I Know What Erwin—Were He Still Alive—Would Think of This

A mega-dormitory called Jester was home during my first two years at the University of Texas. The Jester cafeteria, which served decent institutional food (20 meals per week) is where I met Erwin Reyes.

Born and raised in La Paz, Bolivia, Erwin had come to Austin via Blinn Junior College and was majoring in psychology; he would go on to get a Ph.D. in that field and work for many years as a counselor in New York City. Although it has no bearing whatsoever on the present topic, I will add that Erwin was a hetero-turned-homo guy. Yes, at some point after graduating, he realized his true sexual orientation. He knew mine, too, but that did not keep him from pestering me again and again. I finally had to tell him that there was not a snowball’s chance in hell of us being bed partners. My girlfriend, Pam Grover, found all this amusing if not hilarious.

Before he came to be “light in the loafers,” he had a GF, a coed named Robbie. She was a secular Jew, a fact of which I was just vaguely aware at the time. In fact, I might never have known had it not been for an argument between the two of them—I was not present—which culminated in Erwin cursing her and making a comment about “your damned Jewish ethics.” That, naturally, led to tears and a breakup.

About 700 Jews live in Bolivia today, down from a peak of 7,000 in the late 1930s when Adolf Hitler sent Sephardic and Ashkenazi people fleeing for safety—even to a landlocked country in South America about which they may have known little. Most have since emigrated to Israel, the USA and neighboring Argentina. Erwin, born two years before me, was aware of the Holocaust while growing up in La Paz. I know this because he used to laugh and tell me how he and his friends taunted the few Jewish kids there by calling them “soap.” He stated as fact that the Nazis had used fat extracted from Jewish corpses at Auschwitz to make soap. It appears to be just a rumor, but one that has endured. Although Yad Vashem in Jerusalem (Israel’s official memorial to Holocaust victims) has stated that nothing of the sort happened, just the thought can make one shudder. Erwin and his Bolivian pals thought it funny enough to use as an anti-Semitic putdown. Where he got this bias, I do not know. For what it’s worth, however, his grandfather was of German descent.

Erwin aggravated me not just by his non-stop sexual importuning but by his singular focus on the cause of Palestinians in the Middle East. To him, they were the forever-innocent good guys and the Israelis were the villainous bad guys. I doubted it was that simple, and anyway, I had sympathy for the Jews’ suffering under Hitler as well as respect for their achievements in the fields of music, sports, business, academia, politics and so on. The founding of the state of Israel in 1947 was, I thought and still do, a positive thing. In the end, I sent him in an e-mail and virtually screamed, “Erwin, you are a one-trick pony! Do you not realize that there are other issues in the world than this?”

As he caught the HIV virus in the 1980s, I doubt that he is still alive.* But if he were, he would almost surely be among the loudest cheerleaders for the Palestinians in their current conflict with Israel. To begin with, I admit that this is not something I am deeply knowledgeable about. I realize that life in the Gaza Strip is tough, and the Israeli government and its military do little to ameliorate the people’s suffering. They and their supporters (especially Iran) adamantly refuse to recognize Israel. But should the Israelis, facing an existential threat, not defend themselves stoutly?

It began on October 7, 2023 with a rocket barrage and several thousand militants crossing into Israel. They attacked military sites and civilian communities alike, killed nearly 1,200 Israelis and foreign nationals, kidnapped 250 people and took them back to Gaza. Their demands—that Israel release all Palestinian prisoners and detainees—were ignored as prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu ordered a forceful response three weeks later. More than 40,000 Palestinians have died, virtually all of the 2.3 million people in Gaza have been displaced, infrastructure has been destroyed, and if critics can be believed, a famine has been ongoing since February.

The Israelis mean business. As proof thereof, I offer the names of some of the Hamas and Hezbollah leaders sent into oblivion by the Israeli military or assassination squads since the invasion just over a year ago: Yahya Sinwar, Ibrahim Aqil, Ismail Haniyeh, Fatah Sharif, Ali Karaki, Nabil Kaouk, Mohammed Srur, Ibrahim Qubaisi, Ahmed Wahbi, Fuad Shukr, Mohammed Nasser, Taleb Abdallah, Mohammed Deif, Ismail Haniyeh, Saleh-al Arouri and Marwan Issa. Some bit the dust in Gaza, some in Lebanon and one (Haniyeh) in Iran.

During the first 10 days of the war, world opinion as measured by public protests clearly favored the Israelis. They had, after all, been invaded and attacked in a most brutal way. Things quickly swung in the other direction, however. In the U.S. alone, there have been more than 3,000 public protests supporting the Palestinians and their friends in adjacent countries and far fewer backing Israel. American college campuses (including, needless to say, UT) have been engulfed by strident people waving the red, white, green and black Palestinian flag, wearing the keffiyeh headdress and holding banners that accuse Israel of genocide, apartheid and other unkind acts. U.S. financial and diplomatic support for Israel is criticized, as well.

Perhaps Israel’s response to the October 7, 2023 attack has gone on too long and been unnecessarily harsh. So the critics say, and yet others contend that the instigators of that attack must have known that a bloody nose would ensue. In 1972, while Erwin was still a close friend, Jim Croce wrote a song including these lyrics: “You don’t tug on Superman’s cape / You don’t spit into the wind / You don’t pull the mask off the old Lone Ranger / And you don’t mess around with Jim.” In the present case, Superman, the Lone Ranger and Jim = Israel.

* My online search for an obituary has been fruitless. I did, however find reference to a 1991 academic treatise Erwin wrote entitled “The Interrelationships of Role-taking, Social Competence, Sex Role Concept, Acculturation and Trait Anxiety among Puerto Rican Women in New York City: A Development Approach.”