Monthly Archives: August 2024

Protesting Genocide at the DNC in Chicago: Beyond “One Issue”

(photo by Keeton Holder)

As I’ve written previously, a large coalition of leftist groups has been preparing to take to the streets when the Democratic National Convention comes to Chicago next week. Although there will be a variety of different demands leveled at the DNC during the course of the convention, one key issue clearly stands out as a central common thread through them all – namely, an immediate US arms embargo and a permanent ceasefire to end Israel’s genocide in Gaza.

To name but one example: a rally and march for reproductive justice (of which my congregation, Tzedek Chicago, is a co-sponsor) will take place this Sunday, on the eve of the convention. As “Bodies Outside of Unjust Laws” organizers have made clear, however, the demands of this protest are not limited to issues of domestic reproductive justice alone:

Reproductive justice inherently includes ending the reproductive genocide in Palestine. As U.S. citizens, it is our duty to call on our own government to end the funding of weapons to Israel that enable this nightmare to continue and robs us of funds at home. As feminists and reproductive justice activists, we must also highlight a horrific aspect of the war on Palestinians: it is a war against women and children, who suffer in uniquely cruel ways. 

Likewise, the Coalition to March on the DNC, a group of over 200 national and local organizations is calling for an “End to US Aid to Israel” along with demands on immigrant justice, police crimes, healthcare, housing and the environment. Here again, justice for Palestinians is not viewed in isolation from other issues. As protest organizers correctly understand, these issues are irrevocably interlinked and intertwined.

During the course of this election cycle, those of us who have been demanding an arms embargo and ceasefire in Gaza have become all too familiar with one recurrent criticism in particular: that we are “one issue voters.” I find this to be a dangerous attitude for a number of reasons. More than anything, it’s an egregiously dismissive stand to take in an age of genocide, smacking of “it’s not my problem” American isolationism during the 1940s. For the Palestinian people, of course, Israel’s genocide in Gaza is not simply one issue – it’s the issue.

Witness, for instance, the news from this past weekend:

Officials in Gaza say more than 100 people were killed Saturday in an Israeli attack on a school and mosque where thousands of displaced Palestinians had sought shelter. The attack on the al-Tabin school in Gaza City was one of the deadliest individual attacks since Israel’s war on Gaza began over 10 months ago. Rescue workers said they did not find a “single full body” among the deceased — just body parts often destroyed beyond recognition. Survivors said Israel attacked the school during morning prayers…

CNN has confirmed a US-made GBU-39 small diameter bomb was used in the Israeli strike on the school. The attack came two days after the Biden administration notified Congress that it was preparing to provide Israel with an additional $3.5 billion to spend on US weapons and military equipment. Congress had approved the money as part of a $14 billion package for Israel in April. Zeteo reports part of the new US package includes a direct sale of 6,500 joint direct action munitions to Israel.

First and foremost, the genocide in Gaza is a crime against humanity that should concern us all. But as citizens of the nation that is funding and abetting this genocide, we Americans cannot look away from the blood that is surely on our collective hands. Nor can we ignore the shock waves that resonate far outside the borders of Palestine/Israel: the threat of an all-out regional war, the profits enjoyed by the arms and surveillance industry at taxpayer expense, the devastating environmental impact – the list goes on and on. Palestinian human rights lawyer and activist Noura Erakat put it perfectly on Twitter/X recently: “PSA: ending a genocide is not ‘a single issue’ it is an entire universe of issues.”

Another refrain I’ve been hearing repeatedly is the critique that protesting at the DNC “will only help Trump.” Harris herself leveled this argument at a campaign rally in Detroit when she sternly admonished pro-Palestinian protesters: “If you want Donald Trump to win, then say that. Otherwise, I’m speaking.” To be sure, it was an astonishingly tone-deaf and dismissive response to make in Michigan, the very birthplace of the Uncommitted Campaign. But on a more fundamental level, Harris’s response denied the very real impact of her own administration’s policies. As one of the protesters later put it, “When people are demanding a ceasefire and arms embargo and an end to the genocide and you say that we want Donald Trump to step in—it just shows a lack of accountability. It shows a lack of leadership, a lack of responsibility and a lack of ownership.”

In essence, Harris’s comment was just the latest version of the “shut up and vote” message that the Democratic party routinely sends progressives during every election cycle. In an age of US-supported genocide, however, the cynical emptiness of this message has become patently, painfully obvious. As journalist Masha Gessen has rightly pointed out. “These voters are not choosing between Harris and Trump. They are choosing between their sense of themselves as moral beings if they vote for Harris and their sense of themselves if they vote for a third-party candidate or for no one at all.”

