As of this writing, Israel has killed over 7,000 Palestinians in Gaza – almost 3,000 of whom are children. (According to Defense for Children International – Palestine, almost 1,000 children are reported missing under the rubble of destroyed buildings.) Israel has cut off all food, water and power to the Gaza Strip. Gazans will soon run out of fuel to run their generators – their last link to medical treatment and drinkable water.
Israel clearly has no intention to end their onslaught any time soon; in fact, they are making their intentions all too clear. Prime Minister Netanyahu: “We will turn Gaza into an island of ruins.” Israeli army spokesman, Daniel Hagari: “We are dropping hundreds of tons of bombs on Gaza. The focus is on destruction, not accuracy.” President Herzog: “It is an entire nation who are responsible. This rhetoric about civilians being involved is absolutely untrue…We will fight until we break their backs.”
I don’t think it’s an overstatement to say we are currently facing the greatest moral reckoning of our time. A genocidal onslaught in unfolding before us in real time – countenanced by the international community and enabled by the US government. There can be no more pressing, urgent need at this moment than an immediate ceasefire to this unspeakable violence.
On the face of it, a ceasefire would seem to be the most morally obvious and straightforward course of action – but alas, the simple suggestion that Israel cease its carnage is tantamount to a radical – even extreme – idea at the moment. The Biden administration has made its staunch opposition to a ceasefire abundantly clear. When asked about the human toll, White House spokesperson John Kirby commented, “It is ugly and it’s going to be messy, and innocent civilians are going to be hurt.” When Biden himself was asked a similar question, he answered that he “has no confidence in the numbers that the Palestinians are using.”
Ceasefire is the last thing on Biden’s mind at the moment. Quite the contrary: he’s asking Congress for $14.3 billion in supplemental military aid to enable Israel’s war effort. The only sign of moral leadership in Washington: the “Ceasefire Now” resolution introduced last week by Rep. Cori Bush, which actually asserts currently audacious suggestion that “all human life is precious.” As Bush put it, “We can’t bomb our way to peace, equality, and freedom. With thousands of lives lost and millions more at stake, we need a ceasefire now.” (The number of endorsers currently stands at 18 members of congress. Click here to urge your representative to sign it – or to thank them for doing so.)
Yes, in the current political moment, simply calling for a ceasefire is considered to be a radically dangerous act. Democratic Rep. Josh Gottheimer lambasted the 18 signers, referring to them as “a very small group of extremists.” UN General Secretary António Guterres was subjected to similar treatment: after he recently called for a ceasefire, Israel’s envoy Gilad Erdan, demanded that he resign immediately, saying, “His comments … constitute a justification for terrorism and murder. It’s sad that a person with such views is the head of an organization that arose after the Holocaust.”
This is what it has come to.
I’m profoundly sorry to say that things are no better in the Jewish community. While it’s not a surprise that the Jewish communal establishment is offering its full-throated support to Israel’s military actions, The response from liberal Jewish organizations, sadly, has been no different. J Street, for instance, has warned Democrats who don’t sponsor a “We Stand with Israel” bill that they will lose the group’s endorsement come reelection time. The rabbinical organization T’ruah has also resisted calls for a ceasefire, issuing instead a tepid call for Israel to “follow the laws of armed conflict to avoid harm to civilians” and a “humanitarian corridor” to be opened so that “critical supplies” can enter Gaza.
For its part, the venerable Boston Workers’ Circle dared to sign on to a call for a ceasefire and promptly found itself facing expulsion from the Boston Jewish Community Relations Council. The organization choose to quit the group voluntarily, stating, “Rather than engage in the lengthy and arduous process to be formally expelled, we are turning our attention to focusing on building a future of peace and justice for all.”
According to the Torah, we must not stand idly by while the blood of our neighbor is being shed. And yet here we are. The world is allowing – if not actively enabling – the mass carnage Israel is inflicting on the people of Gaza. Please do what you can: contact President Biden, tell Congress, write to the press. Hit the streets. Shout it to the world:
An op-ed version of this sermon was published in Truthout
Jewish tradition teaches that words have a sacred power. In the very beginning of the Torah, God creates the world itself through the power of the word. In the book of Exodus, the Israelites speak as one people at Sinai, thereby entering into a covenant with God. It is said that on Yom Kippur, the High Priest would enter the Holy of Holies in the Jerusalem Temple and utter the otherwise unspeakable name of God – and at that moment the fate of the very world would hang in the balance. On Yom Kippur, we ourselves stand as a community and say the words of our collective confessions together. As our liturgy would have it, we may not be written into the book of Life for the new year unless we speak these words out loud.
In their way, the power of words is akin to energy. Once they are spoken, they are out in the world – and from that point on there are a myriad of ways their impact might be manifest. Sometimes their power will remain dormant. Other times, our words can be the conduit for deep and powerful transformation.
I think a great deal about the impact of our words when it comes to the issue of Israel/Palestine. We have witnessed their power for instance, over the course of this past year, as thousands of Israelis have been holding regular demonstrations against the current Israeli administration and its plans to limit the power of the Israeli judiciary. Week after week, protesters have chanted words in the streets and carried them on signs, expressing their collective outrage over the government’s “threat to Israeli democracy.” More recently, many in the American Jewish community – including many rabbis – have voiced their support for these protests and have even been staging public protests of their own.
On one level, it could be said that these massive rallies have had a powerful impact. They are the largest and most sustained protests in Israeli history and the most massive mobilization of the Israeli left in years. The rhetoric of the rally has also empowered Zionists in general. Many who advocate for Israel will often refer to it as “the only democracy in the Middle East.” I would suggest that the use of this word is powerful for all the wrong reasons. It covers up the reality that while Israel may be a democracy for Jews, it is decidedly not one for Palestinians. Indeed, for many centrist and right wing Israelis these demonstrations are important because they bolster the illusion of democracy. In so doing, they serve to entrench Zionism and strengthen the Jewish state.
It is true that at many of these demonstrations, there have been some chants and signs condemning Israel’s “occupation.” However, this is an oft-invoked word that can mean different things to different people. For some it refers only to Israel’s military occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. For others it also includes annexed territories such as East Jerusalem and the Golan Heights. For still others, the entire land between the river and the sea is considered to be occupied territory. Thus, when the word “occupation” is invoked during the demonstrations, there is little clarity on what it actually means – or what is actually being demanded.
There is yet another powerful word that has recently emerged in relation to Israel/Palestine, and that word is “apartheid.” Last year, three respected human rights organizations: Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and the Israeli group B’Tselem, all released well-researched reports concluding that Israel is an apartheid regime. Over the past year, many surprising figures have also been increasingly using this word in relation to Israel, including a retired Israeli general.
This past year, a letter was posted online by Israeli academics that openly criticized American Jews for “(paying) insufficient attention to the elephant in the room: Israel’s long-standing occupation.” The letter pointedly stated that “there cannot be democracy for Jews in Israel as long as Palestinians live under a regime of apartheid, as Israeli legal experts have described it.” The so-called Elephant in the Room Letter was widely distributed and was eventually signed by Jewish leaders and figures – to date it has over 2,700 signatures.
With liberal Jewish leaders increasingly willing to use the “A” word in public, there is every indication that it is losing its stigmatized, transgressive status in the Jewish community. But even here, the meaning of the word “apartheid” depends on how it is used. The B’Tselem report, for instance, claims that Israeli apartheid extends “from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea.” The Israeli general, on the other hand, limited it to the West Bank alone.
There are also those who would say that the term “apartheid” itself doesn’t go far enough – that it is a technical term from international humanitarian law that has limited legal applications. Many would argue that the word “settler colonialism” is much more powerful and meaningful because it is related to decolonization – a concrete process of action that includes the return of refugees and reparations to the Palestinian people.
Yes, all of these words do indeed have a complex kind of power when it comes to Israel/Palestine, and I’m often fascinated by the strategic ways we utilize this power. Years ago, I used to avoid controversial and potentially incendiary words in connection with Israel, feeling that they might well alienate and push away the very people I was trying to reach. I would typically use words I thought were less triggering: “dispossession” instead of “ethnic cleansing,” “non-Zionist” instead of “anti-Zionist,” “occupation” instead of “settler colonialism.”
I feel differently about this now. I actually think it’s important to use words such as these. I believe it’s important to name oppression explicitly and not to soften it with euphemisms. If some words make people uncomfortable, that’s OK. Once a word is said, it can’t be unsaid. It’s now part of the discourse. While some may well recoil from that word, they may well come around to accept it in time.
Words can indeed push the line of what is considered acceptable. But they can also represent one step too far, or the crossing of a line. There is still, for instance, a hard line drawn on the word Zionism. For most Jews, it is still considered beyond the pale to refer to oneself as an anti-Zionist: to break not just with the Israeli government, not just with the 1967 occupation, but with the very concept of an exclusively Jewish nation-state.
