David and Goliath in Milwaukee

While gnashing my teeth over the events in the Middle East tonight, it brought back memories of something that happened some fifty years ago in my neighborhood in Milwaukee.

My old neighborhood, now known as Sherman Park, was a melting pot of first and second generation immigrants, and what little ethnic tension existed was masked by the general peacefulness of the 1950s.  

There was one exception: a 16-year old German kid named Hahn, who bullied all the smaller kids, but reserved his greatest abuse and terror for the Jewish kids. I was once sitting with another kid, named Howard, in the stands watching a softball game at the park, and Hahn came up behind us and pulled Howard’s head backwards bending his body into a big arc. Howard’s feet were trapped under the seats in front of us and he screamed in agony. Hahn wouldn’t let up until some older kids approached. Another time I saw Hahn hang a smaller kid upside down on a wire fence until the kid threw up.

Hahn was a tall, beefy kid, looking exactly the way you’d expect a bully to look. Perhaps, something like Goliath must have looked to the Biblical Jews. There was a David in the Neighborhood, too. Or so it turned out. His Name was Billy, and he was a little kid for his age, but had somehow acquired powerful arm and shoulder muscles of the kind Popeye would get when he ate spinach.

Billy was on the school lawn hitting out a softball to a pal, when Hahn and his younger brother showed up. Hahn cursed out Billy with a stream of anti-Semitic invective and ordered him to get lost. He wanted to play ball in that spot and he used the baseball bat he was holding to poke at Billie. It was at that moment that Hahn became a Goliath, and Billie became a David.

Our young David responded to Goliath by whacking him with a full swing on the side of the head. Goliath went down in a heap into a pool of his own blood.

The sirens brought every kid within miles to the schoolground and we all saw Hahn being loaded into the back of the ambulance, and Billy into the back of a police car. Hahn’s younger brother was just standing and crying.

Hahn recovered, but was never quite the same, and he never bullied again. In fact, there was no more bullying in that neighborhood at all. Hahn’s kid brother had a change of heart for the better, too. He went around apologizing to all the Jewish kids for his brother’s behavior and turned out to be a pretty good guy.

Why did the current circumstances in the Middle East summon up this 50-year old memory? I think either you intuitively understand that, or you just don’t understand the relationship between the Israelis and the Goliath’s that surround them.