Of course those who will be protesting at the DNC next week do not want to see Trump elected in November. But even from a purely strategic point of view, what has a better chance of helping the Democrats fortunes in November? We know that a strong majority of American voters across the political spectrum support a permanent ceasefire in Gaza. What would be the more winning strategy: telling those who want to end a genocide to shut up, or exert real leadership that will bring about a ceasefire and an end to the threat of a devastating regional war?

While party conventions function largely as candidate-coronations, they still function as places where parties express their collective vision and finalize their political platforms. On this score, I’m not at all optimistic that an arms embargo to Israel and a permanent ceasefire will find any purchase at the DNC. There are a mere 30 Uncommitted delegates out of 4,600 – and while they are pushing for a voice at the convention (they’ve asked that Dr. Tanya Haj-Hassan, a pediatric intensive care doctor who has volunteered in Gaza, speak from the convention floor), they have still not been offered a slot. Harris’s national security advisor has also made it clear that she opposes an arms embargo to Israel. By every indication, it certainly feels like “shut up and vote” will be the dominant Democratic party message coming out of the convention next week.

I have enormous respect for the Uncommitted delegates who will engage within the convention, particularly co-founder Layla Elabed, who has said even if they are not given a speaking slot, delegates will make their presence known with “news conferences, candle light vigils, tables to distribute literature and, they hope, guest testimonies about life in war-torn Gaza.” When it comes to political advocacy, however, there is always an inside game and an outside game. That’s why those of us who are not delegates will (quite appropriately) be making our presence known outside the walls of the convention hall as well.

Protest organizers have no illusions about the overwhelming militarized presence that will greet us when we gather next week. Federal authorities have divided the area surrounding the United Center, where the main speaking events of the convention will take place, into “soft” and “hard” zones – the latter being off limits to cars and non-credentialled delegates. But even in the soft zones, movement has been heavily restricted. The main protests have been given approved routes far from the convention site, and at one point goes through narrow residential side streets, that will be completely inadequate to handle thousands of protesters. While organizers have appealed the march route, as of this writing there has been no response from the city of Chicago.

When we talk about the potential for police violence next week, of course, the specter of the 1968 Democratic convention in Chicago looms very large. A great deal of ink has been spilled analyzing the differences and similarities between Chicago 1968 and Chicago 2024 – and while I’m loath to venture too far into this rabbit hole, there is one point of commonality I believe bears noting. In general, the mythos around the 1968 DNC protests tend to lay the blame for the Democrats’ defeat on the protest movement that “divided the party.” Often lost in this discussion is the fact that in 1968, those protests were directed toward a political party that had been prosecuting an increasingly unpopular war in Vietnam. Today, as then, I find it deeply misguided to blame protesters and not the immoral policies of the Democratic party itself.

While it’s not particularly helpful to use Chicago 1968 to heighten hysteria over the DNC, protestors are certainly justified in being vigilant over the very real possibility of police violence. I’m not the only one who finds it ominous that the city is doubling down on armed presence in the city. In advance of the convention, the Secret Service agent in charge of “security” has commented that “Chicago has a proven track record when it comes to putting on huge events” – citing the city’s response to Lollapalooza, the NASCAR Chicago Street Race and the Chicago Air & Water Show – as if the DNC is just another tourist event to showcase to the public.

No, we cannot deny of the very real moral and political reality that will be at stake in Chicago next week. We cannot deny that state violence directed against Palestinians is one and the same with so many other forms of state violence that are routinely normalized as “necessary.” And we must resist the call to dismiss any form of systemic violence as just “one issue.” As my friend and comrade, organizer Kelly Hayes has so wisely written:

We have to recognize victims of police brutality, Palestinians, our disabled and unhoused neighbors, and so many others who are subject to forgetting as worthy of grief, outrage and action. Everyday people who are fleeing violence, hunger, and militarism, everyday people whose cites are running out of water or are in danger of disappearing beneath rising flood waters, everyday people who are dying right now because they lack air conditioning amid heat waves – these are the people whose plights and fates should shape our politics. If we are going to fight for any semblance of human decency, we need to reclaim and reassert the value of our lives.

Confronting Tisha B’Av and Gaza: Ten Years Later

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 [photo: Mohammed Salem/Reuters]

Exactly ten years ago, the Jewish fast day of Tisha B’Av arrived as Israel was winding down “Operation Protective Edge” – it’s deadly two-month military assault on Gaza. By the end of the summer of 2014, it would eventually leave more than 2,000 Palestinians dead and more than 10,000 wounded. I remember thinking at the time how the scale of human loss was utterly incomprehensible, which of course, it was.