Apropos of Yom Kippur, it seems to me that when we say these words and cross this particular line openly, we’re really making a kind of confession. It’s not merely a political opinion – it’s an ethical admission that our Jewish identity has been inextricably connected to the oppression of another people.
When I was growing up, I was routinely taught that Zionism was the national liberation movement of the Jewish people. But I was never taught that this “liberation” came at the expense of another people. Like many American Jews, I was raised to view the establishment of the state of Israel as the exclusive Jewish homeland; a Jewish refuge after centuries of persecution; a redemptive homecoming following the collective trauma of the Holocaust.
Our trauma has been compounded by the sense that the world was complicit in it – that the Jewish people were abandoned by the international community. To be sure, the allied nations should rightly bear deep shame for their inaction during the Holocaust and their refusal to accept Jewish refugees following the war. But even as collective Jewish trauma is all too real, it was tragic and profoundly wrong to justify it by inflicting trauma on another people: by establishing a Jewish state on their backs and creating what has now become the largest refugee population in the world.
When Jewish Zionists publicly confess and act on the truth of this history it can often shake their Jewish identity to the core. This phenomenon often reminds me of something James Baldwin wrote in his classic 1962 essay, “A Letter to My Nephew:”
As you will discover, people find it very difficult to act on what they know. To act is to be committed and to be committed is to be in danger. In this case the danger in the minds and hearts of most white Americans is the loss of their identity. Try to imagine how you would feel if you woke up one morning to find the sun shivering and all the stars aflame. You would be frightened because it is out of the order of nature. Any upheaval in the universe is terrifying because it so profoundly attacks one’s sense of one’s own reality.
Though Baldwin was addressing white supremacy in the US, I think his words are equally applicable to Jewish supremacy in Israel. Zionism has become such an indelible part of Jewish identity that it has caused us to enable – or at the very least tolerate – the oppression of another people. The power of this mythic Zionist narrative manages to keep the truth of this ongoing oppression at bay, lest it causes everything we once held so dear to come crashing to the ground.
I experienced this upheaval personally in 2008, at my former congregation. During Israel’s military assault on Gaza, I experienced deep anguish – and I expressed those feelings in a blog post. While I had often been critical of Israel in the past, this was very different. Rather than using the usual words, calling for “balance” and a plea for “peace on both sides,” I used strong and angry language, explicitly naming Israel as the oppressor. I concluded my post with these words:
We good Jews are ready to protest oppression and human rights abuses anywhere in the world but are all too willing to give Israel a pass. It’s a fascinating double standard, and one I know all too well. I understand it, because I’ve been just as responsible as anyone else for perpetrating it.
So no more rationalizations. What Israel has been doing to the people of Gaza is an outrage. It has brought neither safety nor security to the people of Israel and it has wrought nothing but misery and tragedy upon the Palestinian people.
There I said it. Now what do I do?
Now many years after later, I realize that post was a kind of confession. Though I didn’t know it at the time, when I wrote those words I was actually crossing a line that would eventually force me to leave my congregation. To use Baldwin’s words, it was upheaval so profound that it attacked my sense of my own reality. I was fairly sure I couldn’t continue as a congregational rabbi – and I wasn’t completely sure what kind of Jew I would be either.
But as I said earlier, once our words are out in the world, there are myriad ways their power might be manifested. I was eventually able to recover my Jewish identity along with my Jewish conscience. Speaking those words was unexpectedly liberating. I discovered there were other Jews like me – lots and lots of them. And together we became part of an emergent Jewish community that had the freedom to say out loud what must be said. I have no illusions that there is a distinct minority of Jews on this side of the line, but I also know that there are many who are now crossing over, breaking their silence on Israel/Palestine in unprecedented ways.
In its way, this new Jewish community is creating a new counter-narrative to the Zionist narrative that has been dominant for so long. One critical part of this counter-narrative is the understanding that standing in solidarity with Palestinians is a mitzvah – a sacred act. When it comes to solidarity in particular, words are enormously important. Those who engage in solidarity with disenfranchised people know that while words may have great power, words can quickly lose their power if they do not lead to action.
Indeed, history is littered with the betrayal of empty words, promises unkept and treaties broken. Staying true to one’s word can often be a challenge for those who are trying to practice solidarity in good faith. The growing popularity of land acknowledgements is a good example. Land acknowledgements are significant and important, but as many Native people have pointed out, they amount to empty words unless they contain accountability – unless they exist in a larger context of decolonization and reparation. As President Robert Larsen of the Lower Sioux Indian Community has put it, “An apology or an acknowledgment is one thing, but what are you going to do next?”
The same applies to those of us who express solidarity with the Palestinian people. Yes, the words we say matter, but unless they lead to genuine transformation, they will remain little more than empty words. To return to my metaphor of energy, words represent the initial spark, but once kindled, it takes real effort to sustain and increase its power. We must take active responsibility to maintain that initial spark by acting on our words, lest it eventually sputter out.
Putting our words of solidarity with Palestinians can take many forms, but a core priority requested by Palestinian civil society groups is support for BDS – the Palestinian-led Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement. In this regard, I encourage those who are able to attend our Yom Kippur afternoon program today. We will be hosting a conversation with Omar Barghouti, the co-founder of the BDS national committee, whose presentation is entitled, “Repentance, Reparation and Ethical Reconciliation: A Palestinian Vision for Common Liberation.” Omar was deeply honored to be asked to be our teacher for Yom Kippur – but as I told him, I could think of no more appropriate way for a congregation such as ours to observe this day.
I also want to remind our members that Tzedek Chicago was one of the first congregations to sign a pledge from the Apartheid-Free Communities initiative, a newly created interfaith coalition convened by the American Friends Service Committee. In that statement, signatories pledge “to join others in working to end all support to Israel’s apartheid regime, settler colonialism and military occupation.” Now that we have publicly made this pledge, it will be our challenge to live out these words as a community – and in the spirit of Yom Kippur, I want to encourage us to explore what this will mean for our congregation in the years ahead. By signing this public pledge, it is also our hope that it will give other Jewish congregations and organizations the courage to speak these previously unspeakable truths as well.
In the Shacharit service – the Jewish morning prayer – we say the words, “Baruch she’amar ve’haya ha’olam” – “Blessed is the one who spoke and the world became.” While this literally refers to God but it is also a statement about the potential within each and every one of us. Our words have the power to transform our lives and our world – indeed, to create whole new worlds anew.
So let this be our collective blessing this Yom Kippur: let us find the courage to speak the words that must be spoken. Let our words kindle sparks of possibility, and may they inspire us all to create the world we know is possible: a world of Tzedek/Justice, of Tikkun/Repair and of Shalom/Wholeness for all who dwell on earth.
On Passover, when we gather at the seder table to tell the story of the Exodus, we are reminded by the haggadah (the seder text) that merely telling the story is not enough. We are asked to not only relate but to interrogate this sacred narrative, to contemplate its meaning and to discuss the questions it raises for us. Most importantly, we must connect the lessons of the Exodus story to liberation struggles “in every generation.”
This year, many have inevitably been making connections between the Passover story and the recent anti-government protests that have unfolded in Israel since January. In a widely read sermon last February, for instance, Rabbi Sharon Brous compared the protests to the “great birth story” of the Exodus. In a recent New York Timesop-ed, Bret Stephens wrote that the protests were “as close to a revolution as the modern state of Israel has ever seen.” One Jewish leader commented to the press that he plans to read from the Israeli Declaration of Independence at his seder, particularly the passage that promises the “complete equality of social and political rights to all its inhabitants.”
On the surface, this framing might seem to make sense: Since late last year, thousands of Israelis have regularly been filling the streets to protest draconian policies proposed by the newly elected far right government of six-term Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. The protests have largely focused on the “threat to democracy” posed by the government’s plans to drastically curtail the power of the judiciary. The demonstrations seem to have succeeded: late last month Prime Minister Netanyahu announced that he would seek a compromise with his political opponents in order to “avoid civil war.”
While this certainly seems like a “power to the people moment,” it’s worth asking: who exactly are the “people” who have taken back the “power?” Though it was not widely noted by the mainstream media, the protests were largely organized and attended by centrist and liberal Israeli Jews — Palestinians were notably absent. Indeed, it was difficult to ignore the sea of Israeli flags at these demonstrations, along with the drumbeat messaging over “saving Israeli democracy.” By the end, it had become clear that these protests were less about equal rights for Jewish Israelis and Palestinians alike than a desire to reclaim the patriotic Zionist mantle from a newly elected far right government.
In other words, before we’re tempted to connect the Israeli demonstrations to the festival of Passover, it’s worth investigating how we tell the story of liberation, who tells it, who we include, and who we leave out.
These questions are not, in fact, unique to this year. It is common for Zionists to refer to Zionism — the movement to build a political Jewish nation-state — as “the national liberation movement of the Jewish people.” Many might find this to be a curious use of the term, as it is typically used in regard to movements that struggle for liberation against colonial oppression — notsettler colonial movements themselves. Such rhetoric belies the origins of an ideology inspired by 19th-century European nationalism and a movement that actively sought to transplant European Jews in historic Palestine.
