So many people have told me that they are not sure how – or even if – they will celebrate Passover this year. With the genocide and forced starvation of the people of Gaza deepening with no end in sight, they say, it just feels beyond challenging to celebrate a festival of Jewish liberation. To make the moral dissonance even more dissonant, many in the Jewish communal establishment are framing Passover by focusing exclusively on the Israeli hostages in Gaza and call for their liberation from Hamas, with nary a mention of the 34,000 Gazans who have been destroyed in the process through a terrifying war of vengeance.
I personally understand this dissonance – and I certainly don’t begrudge those who choose to scale back or forgo Passover this year. Personally speaking, I’ve chosen to lean in to the festival nonetheless. Despite all the challenge and pain this Passover, I believe the festival can offer us a deeper understanding of what is really transpiring in Gaza at the moment, and how we might respond to it.
In some ways, it seems to me that Passover is a kind of lens that reveals the inner nature of Jewish identity itself, through the deep dialectic between the particular and the universal. For many Jews, Passover is first and foremost about us. This approach identifies deeply with the servitude and liberation of the Jewish people throughout our history, refracting the Exodus story against centuries of anti-Jewish oppression and Jewish survival.
However, this is certainly not the only way to read the Exodus narrative. This is, after all, a mythic story, and one that has been universally embraced by a myriad of spiritual, political and social liberation movements throughout history. Oppressed people and peoples other than Jews have long identified with the experience of the Israelites: MLK, for instance, would routinely frame the civil rights movement in the context of the Israelites’ struggle against the tyranny of Pharaoh in more than a few of his sermons and speeches.
As a Jew who cherishes the value of universalism, this is how I’ve come to understand the Exodus story and the festival of Passover: as a commemoration of Jewish struggle and liberation alongside so many others past and present. On every Passover in every generation, we must ask the question out loud: who is Pharoah and who are the Israelites? Indeed, in the age of Zionism, I believe this question resonates with deep moral reckoning. As I wrote in an article during Passover 2016 (with words I could have easily written in this very moment):
As I watch this tragic process unfold this Passover, I find myself returning to the universal lesson this festival imparts on the corrupt abuse of state power. Although the Exodus story is considered sacred in Jewish tradition, it would be a mistake to assume that the contemporary state of Israel must be seen as equivalent to the biblical Israelites.
On the contrary, any people who suffer under oppressive government policies are, in a sense, Israelites. And any state — even a Jewish state — that views a people in its midst as a demographic threat can become a Pharaoh.
In Tzedek’s seder supplement for this year, we make this universal moral assertion clear in our opening reading when we proclaim, If we read the Passover story as a story of Jewish liberation alone or – God forbid – Jewish liberation at the expense of others, we will not have fulfilled the requirements of the Passover seder. Through this approach to Passover, we reject the view that casts the Jewish people as eternal victims. We affirm that Jews are among a myriad of peoples who have struggled for liberation throughout history. And we reject the zero-sum mindset that other peoples’ freedoms must be swept aside in order to make way for ours.
I realize that this approach to Passover may feel a bridge too far for many Jews: either those who vehemently reject viewing Palestinians as Israelites, or those for whom it is just too painful to gather around the seder table at such a particularly tragic time. But I can’t help but believe that Passover – and Jewish spiritual tradition itself – is creative and resilient enough to give our community a way forward with moral courage, commitment and grace.
Remarks by Maya Schenwar, from last night’s Tu B’shvat gathering sponsored by Tzedek Chicago and the Jewish Fast for Gaza. (Maya is director of the Truthout Center for Grassroots Journalism. She is also a coordinator of the Jewish Fast for Gaza and a member of Tzedek Chicago.)
Many of those of us involved in Jewish Fast for Gaza are breaking our fast tonight. We’ve been fasting weekly on Sundays since mid-October, and we will keep fasting weekly until a ceasefire. We donate the money we would’ve spent on food to organizations supporting people in Gaza in this time of starvation and mass death. And each week, we are also reflecting on and renewing our commitment to solidarity with our Palestinian co-strugglers and people around the world who are calling for an end to this genocide, an end to US funding for Israel’s weapons, an end to colonization and apartheid.
When we call for a ceasefire, when we fast for a ceasefire, we are uplifting a call for life. In the months since October 7, I’ve heard many people quote Ruth Wilson’s Gilmore’s sacred words, “Where life is precious, life is precious.” And one of the things Ruthie is saying, with that message, is that in societies where life is actually treated as precious—where they don’t have the death penalty and life sentences and large-scale state violence and state-sanctioned environmental devastation—in those places, violence is less likely overall, the culture is less violent, because life is affirmed.
We should bear in mind that as the US fuels Israel’s genocide in Gaza, here in the US, Alabama is preparing to carry out the US’s first execution via nitrogen gas—which is torture—on the day of Tu B’Shvat.
People are more likely to treat life as precious when their own lives are treated as precious. So we have to create the conditions in which everyone’s life is treated as inherently sacred and irreplaceable. That work is on all of us.
Our Fast for Gaza draws inspiration from the Jewish tradition of fasting as an act of mourning, and it also draws inspiration from Palestinians incarcerated inside Israeli jails, who have launched many hunger strikes to protest their incarceration, and the incarceration of all Palestinians under occupation, to INSIST that their lives are precious.
When Ruth Wilson Gilmore first introduced this idea—where life is precious, life is precious—she was at an environmental justice conference for youth, where, among other things, the youth denounced the effects of pesticides, including on humans– and of course, pesticides also have impacts on native plants and animals. I think this is significant, for Tu B’Shvat. Recognizing that all life is precious means recognizing our interconnection with all life around us. It means we need to, in the words of Thich Nhat Hahn, “awaken from the illusion of our separateness.” It means recognizing the ways that trees have been weaponized to push Palestinians off their land. It means recognizing Israel’s mass destruction of olive trees.
