When does anti-Zionism become anti-semitism?

Excellent article on "when anti-Zionism becomes anti-semitism" in Shiraz Socialist.

“Absolute anti-Zionism” can be summed up as as a one-sided hostility to Zionism (ie: Jewish nationalism) that willfully refuses to place it in its proper historical context (the pogroms, persecution and genocide of the last century), that whitewashes bourgeoise Arab nationalism and reactionary, fascistic Islamism, applies double-standards to Israel and ultimately winds up denying Israel’s right to exist, even behind pre-1967 borders....
What needs to be spelled out plainly is that this sort of stuff is anti-semitism, pure and simple. The fact that the people putting it about regard themselves as “left wing” is neither here nor there. [Dan] Glazebook (book reviewer for the Morning Star, the British newspaper of the Communist Party of Britain], significantly, also writes in what is probably the world’s leading “left” anti-semitic publication, the US magazine Counterpunch. In fact, the roots of this type of “left wing” anti-semitism are in Stalinism and the Stalinist bureaucracy’s campaigns against “Zionism” from the 1930′s through the 1952-3 “Doctors’ Plot” in the USSR and the ”anti-Zionist” campaign in Poland in 1967-68.
In fact, given their political tradition’s foul history of promoting the “Socialism of fools“, Mr Haylett and his Stalinist colleagues really aught to be more careful about their pandering to ‘absolute anti-Zionism’: or, as it is more properly called: “left wing” anti-semitism.

Good comment also:

We could call it the anti-zionism of fools, but that sounds too mild, too much like the criticism of a few blameless ignorants. They aren’t blameless and they aren’t ignorant. They are racist scoundrels. And they have infected the left with a disease that should have died in 1945, certainly by March 5, 1953.

Hanan Eshel has passed away

I just learned from Paleojudaica (Jim Davila's blog) that Hanan Eshel, the great Israeli scholar of the Dead Sea Scrolls and other early Jewish literature, has just died. I saw him last summer when I was in Jerusalem and learned then that he was ill with cancer. He and his wife Esti spoke about his hopes at that point that he would recover from the disease. I first met him, I think, in 1987 or 1988 when I was a graduate student studying at the Hebrew University. I can't remember if we took a class together or not (or if he was already teaching at that point). He was always gracious, helpful, and often quite funny. May his memory be for a blessing.

An obituary on him can be found at: http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/136903

Human Rights Watch - Obsession with Israel

The Sunday Times (London) has just published an article on Human Rights Watch's most controversial ex-employee, Marc Garlasco (whose hobby was collecting Nazi memorabilia). The article also nails HRW on their obsession with Israel/Palestine above other conflict zones in the world.

Every year, Human Rights Watch puts out up to 100 glossy reports — essentially mini books — and 600-700 press releases, according to Daly, a former journalist for The Independent.

Some conflict zones get much more coverage than others. For instance, HRW has published five heavily publicised reports on Israel and the Palestinian territories since the January 2009 war.

In 20 years they have published only four reports on the conflict in Indian-controlled Kashmir, for example, even though the conflict has taken at least 80,000 lives in these two decades, and torture and extrajudicial murder have taken place on a vast scale. Perhaps even more tellingly, HRW has not published any report on the postelection violence and repression in Iran more than six months after the event.

When I asked the Middle East director Sarah Leah Whitson if HRW was ever going to release one, she said: “We have a draft, but I’m not sure I want to put one out.” Asked the same question, executive director Kenneth Roth told me that the problem with doing a report on Iran was the difficulty of getting into the country.

I interviewed a human-rights expert at a competing organisation in Washington who did not wish to be named because “we operate in a very small world and t’s not done to criticise other human-rights organisations”. He told me he was “not surprised” that HRW has still not produced a report on the violence in Iran: “They are thinking about how it’s going to be used politically in Washington. And it’s not a priority for them because Iran is just not a bad guy that they are interested in highlighting. Their hearts are not in it. Let’s face it, the thing that really excites them is Israel.”

Noah Pollak, a New York writer who has led some of the criticisms against HRW, points out that it cares about Palestinians when maltreated by Israelis, but is less concerned if perpetrators are fellow Arabs. For instance, in 2007 the Lebanese army shelled the Nahr al Bared refugee camp near Tripoli (then under the control of Fatah al Islam radicals), killing more than 100 civilians and displacing 30,000. HRW put out a press release — but it never produced a report.