However, even Zionists who view Jewish nation-statehood in liberative terms must ultimately admit that from the beginning, Zionism focused exclusively on Jewish liberation — and that this liberation most certainly did not extend to Palestinians. Quite the contrary, of course. As a nation-state whose identity was predicated on a demographic majority of Jews in the land, Palestinians were, through their very existence, viewed as an obstacle to Jewish liberation.
Israel’s Declaration of Independence makes it clear that this nation was created first and foremost for Jews. The 10 paragraph-long preamble essentially reads as a Jewish history lesson, ending with the line, “This right is the natural right of the Jewish people to be masters of their own fate, like all other nations, in their own sovereign State.” There is only one paragraph that pertains to the rights of non-Jews:
THE STATE OF ISRAEL will be open for Jewish immigration and for the Ingathering of the Exiles; it will foster the development of the country for the benefit of all its inhabitants; it will be based on freedom, justice and peace as envisaged by the prophets of Israel; it will ensure complete equality of social and political rights to all its inhabitants irrespective of religion, race or sex; it will guarantee freedom of religion, conscience, language, education and culture; it will safeguard the Holy Places of all religions; and it will be faithful to the principles of the Charter of the United Nations.
Note that the Declaration “ensures” social, political and religious — but not national — rights to its Palestinian citizens. This language is quite intentional: Israel considered Jews throughout the diaspora to be part of the “Jewish nation,” granting any Jew who immigrated to the state from anywhere in the world instant citizenship through its Law of Return. Conversely, the over 700,000 Palestinians refugees who were forcibly displaced from their homes and forbidden to return were decidedly not included as part of the newly established nation.
To this day, Israel has maintained a careful distinction between “nationals” and “citizens.” As non-Jews, Palestinians in Israel can be citizens, but they are not nationals, thus depriving them of rights and privileges enjoyed by Israeli Jews. As a result, to this day, there are more than 60 laws that discriminate against Palestinian citizens of Israel directly or indirectly, impacting virtually every aspect of their lives, including housing, employment, education, health care, and who they can marry.
The status of Palestinian citizens was compromised yet further in 2018 with Israel’s passage of the so-called Nation-State Law, which determined that “the right to exercise national self-determination” in Israel is “unique to the Jewish people,” established Hebrew as Israel’s official language, and established “Jewish settlement as a national value,” mandating that the state “will labor to encourage and promote its establishment and development.” According to Adalah:
This law – which has distinct apartheid characteristics – guarantees the ethnic-religious character of Israel as exclusively Jewish and entrenches the privileges enjoyed by Jewish citizens, while simultaneously anchoring discrimination against Palestinian citizens and legitimizing exclusion, racism, and systemic inequality.
Of course, the injustices facing the almost 3,000,000 Palestinians who live under military occupation in the West Bank — and the over 2,000,000 who live under a crushing blockade in Gaza — are dramatically worse than those experienced by Palestinian citizens of Israel. But it would be a mistake to draw a fundamental distinction between these different Palestinian populations. As the Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem puts it in its 2021 report, Israel maintains “a regime of Jewish supremacy from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea.” Put simply, as a Jewish nation-state, Israel systemically denies basic civil and human rights to all non-Jews who live under its control.
It’s interesting to note that the “selective liberation” story we tell about Israel is not dissimilar from the story we tell about the establishment and history of another notable settler colonial state — namely, the United States. Indeed, I’m often struck that we typically use the term “American Revolution” to refer to what was essentially a political-economic secession by colonists from the British empire, whose nation was built on the genocide of Native peoples, enabled by the stolen labor of Black slaves.
Here too, it’s critical to interrogate how we tell the story of this national liberation, who tells it, who we include, and who we leave out. It has often been observed that the opening words to the American Constitution, “We the People,” is a radical misnomer as the founders originally defined “we” to be limited to white, property-owning males. This inherent inequity was already being openly challenged not long after the founding of the state. As Frederick Douglass famously declared in his 1852 speech, “What to a Slave is the Fourth of July:”
The rich inheritance of justice, liberty, prosperity and independence bequeathed by your fathers, is shared by you, not me. The sunlight that brought light and healing to you, has brought stripes and death to me. This Fourth of July is yours, not mine. You may rejoice, I must mourn.
When it comes to this legacy of American structural injustice, one can draw a direct line from Douglass to the words of Malcolm X, from his 1964 speech “The Ballot or the Bullet”:
No, I’m not an American. I’m one of the 22 million Black people who are the victims of Americanism. One of the 22 million Black people who are the victims of democracy, nothing but disguised hypocrisy. So, I’m not standing here speaking to you as an American, or a patriot, or a flag-saluter, or a flag-waver — no, not I. I’m speaking as a victim of this American system. And I see America through the eyes of the victim. I don’t see any American dream; I see an American nightmare.
At the same time, however, there remains a uniquely American tension between the “American nightmare” of Malcolm X and the “American Dream” referred to by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in his “I Have a Dream” speech, where he famously challenged the United States to be true to its stated intention to form a more perfect union: “I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.”
More recently, Nikole Hannah-Jones, author of the “1619 Project” has observed that “the United States is a nation founded on both an ideal and a lie.” Still, she concluded:
Despite being violently denied the freedom and justice promised to all, Black Americans believed fervently in the American creed. Through centuries of Black resistance and protest, we have helped the country live up to its founding ideals. And not only for ourselves — Black rights struggles paved the way for every other rights struggle, including women’s and gay rights, immigrant and disability rights.
Of course, we are currently witnessing a white supremacist backlash against those who seek to challenge the legacy — and reality — of American structural racism. As ever, Americans are struggling openly over how inclusive, extensive and complete our liberation will be. It is a tension that has been ongoing since the very founding of this country — it is at its core, a quintessentially American struggle.
In Israel, however, the struggle for democracy is far more complicated. As a Jewish state, Israeli democracy can only truly extend to its Jewish citizens. Unlike the U.S., where those who advocate equal rights for all can still be described as “believing fervently in the American creed,” those who call for one state with full citizenship for all are routinely accused of antisemitism, seeking nothing less than “the destruction of the Jewish state.”
Another important difference: unlike the U.S., Israel does not have a Constitution that, theoretically at least, ensures equal rights for its citizens. Noting Israel’s early, aborted attempts at creating a Constitution, journalist Joshua Leifer has recently commented:
America’s Constitution begins, “We the People.” One of the things that’s very striking when you read the drafts of the Israeli constitution that were written in 1950 is that the proposed version of Israel’s constitution began with “the Jewish people.” The ethnos was imagined as the demos from the beginning.
Like many Americans, I believe it is my responsibility to challenge my country to, as MLK put it, “live out the true meaning of its creed.” Among other things, this means actively supporting anti-racist struggles in the U.S. that demand full and equal rights for all itscitizens. As an American Jew living in the age of Zionism, I can demand nothing less for all who live between the river and the sea.
As Aurora Levins Morales concludes in her classic poem “Red Sea:”
This time that country is what we promise each other, our rage pressed cheek to cheek until tears flood the space between, until there are no enemies left, because this time no one will be left to drown and all of us must be chosen. This time it’s all of us or none.
This Passover, it is clearer than ever before that we need a new Jewish liberation story: one that is inseparable with the vision of liberation for all.
Last month, Michigan Representative Rashida Tlaib spoke at an organizing seminar for Palestine solidarity activists. It was an in-house event, and it likely would not have garnered much attention except for one part of her speech:
It has become clear that you cannot claim to hold progressive values, yet back Israel’s apartheid government. And we will continue to push back on and not accept this idea that you are “progressive except for Palestine.”
I’m opening with Rashida Tlaib’s words because I believe they’re deeply relevant to Yom Kippur. This is, after all, the day for facing up to hard truths, particularly the ones that affect our community. And I frankly cannot think of a more important, more critical moral challenge facing the Jewish community than the issue of Palestine-Israel.
As you might expect, after Rep. Tlaib made her remarks, the wrath of the titans rained down upon her. Jonathan Greenblatt, the CEO of the Anti-Defamation League, berated her on Twitter and accused her of being an antisemite. So did Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz. Scores of her Democratic colleagues condemned her for slandering the “Jewish and Democratic state of Israel.”
Tellingly, however, none of her critics actually responded to the essential claim of her comment – namely, that Israel is an apartheid state. None of them mentioned that Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International and B’tselem, the most prominent Israeli human rights organization, have all determined that Israel is an apartheid regime. B’tselem’s report concludes, in words that are powerfully appropriate for Yom Kippur:
As painful as it may be to look reality in the eye, it is more painful to live under a boot. The harsh reality described here may deteriorate further if new practices are introduced – with or without accompanying legislation. Nevertheless, people created this regime and people can make it worse – or work to replace it. That hope is the driving force behind this position paper. How can people fight injustice if it is unnamed? Apartheid is the organizing principle, yet recognizing this does not mean giving up. On the contrary: it is a call for change.