Trees themselves recognize that where life is precious, life is precious. Forests are social systems in which trees support each other through their root systems, through chemical signals in their leaves, through the social climate they create. As we celebrate the trees’ birthday today, we can also celebrate their preciousness, the preciousness of all the life they nurture and that nurtures them. And we can express that through our urgent calls for a ceasefire, for Palestinian liberation, and for collective liberation.
When we say ceasefire now, we are also saying environmental justice now. When we say ceasefire now, it is a call for Indigenous liberation now, from Palestine to Turtle Island and beyond.
Ceasefire now can be a call to stop death penalties of all kinds, including this execution that is set to happen in our own country on the day of Tu B’Shvat. Let’s insist on the preciousness of people, and of trees, and of the interconnectedness of all beings.
Last week, the board of my congregation, Tzedek Chicago released this statement in repsonse to Israel’s ongoing military assault in Gaza. Although it is addressed to all people of conscience, it contains a specific challenge to the Jewish community at large.I’m immensely proud of the statement, which I hope will be considered seriously even (especially) by those members of the community aren’t ready to heed its words.
Our statement is not so much an academic argument as it is a call to moral action. As we say in our statement, “We are witnessing the continuation of the Nakba in real time…Now more than ever, it is time for Jews of conscience to call out the essential injustice at the heart of Zionism in no uncertain terms.“
The full statement follows below:
The unspeakable violence currently unfolding in Gaza is confronting the Jewish community with the most critical moral challenge of our lifetime.
As of this writing, over 21,000 Palestinians have been killed by the Israeli military, almost half of them children. According to the UN, nearly two million people have been internally displaced, confining them to less than one-third of the Gaza Strip’s territory. Disease and starvation are rampant, subjecting one in four households into “catastrophic conditions.” As the Secretary General of the UN recently described, “(Gaza) is at a breaking point. There is a high risk of a total collapse of the humanitarian system.”
Together with Jews and allies around the world, we grieve the massive loss of life that occurred as a result of Hamas’ heinous violence in Israel on October 7. We join with those around the world who are demanding the safe return of the remaining hostages currently being held in Gaza. We unreservedly condemn Hamas’ actions on that terrible day – there can be no justification for this brutal attack on civilian life.
We also know there was a crucial, underlying context to this horrible violence. We assert without reservation that to contextualize is not to condone. On the contrary, we must contextualize these events if we are to truly understand them – and find a better way forward.
The violence of October 7 did not occur in a vacuum. It was a brutal response to a regime of structural violence that has oppressed Palestinians for decades. At the root of this oppression is Zionism: a colonial movement that seeks to establish and maintain a Jewish majority nation-state in historic Palestine.
While Israel was founded in the traumatic wake of the Holocaust to create safety and security for the Jewish people, it was a state founded on the backs of another people, ultimately endangering the safety and security of Jews and Palestinians alike. Israel was established through what Palestinians refer to as the Nakba: the ethnic cleansing of 750,000 Palestinians from their homes in 1948. And since that time, Israel has subjected Palestinians to a regime of Jewish supremacy in order to maintain its demographic majority in the land.
This ongoing Nakba is the essential context for understanding the horrifying violence of the past three months. Indeed, since October 7, Israeli politicians have been terrifyingly open about their intentions, making it clear that the ultimate end goal of their military assault is to ethnically cleanse Gaza of its 2.2 million Palestinian residents. One prominent member of the Israeli government put it quite plainly: “We are now rolling out the Gaza Nakba. Gaza Nakba 2023. That’s how it’ll end.” More recently, Prime Minister Netanyahu was reported as saying that he is actively working to transfer Palestinians out of Gaza. The problem, he said, “is which countries will take them.”
Israeli leaders are being true to their word: we are witnessing the continuation of the Nakba in real time. As in 1948, Palestinians are being driven from their homes through force of arms. As in 1948, families are being forced to march long distances with hastily-collected possessions on their backs. As in 1948, entire regions are being razed to the ground, ensuring that they will have no homes to return to. As in 1948, Israel is actively engineering the wholesale transfer of an entire population of people.
In a statement last week, the UN Special Rapporteur on the human rights of internally displaced persons warned:
As evacuation orders and military operations continue to expand and civilians are subjected to relentless attacks on a daily basis, the only logical conclusion is that Israel’s military operation in Gaza aims to deport the majority of the civilian population en masse.
In short: Israel’s military onslaught on Gaza is revealing the true face of Zionism.
From its founding, Tzedek Chicago has openly rejected the conflation of Judaism with Zionism. As expressed in our congregation’s core values statement: We are anti-Zionist, openly acknowledging 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.
Since Israel’s most recent military assault on Gaza began, Tzedek Chicago has been a proud and active participant in the cease-fire movement, which has been steadily growing in the Jewish community. This movement is collectively motivated by the Jewish mitzvah of pikuach nefesh – the sacred imperative to save life. At the same time, however, it is critical to assert the Jewish value of “tzedek, tzedek tirdof” – “justice, justice shall you pursue.” Beyond ceasefire, we must acknowledge and call out the human dispossession that is at the root of Israel’s latest assault on Gaza.
Now more than ever, it is time for Jews of conscience to call out the essential injustice at the heart of Zionism in no uncertain terms. This is a critical moment for our Jewish communal organizations as well. We know it is not easy for Jewish institutions to reject Zionism, but we believe it’s critical that they do. In particular, we ask synagogues that are proudly “standing with Israel” to morally reckon with whom they are choosing to stand and consider the real human costs of their position.