With Tisha B’Av 2014 approaching, I met with a small group of Jewish friends and activists who had been active in the Palestine solidarity movement to plan an observance. Tisha B’Av (literally, the 9th of the month of Av) is a day of mourning for the destruction of the 1st and 2nd Temples in Jerusalem – and by extension the myriad of other tragedies that have befallen the Jewish people throughout the centuries. In addition to a day-long fast, the traditional Tisha B’Av observance includes the chanting Biblical book of Eicha (Lamentations), which vividly and painfully describes the fall of Jerusalem to the Babylonians.

Given the violence Israel had been unleashing on Palestinians in Gaza that summer, we just couldn’t bear to observe the festival in the traditional manner, i.e., as a day of mourning exclusively for Jewish loss. And so, when the festival arrived, we gathered in a home in Evanston to share our fears, our grief, our outrage, over what had transpired over the course of that tragic summer. In a sense, we were mourning the loss of Judaism itself as we had known it. Though it was obviously far from a traditional Tisha B’Av observance, those who attended will never forget that gathering – and would agree it was a turning point in our Jewish lives and identities.  

Among the readings shared at the ceremony, was a new poetic translation of the first chapter of Eicha that I had written for the occasion, entitled “A Lamentation for Gaza.” This is how it began:

Gaza weeps alone.
Bombs falling without end
her cheeks wet with tears.
A widow abandoned
imprisoned on all sides
with none willing to save her.

We who once knew oppression
have become the oppressors.
Those who have been pursued
are now the pursuers.
We have uprooted families
from their homes, we have
driven them deep into
this desolate place,
this narrow strip of exile.

It’s fair to say that none of those who attended that ceremony could ever have imagined the scale of the genocidal carnage that Israel would unleash on Gaza ten years later. To date, nearly 40,000 Gazans have been killed, though the actual number will almost surely climb far higher. The Israeli military has indiscriminately killed random civilians, relief workers, journalists and health care workers. Israel has wiped out the bloodlines of entire families. The Gaza strip is now gripped by spreading famine and polio epidemics. And unlike ten years ago, this current violence has now brought the entire region to the brink of all-out war.

In anticipation of Tisha B’Av this year, I recently re-read my “Lamentation for Gaza” – and while it’s an accurate snapshot of my feelings at the time, I don’t think it fully expresses my heart and soul now the way it did during the summer of 2014. Most fundamentally, I no longer relate to the essential perspective of the lamentation itself, which I wrote in the first-person plural:

We have become Gaza’s master
leveling neighborhoods
with the mere touch of a button
for her transgression of resistance.
Her children are born into captivity
they know us only as occupiers
enemies to be feared
and hated.

When I read this now, it is jarring to realize how I – a diaspora Jew living in the United States – wrote from the perspective of “Gaza’s master” and an “occupier.” When I wrote those words, I still maintained a personal connection to Zionism and reflexively adopted Israel’s perspective. At the same time, however, I clearly expressed deep anguish over what “we” had wrought – as if I didn’t know fully where I stood anymore.

Ten years later, I’m fully secure in my identity as an anti-Zionist Jew. Tzedek Chicago, is (yes) almost ten years old – and avowedly lifts up core values that express diasporist-focused Judaism beyond Zionism. I’m part of a Jewish community that is unabashed about taking a stand in the face of genocide.

I don’t believe it’s an exaggeration to say that as Tisha B’Av falls this year, the Jewish communal fissures over Palestine/Israel have become an abyss – perhaps even a schism. We are facing a deep and profound divide between those who place political nationalism at the center of their Jewish identity and those who refuse to associate settler colonialism, apartheid – and now genocide – with their Judaism. And though it pains me to say so, I don’t think there will be any bridging this gap. Contrary to the final line of Lamentations, “chadesh yameinu ke’kedem” (“renew our days as they were before”), there is no going back to the days of old. There will be no putting the pieces back together the way they were.

According to classical Jewish theology, the cataclysmic fall of the Second Temple in Jerusalem occurred as a result of “sinat chinam” – the baseless internecine hatred in the Jewish community that allowed the Romans to come breach the walls of the city and conquer Jerusalem. There is deep division in the Jewish community in the current moment as well, but now our Jewish trauma and hatred is directed outward rather than inward. Now, it is the Palestinian people – not we – who are bearing the full brunt of violent dispossession and collective loss.

While it would be hubris to predict what the future will hold for our tradition, I fervently believe that the Judaism of the future must be universalist in nature. Just as I suggested this past April that Passover cannot commemorate Jewish liberation exclusively, so too Tisha B’Av can no longer focus on Jewish mourning alone. Our cries of grief must include the Palestinian people – and all who are targeted, othered, and singled out for oppression through state violence.