Such imbalance was at the heart of a public dressing-down that shook HRW in October. It came from the organisation’s own founder and chairman emeritus, the renowned publisher Robert Bernstein, who took it to task in The New York Times for devoting its resources to open and democratic societies rather than closed ones. (Originally set up as Helsinki Watch, the group’s original brief was to expose abuses of human rights behind the iron curtain.)

“Nowhere is this more evident than its work in the Middle East,” he wrote. “The region is populated by authoritarian regimes with appalling human-rights records. Yet in recent years Human Rights Watch has written far more condemnations of Israel… than of any other country in the region.”

Bernstein pointed out that Israel has “a population of 7.4m, is home to at least 80 human-rights organisations, a vibrant free press, a democratically elected government, a judiciary that frequently rules against the government…and probably more journalists per capita than any other country in the world… Meanwhile the Arab and Iranian regimes rule over some 350m people and most remain brutal, closed and autocratic”.

Bernstein concluded that if HRW did not “return to its founding mission and the spirit of humility that animated it… its credibility will be seriously undermined and its important role in the world significantly diminished”. HRW’s response was ferocious — and disingenuous. In their letters to the paper, Roth and others made it sound as if Bernstein had said that open societies and democracies should not be monitored at all.

It turns out that even Garlasco was not as enthused about the anti-Israel line of HRW as his bosses in New York wanted him to be:

Associates of Garlasco have told me that there had long been tensions between Garlasco and HRW’s Middle East Division in New York — perhaps because he sometimes stuck his neck out and did not follow the HRW line. Garlasco himself apparently resented what he felt was pressure to sex up claims of Israeli violations of laws of war in Gaza and Lebanon, or to stick by initial assessments even when they turned out to be incorrect.

In June 2006, Garlasco had alleged that an explosion on a Gaza beach that killed seven people had been caused by Israeli shelling. However, after seeing the details of an Israeli army investigation that closely examined the relevant ballistics and blast patterns, he subsequently told the Jerusalem Post that he had been wrong and that the deaths were probably caused by an unexploded munition in the sand. But this went down badly at Human Rights Watch HQ in New York, and the admission was retracted by an HRW press release the next day.

Emphasis mine.

Volcano in Iceland

The Fimmvoruhald volcano erupting at Iceland's Eyjafjallajökull glacier, earlier this week. (Don't ask me to pronounce either name - when I listen to Eyjafjallajökull being pronounced via Slate or Wikipedia, it sounds very little like what it looks like).

I was living in Seattle in 1980 when Mount St. Helens blew (see the website for the Mount St. Helens National Volcano Monument for more information).

The winds never blew the ash cloud into Seattle, but Portland was hit several times by the ash when the wind blew in the right direction. It was still very dramatic - you could see the huge column of ash for a long time from Seattle. I never did visit the volcano, but one of the tourist souvenirs one could buy soon afterwards were little glass vials of volcano ash. I bought one but have no idea what happened to it.

"Among the Righteous" updated

I just finished watching "Among the Righteous" - it's a very interesting film, not only telling the stories of some Arabs who saved Jews in North Africa, but also asking the question of why this has not been researched and remembered. These are my notes on the film:

Among the Righteous

More than one hundred concentration camps were set up in North Africa, by the Vichy French, the Nazis, and the Italians. A camp in Libya named Giado was where the most Jews died of all of the camps. An interesting point made by Satloff is that even though knowledge of these camps had been forgotten for a long time, the movie Casablanca (made during the war) mentions concentration camps at a couple of points, so their existence was certainly known at the time.

One example of a righteous person whom Satloff found was an Arab nobleman named Ali Sikkat, in Tunisia. During fighting in 1943, sixty Jews were being kept in a labor camp fled the camp in the middle of a battle between the Allies and the Axis. Their lives were saved by Ali Sikkat, whose story was published already fifty years ago.

Satloff said that his search for a righteous Arab was politically loaded: why don’t we know these stories? Arabs don’t want to be found – it became toxic in many Arab countries to let it be known that you’d helped Jews. The problem is that Arab sympathy for the Palestinian people has prevented these stories from being unearthed and told, in order not to give support to Israel.

Historically speaking, Jews in Muslim lands lived as second class citizens (admittedly, usually better than the situation of Jews living in Christian countries). Jews were under legal prescriptions (as dhimmis who had to pay the jizya to gain legal protection), and from time to time there was violence against them. In the 1930s, the Jews of North Africa faced a new threat – fascism and antisemitism.