There are some Jewish congregations that maintain an inclusive “wide tent” that makes room for both Zionists and anti-Zionists alike. While this may seem like a welcome development, we encourage these synagogues to consider how this inherently contradictory position nonetheless enables the violence Israel is perpetrating against Palestinians. We also invite congregations that publicly support “Palestinian liberation” to be clear about what this liberation will ultimately look like. Will it be a liberation in name only or will it include the dismantling and transformation of the colonial Zionist project once and for all?
The moral challenge of the moment is clear. We invite other Jews of conscience to join us in the creation of a thriving movement of Judaism beyond Zionism. A Judaism that lifts up a diasporic consciousness that doesn’t express entitlement over land. A Judaism that rejects ethno-nationalism, militarism and dispossession and celebrates our spiritual tradition of justice, liberation and solidarity with all who are oppressed.
Let our call for ceasefire be but the first step toward a greater liberation: one that extends true justice and equality for all who live between the river and the sea.
According to Jewish law, it is forbidden to mourn on Shabbat: between sundown on Friday and sundown on Saturday, funerals do not take place and the public aspects of shiva observance are suspended. For many, the very notion “forbidding mourning” can feel harsh and emotionally insensitive. I’ve often heard from mourners who resist this idea of “suspending their grief.” More than one congregant has pointed this out to me over the years: “Grief isn’t something I can just turn on and off. How do I possibly stop my grieving for this one day? Should I pretend that Shabbat will just magically make everything better?”
One way to answer to this question is to understand the difference between grief and mourning. While grief is an emotional state; mourning refers to the rituals and practices we observe to help us manuever through our experience of loss. Of course, we cannot turn our grief on and off, nor should we be expected to. Grief by its very nature cannot be scheduled to our convenience. As anyone who has experienced the loss of a loved one will attest, the emotions that attend grief will invariably grip us with unsettling randomness – often when we least expect it.
When we suspend certain mourning practices on Shabbat, however, even in the midst of intense grief, we affirm a life beyond the loss, beyond the pain. Shabbat is our weekly reminder of this: our regular opportunity to experience olam haba – “the world as it should be.” When we suspend these rituals on Shabbat, we make a point of affirming healing during the most painful times in our lives. In some ways, it feels like nothing less than an act of spiritual defiance.
For over a month now, it has been a time of unimaginable, exponential, cascading grief on a scale few of us have ever seen. Israelis and scores of Jews the world over are still experiencing deep shock and trauma over Hamas’ brutal attack on October 7. Even as I write these words, we do not know the full extent of these massacres and abductions – many still do not know if their loved ones are alive or dead, whether they were killed or taken hostage. We are still learning the heinous nature of the attacks that unfolded on that terrible day. How does one even begin to mourn when faced with grief of such magnitude?
Tragically, we were never given the opportunity to learn the answer to this question. Only a few days after this attack, the Israeli government chose to respond with a vengeful military onslaught. As so many have now observed, Israel “weaponized its grief” against an imprisoned population of 2.2 million Palestinians trapped in Gaza with nowhere to run. The exponential human loss Israel has unleashed is truly beyond comprehension: to date, the current death toll: 12,000 people, including 5,000 children.
For so many of us, the only work of the past six weeks has been to voice our collective conscience as loudly, as often and as fiercely as possible. We have been bearing witness to the most sacred values of our tradition: pikuach nefesh – saving a life is sacrosanct and tzelem elohim – affirming that all humanity is created in the divine image. All of these values are embodied in the two sacred words we’ve been chanting over and over and over again: “Ceasefire Now!” To end this vengeful, genocidal violence. To negotiate a homecoming for hostages and prisoners. To begin the process of rebuilding and healing through a process of just peace for all.
No, as Shabbat falls this evening, we will not “switch off our grief.” We will not deny this all-pervading, still unfolding pain. But we will affirm a world beyond it.
We know all too well that in moments of brokenness, it is difficult to imagine a world beyond. We know from experience that brokenness, by definition, involves loss. We know that what is broken can never be put back exactly the same way it was. But beyond the loss, Shabbat comes to remind us that no matter what, we never forfeit the chance to rebuild and heal. While grief can break us open, it also has the potential to transform us: opening us up to new visions, new opportunities, new worlds that we never may have dreamed possible.
In this moment, when so much around us seems to be shattering into so many painful shards, let us hold tightly to this truth.
When I heard the initial reports that Palestinians had breached the fences of Gaza this past Saturday, I will be completely honest – my first reaction was “good for them.” Israel had been collectively punishing Palestinians in Gaza for years with a crushing blockade with little to no care from the rest of the world. Now, amazingly, Palestinians had broken free from this seemingly impenetrable open-air prison. With power and ingenuity, they were resisting their oppression, reminding Israel – and the world at large – that they were still here. That they would not submit.
Inevitably, as the news of the attacks trickled in during the course of the day, however, my emotions turned to shock and grief. Along with the rest of the world, I learned about the sheer scale of violence committed by Hamas militants against Israeli civilians: the largest single day massacre in Israeli history. At last count, at least 1,200 Israelis have been killed and it is estimated that 150 have been abducted and taken hostage into Gaza. Everyone in Israel and many Jews throughout the world, know people – or know of people – who were killed, injured or taken hostage. Like so many in the Jewish community, my social media feed has been filled with heartbreaking pictures and stories of Israelis who have been slain or are still unaccounted for.