Fighting for a future based on human rights, liberty and justice is especially crucial now. There are various political paths to a just future here, between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea, but all of us must first choose to say no to apartheid.
But you really don’t need to pore through human rights reports to grasp this reality. The bottom line is this: Zionism promotes a Jewish majority state in historic Palestine. In order to keep that majority, Israel must pursue policies that are patently undemocratic. It must create and enforce laws that fundamentally privilege Jews over non-Jews. It must dispossess and disenfranchise Palestinians. It must maintain what B’tselem calls “a regime of Jewish supremacy” from the river to the sea.
So yes, as Rashida Tlaib put it, you can’t be progressive and support apartheid. Unless you define the term “progressive” in a way that is devoid of any meaning whatsoever, you cannot support a Jewish supremacist state and claim to be a progressive. It’s interesting to note that virtually every one of Rep. Tlaib’s critics slammed her for creating a “litmus test” for progressives. But in truth, I don’t believe she was interested in creating a test for her colleagues. She was simply arguing for moral consistency.
When I read about this dustup, I was reminded of Rev. Martin Luther King’s 1963 “Letter from a Birmingham Jail.” Whenever I hear so-called progressives defending injustice in the name of progressive values, I invariably think of King’s letter. It was written to liberal white clergy in Birmingham who had signed a public statement telling King to stay away and not make trouble in their city. At one point they wrote, “We feel that inflammatory and rebellious statements can lead only to violence, discord, confusion and disgrace for our beloved state.”
Now fast forward to 2022. This was Debbie Wasserman Schultz’s angry response to Rep. Tlaib:
Proud progressives do support Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish and democratic state. Suggesting otherwise is shameful and dangerous. Divisive rhetoric does not lead to peace.
In the end, it’s really just a distraction to make this a debate about what is or isn’t “progressive.” It’s an issue of basic morality. For the Jewish community it’s a challenge that goes to the very core of our spiritual and ethical tradition. I don’t believe you can identify as a Jew in the age of Zionism and dither on this issue. Every single day, Israel’s actions present us with this basic question: will we support apartheid, dispossession and militarism in our name or will we not?
I’m sure all of you know that the Tzedek Chicago membership voted last March to change our core values to articulate that we were an anti-Zionist congregation. Our decision followed a unanimous board vote and a month’s long series of congregational meetings. As those who attended will attest, these conversations were inspiring in their depth and thoughtfulness. No matter what their position, members who participated in this process shared their opinions openly, honestly, and with deep respect for one another.
In the end, 72% of our membership quorum voted in favor of the change. Yes, there were those who voted against, but I’m heartened that as far as I know, no members have left our congregation as a result of our decision. In fact, we actually gained several new members, many of whom said that this was the first time they had joined a synagogue – that they had wanted to be part of a Jewish congregation, but the issue of Zionism had consistently kept them at bay.
I can’t understate what a powerful statement we’ve made. Yes, we are one small congregation, but the bottom line is that as a result of our decision there is now a new fact on the ground. There is now a progressive (yes, progressive) Jewish synagogue that is openly and unabashedly promoting a Judaism beyond Zionism. Tzedek Chicago has taken a public, principled stand on the most important, most critical moral challenge facing the Jewish community today.
And by the way we don’t stand alone. At this very moment, the Mending Miyan, an anti-Zionist congregation in New Haven, is celebrating its first High Holidays with its new student rabbi, May Ye, who many of you will remember was Tzedek Chicago’s rabbinical intern in 2018. Just a few days ago, I was contacted by a friend who told me that a group of Jewish anti-Zionists, inspired by what we have done here in Chicago, had held their first Rosh Hashanah service together in Denver. And I have no doubt there are others – that this is only the beginning.
Our decision is also important because we are currently witnessing a very real and very dangerous campaign that seeks to equate anti-Zionism with antisemitism. The Israeli government and the Jewish institutional establishment are clearly doubling down to stem the growing number of Jews in the US — particularly young Jews — who are openly identifying as non or anti-Zionist. This backlash has been fierce, and at times perverse, actually calling into question our very status as Jews. In a widely read essay last year, Natan Sharansky labeled anti-Zionist Jews as “un-Jews.” Last May, immediately following Israel’s military onslaught on Gaza, a Reform rabbi in the Chicago area gave a sermon in which she called anti-Zionist Jews “Jews in name only” who must be “kept out of the Jewish tent.”
Given the tenor of the current moment, I believe the need for public stances by principled Jewish anti-Zionists is more critical now than ever. Most importantly, Jewish anti-Zionists create cover for Palestinians, the ones who are most directly impacted by these accusations of antisemitism. Right now, public figures such as Rashida Tlaib, as well as scores of Palestinian activists on college campuses and communities across North America, are being subjected to withering attack. We know how devastating the accusation of antisemitism can be. It destroys careers and ruin lives. And right now, this accusation is being weaponized by Israel and its institutional supporters in profoundly harmful ways.
The most insidious thing about this accusation: when we equate anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism, we effectively brand just about every Palestinian in the world as an anti-Semite. How could it be otherwise? The direct product of Zionism was the Nakba – the forced expulsion of over 700,000 Palestinians from their homes in 1948, creating what is today the largest refugee population in the world. The creation of an exclusively Jewish nation state in historic Palestine has led to the ongoing dispossession and oppression of the Palestinian people that continues to this very day. How could we honestly expect Palestinians to be anything other than anti-Zionist? By this definition, Palestinians are guilty of being antisemites just for being Palestinian.
We can’t underestimate the power of this current backlash against anti-Zionism. After Tzedek Chicago made our announcement, we garnered, as you might expect, some “responses” from the Jewish institutional community. While we did get some positive and thoughtful press, there was the inevitable nastiness, particularly and inevitably on Twitter. I don’t have much to say about that, except for this: amidst all the horribleness and toxicity, I noticed an interesting common denominator. Over and over, our attackers made the claim that Zionism was essential to Judaism – and that our being anti-Zionist was tantamount to being anti-Jewish. This, I would like to address:
Of course, the claim that Eretz Yisrael is intrinsic to Jewish tradition is absolutely correct. It would be ignorant to claim otherwise. However – and this is a big however – the notion of creating a sovereign Jewish nation state was never part of the Jewish land tradition until the rise of political Zionism in 19th century Europe. And herein lies the central fallacy of the Zionism equals Judaism argument: for most of Jewish history, the yearning for Zion has been rooted in an idealized messianic vision. The very idea of a mass migration to the land in order to establish a 3rd Jewish commonwealth was commonly considered to be an anathema – a “forcing of God’s hand” – by traditional rabbinic authorities.
Those who say Zionism is central to Judaism consistently and conveniently neglect this point: political Zionism did not arise until relatively recently in Jewish history. Yes, Zionism is undeniably a Jewish movement, and a successful one at that. But it is also a quintessential movement of Jewish modernity that represented a conscious and radical break with traditional Judaism as it was understood and practiced until that time. While it has clearly been embraced by a majority of Jews in Israel and throughout the diaspora, the claim that Zionism is somehow intrinsic to Judaism is false and in fact, deeply disingenuous.
In the end, however, this struggle isn’t over what is or isn’t Judaism. Rather, it is over what kind of Judaism we want to affirm in the world. I don’t believe in essentializing Judaism – or any religion, for that matter. The fact that Zionism was “a modern movement that broke with traditional Judaism” is not in itself a bad thing. After all, modernity gave rise to a host of Jewish movements that broke with traditional Judaism. My own denomination, Reconstructionist Judaism is most certainly such a movement.
I often think of this when I hear liberal Christians respond to the hateful things said and done by white Christian nationalists by saying, “that is not Christianity.” No, in fact it is Christianity. The Christian church certainly has a great deal to live down from its history up until present day. But to the Christians who seek to promote humane Christianity, I would suggest that the answer is not to deny the more problematic or toxic manifestations of their tradition. The answer is to recognize that every religious tradition, every religious community has its good, its bad and yes, it’s ugly. And if we want the good to prevail, it seems to me, we must be ready to confront the all of our religious traditions.
The same goes for the Jewish community. Even if Zionists deny us our Jewishness, It’s not intellectually honest, nor is it particularly productive, to deny Zionists theirs’. The question before us is not who is the most “authentic” Jew? The real question is: what kind of Judaism do we want to lift up in the world, to live out, to bequeath to future generations?
This is why I feel so blessed to be a part of Jewish congregation that is ready to stand up and say we seek a Judaism beyond Zionism, beyond apartheid and settler colonialism. A Judaism that views the diaspora as the fertile ground for Jewish creativity, a Judaism that seeks the Divine wherever we may happen to live, that affirms the whole earth is filled with God’s glory. A Judaism that values spiritual power over physical power. A Judaism that makes its home in the margins, because that’s where our sacred sparks of creativity have always resided. A Judaism of solidarity, that knows our place is alongside all who are marginalized, demonized and oppressed for who they are.