The only Holocaust memorial monument in all of North Africa commemorates a group of Tunisian Jews who were deported and killed in Europe – Joseph, Gilbert, Jean Scemla. Gilbert went to the Ecole Polytechnique (highest French university), and fought with the French against the Nazis in 1940.

France’s Vichy government was almost as antisemitic as the German government. After the fall of France, Gilbert rejoined his family in Tunis, since he was no longer at home in France. But North Africa was becoming less hospitable to Jews – the film shows images of Petain, and the fascist salute.
The strict quotas of France’s antisemitic laws were imposed in French North Africa. Jewish businesses were confiscated, Jews were barred from the professions, Jewish children were kicked out of schools, and Jews were stripped of their citizenship.

The Vichy government established harsh internment camps in Algeria and Morocco, in the Sahara. The
Jewish prisoners were mostly from central Europe, people who had fled to North Africa from the Nazis in Europe. Satloff relays testimonies from Polish Jewish survivors who were liberated by the British. One of the tasks laid upon the prisoners was to build the trans-Sahara railway. A couple of the camps in Morocco were in Bergen and Tendrara, where people died of starvation, insects, exposure, and illness.

In beginning of 1942, Rommel (general of the Afrika Korps) entered Egypt. Hitler ordered him to hold North Africa. Operation Torch, the beginning of the Allied counteroffensive against the Nazis, landed American and British troops in North Africa. The video shows the war cemetery in Tunis, with the graves of 6,000 American troops (I never knew this).

German troops invaded Tunisia - it was the only Arab country to be occupied by the Nazis. Once the Germans entered Tunisia, they began the usual routine of persecuting the Jews. The SS commander in Tunis was Walter Rauf, the Nazi commander who had been involved in organizing the mobile gas killing vans in eastern Europe. In December, 1942, Rauf rounded up Jews in Tunis. Jewish laborers were forced to wear the yellow star.

How did Arabs react to the persecution of their Jewish neighbors? Most were bystanders, a few made their hatred heard – “you Jews, you Yids, will all have your throats cut.” Some Arabs enlisted in the German army, others volunteered to guard the camps, and a few rescued Jews from Nazi persecution.

Joseph Naccache said that his neighbors had shielded him. Satloff found his house and the hammam (bathhouse) where he had been protected. Why did they protect the Jews? Because Jews and Muslims were like brothers (speaking to the son of the man who protected Naccacche).

Satloff showed the marble mausoleum of King Mohammed V of Morocco, who was king during WWII. He defied the Vichy authorities and said that in his kingdom there were no Jews or Muslims – only Moroccan citizens. The Vichy authorities wanted Moroccan Jews to wear the yellow star, but the king refused, saying that he too would wear the yellow star. In Algeria there were Muslim religious objections to Vichy laws against the Jews. An announcement was made in the mosques forbidding any Muslim believer from serving as a custodian of confiscated Jewish property. The newly crowned king of Tunisia under Nazi rule told the Jews he thought of them as part of his family.

To return to the Scemla family. They moved to the seaside town of Hammamat. Gilbert and Jean decided to fight with the French resistance. They then tried to escape, with the help of Hassan Vergany, who was a friend of the family. Vergany turned them into the Germans, and they were arrested outside of the German headquarters of Rommel himself. Joseph Scemla and his two sons were sent to the old Turkish prison in Tunis. In April 1943 they were sent to Dachau in Germany with 50 other prisoners.
It was a year before the Germans decided on their fate.

Satloff then recounted the story of Khaled Abdul Wahad, who owned a farm in Tunisia. Annie Bouqris told of this Arab landowner who saved her life and the life of her family. His daughter is still alive, and she said that at that time she knew that there were some Jewish families on the farm.

Edmee Masliah was told that her family’s home was being taken by the Nazis. Her family took refuge in an abandoned olive oil factory along with other Jewish families. Khaled wined and dined the German soldiers and learned that one of them had his eye on a Jewish girl. Khaled went to the oil press factory and told the Jews they had to leave immediately, and he led them to his farm, where they stayed in the stables. This should have been a perfect hiding place for the Jews, but soon after they arrived, a German regiment pitched its tents right on the edge of his property. Khaled told them not to wear their Jewish stars, so no one would know they were Jewish. One night when the men were away doing forced labor, the women and children almost came to grief. Khaled was still entertaining Germans to keep informed; a drunken German wandered off into the Bouqris family’s bedroom and threatened to rape one of the girls. He told them he was going to kill them that night. At that moment Khaled showed up and led away the German from the Jews.