Amidst all the grief, however, I was also deeply troubled by the ominous, growing cries for vengeance voiced by the Israeli government and media, and felt a creeping dread over the shattering military response that would almost certainly rain down on the people of Gaza. And now that day has come. Israel has shut off all electricity and water for over two million Palestinians as the military wreaks complete and total devastation on across that tiny strip, attacking hospitals, schools, mosques, marketplaces, and apartment buildings. As of this writing, the death toll has risen to more than 1,200, with 5,600 wounded. More than 250,000 people have been rendered homeless – and these numbers will almost certainly rise significantly in the coming days and weeks.
In a letter to my congregation a few days ago, I wrote that “so many of us are feeling layers upon layers of intense emotion, in often confusing and contradictory ways. For Jews who stand in solidarity with Palestinians, I know these confusing contradictions are particularly keen.” Even so, I wrote, we simply must lift up the underlying context of this horrible violence. I continue to hold tightly to this conviction. While the sheer scope of our grief may feel incomprehensible, we simply must find the wherewithal to say out loud that the facts of these events have not only been comprehensible, but in fact inevitable.
Indeed, Palestinians and their allies have long been sounding the alarm that Israel was subjecting Palestinians to a brutally violent apartheid regime with impunity – and that there would be terrible consequences if the international community failed to intervene. Over and over, we’ve been warned about the cataclysmic violence that would inevitably ensue if Israel was not held to account. As Palestinian historian Rashid Khalidi put it recently, “an entire people (has been) living under this kind of incredible oppression, in a pressure cooker. It had to explode.”
As we attempt to understand the context of this recent violence, I believe it’s utterly critical to know where to plot the starting point – and to my mind, this is precisely where most of the media analyses of the past several days have sadly gone astray. To judge by any number of pundits, this current outbreak of violence began alternatively with the US – Saudi deal or the policies of the far-right Netanyahu administration. While it might be said that any of these causes may have provided the most recent spark, I’ve been deeply disappointed, if not surprised, that precious few of these analyses have even mentioned the Nakba in relation to this latest outbreak of violence.
To be sure, the Nakba was an act of violence and harm that has been reverberating through the land between the river and the sea from 1948 until this very day. To put it simply, for the past 75 years, Israel has been violently dispossessing Palestinians in order to make way for a majority Jewish state. And for just as long, the Palestinian people have been resisting their dispossession – yes, often violently.
It is not by chance that this most recent violence has occurred in and around Gaza. As many commentators have observed, Gaza has in many ways been the epicenter of the Nakba – and of the Palestinian people’s resistance to it. To grasp this fully, it is important to understand the history of this region. Gaza’s narrative did not begin with Israel’s blockade or the political ascension of Hamas. What we call today the “Gaza Strip” was artificially created in 1949, when it became a repository for a flood of ethnically cleansed Palestinian refugees from cities and villages in the coastal plain and lower Galilee. Before the Nakba, the population of this small region numbered 60 to 80,000 residents. By the end of the hostilities, at least 200,000 refugees were crowded into this 140 square mile strip of land.
At the time, most of the refugees fully expected to return home – some could even see their towns and villages through the 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 along that narrow corridor. The numbers of that once sparse territory have grown to a population today of over 2,000,000 people – at least 70% of whom are refugees.
Following the founding of the state of Israel, many of the original settlements and kibbutzim founded on the border with Gaza were military outposts, most of which were built on top of or near demolished Palestinian villages. In fact, the sites that suffered the brunt of last Saturday’s massacres (including Kibbutz Kfar Aza, Re’im and Sderot) were settlements that were originally established in these locations for reasons of Israeli “national security.”
One such site was Kibbutz Nahal Oz, which was flooded by dozens of Hamas militants, and where, according to witnesses, at least two entire families were killed, and two more kidnapped and taken to Gaza as hostages. When I heard about the massacre at Nahal Oz, I couldn’t help but recall that this was not the first time this community had experienced Palestinian armed resistance. Back in 1956, a group of Palestinian militants entered Nahal Oz and killed a kibbutznik named Roi Rotenberg. At the time, this tragedy was keenly felt throughout the nascent state of Israel. At Roi’s funeral, the famed Israeli general Moshe Dayan offered a eulogy, expressing himself with brutal and unexpected honesty:
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.
Dayan’s words resonate today with terrible prescience. Decades later, the descendants of this original Gazan generation still remain in refugee camps in Gaza, “gazing though the barrier fences as Israel appropriates as its own portion the land and the villages in which their ancestors dwelled.” Dayan’s eulogy also powerfully described a hypervigilant Israeli mindset that has only deepened throughout the decades. Since the Nakba could not and did not result in the complete ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from their homes, Israel has attempted to control them with a “steel helmet and the barrel of a cannon” for the past 75 years. During this time, Israel has widened its regime of violence in order to contain Palestinians in the occupied territories, subjecting them to a daily context of systemic, unceasing state violence every moment of their lives.
It is also telling that Dayan invoked the trauma of the Holocaust in his eulogy – and today, so many decades later, we can clearly see that this trauma was not limited to his generation alone. If anything, it has been handed down to subsequent generations in way that are all too real and all too palpable. Indeed, we can clearly see this generational trauma at work in Jewish responses to this latest violence, which is being openly characterized as “the worst mass murder of Jews since the Holocaust.” It is painfully poignant to consider that these massacres occurred in a state that was founded in the wake of the Holocaust in order to safeguard Jewish lives once and for all.