This year, Tisha B’Av eve falls on Monday night August 12 – and this time, I know where I belong. I encourage local members of Tzedek Chicago to join us at Federal Plaza in downtown Chicago, where we will collaborate with Higaleh Nah, a local non-Zionist havurah, to chant the entire book of Eicha. It feels absolutely fitting that we will gather at the seat of state power to send forth our lamentations toward the nation that is arming and enabling this ongoing genocide in our name.

May our cries pierce the highest heavens, and may our mourning be expansive enough to include all who are oppressed in our midst.

Assassinating Haniyeh has Devastated Hopes for a Ceasefire – and has Brought the Region to the Brink

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photo: Getty Images

Among the myriad of news items jostling for our attention this past week was the assassination of Ismail Haniyeh, a top political leader of Hamas, who was killed by a bomb in Tehran on Wednesday. Israel is almost surely behind this act, even if it hasn’t publicly acknowledged it. While I realize that there are many in the Jewish community and around the world who are not mourning Haniyeh’s death, it’s difficult to overstate the damaging impact of Israel’s actions on the prospects for a ceasefire in Gaza.

Ismail Haniyeh may have been a leader of Israel’s sworn enemy, but he was also one of the primary figures in ongoing ceasefire negotiations. By killing its own negotiating partner, Israel has made it substantively more difficult to realistically imagine an end to its genocidal violence, a return of Israeli hostages and a Palestinian prisoner exchange any time soon. The Prime Minister of Qatar, who has been a central figure in brokering ceasefire talks put it bluntly: “How can mediation succeed when one party assassinates the negotiator on the other side?”

Why would Israel assassinate Haniyeh, knowing that it might fatally damage ceasefire talks? Many are suggesting that it is in Netanyahu’s personal/political interest to prolong this violence as long as possible – even as it endangers the lives of his own nation’s citizens. While this is no doubt true, I think there is a deeper reason: these latest targeted killings were rooted in Israel’s historic – and fatal – belief that the use of its relentless, overwhelming military force will inevitably force their enemies to submit. It’s worth noting that Haniyeh’s assassination follows the targeted killing of his three sons last April, as well as his sister and nine other members of his family in June. These actions certainly track with Netanyahu’s vow to exact a “mighty vengeance” following Hamas’ October 7 attack.

In fact, Israel has had a long history of assassinating Palestinian leaders, knowing full well that these actions ultimately serve no strategic purpose other than a satisfying show of force. The Israeli military has been assassinating Hamas’ leaders for decades – and Hamas has consistently replaced them. For all its efforts, Israel has succeeded only in increasing the number of Palestinian martyrs and strengthening Hamas’ resolve to resist all the more. In this most recent instance, many observers have pointed out that the killing of Haniyeh will now leave a vacuum to be filled by more radical leaders such as Yahya Sinwar, among others.

Meanwhile, Israel’s genocidal onslaught in Gaza continues with impunity – and nary a protest from the international community. Yesterday, Israel killed at least 15 people – including two children – and injured 40 others in an airstrike that targeted a school-turned-shelter in Gaza’s Shejaiya neighborhood. On Wednesday, the Israeli military killed two journalists from Al-Jazeera, Ismail Al-Ghoul and cameraman, Rami Al-Rifi, with an airstrike on their car. Their colleague Hind Khouri broke down as she reported on their killings, which brings the current number of journalists killed in Gaza to 113.

Israel’s most recent actions have also brought the region, terrifyingly, that much closer to all-out war. On the same day as Ismail Haniyeh’s killing, the Israeli government confirmed that it had assassinated a top Hezbollah leader, Fuad Shukr, in Beirut. The leadership of both Iran and Lebanon, and their proxies in the region are now vowing to retaliate – and the Israeli military is reportedly on “high alert.” Even more ominously, the US intelligence community reports it has received “clear indications” that Iran is planning an attack. One official said the Pentagon and US Central Command are making preparations to help defend Israel militarily, “(involving) US military assets in the Gulf, the Eastern Mediterranean and the Red Sea.”

In times such as these, we are reminded how unbearably high the stakes of a just peace in the region truly are. I understand the palpable sense of powerlessness in the current moment: it sometimes feels as if there is nothing left to do but to pray that leaders on all sides ultimately take a breath and a step back from the brink. In the end, however, we cannot be content to passively hope that the leaders who have brought us to this unthinkable moment will do the right thing.

As has often been said, hope is a discipline. We must find the wherewithal to continue the struggle: to demand a US arms embargo to Israel, an immediate ceasefire in Gaza – and a redoubling of our commitment to a just and equitable peace for all. We must advocate in no uncertain terms that the alternative is utterly unacceptable.