Bob Dylan & Israel, The Neighborhood Bully

Anybody remember “Hurricane Carter”? This was the song that got an innocent black man triply convicted of murder exonerated and eventually released from jail. I still get the chills when I listen to it forty plus years later.

That was the Bob Dylan some of us fell in love with, the folk singer who pulled no punches and couldn’t stomach injustice.

Bob Dylan probably wouldn’t make any comment about what’s going on in Israel and Gaza today. Too fraught. Anyway, he’s too clever to paint himself into tight political corners he can’t get out of.

But here’s what he had to say about or sing about Israel in 1983. No, it’s nowhere near his best song, but the lyrics…see if you recognize what’s happening now in what he wrote way back then.

Neighborhood Bully

Well, the neighborhood bully, he’s just one man
His enemies say he’s on their land
They got him outnumbered about a million to one
He got no place to escape to, no place to run
He’s the neighborhood bully.

The neighborhood bully he just lives to survive
He’s criticized and condemned for being alive
He’s not supposed to fight back, he’s supposed to have thick skin
He’s supposed to lay down and die when his door is kicked in
He’s the neighborhood bully.

This stanza makes me wonder under what circumstances it would ever be considered legitimate for Israel to defend itself. In the Warsaw Ghetto, maybe? If God forbid, one of its Middle East neighbors dropped a bomb on the country? The warped thinking goes: Israel, and by extension Jews, only are “allowed” to defend themselves when they are at the razor edge of their entire existence, hanging on by a pinky, or even better, after most of them have died.

The neighborhood bully been driven out of every land
He’s wandered the earth an exiled man
Seen his family scattered, his people hounded and torn
He’s always on trial for just being born
He’s the neighborhood bully.

Imagine a world before there was a Jewish State. That was the world that Emma Lazarus saw, when in the 1880s, more than 250 pogroms in Imperial Russia caused more than 100,000 Jews to flee, mostly to the U.S. The more she became aware of their plight (and the rampant antisemitism in her own literary upper-crust circles), the more she became an advocate and spokesman for Jewish statehood. You easily could call the Jewish poet the mother of Zionism, because her ideas preceded Theodore Hertz’s by a good decade.

Emma wrote, “The Jewish problem is as old as history and assumes in each age a new form. All the magnanimity, patience, charity, and humanity, which the Jews have manifested in return for centuries of persecution, have been thus far inadequate to eradicate the profound antipathy engendered by fanaticism and ready to break out in one or another shape at any moment of popular excitement.”

It’s that phrase “popular excitement” that sends shudders through me. I’d say it captures too well the mood of what we’re all living through now.

Well, he knocked out a lynch mob, he was criticized
Old women condemned him, said he should apologize
Then he destroyed a bomb factory, nobody was glad
The bombs were meant for him. He was supposed to feel bad
He’s the neighborhood bully.

The bomb factory he’s referring to is the Iraqi atomic reactor that, back in 1981, was a few months away from completion. Such a bomb would’ve had the capacity to kill at least 100,000 people in nearby Israel. This was in the days of the Global Menace called Saddam Hussein. Would you want that volatile thug in your backyard toying with nuclear weapons — especially if he didn’t like you? Israel launched a strike and destroyed the reactor with stupefying precision, an act that brought in its wake world condemnation as well as the fulminations of the New York Times: “Israel’s sneak attack on a French-built nuclear reactor near Baghdad was an act of inexcusable and short-sighted aggression.”

Short-sighted? Hm. I’m not so sure the US troops who fought in the Gulf War in 1991, would agree with that assessment. They were pretty relieved actually, that the Madman of the Middle East didn’t have any nuclear bombs at his disposal.

Well, the chances are against it, and the odds are slim
That he’ll live by the rules that the world makes for him
’Cause there’s a noose at his neck and a gun at his back
And a license to kill him is given out to every maniac
He’s the neighborhood bully.

Oh those customs, rules and especially laws that were enacted against Jews, no matter where they set their roots, no matter how many centuries they’d lived in a particular place. My mother and her family had lived in Morocco for centuries, and while Morocco treated its Jews the best of any Arab nation, there were some less than lovely aspects. I won’t bore you with the specifics. If you want to get a taste of life for a Jew — and for that matter a Christian — in Islamic lands, read this: The Decline and Fall of Islamic Jewry — Bernard Lewis, Commentary Magazine

Well, he’s surrounded by pacifists who all want peace
They pray for it nightly that the bloodshed must cease
Now, they wouldn’t hurt a fly. To hurt one they would weep
They lay and they wait for this bully to fall asleep
He’s the neighborhood bully.

I guess a decent example of the above are the presidents of “elite” universities who exposed cancel-culture hypocrisy on their campuses, in their inability to condemn genocide against Jews. I’m sure there are better examples. Send them my way, if you can.

Every empire that’s enslaved him is gone
Egypt and Rome, even the great Babylon
He’s made a garden of paradise in the desert sand
In bed with nobody, under no one’s command
He’s the neighborhood bully.

Bob, maybe you should’ve omitted the above stanza, especially the line about making paradisiacal gardens out of wasteland. You don’t want to make the Jews looking too smart or good or successful, or God forbid too powerful in any area. It feeds on certain fears by the kind of people who enjoy reading the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

What’s anybody indebted to him for?
Nothing, they say. He just likes to cause war
Pride and prejudice and superstition indeed
They wait for this bully like a dog waits for feed
He’s the neighborhood bully.

What has he done to wear so many scars?
Does he change the course of rivers? Does he pollute the moon and stars?
Neighborhood bully, standing on the hill
Running out the clock, time standing still
Neighborhood bully.

This story may well be apocryphal but I want to end on something mildly hopeful: King Frederick of Prussia once asked his ministers for one single irrefutable proof of God. His physician, Jean-Baptiste du Boyer, the Marquis d’ Argens, is said to have answered, “The Jews, your Majesty. The Jews.”