At the same time, however, this Holocaust rhetoric is deeply troubling given the vengeful fury currently being whipped up by a far-right Israeli government that is demonizing Palestinians with unabashedly genocidal language. Israel’s Defense Minister Yoav Gallant recently stated “Israel is fighting human animals” and should “act accordingly.” Netanyahu has promised that Israel’s military offensive on Gaza will “reverberate for generations.” One prominent Israeli general has promised to “open the gates of hell.” And perhaps most chillingly, a member of Israeli Parliament has called for a “second Nakba that will overshadow the Nakba of 1948.”
As I write these words, the Israeli military is mercilessly bombarding the Gaza Strip with a ferocity that is truly terrifying to behold. For the past few days, I’ve been combing social media for their postings from friends in Gaza, as I helplessly watch footage of whole neighborhoods and communities completely destroyed along with their inhabitants. One of the last messages I read came from a friend and former colleague at American Friends Service Committee: “Nothing left to say. More than 80 hours without electricity, water, or internet connection. Communication is very limited with everyone inside or outside Gaza. Carnage everywhere, hard to recognize streets, we are all waiting for the time to die.”
It is not an understatement to suggest that the Jewish community is now faced with a profound moral challenge. Even as we mourn our dead in Israel, we must acknowledge and protest the genocide Israel is currently perpetrating in their memory in no uncertain terms. I cannot say this forcefully enough: those of us who ignore this reality – who mourn the Jewish dead exclusively without even a mention of the massive crimes Israel is actively committing against the Palestinian people – will be quite frankly, complicit in this horrific bloodshed.
Over the past several days, I’ve found myself returning to a famous narrative from this week’s Torah portion: the story of Cain and Abel. In the wake of the first act of violence in human history, God says to Cain, “What have you done? The blood of your brother is crying out to me from the ground! Cursed by the ground that opened its mouth to receive the blood of your brother.” From this we learn, among other things, that bloodshed actually has the power to pollute the earth. Later on in the Torah, we will learn that nothing can ever be the same – or considered normal again – when blood is spilled. it must be expiated, or atoned for through a set of very complex and explicit sacrificial rituals. In our day, we can understand these to be acts of reparation, restoration and repatriation. We will only truly make atonement for this bloodshed with very real measures that will restore justice and balance for those who dwell in the land.
As I read this story, I can’t help but think of the blood originally shed in the terrible days of the Nakba, and how it continues to cry out to us all from the ground. I can’t help but think of the immense amount of blood that has been shed since, whose collective cry must certainly be a searing roar, if only we would allow ourselves to hear it. But we will never heed the cry as along as we remain hardened into sides, into “us and them.” In fact, in this week’s Torah portion, there are no “sides” to speak of. There are no nations, no Israelites, no Canaanites, no Amalekites, no Moabites. There is only one common humanity, struggling how to live together in a too often harsh and unyielding world.
Those it may seem more painfully difficult than ever, let us hearken to this voices that have so long been crying out from the ground. Let us respond with understanding, compassion and action. Even amidst the terrible grief, let us shine an unflinching light on the true roots of this violence – and on the vision of a future based on justice and equality for all who live in the land.
With this in mind, I will conclude now with the prayerful words of my dear friend and colleague Rabbi Alissa Wise:
May the One Who Remembers allow us to hold in one hand 75 years of occupation, dispossession and violence and in the other a future of peace, justice and freedom;
May the One Who is Slow to Anger soften our hearts and our fists helping us to put down the sword even at the height of the arc of our rage;
May the One of Possibility remind us that a future of peace with justice is possible;
May the One Who Awakens Us to Life hold us in our pain and vindictiveness until we set those down for the sake of life;
May the One Who Endures allow us to act for the sake of the coming generations;
May the One Who is Without Limit expand our senses of what is possible as we reach for justice, freedom and peace for us all.
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.
The High Holidays we observed in 2020 were like none we’d ever experienced before. We were in the midst of the COVID lockdown – and like every other synagogue, we held our services entirely on Zoom. It all felt utterly unprecedented and surreal – apropos of a year in which pretty much everything felt unprecedented and surreal.
On Rosh Hashanah, I addressed the pandemic directly, suggesting that we were all in a collective state of grief – both for those had died and for the world we had lost:
Amidst all of this massive change, even as we adjust to this new world, there’s that nagging question lurking in the background: how long will we actually have to do this? When will we get our lives and our world back? When will things get back to “normal?”
I think it’s safe to say we’ve come a long way in the three years since then. Just a few months after I spoke those words, the first COVID vaccine was administered – and since that time, COVID related deaths and hospitalizations have decreased dramatically. Lockdown orders have been lifted, mask mandates have disappeared and social distancing requirements are now a thing of the past. While a large percentage of the workforce are still working from home, increasing numbers are returning to their workplaces.
We’re also receiving a confident political message that things are getting “back to normal.” A year ago, President Biden publicly declared that the pandemic was over during an appearance in 60 Minutes. This past May, his administration ended the Public Health Emergency Declaration, dramatically reducing funding for COVID vaccines and treatments. In its announcement, the White House claimed that “(COVID-19) no longer meaningfully disrupts the way we live our lives.”
Is this actually true? Are things really getting back to normal? Technically speaking, the pandemic is not over, though we fervently wish it were. Thousands continue to die every week – in the US, nearly one hundred are dying every day. In recent weeks, a spike has caused a sharp increase in hospitalizations, a dramatic reminder that COVID is still very much a part of our lives and our world.
What’s the reason for this normalization? On a purely human level, I think it’s pretty easy to understand. We want our lives back. We don’t want to live with uncertainty and upheaval any more. We crave the connection and community that we once knew. We want things to feel normal again.
But no matter how fervently we might back our days of old, things are still not normal. On so many levels.