That spring the German army was caught in a pincer between the British and American armies. Hundreds of thousands of German soldiers were captured. The ordeal of North African Jews was almost over. Satloff showed a film clip of Jews in Tunisia taking off the yellow stars.

To return to Joseph Scemla and his sons: they were transferred to the prison at Halle, Germany, and all were condemned to death. (Vergany was also condemned to 14 years in jail when the Free French took over Tunisia after the defeat of the Germans in 1943).

When Satloff lectures in Arab countries about the Holocaust, some Arabs yell at him, and say why are we talking about the Holocaust of 60 years ago instead of the Holocaust of the Palestinian Arabs today (he shows a clip of man who left his lecture yelling at him). A Palestinian Arab woman says we can now make a choice for peace, but many Arabs don’t want to recognize the Holocaust out of the fear that it means the acceptance of Israel.

In Israel – Satloff asks why haven’t we looked for Arab rescuers? He presents more stories from Tunisian survivors – about how they were saved from Germans by Arab neighbors. Satloff is trying to get Khaled Abdul Wahad recognized as one of the Righteous – but Yad Vashem has refused, out of doubt that he risked his life for Jews (which is required to declare someone a Righteous Gentile).

What If Israel Ceases to Be a Democracy?

Jeffrey Goldberg of the Atlantic asks: What If Israel Ceases to Be a Democracy?

Is it actually possible that one day Israelis -- Jewish Israelis -- would choose to give up democracy in order to maintain Israel's Jewish voting majority? Some people, of course, argue that Israel has ceased to be a democracy, because there is nothing temporary about the 43-year-old occupation of the West Bank. I believe it is premature to talk about the end of Israel as a democratic state -- mainly because the disposition of the West Bank is still undecided -- but I can't say that the thought hasn't crossed my mind that one day Israelis will make the conscious, active decision to preserve the state's Jewish character instead of its democratic character (I use the word "Jewish" in the demographic sense, not the moral sense, obviously).

As I wrote last week, there's very little Israel's right-wing government has done in the past year or so to suggest that it is willing to wean itself from its addiction to West Bank settlements, and the expansion of settlements bodes ill for the creation of a Palestinian state -- and the absence of Palestinian statehood means that Israel will one day soon confront this crucial question concerning its democratic nature: Will it grant West Bank Arabs the right to vote, or will it deny them the vote? If it grants them the vote, this will be the end of Israel as a Jewish state; if it denies them the vote in perpetuity, it will cease to be a democratic state.

And David Remnick of the New Yorker says I can't take the occupation any more.

A new generation of Jews is growing up in the US. Their relationship with Israel is becoming less patient and more problematic. They see what has happened with the Rabbinical Letter [proscribing rental and sale of property to Arabs -- DR], for example. How long can you expect that they’ll love unconditionally the place called Israel [sic]? You’ve got a problem. You have the status of an occupier since 1967. It’s been happening for so long that even people like me, who understand that not only one side is responsible for the conflict and that the Palestinians missed an historic opportunity for peace in 2000, can’t take it anymore.

“The US administration is trying out of good will to get a peace process moving and in return Israel lays out conditions like the release Jonathan Pollard. Sorry, it can’t go on this way. The Jewish community is not just a nice breakfast at the Regency. You think it’s bad that a US President is trying to make an effort to promote peace? That’s what’s hurting your feelings? Give me a break, you’ve got bigger problems. A shopping list in exchange for a two month moratorium on settlement construction? Jesus [sic].

Earlier this year, Yosi Even-Kama, an Israeli student at the Shenkar College of Engineering and Design, produced his final project about the destruction of Israeli democracy through a right-wing revolt.

The controversial final project of a graduate of the Shenkar College of Engineering and Design has Israel's religious community up in arms. Yossi Even-Kama's "State of Judea" exhibit, which has been posted on Facebook and picked up by various religious websites, is a fictional depiction of the gradual death of Israeli democracy in the years 2020-2023 and the establishment of a religious, anti-democratic state in its place.

I'm not so sure that Even-Kama's scenario is the most likely - there certainly seem to be strong anti-democratic figures in Israel today who are not religious (like Avigdor Lieberman, surely the worst foreign minister Israel has ever had). But if Israel does abandon democracy, the extreme right-wing religious Zionists will probably also play a part.