So, this Yom Kippur and for every day forward, let this be our prayer:
May the dream of a world complete become reality soon, in our own day, that every land may be a Zion, every city a Jerusalem, every home a sanctuary offering welcome to all. May the world be rebuilt upon a foundation of compassion, equity and justice, as it is written, compassion and truth will meet; justice and peace will kiss. Baruch atah adonai, boneh ha’olam b’tzedek v’rachamim – Blessed are you, who rebuilds the world in justice and compassion.
Alaa Abdullah Riyad Qaddoum, age 5, killed by the Israeli military in Gaza City on August 5, 2022.
In August 2014, the Jewish festival of Tisha B’Av arrived as Israel was waging a military onslaught on Gaza that would eventually kill 2,251 Palestinians, 1,462 of whom were civilians, including over 500 children. Tisha B’Av is traditionally observed a day of mourning over the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem and by extension, the tragedies that have befallen the Jewish people throughout its history. To mark the occasion of the festival in 2014, I wrote a new version of the first chapter of Lamentations (the Biblical book traditionally chanted on Tisha B’Av). At the time, I suggested this new version be added to the ceremony to acknowledge the massive tragedy the state of Israel was inflicting on Palestinians in Gaza in the name of the Jewish people.
Now eight years later, the eve of Tisha B’Av 2022 arrives this evening amidst yet another grievous military assault on Gaza. As of this writing, 24 people have been killed and over 120 more have been wounded. The Israeli military reports it is preparing for a week long operation “that could take longer, if needed.” It is not currently engaging in any ceasefire negotiations.
As in 2014, Israel, its supporters and the mainstream media at large are selling this latest military onslaught by claiming “Israel has a right to defend itself” from Gazan rocket fire. But as I wrote about Israel’s actions in 2014, this is a cynical and empty posture. As was the case eight years ago, this new war on Gaza was openly and unabashedly provoked by Israel. The timeline leading up to this latest assault is a matter of public record that is available to anyone interested in reading past Israel’s hollow propaganda:
• This past May, it was reported that the Israeli military was expanding what it described as a “bank of targets” in the Gaza Strip it had identified since its most recent military offensive in 2021.
• On Monday, August 1, the Israeli military arrested Bassam al-Saadi, a senior member of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ), during a raid on the Jenin refugee camp. The PIJ issued threats in response but took no action.
• Concerned that the PIJ would attack in retaliation, the Israeli military directed authorities to close roads near the Gaza border.
• Yesterday, claiming that it was responding to an “imminent threat,” Israel unleashed a wave of airstrikes in Gaza, killing PIJ military commander Tayseer Jabari along with seven other people, including a 5 year old girl, Alaa Abdullah-Riyad Qaddoum.
• The PIJ retaliated by sending more than 100 missiles into Israel. The Israeli military reported that it had intercepted about 95 percent of the rockets. There were no reports of significant property damage.
• The US Ambassador to Israel, Tom Nides, stated that “the United States firmly believes that Israel has a right to protect itself.”
This is, in short, purposeful wanton aggression. That it is repeatedly committed against a blockaded, besieged population of 2,000,000 who literally have nowhere to run raises it to the level of atrocity. It is no less abominable to rationalize it away by with the bromide that “Israel has the right to defend itself” or to blame Palestinians themselves for their own destruction by invoking the allegation of “human shields” – a false claim that has been repeatedly disproved by human rights observers.
These rationalizations are particularly profane in the way they rob Palestinians of their basic humanity. I remember thinking of precisely this on Tisha B’Av 2014 – and how incongruous it felt to engage in a ceremony of grief over Jewish loss while a nation state purporting to act in the name of the Jewish people inflicted such unspeakable losses on another people.
According to Jewish tradition, the fall of the Temple was caused by internal sinat chinam – baseless hatred – that wracked the disempowered, besieged Jewish community of ancient Jerusalem. In the age of Zionism, it seems to me, we must be ready to acknowledge a different kind of sinat chinam – one that is wielded by a Jewish state power against a people it continues to disempower and besiege.
As in 2014, I will not be mourning the destruction of the Temple this Tisha B’Av. I will be mourning the losses of yet another merciless war waged by Israel against the Palestinian people. And as in 2014, this will be my lament:
For these things I weep: for the toxic fear we have unleashed from the dark place of our hearts for the endless grief we are inflicting on the people of Gaza.
As many of you know, in January of 2020 it was my great honor to become Tzedek Chicago’s full-time rabbi. Among my first orders of business at the time was to find an office and a more suitable facility for our congregation. As it turned out, my search didn’t last too long. Soon enough, along with the rest of the world Tzedek had to hunker down and make our home in the land of Zoom.
We weren’t at all sure what to expect in this strange new virtual world, but we certainly weren’t prepared for what happened next. In a word, we grew. We grew from two Shabbat services a month to weekly services, Torah studies, festival services and family programs. We instituted a weekly Wednesday afternoon gathering as a check-in for our members. We also held increasing numbers of adult educational opportunities and concerts. The pandemic truly transformed the life of our congregation in astonishing and unexpected ways.
It didn’t take us long to figure out why. It was a time of profound social isolation. We all felt it palpably, some of us more than others. The world craved connection – and in this strange new world, religious congregations had a particularly crucial role to play. Like so many other houses of worship, Tzedek served as a sacred virtual space where we could regularly gather and overcome our increasing separateness from one another.
But there was another way Tzedek grew as well: we grew geographically. Almost overnight, we gained regular members and attendees from around the country and around the world: from Canada, the UK, Germany and New Zealand, among many other places. Again, it didn’t take long to understand why. We’d always drawn our members from a wide swath of the Chicagoland area and even some surrounding states. We were never strictly a local congregation; from the very beginning we’ve been a community bound together by our convictions.
Those of us who founded Tzedek Chicago were very clear on this point: we really weren’t interested in creating another liberal Jewish congregation. We wanted to build a congregation on a foundation of core values. We emphasized “standing with the oppressed and calling out the oppressor.” We took “a stand against colonialism and militarism, especially when it is waged in our name as Jews and Americans.” We made a particular point of disavowing Zionism, stating that “the creation of an ethnic Jewish nation state in historic Palestine resulted in an injustice against the Palestinian people – an injustice that continues to this day.”
When we founded Tzedek, we drafted our core values even before we recruited a single member of our congregation. We wanted to make sure that those who joined us would join because they sought a Jewish community that shared their values. We just knew that there was a significant and growing constituency for the vision of Judaism we sought to promote.
It’s been so gratifying to see how our faith has been validated these past six years. Speaking personally, it’s been a blessing for me. When I left my former congregation, I really never thought I’d work as a congregational rabbi again. I’m so grateful that Tzedek has given me this opportunity – and I’ve never, ever taken it for granted.
Over the years, I’ve received regular emails from folks from across the country and around the world asking if there was a congregation like Tzedek in their home communities. I’d almost always have to say no, I didn’t think there was. But starting in 2020, of course, that question became moot. We became a global congregation in ways we never could have dreamed. As the world opens up (may it happen soon in our day!) we’ll certainly reinstitute more in-person services and programs. But our congregational leadership has made it clear that going forward, we’ll continue to be a primarily virtual congregation. The pandemic has changed us indelibly – and we welcome this change. We’re excited by the prospect of broadening our membership even further around the world to include anyone and everyone who shares our particular vision of Jewish community.
While I’m on the subject of vision, I’d like to return for a moment to our core values, and why they continue to be so critical – perhaps now more than ever. I mentioned that when we drafted our values, we wanted to be explicit about the fact that we weren’t Zionist. Unlike other congregations, we weren’t praying for a “just peace” or “coexistence” between both sides. We didn’t claim that our members held “a variety of views” on the Israel-Palestine conflict. We stated quite explicitly that we opposed the very concept of Jewish nation-statism. On that point we were, and continue to be, unequivocal.
We weren’t the first progressive congregation to take this stance, but we were certainly among the very few. Over the past few years, the numbers of non and anti-Zionist communities has grown to a certain extent. Not long after our founding, Jewish Voice for Peace created a Havurah Network for spiritual communities such as ours, and we’ve been a proud, participating member of the network from the very beginning. Still, I confess to some disappointment that there still aren’t more congregations willing to take this kind of a public stand.
There’s no question that the narrative on Israel/Palestine is changing. Last May, the Jewish Electorate Institute, a group led by prominent Jewish Democrats, released the results of a poll in which 34% of US Jewish voters agreed that “Israel’s treatment of Palestinians is similar to racism in the United States,” 25% agreed that “Israel is an apartheid state” and 20% said they preferred “establishing one state that is neither Jewish nor Palestinian.” As you might expect, when these findings are narrowed down to Jews under 40, they skew significantly higher.
It’s clearly getting harder and harder to ignore what Zionism has wrought. This past year was also the occasion of a report from the Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem entitled, “This is Apartheid: A Regime of Jewish Supremacy from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea.” The report ended with these astonishing, unprecedented words:
As painful as it may be to look reality in the eye, it is more painful to live under a boot…Nevertheless, people created this regime and people can make it worse – or work to replace it. That hope is the driving force behind this position paper. How can people fight injustice if it is unnamed? Apartheid is the organizing principle, yet recognizing this does not mean giving up. On the contrary: it is a call for change.
