It was an open-and-shut case of mean white men hitting on the noble red men.  And while I didn't think of my role-playing and sympathies for the victim as particularly Jewish in nature, unconsciously they were.

Fast forward to today and to the presumed parallel of white-skinned Israeli Ashkenazi Jewish Zionists settling/invading/colonizing Judea and Samaria and in the process victimizing and pushing out dark-skinned, "native" Palestinian Arabs. 

Visually, the two scenarios -- the cowboy-Indian scenario of yesteryear and the Zionist-Arab scenario of today -- seem the same.  How, therefore, can any Jew, who by definition is predisposed to sympathizing with victims of society, not take the part of the Palestinian Arabs? It's another open-and-shut case of bad whites hitting on innocent non-whites, right?

WRONG.  Much like singling out and blaming white America for the practice of enslaving blacks, while ignoring the fact that slavery was just as vicious and common in black Africa and the Muslem Middle East (even today), so, too, the view that the (white) Jews are guilty and the (dark) Arabs are innocent is woefully simplistic, one-sided and full of holes. 

Consider: many Jews are not white-skinned; many Jews have lived in Israel for generations, even centuries; many Arabs are as much newcomers as those Jews who left the displaced-person camps of Europe after World War II and the Holocaust, and struggled to come to Palestine on battered ships like the Exodus in 1947; Jews have repeatedly sought co-existence  in the Holy Land, but the typical Arab response for decades has been hate and war; the original deed to the land of Israel -- and especially the heartland called Judea and Samaria/the West Bank, also Jerusalem, also the holy Temple Mount -- goes back to the holy Bible; throughout both the Old and New Testament, the theme is repeated that the Jewish People possess the land eternally.   

In short, the Jews are the owners, they have the keys to the house, they are the indigenous natives.  Indeed, the Koran of Mohammed centuries later also makes this point of the Jews' special connection, even though this is denied by falsifiers and propagandists today.

So the sentimentalized, simplistic parallel between bad cowboys/virtuous Indians and bad Jews/virtuous Arabs is a false construct.  

I'll add that when I was about 14, when I was no longer a child, I learned that "the Indians" were actually a mixed bag.  Some tribes (Iroquois, Apache) were known -- to other Indians, not just to whites -- for extreme cruelty and domination; jealousy and competition prevented the Indians from uniting time and again; sadly, many were willing to sell their land for trinkets, guns and firewater, or ally with whites in order to kill off rival tribes.

Not a pretty picture, and I was not happy to learn it.  I had to hang up, as it were, my bonnet of Indian feathers and homemade tomahawk.  But it's all about growing up and seeing beyond simple good guy/bad guy scenarios.  

Too bad many Jews today, who have turned against Israel and who hate the settlers and love the Arabs -- typically leftwing socialist or ultra-liberal Reform Jews -- have not grown up.  Indeed they refuse to grow up, thus they willfully deny history and reality.  They're still fixated on the cowboy-Indian analogy.  And guess what -- they're older than 14!