In the first place, things are not certainly normal for the loved ones of the millions who have died of COVID. Almost 7,000,000 people have died from COVID globally since the pandemic began – including over 1,000,000 in the US. The mass grief caused by this pandemic is still very palpable and very real. For those who are just beginning to struggle with the loss of a parent, a partner, a child, the suggestion that it is time for things to “get back to normal” is quite simply, profane.
This insistence on normalcy dismisses the massive, life-altering consequences of these losses. Many who died of COVID were the primary or sole wage earner in their household. Moreover,hundreds of thousands of children in the US – and over 10 million children worldwide – have lost a parent or caregiver to COVID. According to a report last December by the Covid Collaborative, more than 13,000 children have lost their sole caregiver; children who were already more socially and economically at risk.
COVID normalization also amounts to an abject abandonment of elderly people in our communities. Hospital admissions, while dropping, are more than five times higher among people over 70 than those in their 50s. COVID also disproportionately affects immunocompromised, disabled and chronically ill people, whose humanity is routinely dismissed by US government and health officials that treat their conditions as expected, and thus somehow more acceptable.
In a recent New York Times article about the latest COVID spike, I read one subtle paragraph that sums up the prevailing attitude toward those who are at higher risk of illness and death:
At the moment, the numbers suggest that Americans should tailor their behavior to their own risks, some experts said. Those who are the most vulnerable to COVID — older adults, pregnant women and those with weakened immune systems — might well choose to take the utmost precautions, such as masking most or all of the time and avoiding crowded indoor spaces.
In other words, those who are the most vulnerable people are essentially on their own. Their welfare is their individual responsibility – it is not the problem of the communities in which they live.
The changes to our world wrought by the virus remain so profound. The increasing numbers of people who have developed the post-virus condition known as long COVID will attest to its debilitating and life-altering symptoms. Scores of children have lost years of their education. Teachers, health care workers and essential service workers continue to live with acute trauma and anxiety. We’ve witnessed the massive loss of small businesses and the devastation of whole economies. The list goes on and on. Truly, it would take a great deal of willful denial to regard any of this as normal.
The politicalmotives behind COVID normalization, of course, are clear – and it is causing very real harm. When the Biden administration terminated the Public Emergency Declaration in May, it was essentially capitulating to congressional Republicans, who months earlier had passed a bill they called “The Pandemic is Over Act.” In so doing, it ended a vital series of protections for millions of Americans, causing what the Nation Magazine referred to as “a public health disaster.”
In the meantime, the Biden administration is also preparing to transfer COVID vaccines to the private market. For their part, Pfizer and Moderna have announced that they plan to increase the price of their vaccines by 400%, which will cost uninsured Americans anywhere from $110 to $130 per dose. Such is the human price of the new normalcy. It is, in the end, really just the entrenchment of the old normalcy.
This human price, of course, is symptomatic of a deeper dysfunction: a system that has always divided humanity into those who count and those who do not. In their important and powerful new book “Let This Radicalize You,” Mariame Kaba and Kelly Hayes put it perfectly:
(Capitalism) requires an ever-broadening disposable class of people in order to maintain itself, which in turn requires us to believe that there are people whose fates are not linked to our own: people who must be abandoned or eliminated.
When the COVID pandemic first broke out, it occurred to me that this virus was presenting us with a fundamentally different way to live. It was challenging us to live according to an ethic of collectivity rather than radical individualism. COVID was a dramatic reminder that our neighbors’ fates were linked to our own. And that if we were to literally survive, we had to accept that our personal well-being was inextricably tied to the well-being of all.
People in disenfranchised communities have long understood this truth. When you live in a system that doesn’t care about you, that regards you as disposable, you learn how to care for one another. Indeed, long before the pandemic descended, poor people, people of color, disabled people, LGBTQ+ people and Native people have been creating their own communities of care through powerful mutual aid projects.
The term mutual aid refers to grassroots groups that organize collectively outside the mainstream and are not dependent on the largess of external charity. While mutual aid projects have long existed in various forms, they mobilized and proliferated during the pandemic in ways that were truly inspiring to behold. As Kaba and Hayes have described it:
In spring 2020, unprecedented numbers of people organized mutual aid efforts to help their neighbors survive. Using technology to overcome the physical barriers imposed by the pandemic, tens of thousands of people started new groups and built new mechanisms within existing organizations to meet the needs of people who were struggling. From delivering groceries and medicine to helping people access remote therapy after the loss of loved ones, people across the country devised ways to care for one another. Contrary to fictitious, popular depictions of people in dire straits, many people coping with the grief, uncertainty, and isolation of the pandemic longed to connect through acts of aid and care and they did. Grassroots groups redistributed millions of dollars to people who were struggling. Empty refrigerators were stocked. Countless people in crisis were met with compassion and assistance. In a society where we are taught to fear each other, many were moved by the realization that we were and are each other’s best hope amid catastrophe.
To my mind, these words are a powerful description of what the new normal should be. Though we must always fight to hold them accountable, governments are not going to save us. Nor will philanthropic charities, crisis response or nonprofit organizations. Collective care will ultimately be created by communities of people honoring their interconnectedness. By those who understand that they are each other’s best hope.
As the world increasingly looks to mutual aid groups as a model for living, it will be important for privileged folks not to tokenize disenfranchised people or co-opt their efforts. But having said this, I do believe that the idea of mutual aid models a way of living for all people. One that values a culture of care: interdependence over individualism. Thriving and not merely surviving. A way of creating community that centers innate altruism and a long-term commitment to one another.
