Practically every levelheaded Israeli -- including Defense Minister Moshe (Bogie) Ya'alon and Education Minister Shay Piron -- condemned the management of the Superland amusement park on Thursday for the segregationist practices that resulted in Arab and Jewish schoolchildren visiting on different days. This form of racism is just despicable. It is particularly troubling because it has taken place in the Jewish state. Such an event immediately reminds me of Rabbi Judah Halevi's "The Kuzari," in which the king argues that when the persecuted Jews obtain sovereignty in their land, they too will exhibit evil, the same evil harbored by other nations. The king's friend disputes this. There is no way of telling what the park managers were thinking when they adopted an apartheid policy. Perhaps they are a racist bunch. In fact, they might be racist to such a degree that they would prefer to see a drop in visitors than to see Jews and Arabs having a good time together. This explanation smacks of evil. But there is an even worse possibility. They could have concluded that their Jewish clientele were in favor of such a policy -- perhaps not all the Jewish patrons, but enough to take such a policy into account. "The customer is always right," the managers must have told themselves. If this is the conclusion they arrived at after years of operating the park, then the problem lies with the Jewish guests who enter its gate, not with Superland. Financially as well, it makes no sense to separate the two populations. If Jews and Arabs are not on the same merry-go-round, the park would lose money because the staff would have to serve fewer clients on the Jewish-only and Arab-only days. Unless, of course, the integrated rides lower the number of Jewish visitors. That would be outrageous. The underlying assumption, if the latter option is believable, is that the park managers witnessed clashes between Jewish and Arab visitors and decided this hurt their business more than the apartheid. Why not let each side have their comfort zone on separate days, they said to themselves. That scenario sends chills down my spine as well. All these options attest to the need for a targeted educational approach to eradicate racism. The world's Jewry and the early Zionists rejected such racist policies even while they themselves were persecuted. In his writing, Ze'ev Jabotinsky expressed his wish that the would-be Jewish state would have the "son of Arabia, and the son of Nazareth and my son" live together. Precisely because the managers took into account various scenarios and considered an integrated ferris wheel to be a threat, it is doubly important to prohibit segregation, even if this comes with unpleasant strains. We Jews have hoped, ever since "The Kuzari" came out in the 12th century, that the king would be proved wrong in his prediction about how the Jews would act once they obtained statehood and that his friend would be proved right in this fictional debate, written by the greatest Jewish poet in medieval Spain.
