Why I write about Palestine

It’s the end of the year, a time when we often contemplate why we do the things we do and what we intend to do in the future, in broader strokes than usual.

I’m a Jewish Israeli citizen and I’ve been writing about Palestine publicly for over seven years. The mere act of writing critically about Israel’s actions vis-à-vis Palestine, particularly in English and aimed at a wide international audience, was a decisive point which marked the end of various friendships from times immemorial, spoiling the nationalist romance that was inherent in so many dealings, even the most intimate ones.

People of my “tribe” chided me for obsessing on this one – the classical “whataboutism” – Israel is not perfect, but what about Syria? Why not pick on others?

While I do relate to many other international crises, conflicts, oppressions and genocides, I do focus on Palestine-Israel in a singular way. And I don’t think that everyone needs to focus on everything and everywhere in an equal way in order to prove that they are fair. Nobody has the capacity to do that, and it doesn’t mean one is inconsistent or unfair when one zooms in so consistently on one place and one issue. In fact, consistency should be assessed by what one does in that particular area.

I also ponder how, if I were living in say the 30’s, I might have been occupied with another subject – the oppression and genocidal targeting of European Jewry by ultra-nationalists. I would like to think, that if I had been a Jew, I would have had the opportunity to write about that, or do something about that, even though it might have cost me my life, if I were in Germany for example. I would like to think, that even if I were not born Jewish, I would have had the moral backbone to fight that strongly.

But it is not the 30’s, nor the 40’s, and it happens to be true that Jews, despite all the monitoring of antisemitism, are overall one of the most privileged people on earth today – internationally so. Thus I’m not going to sing in that chorus of Halleluja for the privileged ones. It also happens to be true that Jews today are in the most part either directly involved in a brutally oppressive system of Apartheid enacted by the state of Israel, or implicitly involved by supporting it.

And that makes it one issue for me to speak up about, in these times. At the very least, to speak up about it. Not only is there no shame in focusing on this so as to make one’s voice heard against it; it is a necessity to focus one’s voice so as to be heard past the massive cacophony of Israel apologia, a Danse Macabre that is honed to an ugly perfection, made to deceive and target anyone deemed a threat to the Jewish State, with the ultimate WMD of ‘antisemitism’.

This is not complicated. The left-Zionist Meretz party, when they hold a cabinet meeting on the occupied Syrian Golan and sign off on doubling the settler population there, they can say it’s “complicated”. They can say it’s complicated when their government labels prominent Palestinian human rights and civil society NGO’s “terrorist”. But I don’t have to participate in that “complicated” charade. I don’t have to pretend I’m part of that Zionist tribe so as to supposedly change things from the inside. The tide of Zionism is so strong that I do not deem it wise to try to change it from the inside, just like I would certainly not even want to contemplate the prospect of joining the Nazi party in the 1930’s so as to change it from the inside – and that, mind you, without equating Zionists and Nazis.

No, it’s not complicated. It’s a decision. Zionism doesn’t really have a way out of this Apartheid (and its adherents will mostly deny that it really exists). The method applied by its supposed liberal supporters is mostly denial (that’s where the “complicated” comes from), they keep going with it and closing their eyes to the worst of it. When things are admitted outright, it becomes a real and simple choice between genocidal ethnic cleansing or freedom and equality – like when (self-declared leftist) Israeli historian Benny Morris admits that the expulsion of Palestinians had to happen for a Jewish state to be established; or when right-wing politicians warn of a “third Nakba“. Morris ended up saying that it should have gone further, a total “cleansing.” Others harbor these wishes in their hearts for times to come. But it’s not complicated.

Meretz co-leader Tamar Zandberg can say she “still hopes for peace” when she signs off on those settlements. I wonder what the great peacenik Yitzhak Rabin hoped for when he signed off on the expulsion of the Palestinian inhabitants of Lydda and Ramleh in 1948. Did he also hope for peace one day? Did he think that he could achieve it by ordering the breaking of bones of unarmed protesters during the 1st Intifada?

Maybe those people think they are heroes because they supposedly strive within that “complicated” reality. The prospect of giving up Zionism is simply not in their book – for them, that’s like giving up existence – Jewish existence, in a collective way. But Jewish existence in a collective way does not have to entail an Apartheid state of Jewish supremacy from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea. That, however, is the reality that Zionism has pushed towards, and succeeded in achieving. Not even the great peacenik Rabin would accept a Palestinian state, only “less than a state”. What Israel could accept was always less than a state, and it always amounted in one way or another to Bantustans.

That’s what I write about. It’s a very personal matter, and it’s a huge moral issue – one that Nelson Mandela once called “the greatest moral issue of our times”. I happen to be part of that oppressive stratum, at this time, simply by the function that my own registration as a Jewish-Israeli plays in the demographic politics of Zionism. My body is part of that demographic engineering. And I am not a body – I will not lend my body to this experiment in human suffering.

Yes, I do care about Jewish existence – both personally (Jewish individuals) as well as collectively (Jews, Judaism, Jewishness). And if there was no other way to have all that exist without Apartheid, I would have to go against Judaism. But that’s not the case. There is a way out. Judaism and Jews can exist without Apartheid – and therefore, I fight against Apartheid and for Judaism simultaneously.

Relatively few Jews today would appreciate this as any sort of redemption of their religion. And I’m not claiming any sort of religious mission here, I mean, Judaism is just not that important for me, to be honest. What is a religious calling for me, however, is humanism, and the notion of not doing evil to our brothers and sisters – but hey, I think there’s something in Jewish tradition concerning that too, we just seem to ignore it too often.

There is a future beyond Apartheid – I have no doubt in it. I believe it as strongly as did Desmond Tutu, who died recently, a man whom I loved deeply. Imagine–many Israelis love to hate him – Israel apologist-in-chief Alan Dershowitz called him a “rampant anti-semite and bigot” right after his death – although Tutu “did… a lot of good things on Apartheid”. When it comes to Israeli Apartheid, Dershowitz just calls the mere expression of that idea antisemitism. We will get there, to the relinquishing of Israeli Apartheid – but it won’t be easy, and it will require as always a material and concerted effort against the nexus of political power that Israel holds.

So yes, I am fighting against my state, and for my co-religionists. I don’t want to call these Jews a “nation”, as Israel does, it’s simply not. It’s just a religion, and if you want to, call them “a people”. I think I’d just go with “people”. Because when it comes down to it, our needs are very similar, whoever we are, and that needs to guide us as a moral compass. If we can’t see the humanity in a Gazan child, we’ve lost it.