was that my regard for how some Jews (but not all, mind you) use the Holocaust has fallen a notch or two. First of all, Jews do not have exclusive rights to the Holocaust. Certainly they were the primary victims, but there were at least 5 million others who were exterminated as well. Jana should have some claim to the Holocaust, being a physically disabled Mormon pacifist intellectual with socialist tendencies and a common Polish/Slavic first name. Secondly, wouldn’t going through something like the Holocaust make a people and its religious leaders more sensitive against the systematic marginalization of another people? (Granted, the Israelis are not Nazis, and Arab states are not paragons of virtuous freedom.)

We closed the meeting singing, “Let There be Peace on Earth and let it begin with me.”