Tragically, last year was also the occasion of yet another devastating military assault on Gaza, killing 260 Palestinians, including at least 129 civilians, of whom 66 were children. As with past Israeli attacks on Gaza, I found those weeks in May to be utterly unbearable. The massive loss of life. Entire families wiped out. Scores of Palestinians left grievously wounded and homeless. On top of that, of course, there was the appalling response of the Jewish community. Not just the organized Jewish community, whose craven support of Israel we’ve come to expect, but the so-called liberal, progressive Jewish community, who reacted to this moral outrage with equivocation – responding to war crimes committed in their name with rationalizations and hand wringing; with “yes, buts” or “both sides-isms.”
When we openly state that our congregation is not Zionist, that’s more than mere semantics. It is a statement that the Judaism we lift up will not and cannot include apartheid, settler colonialism and militarism. This is not merely a political position – it’s a spiritual statement of conscience about what it means to be Jewish and what kinds of Jewish communities we seek to create. I’ve personally come to the conclusion that among all the issues that divide the Jewish community today, the role of Zionism is far and away the most critical. Can we truly imagine any other ideological divide that is more important – more morally consequential – than this?
Lately, we’ve been hearing news of fairly prominent congregations that promote an “open tent” approach when it comes to Zionism – i.e., congregations that openly make room for the views of non and anti-Zionists along with liberal Zionists in their communities. As welcome as such a development is, however, I have to ask myself, is this so-called open-tent ultimately tenable? Is it sustainable? Is it even desirable: to build congregational communities in which members have such fundamentally different moral approaches to being Jewish? In which some congregational members cherish and celebrate Israel, while others view it as an apartheid, settler colonial state? However well meaning, I cannot view this as anything other than an untenable, unbridgeable divide.
In my very first sermon for Tzedek Chicago, I said the following:
I daresay if you go to the websites of most liberal American congregations and read their core values, you’ll read words like “welcoming,” “inclusive,” “warm” and “open.” When you stop to think of it, most of these terms are actually pretty value-free. They aren’t really values per se so much as virtues. They don’t really represent anything anyone would object to and they don’t tell you anything about what the community ultimately stands for.
Six years later, I feel this even more strongly: too often, liberal Jewish congregations wield the word “inclusion” to provide them with convenient cover for taking a stand. But sooner or later, there’s a point in which the value of inclusion must give way to moral conviction. Sooner or later, we’re going to have to come clean about what kind of Judaism we seek to affirm, what kind of Jewish spiritual communities we seek to build. I can’t begin to tell you how grateful I am for Tzedek, a Jewish home in which I can speak my truth as a rabbi unabashedly and without compromise. I hope and trust it’s a community where youcan openly express your most consequential Jewish truths as well.
On Kol Nidre, we affirm the vows we make that we know we will not or cannot fulfill in the coming year. This Kol Nidre – and every Kol Nidre – let us also affirm the vows on which we will not and cannot compromise. Let us affirm that our Judaism does not depend upon the dispossession of others, but on the liberation of all. Let us continue building our congregation into a global community that is the living breathing embodiment of this vow.
Chazak, chazak v’nitchazek – may we all go from strength to strength in the coming year and beyond.
I delivered this sermon yesterday at Second Unitarian Universalist Church of Chicago:
When Reverend Jason invited me to give the sermon to you today, I had some idea of what I wanted to talk to you about. My original thought was to address the idea of collective narrative. To explore the stories communities tell about themselves – and the often unintended impact those stories have on our lives and on our world.
I think it’s important to understand the way collective narratives can blind us to the narratives of others. It’s particularly critical for communities of power and privilege to understand how the stories tell about themselves affect their actions toward disenfranchised communities. Or more to the point, the communities they disenfranchise.
I think it’s safe to say that white America is starting to challenge the dominant narratives that are told about the birth of this country – and the harm they continue to cause to this very day. In a very similar way, increasing numbers of us in the Jewish community are now starting to confront the Zionist narrative that has been instilled in us for the past 73 years. Much like the American narrative, it is also rooted in colonialism and racism – i.e., the story of about a nation created on the backs of a dispossessed and disenfranchised people.
However, given the terrible, tragic events that are still ongoing now in Palestine/Israel, I’ve decided to address this issue in a more immediate way – and a more personal way. In particular, I want to talk to you about Gaza. I’ve chosen this subject because that’s where the greatest and most tragic violence is occurring right now. I also believe Gaza epitomizes the ways Israel’s national narrative has inflicted harm on Palestinians – and how it continues to inflict such unthinkable harm even as we speak.
The subject of Gaza also has a special place in my own heart. In 2008, Israel launched a military operation on Gaza known as “Operation Cast Lead” not unlike the one we are witnessing at this very moment. This event became a pivotal turning point in my own relationship to Israel/Palestine – and to Zionism in general.
By the end of this “operation,” the Israeli military killed over 1,300 Palestinians, including 300 children. Beyond my anguish over these horrific casualties, it was the response of many in my Jewish community that shook me to my core. The rationalizations. The moral equivocation. The inability to face with the wider context in which these actions were occurring. The vilification of those – including many reputable human rights organizations – who suggested that Israel’s actions constituted war crimes and even crimes against humanity.
Then it happened again in 2014: the Israeli military killed over 2,000 Palestinians were killed, 495 of whom were children. And now today: Israel is once again unleashing overwhelming military firepower against a population of 2,000,000 whom they’ve blockaded in a tiny strip of land and who literally have nowhere to run. This is not a difficult moral calculus for me anymore – as a rabbi, as a Jew, and as human being of conscience.
Like many American Jews, my identity growing up was profoundly informed by the classic Zionist narrative: the story of a small underdog nation forging a national and cultural rebirth out of the ashes of its near-destruction. The redemptive nature of this narrative assumed a quasi-sacred status for me, as it did for many American Jews of my generation and older.
Politically speaking, I identified with what tends to be referred to today as “liberal Zionism.” I connected in particular with Israel’s Labor Zionist origins and generally aligned myself with positions advocated by the Israeli left and the Israeli peace movement. When it came to the ongoing conflict with the Palestinians, I’d invariably intone a familiar refrain of liberal Zionists: “It’s complicated.”
2008, however, was a tipping point for me. I read about the bombing of schools, whole families wiped out, children literally burned to the bone with white phosphorous. Somehow, it didn’t seem so complicated to me anymore. At long last, it felt as if I was viewing the conflict with something approaching clarity.
My relationship to Gaza deepened yet further in 2017, when I visited Gaza as a staff person for the American Friends Service Committee to meet with our programmatic staff there. I don’t know any other way to say it other than that I now take Gaza very, very personally. I have been indelibly transformed by my experience of there and by the friendships that I cherish to this day. As a result, it has given me an even deeper sensitivity into a narrative about a place that has become hideously twisted, even by the most well-meaning of people.
Too often, I believe, we tend to fetishize Gaza and Gazans, describing them alternatively as murderous terrorists, helpless pawns of Hamas or poor, passive victims. And since most people only tend to think of Gaza when the bombs are falling, this is generally about as far as its public image tends to go. Gaza becomes an objectified symbol of people’s fears, their political agendas and their own internalized prejudices.
So for some time now, it’s been something of a personal mission of mine to try and expand the one-dimensional narratives that are routinely told about Gaza. To contextualize Gaza’s history with information that is generally unknown to most of the world but is absolutely critical if we want a deeper understanding of the events currently unfolding there. I also see it as a mission to shine a light on the moral and religious challenge that Gaza presents to the Jewish community – and to all people of conscience.
First, a brief geography tutorial: what we call the “Gaza strip” constitutes a 140 square mile piece of land on the southeastern Mediterranean coast. While we generally think of “Gaza” as this one little crowded land mass, this term historically refers to a much larger territory that has been continuously inhabited for over 3,000 years. In ancient times it enjoyed extensive commerce and trade with the outside world and was a major port and an important stop along the spice and incense route. As such, it was located at a significant cultural crossroad, connecting a wide variety of different civilizations over the centuries.
Of course if folks associate Gaza with anything today, it’s with violence, refugees and refugee camps. But it’s important to bear in mind that this is a relatively recent phenomenon in its history. The so-called “Gaza strip” was created in 1949, when it became a repository for a flood of Palestinian refugees from cities and villages who had been expelled from their homes by Zionist militias. Before the outset of war, the population of this small strip of land numbered 60 to 80,000. By the end of the hostilities, at least 200,000 refugees were crowded into what we call today the Gaza Strip. The borders of this area were drawn arbitrarily, determined by the position of Egyptian and Israeli forces when the ceasefire was announced. It ended up being smaller by at least a third than the entire area of the Gaza District during the British mandate.
