Diana Wichtel: No fun being wrong half of Jewish

Lately, it hasn't felt like a good time to be Jewish. But when, in the past couple of millenniums, has it been? My problem is compounded by the fact that I'm only half-Jewish, and the wrong half at that.

There was a time when I was comforted by the thought that, if things got bad for Jews again, I could always head for the safety of Israel. But even when that country is no longer anyone's idea of a haven, it wouldn't have me.

Orthodox Judaism says there are no half-Jews. You either are or you aren't. If your mother is a Gentile (mine is a Catholic Kiwi, which is about as Gentile as you can get) you aren't. Jewish is a club I can't join.

The more relaxed Reform Judaism welcomes those of us with Jewish fathers, as long as we were "brought up Jewish". Well, we ate a lot of matzos and gefilte fish, but I'm not sure that counts. So what am I? It's an unsettling question to have to put to oneself at this stage of life.

But lately I've discovered I'm not alone. In fact, I'm in danger of becoming a burgeoning subculture. Suddenly, there are half-Jewish books, half-Jewish conferences and the inevitable half-Jewish website. At www.halfjew.com I have learned that "Oy vay" can be loosely translated as "Geez, Louise". I'm reliably informed that Paul Newman, Goldie Hawn, Courtney Love and Geraldo Rivera are fellow half-Jews. I have also discovered new ways to describe my "bagel no lox" heritage, my favourite being the defiantly self-effacing "Wrong-Side Half-Jewish".

It's all go at half-jew.com. The board has posted an open letter to the New York City fathers asking that Governors Island be handed over to half-Jews so they can "grow their dynamic, evolving identity, and to have mixers on". Oy, Louise, I may soon have a homeland after all.

Other issues of mixed identity are less fun to deal with. The latest escalation of the ongoing tragedy in the Middle East presents me with an old, familiar conflict between heart and head. One of the reasons my Jewish heritage matters to me involves the sheer odds against my having any heritage at all. I really shouldn't be here.

My father was a Holocaust survivor. He went back to Poland after the war to see if there was anyone left. There wasn't. He never went back again. Some survivors were murdered when they did. He went to Canada, where his background - if it was known at all, he almost never talked about it - was greeted with an embarrassed silence.

Despite ongoing controversy, it is clear that the Allies knew about Hitler's plans early on. In 1939, a ship with nearly 1000 Jews was turned back by the United States and Cuba. At least half those people died.

It is also clear, from modern scholarship, that in countries such as Bulgaria, where the dominant church spoke out from the start against the deportation of Jews, most survived.

Every appalling, still incredible, fact and statistic I've learned about why there is such an absence of branches on one side of my family tree has strengthened my emotional allegiance to the idea of Israel. And a feeling that much of the Western World shares some historical responsibility for Israel's implacable will to survive at any, terrible cost. The Jews were given ghettoes and concentration camps. They had to get a homeland for themselves.

Lately, many local commentators have repeated the sanctimonious line that Jews, "of all people", shouldn't be capable of what the Israeli military are doing in the Middle East.

We live in a society that has long accepted the notion of the cycle of abuse. It is fashionable in some areas of the media to understand the desperation of terrorists who fly planes into buildings and strap explosives on to their children.

Yet Jews, world record-holders when it comes to enduring centuries of genocide, persecution and indifference, are held to a different standard and meant to be somehow genetically above the effects of such a history.

It's an odd way to look at things, particularly when those same commentators, keen to see Israel give all occupied land back, don't seem in a hurry to return the land taken from indigenous people during the colonisation of this country.

Of course Ariel Sharon is a disaster, a reality recognised by many of my Jewish and half-Jewish friends, and by a lot of Israelis. Even those who support his "war against terrorism" don't seem to hold out hope that it will work.

Israel must eventually give back the occupied territories. At the excellent Palestinian-Israeli website, www.bitterlemons.org, a passionately pro-Israel writer, addressing the growing anti-Semitism in Europe, talks about the damage done by "the ongoing and anachronistic occupation of most of the West Bank and Gaza, and expansion and fortification of settlements that constitute a key provocation in the eyes of Palestinians, many Israelis, and all of the world".

But even if Israel does withdraw, will that work? Pessimists think not and there seem to be more pessimists by the day.

Extremists, both Israeli and Palestinian, will see it as further justification for the terrorism on both sides that has become a horribly simple way of dealing with a hopelessly complex situation.

As Israeli scholar Avishai Margalit rather despairingly put it: "It's a blood feud and it's not future-oriented but always backward-oriented." Hopeless.

But then things have been quiet in Northern Ireland lately, and the Berlin Wall did eventually fall. Sometimes, miraculously, people get sick and tired of settling old scores.