In her book, “A Paradise Built in Hell,” Rebecca Solnit pointed out that contrary to the dominant narrative, the natural human response to disaster is not an apocalyptic, individualistic “everyone for themselves” mentality. Through examining the human response to several different catastrophes, Solnit concluded, “The image of the selfish, panicky or regressively savage human being in times of disaster has little truth to it.” Rather, “most people are altruistic, urgently engaged in caring for themselves and those around them, strangers and neighbors as well as friends and loved ones.” This, I would suggest, is the true normal: a more natural culture of mutuality,notself-interest and abandonment.
As you know, last month, the Tzedek Chicago board passed a COVID safety policy for our High Holiday services requiring all in-person attendees to wear N95 masks and have up to date vaccinations. Our board’s decision was prompted by a request from chronically ill and disabled members of our congregation, which inspired our leadership to engage in honest process of discernment. It occurred to me that these conversations were utterly appropriate to our season – a time for interrogating how we can do better in our lives and in our communities.
Though mask mandates have become politicized to an absurd degree, two-way masking is still the most effective way to mitigate the spread of the COVID virus. When healthy, younger, abled people put the burden of masking on those at greater risk, whether they realize it or not they are sending the message that they health is not their problem. As one public health expert has written:
I get it—wearing a mask can suck. I don’t exactly enjoy it, and like most people, I’d rather be living life like it is 2019. That’s the final problem with one-way masking: If we can all relate to masking being uncomfortable, why would we suggest that the immunocompromised and disabled be relegated to wearing a mask in perpetuity?
As I look out into our sanctuary now, to a room full of masked people gathering for Yom Kippur, I see a powerful visual of one community’s commitment to the health of all its members. This what the new normal should look like.
In my High Holiday sermon three years ago, I quoted the great activist poet Sonya Renee Taylor who wrote these words at the outset of the pandemic:
We will not go back to normal. Normal never was. Our pre-corona existence was not normal other than we normalized greed, inequity, exhaustion, depletion, extraction, disconnection, confusion, rage, hoarding, hate and lack. We should not long to return my friends. We are being given the opportunity to stitch a new garment. One that fits all of humanity and nature.
Today, three years after those words were written, powerful interests are trying to convince us that it is time to “go back to normal.” We must not let them. We must continue to hold on to Taylor’s beautiful vision of a new garment, even in the face of such daunting odds. We must cherish this vision and resist the cynical voices telling us that what they are giving us is the best we can hope for.
Because we should hope for more. We should aspire to more. After all, isn’t this what Yom Kippur is ultimately all about? Every year, at this season, we’re commanded to take a hard, unflinching look at the status quo, openly admit what needs changing, and commit to the hard work it will take to transform it. It’s an inherently radical idea: to proclaim every year that the status quo is unacceptable and that nothing short of genuine intervention will do. If our Yom Kippur prayers are to mean anything at all, we must be prepared to act upon this radical idea.
This is also the season in which we stand before the open gates of heaven, before the open books of life and death, and pray that we may be written in the book of life for the coming year. But we also affirm that repentance, prayer and acts of justice can “avert the decree.” To me that means that we cannot wait passively for that choice to be made for us. In the end, we’ll need to take responsibility for writing our own names and the names of our neighbors in the Book of Life. If we’re going to be sealed for life, it is we who must affix that seal.
So this new year, let us affix that seal by recommitting ourselves to the value of pikuachnefesh – the moral imperative that views the saving of life as sacrosanct. Let us resist a “return to a normalcy” that values some lives over others. Let’s enter this new year affirming not only in word, but in deed, that it must be all of us or none.
While the US Congress is undoubtedly a horrid dysfunctional mess of an institution, there have been occasional examples of genuine hope and even inspiration. This past week provided us with one of those examples.
Many of you, I’m sure, have been following the upheaval that occurred when Washington Rep. Pramila Jaypal called Israel “a racist state” at the Netroots Nation conference. After the wrath of the Israel lobby and her Israel-supporting congressional colleagues inevitably rained down upon her, Jaypal walked back her statement. Shortly after, a Republican congressperson cynically introduced a non-binding House resolutionthatexpressed unconditional support for Israel and condemned antisemitism. Of course, it passed overwhelmingly.
While all this was boilerplate Israel politics on Capitol Hill, nine Democratic representatives had the courage tovote no on the resolution: Alexandria Ocasio-Coretz and Jamaal Bowman of New York, Cori Bush of Missouri, Andre Carson of Indiana, Summer Lee of Pennsylvania, Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts, Delia Ramirez of Illinois and Rashida Tlaib of Michigan.
And speaking of courage, Tlaib went on to say this on the House floor:
Israel is an apartheid state. To assert otherwise, Mr. Speaker, in the face of this body of evidence, is an attempt to deny the reality and an attempt to normalize violence of apartheid. Don’t forget: This body, this Congress, supported the South African apartheid regime, and it was bipartisan as well.
And if this wasn’t enough, all of this occurred before a US visit from Israeli Prime Minister Isaac Herzog. When Herzog address a joint session of Congress, his speech was openly boycotted by Ocasio-Cortez, Bowman, Omar, Bush and Tlaib.
While some will undoubtedly say that we are only talking about a small number of congresspeople here, it is still utterly unprecedented. Some might well recall that back in 2015, 58 members of Congress similarly skipped a speech by Prime Minister Netanyahu. That protest, however, was largely an issue of political protocol – it was a Democratic response to the refusal of Congressional Republicans to alert the Obama White House of their invitation to Netanyahu to address Congress. By contrast, this boycott was an unabashed protest against Israeli racism and apartheid.