At the time, most of the refugees fully expected to return home – some could even see their own towns and villages through the barbed wire fences. Those who crossed the border to gather their possessions or harvest their crops were considered “infiltrators” by Israel and shot on sight. Eventually, it became all too clear there would be no return. Over the years the tents turned into concrete buildings that grew ever higher in that narrow corridor. The population of that once sparse territory has now grown to almost 2,000,000 people.
Given this context, it was natural that Gaza would become a center for the Palestinian resistance movement. We know from history that when a people are oppressed, they will inevitably resist their oppression. And yes, sometimes that resistance will be violent in nature.
As early as the 1950s, groups of Palestinians known as “fedayeen” crossed over the border to stage violent attacks in the surrounding settlements. One of these attacks offers an important insight into the course of Gaza’s history in ways that reverberate for us even today. In 1956, a group of fedayeen entered a field in Kibbutz Nahal Oz and killed a kibbutznik named Roi Rotenberg. The famed Israeli general Moshe Dayan spoke at his funeral – and he expressed himself himself in his eulogy with remarkable candor:
Do not today besmirch the murderers with accusations. Who are we that we should bewail their mighty hatred of us? For eight years they sit in refugee camps in Gaza, and opposite their gaze we appropriate for ourselves as our own portion the land and the villages in which they and their fathers dwelled…
This we know: that in order that the hope to destroy us should die we have to be armed and ready, morning and night. We are a generation of settlement, and without a steel helmet and the barrel of a cannon we cannot plant a tree and build a house. Our children will not live if we do not build shelters, and without a barbed wire fence and a machine gun we cannot pave a road and channel water. The millions of Jews that were destroyed because they did not have a land look at us from the ashes of Israelite history and command us to take possession of and establish a land for our nation.
It’s now 73 later and Israel continues to rule with a barbed wire fence and the barrel of a gun. Just as importantly, the descendants of the original Gazan refugees have lost none of their ancestors’ desire for return. Most of them know full well where their ancestral homes and fields are located – in some cases just a few short kilometers from where currently live.
As in other parts of Palestine, the memory of home and the desire for return are a palpable part of Gazan culture. I experienced this in a simple yet powerful way during my visit there. One afternoon, while we were traveling north along the coast from Rafah to Gaza City, I noticed a series of colorful concrete benches along the beachfront. My colleague Ali explained that each one bore the name of a Palestinian city or town where Gazans lived prior to 1948.
It’s not difficult to grasp the sacred significance of these simple seaside benches to the refugees of Gaza. Unlike most memorials, which commemorate what was lost and is never to be found, I’d wager that those who come to these beaches don’t believe their home cities and villages to be lost at all. On the contrary, I believe these benches testify that these places are still very real to them. And to their faith that they will one day return home.
When we consider the narrative of Gaza, I believe we must keep this critical piece of context in mind: long before there was a Hamas, Palestinians in Gaza have been resisting their oppression – and Israel has been retaliating brutally against their resistance. Of course, when we do the moral calculus, we can argue about the strategic sense and morality of the rockets Hamas fires into Israel – as many Palestinians do. But if we truly seek to understand Gaza’s narrative, we must honestly ask ourselves – what would we ourselves do in their situation?
As I noted earlier, many white Americans are starting to reckon seriously with the colonial narratives instilled about the birth of this country. The narratives of the powerful and the privileged have great power. But when they collide with the narratives of those they’ve disenfranchised, the impact can sometimes create a spark of transformation – it can indeed, lead to the construction of a new and more just narrative. The Black Lives Matter protests that were born last summer are a powerful example of this phenomenon. I think we’ve all been astonished and inspired by a new narrative struggling to be born in this country.
I fervently believe there is a potential for a similar transformation in Israel/Palestine. It will not happen easily, or painlessly, but I do believe it can happen. In a very real sense, it has to happen.
May we commit ourselves to this transformation – and may it happen soon in our day.
The central story commemorated on Hanukkah comes from books 1 and 2 Maccabees, which tells of a small group of Jews in the land of Israel that fought to liberate their community from the increasingly oppressive reign of the Seleucid empire. Under Antiochus IV Epiphanes, the empire had imposed their Hellenistic culture upon the Jewish community; in 167 BCE, Antiochus intensified his campaign by defiling the temple in Jerusalem and banning Jewish practice. The Jewish band known as the Maccabees subsequently waged a three-year campaign that culminated in the cleaning and rededication of the temple and ultimately, the establishment of the second Jewish commonwealth.
The meaning of Hanukkah has historically been understood and interpreted in many different ways by Jewish communities throughout the centuries. For the rabbis of the Talmud, who sought to downplay the militarism and violence of the story, the holiday is emblematic of God’s miraculous power, symbolized famously by the Talmudic legend (quoted above) of a miraculous cruse of oil in the rededicated Temple that lasted for eight days. The Zionist movement and the state of Israel celebrate Hanukkah as a nationalist holiday, glorifying the Maccabees’ military struggle for political independence. In many nations throughout the Jewish diaspora, the festival is often understood as an expression of Jewish minority pride and a celebration of religious freedom.
More recently, some American Jewish religious leaders have been reinterpreting Hanukkah as a holiday of sacred environmental concern, framing the legend of the oil as a lesson about the importance of energy sustainability. Jewish environmental activist Rabbi Arthur Waskow, for instance, has proposed observing “Eight Days of Environmental Action” during Hanukkah, suggesting that the legend “is a reminder that if we have the courage to change our lifestyles to conserve energy, the miracle of our own creativity will sustain us.” The website of the Reform movement’s Religious Action Center (RAC) now devotes an entire section to “Green Resources for Hanukkah.” The Jewish environmental organization Hazon also offers extensive resources for the holiday, including “10 Ways to Make your Hanukkah More Sustainable.”
While these new approaches are certainly meaningful as far as they go, it is worth questioning why the environmental dimensions of Hanukkah must begin and end with green personal behaviors. Given that the festival celebrates a struggle for liberation, Hanukkah also offers us a powerful opportunity to highlight and celebrate the emergent global movement for environmental justice.
This connection is particularly relevant since this struggle is unfolding in critical ways in the land where the Hanukkah story actually took place. In fact, the state of Israel has a well-documented history of monopolizing and exploiting the natural resources of historic Palestine — all too often at the expense of the Palestinian people themselves. If we are truly serious about celebrating Hanukkah as a “green holiday,” we should also use these eight days to shine a light on the myriad environmental injustices being committed in Israel/Palestine — and further, to rededicate ourselves to the movement for environmental justice there and around the world.
“Green Colonialism” in Israel/Palestine
Environmentalism has always been central to the myth of Zionist pioneers who described themselves as having “greened the barren desert” of Palestine. Like many of my generation who came of age in American Jewish religious schools, I well remember being taught that helping the Jewish National Fund (JNF) plant pine trees in Israel was an act of almost sacred significance. Like generations of Hebrew school students before and after us, we were encouraged to regularly put coins in the iconic blue-and-white JNF collection boxes and were given certificates as gifts whenever a tree was planted in our honor or for a special occasion.
The reality beneath this mythos, however, reveals a much more problematic and troubling history. We didn’t learn the crucial colonial goal behind the JNF’s forestation policy throughout Palestine — that the widespread planting of pine groves and forests was instrumental in the dispossession of Palestinians. We certainly didn’t learn about Yosef Weitz, director of the JNF from 1932 to 1948, who was a primary architect of the Zionist policy of Palestinian Arab “transfer,” often advocating for this policy openly and unabashedly.
At a meeting of the Transfer Committee in 1937, for instance, Weitz stated:
The transfer of Arab population from the area of the Jewish state does not serve only one aim — to diminish the Arab population. It also serves a second, no less important, aim which is to advocate land presently held and cultivated by the Arabs and thus to release it for Jewish inhabitants.
It is now known that pine forests planted by the JNF were widely used as national and recreational parks to hide the remains of destroyed Palestinian villages and neighborhoods that were depopulated by force in 1948. According to scholars Ilan Pappé and Samer Jaber, “covering ethnic cleansing with pine trees is probably the most cynical method employed by Israel in its quest to take over as much of Palestine as possible with as few Palestinians in it as possible.” The Israeli organization Zochrot estimates that “more than two-thirds of [JNF] forests and sites — 46 out of 68 — conceal or are located on the ruins of Palestinian villages demolished by Israel.”
In a recent conference call sponsored by Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP), journalist/activist Naomi Klein referred to this practice as “green colonialism,” pointing out that “the use of conservation and tree planting and forest protection as a tool of settler colonialism is not unique to Israel” and that “the creation of state parks and national parks (in North America) are seen by Indigenous people in these settler colonial contexts in similar ways.” According to Klein, “there is a long and ongoing history of conservation … where the land is declared a park and the traditional inhabitants and users of the land are locked out.”