Last summer, when I was visiting Israel, a right-wing group called Im Tirtzu attacked Israeli higher education for its supposed anti-Zionist bias. They sent a letter to the president of Ben Gurion University demanding that she change certain supposedly anti-Zionist academic programs within thirty days, and advising potential donors not to contribute to the university.

The Im Tirtzu Zionist movement is threatening to deter philanthropists from donating to the Ben-Gurion University in Beersheba if it doesn't change its "anti-Zionist bias in the Politics and Government Department."

The movement sent a letter to University President Prof. Rebecca Carmi threatening to ask donors to deposit their funds to a trust fund managed by a lawyer should the university fail to meet their demands within 30 days, and replace some of the staff and change the study program.

Im Tirtzu claims that the university employs more leftists that rightists in its academic staff. According to the activists, President Carmi allowed "the academic dictatorship to gain control of academic freedom and considerably limit intellectual pluralism."

Im Tirtzu director Ronen Shoval and Erez Tadmor, head of the movement's policy and PR department presented data from a report the movement issued which found a "post-Zionist bias" in the political science faculties in various Israeli universities.

According to the report, nine out of 11 academic staff members in the Ben-Gurion Politics and Government Department are involved in political activity which champions "radical Left" agendas. It is stated that three out of 6 doctoral candidates signed a petition supporting Dr. Neve Gordon who called for a boycott of Israel. "We implore you to put and end of the anti-Zionist bias and the exclusion of Zionist students and researchers from the department."

The Zionist movement also threatened to urge students to leave the university. "We shall employ all legal means at our disposal to bring this information to the attention of current and future students as well as elements supporting the university in Israel and aboard," it was stated.

"We want them to take the report seriously, check the claims and stop burying their heads in the sand thinking all is permitted to them," Tadmor told Ynet. "Their dismissive attitude attests to the severity of the problem. I don't want them to fire lecturers. I find it unreasonable that 90% of the senior staff are radical left-wingers just as it is unreasonable for a workplace to have a complete majority of men. It's obvious there is discrimination."

The Ben-Gurion University stated in response: "The university is not in a habit of holding periodical examinations of its staff members' political positions. Such a demand and a demand to "balance" the staff members' political views is extremely reminiscent of McCarthyism and goes against the democratic principles on which the State of Israel was founded. Can it be conceived that a university or any other institution fire or hire employees on the basis of their political opinions?"

The Israeli education minister, Gideon Saar, appeared to support at least in part the agenda of Im Tirtzu. He attended a conference earlier in the year organized by the group and said that he would take their report seriously. In remarks he made to the Knesset in late June, 2010, he stated the following:

Sa'ar said: "I think that the Im Tirtzu report is important in the sense that it generates public debate. It is important to examine the issues raised in the report." In his statements to the plenum [of the Knesset], Sa'ar referred specifically to professors who have backed calls to boycott Israeli universities.

"This is something that is impossible to accept," Sa'ar said. "I have already spoken about this with the head of the Higher Education Council's planning and budgeting committee [Manuel Trajtenberg], and there will be measures taken vis-a-vis the heads of these institutions. This matter is on our agenda - and we plan on taking action over the course of the summer."

Ariel seemed to understand Sa'ar as saying he plans to investigate the charges. His office released a statement reading: "The education minister said that he plans on thoroughly probing the charges made by Im Tirtzu this coming summer."

A spokesperson for Trajtenberg refused to comment when reached by Haaretz, deferring to Sa'ar's office.

"It would behoove the education minister to ignore the report, which emits an aroma of McCarthyism," said Professor Yossi Ben-Artzi, the rector of the University of Haifa. "I hope he will understand the gravity of the very fact of monitoring and informing on lecturers, and of whether he even needs to take seriously an organization like Im Tirtzu, which causes incitement." Earlier this year Sa'ar took part in a conference organized by Im Tirtzu. "I place great importance in this gathering," he said. "Campus activism is hugely vital, and this is what you are doing. For this, you will be blessed." "I very much appreciate this work, which gives expression to an authentic Zeitgeist felt by the public and is much needed on our campuses," Sa'ar said of Im Tirtzu. "I came to tell you: God speed.

Sa'ar on the other hand did oppose the ultimatum given to Ben-Gurion University by Im Tirtzu:

Education Minister Gideon Sa'ar's office stated that, "Regardless of the claims relating to pluralism within Israeli academia and other issues, Education Minister and Chairman of the Committee for Higher Education Gideon Sa'ar discounts any move that is liable to harm donations to universities in Israel and their conditions."

