Semite Fight

My Australian roommate back on the kibbutz used to tell me frequently that you should never insult a Middle Easterner’s mother, because no one gets insulted by that sort of thing like these people do. I used to laugh and playfully tease her, “What, do you know of an ethnicity whose people LIKE having their mother insulted?”

Anyway, during work the boss told me to fill up the refrigerator in front with soft drinks from the back. So after taking a couple minutes to make a note of what was missing up front, I headed to the back room. I had to squeeze by because the boss seemed to be arguing with one of the other workers, telling him to be more respectful to another worker…but I wasn’t really paying attention. I had my back to the whole thing while I grabbed myself a crate, and as I turned back around to start filling it up I noticed that one coworker was holding back another coworker. For the sake of clarity, I’ll tell you that the coworker being held back was Arab. I then took a second look and saw that the boss was holding a Jewish coworker back. The Jew and the Arab kept trying to lunge at the other, and kept screaming at each other. I couldn’t tell exactly who or what started the fight, but apparently mothers on both sides had been insulted, and so both were screaming things like, “Don’t you talk about my mother!”

“WHAT DO YOU KNOW ABOUT MY MOTHER???”

“WHAT DOES MY MOTHER HAVE TO DO WITH THIS?”

Part of me wanted to run to the Arab’s aid, because he’s the only coworker who hasn’t made a nasty comment about my weight, and is just generally very nice, and also because he’s sort of a kindred spirit—his Hebrew is very good, much better than mine, but it’s still not his language of comfort and so he sometimes feels sort of out of the loop just like me. The non-Israeli part of me felt that it was unfair that the Jew got to yell at this guy and fight back in his native tongue, whereas the Arab had to do it in a foreign language. To top it off, for various reasons I don’t like this particular Jew. So basically—and I say this as a loyal Zionist and Jew—I was rooting for the Arab to beat the shit out of this Jew.

But I just sort of stood there dumbfounded. Clearly it would be inappropriate for me to continue filling up my crate with soft drinks in this tiny back room filled with screaming and thrashing foreigners. But what was I supposed to do? I didn’t know if I should grab a pizza cutter to protect myself or if I should start singing some kind of peaceful Jesus or Kumbaya song in hopes that everyone would stop fighting and instead hold hands and join together in song. Maybe even make s’mores. And part of me considered turning the sink hose on them.

Instead I decided to just stand there with my mouth partially open, looking like a total retard.

The lunging got more aggressive, and the shouting got more frightening. What was particularly terrifying about the whole situation was that I didn’t fully understand what was going on because of the language barrier, but it was perfectly obvious that things were gonna get UGLY. “Oh G-d,” I thought to myself, “this is the part where people start blowing up.” Were we going to have to call in the American Army?

The boss, struggling to hold back the lunging Jew, caught sight of me standing agape like some kind of feminine and obese version of Aeneas (“obstipescere”) and shouted for me to leave the room and close the door. So I weaved my way through a sea of thrashing Jews and an Arab, and closed the door. Customers kept curiously glancing towards the door to the back room, because you could still hear people screaming at each other, and you could hear the aggressive shuffling of lunging feet. So I just turned up the volume to the song “Don’t Stop” by the Rolling Stones and hoped for the best….
Actually, the song “Don’t Stop” felt appropriately aggressive. I think it could have been worse if I had tried to cover up the sounds to Middle Easterners screaming at each other with something like the song “MMMBop” by Hanson or “Downtown” by Petula Clark. Or “Dancing Queen.” Now that would have just been disturbing…