The cumulative environmental impact of nonindigenous pine trees throughout historic Palestine has been devasting. European pines, which were consciously planted to evoke the memory of the forests familiar to Zionist settlers, have largely failed to adapt to the local soil, requiring frequent replanting. As they have aged, non-native pines also have demanded more and more water, rendering them more vulnerable to disease. Moreover, falling pine needles have acidified the soil, inhibiting the growth of native species.
This practice, coupled with the steadily soaring temperatures in the region, has increasingly led to devastating forest fires such as the Carmel wildfire in 2010, estimated to be the worst in Israel’s history. Given its grievous environmental impact, the 2010 fire subsequently precipitated a widespread reassessment in Israel of early Zionist tree-planting policies. In 2011, Yisrael Tauber, director of forest management for the JNF, grudgingly admitted, “Planting is still important, but in many cases we have to make a kind of change in our consciousness.…We are now building sustainable forestry after these pioneering pines did a wonderful job for the first generation.”
Of course, given the rising threat of the global climate crisis, this admission arrives as too little, too late. Increasingly dangerous conflagrations are now a regular occurrence throughout Israel; this past summer, three simultaneous wildfires necessitated the evacuation of hundreds of residents across the country. This trend is particularly ominous given that this region is among the hardest hit by the climate crisis. At the UN Climate Conference in Madrid this month, the Israeli Ministry of Environmental Protection issued a report listing a number of devastating projections, including an expected rise in the risk of natural disasters.
“Water Apartheid” in the West Bank
The struggle over water resources is another important example of historic and ongoing climate injustice in Israel/Palestine. Israel has almost complete control over water sources in the region, a monopoly the human rights group Al-Haq refers to as “water apartheid.” According to Amnesty International, Palestinian consumption in the Occupied Palestinian Territories is about 70 liters a day per person (well below the 100 liters per capita daily recommended by the World Health Organization) whereas Israeli daily per capita consumption is about 300 liters. In some rural communities, Palestinians survive on 20 liters per day.
Those who visit the West Bank cannot help but be struck by the sight of Israeli settlements, with lush, well-watered lawns looming over Palestinian towns and villages surrounded by rocky soil and sparse vegetation. This is largely due to the fact that Israel uses more than 80 percent of the water from the Mountain Aquifer, the only source of underground water in the West Bank, as well as all of the surface water available from the Jordan River, which is completely denied to Palestinians.
As a result of this inequitable system, some 180,000 to 200,000 Palestinians in rural communities have no access to running water. In towns and villages which are connected to the water network, water rationing is common, many Palestinians have no choice but to purchase additional supplies from mobile water tankers which deliver water of often dubious quality at a much higher price. (The Mountain Aquifer, one of the most valuable natural resources in the region, is situated almost completely east of the Green Line, a key factor in Israel’s inexorable annexation of the West Bank.)
Over the years, Israel’s over-pumping of underground aquifers has lowered the groundwater table below sea level and caused saline water intrusion in many areas. The average flow of the Jordan River has been decreasing dramatically and has become so polluted by Israeli settlement and industry run-off that it was declared unsafe for baptism by Friends of the Earth Middle East in 2010 (known today as EcoPeace Middle East). The Dead Sea has shrunk into two separate and rapidly evaporating bodies of water, increasingly polluted by Israeli companies that pump out its salts for cosmetic products.
Environmental Injustice in Gaza
When it comes to Gaza, Israel’s crushing 12-year-old blockade has almost completely depleted the supply of drinkable water for the nearly 2,000,000 Palestinians who live in this small strip of land. Gaza’s only water resource, the Coastal Aquifer, is insufficient for the needs of the population, and Israel does not allow the transfer of water from the West Bank to Gaza. In the meantime, the aquifer has been steadily depleted and contaminated by over-extraction and by sewage and seawater infiltration, and 97 percent of its water has been contaminated and unfit for human consumption.
Stringent restrictions imposed in recent years by Israel on the entry into Gaza of material and equipment necessary for the development and repair of infrastructure have caused further deterioration of its water and sanitation situation. For the past several years, sewage has been flowing into the Mediterranean at a rate of 110 million liters a day. At present, 97 percent of Gaza’s freshwater is unsuitable for human consumption and only 10 percent of Gaza’s residents have access to safe drinking water.
However, as is invariably the case with issues of environmental injustice, what goes around comes around. This past June, EcoPeace Middle East reported that the collapsing environmental situation in Gaza was creating a “national security risk” to Israel, warning that “the collapsing water, sewage and electricity infrastructure in the Gaza Strip pose a material danger to (Israel).” In a particularly perverse example of victim-blaming, the Israeli military recently urged the World Health Organization to condemn the “ecological catastrophe” caused by the burning of tires by Palestinians on the border during the weekly Great March of Return protests.
In addition to water pollution, there have also been reports of rapidly increasing soil contamination due to Israel’s regular military assaults on Gaza. According to a report by the New Weapons Research Group, Israeli bombings in Gaza Strip have left a high concentration of toxic metals, such as tungsten, mercury, molybdenum, cadmium and cobalt in the soil. These metals can cause tumors and problems with fertility, and they can have serious and harmful effects on newly born babies.
Hanukkah and Global Climate Justice
What does this current environmental reality bode for the future of the Jewish state? British journalist Robert Cohen powerfully concludes that the climate crisis, coupled with Israel’s steady over-exploitation of resources, has functionally rendered Zionism “obsolete.”
“How,” writes Cohen, “can Israel present itself as a Jewish safe haven from a hostile world when its water security is at high risk, crop yields will soon be falling and fires will be raging all year round…? When it comes to climate change, national borders will offer no protection from antisemitism. Climate has no interest in faith or ethnicity or in historical or religious claims to a particular piece of land.”
Cohen’s point can certainly be applied to the world at large. The climate crisis clearly knows no borders. But while no one will ultimately be safe from its devastating effects, we can be sure that the more powerful will increasingly seek to safeguard themselves and their interests at all costs at the expense of the less powerful. Such is the harsh reality of “green colonialism”: as the climate crisis renders more and more of the world uninhabitable, we are clearly witnessing increased state efforts at border militarization, population control and the warehousing of humanity.
What then, is to be done? In a recent op-ed for The Nation, journalist Ben Ehrenreich offered this compelling prescription: “it is time to shout, and loudly, that the freedom of all the earth’s people to move across borders must be at the center of any response to the climate crisis.… If we are to survive as a species, we must know that no boat can save us except the one we build together.” In her JVP presentation, Naomi Klein echoed this challenge in similarly powerful terms:
What is clear is that the space for humanity to live well is contracting…. So, the core question is what kind of people are we going to be as we live in greater density? And if we look to Israel/Palestine, we see a really terrifying example of how to lose your humanity and how to fail to share land — and the monstrousness it requires to fail to share….
This is a global process that is happening now … so we’re going to have to start practicing solidarity and mutual aid. And we’re going to have to practice love and show each other what love looks like in public more and more. Because a lot of people have lost faith that they can do it.
There can be no better Hanukkah message for the 21st century. Given the realities of our current age, the nationalist dimensions of the holiday are not merely irrelevant, but dangerous. In the words of poet/liturgist Aurora Levins Morales, “this time it’s all of us or none.” If Hanukkah is to be a true celebration of environmental justice, it must become a “rededication” to fight for a more universal vision of liberation, for a world of solidarity, mutual aid and open borders.
Or to put it another way, the Maccabees’ struggle must now be broadened to represent the universal struggle of all who are committed to showing what love looks like in public, for the sake of all humanity. For the age of global climate crisis, the stakes could not be higher.
oh lord deliver me from my people
who wield their weapons with impunity
whose armies rain bombs on the imprisoned
whose apologists equate oppressor and oppressed
who punish resistance without mercy.
keep me from those who speak so easily of two sides
of dual narratives of complexities and coexistence
those who call submission peace and lawless laws justice
who never tire of intoning never again
even as they commit crimes again and again
who have forsaken every lesson they’ve learned
from their own history and their
own sacred heritage.
like jacob i have dreamed fearful dreams
i have struggled in the night
i have limped pitifully across the river
and now like jacob in my last dying breath
i have nothing left but to curse my own
whose tools are tools of lawlessness
who maim refugees who dare dream of return
and send bombs upon the desperate
for the crime of fighting back.
so send me away from this people
this tortured fallen assembly
keep me far from their council
count me not among their ranks
i can abide them no longer.
Here is an excerpt from my new Passover seder supplement, “Olives and Maror – The Great Return March:”
And so, on this night of Passover we affirm: we cannot gather to tell the Exodus story without acknowledging the liberation narrative that is currently unfolding at the Gaza border. We affirm further: if we remember our own persecution yet fail to call out Israel’s persecution of the Palestinian people, our seder will not be complete.
We now combine maror and olives, to acknowledge the bitterness of lives lost and dreams denied – together with the eternal hope of justice and return. Let us redouble our resolve to do our part to make these hopes and dreams a reality bimeirah be’yamneinu – speedily and in our own day.
Click here for the entire supplement to print out and read at your seder table this year. (Click here, here, here and here for supplements I’ve written in previous years.)
Shalom Rav 