Westboro Baptist Church vs. sanity: picketing Elizabeth Edwards' funeral

Honestly, the world really is going to hell in a handbasket, as my grandmother might have said!

Elizabeth Edwards Funeral To Be Picketed By Westboro Baptist Church. Reading their insane announcement about Edwards' funeral, what seems to anger them most is that she said, "I'm not praying to God to save me from cancer."

In my opinion, what she said was admirable. Unlike so many people, she didn't try to fool herself into thinking that God would intervene to stop her cancer. NPR has an interview with Jonathan Alter, who spoke with her in 2007 about her life.

INSKEEP: When you sat down with Elizabeth Edwards how did the two of you talk about such a personal subject?

Mr. ALTER: Well, this was after her recurrence in 2007. And for those who are listening who've had cancer, had somebody close to them with cancer, you know, that it's kind of a club, almost. It's a way of looking at the world that is impossible if you haven't experienced it.

So we bonded, pretty quickly, even though I wasn't a particular supporter of her husband's campaign. And what struck me in that interview shortly after recurrence, was her brutal honesty, which I think the rest of the world came into contact with in later years.

INSKEEP: What do you mean?

Mr. ALTER: Especially struck by how honest she was on the issue of faith, which most presidential candidates and their spouses have - are required almost, by the world we live in, to talk with great sincerity about their religious faith.

And what Elizabeth said on that particular occasion, was that she couldn't see how she could believe in a god who would blow her 16-year-old son off the road and kill him in an auto accident in 1996. And that any god who could do that, was a god that she was not going to be praying to to cure her cancer. Because if he wouldn't save her son, he wasn't going to save her. And that just was reflective of the degree of honesty that she achieved after she had this horrible life experience.

From a profile of Edwards, quoted in Politics Daily:

"I have, I think, somewhat of an odd version of God," Edwards explained to an audience of women bloggers when asked how her beliefs inform her politics. "I do not have an intervening God. I don't think I can pray to him -- or her -- to cure me of cancer."

Edwards, according to Stan, laughed after describing God as "her" -- hardly a heresy and certainly understandable given her audience -- and continued on:

"I appreciate other people's prayers for that [a cure for her cancer], but I believe that we are given a set of guidelines, and that we are obligated to live our lives with a view to those guidelines. And I don't believe that we should live our lives that way for some promise of eternal life, but because that's what's right. We should do those things because that's what's right."

From an interview with Larry King:

In the weeks and months after Wade's death, she told King, "I had this idea that God was going to find some way to turn back time and he was going to be alive." She continued to ask herself, as many do, whether she had done something wrong -- did she not teach him well enough, not get him a safe enough car? And then when cancer struck, and her husband's affair was revealed, she agonized about the possibility of her own cosmic cooperation in it all.

"And I have to recognize with each of these things, they just happen," she told King. "You didn't have to do something wrong to justify them."

But she added, "You still sort of wonder: Is there some grand plan where you've done something someplace else?"

Edwards said she had to move on from such magical and negative thinking, and she quoted a line from the Bill Moyers PBS special on the Book of Genesis, to the effect that "You get the God you have, not the God you want."

"The God I wanted was going to intervene. He was going to turn time back. The God I wanted was -- I was going to pray for good health and he was going to give it to me," she said. "Why in this complicated world, with so much grief and pain around us throughout the world, I could still believe that, I don't know. But I did. And then I realized that the God that I have was going to promise me salvation if I lived in the right way and he was going to promise me understanding. That's what I'm sort of asking for . . . let me understand why I was tested."

Such openness to doubt and, in particular, to the persistence of suffering runs counter to powerful currents of American Christianity that stress the blessings (mostly material) that will flow to those who believe (and donate), as well as to the premium so many Christians place on voicing a confident and undiluted conviction, no matter what the reality.

It's that last point - the openness to doubt and especially to the persistence of suffering - that is so important. I don't think that religion should be used to shield us from the reality of suffering, to make us pretend that suffering doesn't exist - for each and every one of us, no matter how rich or successful we may end up being. We all die in the end, often in pain, often in loneliness. I don't see the point of religion which cloaks that reality. That's why the books of Job and Ecclesiastes (Kohelet) are so important - perhaps we need to read them more often, rather than wasting our time on spiritual pabulum that soothes us while at the same time lying to us.