Of course, Jaypal was absolutely correct in referring to Israel as a racist state – a fact that was pointed out in several mainstream media op-eds following her comment. It was also noted that many Israelis and Israeli organizations have regularly referred to Israel in this manner as well. Apropos of Tlaib’s comment, I can’t help but recall when it was considered politically beyond the pale to criticize South African apartheid on the Hill. To be sure, naming this term out loud was an important part of what eventually resulted in the passage of the Anti-Apartheid Act of 1986 (vetoed by President Reagan, but overridden largely due to the leadership of the Black Congressional Caucus).
Fast forward to 2023: did any of us ever expect we would live to see the day that a Palestinian American congressperson would call Israel an apartheid state on the House floor? Or that another congressperson (Ilhan Omar) would publicly state:
There is no way in hell I am attending the joint session address from a President…during the deadliest year for Palestinians in the West Bank in history, immediately following Israel’s largest incursion into the occupied West Bank in two decades, one that flattened city blocks, and killed at least a dozen people.
Yes, we did indeed witness genuine political courage in Washington DC this week. Please join me inthanking these congresspeople for their fearless stand against Israeli apartheid.
People carry their belongings on the street after the Israeli army’s withdrawal from the Jenin camp in the Israeli-occupied West Bank on July 5, 2023 [Ammar Awad/Reuters]
Israel’s military assault on Jenin may have receded from the headlines for most of the world, but it remains all too tragically present for the people of Jenin. The countthis time: twelve Palestinians killed – including five children – and more than 100 injured. The Israeli government has said the raid is now officially “over.” But of course, Israel’s immiseration of the Palestinian people is so far from being over.
In the wake of this most recent operation, most of the mainstream media has, as ever, analyzed events using tired “war on terror” tropes. The New York Times, offeredthis all-too-familiar analysis:
As Israeli forces hunted for wanted men, weapons and explosives in the Palestinian refugee camp in Jenin this week, after using aerial drones to blow up what they described as terrorist hubs there, the city was living up to its reputation as a center of militant defiance in the occupied West Bank.
The US State Department did its part to promote this age-old narrative as well, issuing boiler plate talking points: “We recognize the very real security challenges facing Israel and the Palestinian Authority, and condemn terrorist groups planning and carrying out attacks against civilians.”
If you want to know the actual truth behind Israel’s actions in Jenin, however, it’s not too difficult to discern – just listen to the Israeli government itself. Israel’s National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, for instance, had this to saylast month during a press conference at a West Bank settlement:
The Land of Israel must be settled and at the same time as the settlement of the Land a military operation must be launched. [We must] demolish buildings, eliminate terrorists, not one or two, but tens and hundreds, and if necessary even thousands, because at the end of the day, this is the only way we will hold on here, strengthen control and restore security to the residents, and above all we will fulfill our great mission. The Land of Israel is for the people of Israel, we are backing you, run to the hills, settle down. We love you.
Make no mistake: Israel’s assault on Jenin is about the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians in service of widespread Jewish settlement. We are witnessing nothing short of an ongoing Nakba – the continuation of a story that began seventy-five years ago and shows no sign of stopping.
In fact, news reports of events in Jenin evoked chillingly familiar parallels to 1948. The operation led to the mass displacements of residents – as many as 3,000 of the camp’s roughly 17,000 residents sought shelter in schools and other public buildings, or with families elsewhere. Numerous Palestinian officials reported that Israel had threatened and forced camp residents to evacuate their homes. Jenin’s mayor, Nidal al-Obaidicommented, “What’s happening is like an earthquake. It reminds us of the days of Nakba.”
There is, of course, one way Israel can be stopped. Peter Beinart spelled it out plainly in an MSNBC op-edyesterday:
Ultimately, preventing another Nakba requires telling Israeli leaders that another effort at mass expulsion would bring a dramatic U.S. response: a halt to arms sales, condemnation at the United Nations, support for prosecutions at the International Criminal Court. It requires telling Israel that America’s support is not, as President Joe Biden continues to insist, “unbreakable.” Mass ethnic cleansing would break it.
To this, I would add: liberal Zionists in the American Jewish community needs to give up their illusions that the latest events in Jenin are a product of aberrant Israeli ministers who are “threatening the democracy” of an otherwise noble national project. We are not witnessing the death of a dream – we are witnessing the logical consequences of a colonial movement that seeks to establish a state on the backs of another people.
If there is anything new now, it is that Israel has government leaders who are willing to say as much out loud. When will we take them as their word? And when will we hold them accountable?
To that end, I’ll close with the words from a recently released statementby the Jewish Voice for Peace Rabbinical Council:
There is no hiding from the horror of what Jenin has endured. We must act. We must hold Jewish communities and government officials accountable for allowing the attacks to continue. Each day a Jewish person takes action to resist Israeli occupation, we affirm what the Torah requires: To protest within our households, our cities and our world until the occupation is ended, the right of return is restored and Palestinians can live peacefully in their land.
Click hereto write to your member of Congress and demand they “condemn the Israeli government’s invasion of Jenin and take steps to end US complicity in Israeli apartheid.”
This year, the Passover seder supplement I’ve composed for Tzedek Chicago highlights the rise of anti-trans hate legislation throughout the US. In addition to the reading, the supplement contains action components to help you participate in the resistance movement to the growing threat to the well-being of trans, non-binary, and gender non-conforming people.
As it concludes:
May the bitterness of this maror awaken us to resist and turn back all legislated hate directed toward trans, non-binary, and gender non-conforming people. Let us redouble our resolve to build a society that recognizes the tzelem elohim – the divine image – in all people – and a world that cherishes each and every one of us for all of who we are.
Here are a few more Passover resources that I’ve developed over the years – feel free to print out, share and use at your seders this week:
Shalom Rav 