In August 2014, the Jewish festival of Tisha B’Av arrived as Israel was waging a military onslaught on Gaza that would eventually kill 2,251 Palestinians, 1,462 of whom were civilians, including over 500 children. Tisha B’Av is traditionally observed as a day of mourning over the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem and by extension, the tragedies that have befallen the Jewish people throughout its history. To mark the occasion of the festival in 2014, I wrote a new version of the first chapter of Lamentations (the Biblical book traditionally chanted on Tisha B’Av). At the time, I suggested this new version be added to the ceremony to acknowledge the massive tragedy the state of Israel was inflicting on Palestinians in Gaza in the name of the Jewish people.
Now eight years later, Tisha B’Av 2022 arrived amidst yet another grievous military assault on Gaza. At least 49 Palestinians were killed, including 17 children, and over 300 more were wounded.
As in 2014, Israel, its supporters and the mainstream media at large sold this latest military onslaught by claiming “Israel has a right to defend itself” from Gazan rocket fire. But as I wrote about Israel’s actions in 2014, this is a cynical and empty posture. As was the case eight years ago, this new war on Gaza was openly and unabashedly provoked by Israel. The timeline leading up to this latest assault is a matter of public record that is available to anyone interested in reading past Israel’s hollow propaganda:
• This past May, it was reported that the Israeli military was expanding what it described as a “bank of targets” in the Gaza Strip it had identified since its most recent military offensive in 2021.
• On Monday, August 1, the Israeli military arrested Bassam al-Saadi, a senior member of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ), during a raid on the Jenin refugee camp. The PIJ issued threats in response but took no action.
• Concerned that the PIJ would attack in retaliation, the Israeli military directed authorities to close roads near the Gaza border.
• On August 5, claiming that it was responding to an “imminent threat,” Israel unleashed a wave of airstrikes in Gaza, killing PIJ military commander Tayseer Jabari along with seven other people, including a 5 year old girl, Alaa Abdullah-Riyad Qaddoum.
• The PIJ retaliated by sending more than 1,000 missiles into Israel. The Israeli military reported that it had intercepted about 95 percent of the rockets. There were no reports of significant property damage.
• The US Ambassador to Israel, Tom Nides, stated that “the United States firmly believes that Israel has a right to protect itself.”
This is, in short, purposeful wanton aggression. That it is repeatedly committed against a blockaded, besieged population of 2,000,000 who literally have nowhere to run raises it to the level of atrocity. It is no less abominable to rationalize it away by with the bromide that “Israel has the right to defend itself” or to blame Palestinians themselves for their own destruction by invoking the allegation of “human shields” – a false claim that has been repeatedly disproved by human rights observers.
These rationalizations are particularly profane in the way they rob Palestinians of their basic humanity. I remember thinking of precisely this on Tisha B’Av 2014 – and how incongruous it felt to engage in a ceremony of grief over Jewish loss while a nation state purporting to act in the name of the Jewish people inflicted such unspeakable losses on another people.
According to Jewish tradition, the fall of the Temple was caused by internal sinat chinam – baseless hatred – that wracked the disempowered, besieged Jewish community of ancient Jerusalem. In the age of Zionism, it seems to me, we must be ready to acknowledge a different kind of sinat chinam – one that is wielded by a Jewish state power against a people it continues to disempower and besiege.
As in 2014, I did not mourn the destruction of the Temple this Tisha B’Av. I mourned the losses of yet another merciless war waged by Israel against the Palestinian people. And as in 2014, this was my lament:
For these things I weep:
for the toxic fear we have unleashed
from the dark place of our hearts
for the endless grief
we are inflicting
on the people of Gaza.
A version of this post first appeared on Rabbi Brant Rosen’s blog, Shalom Rav, on August 6, 2022.
Shameless israel…
As a rabbi, I find this opinion piece repulsive. Is my colleague seriously suggesting that the fears and resentments that Israelis have of Islamic Jihad et. al. are “senseless”? Just some bizarre irrational fantasy? Paranoia detached from reality? Tell that to the 8 Jews wounded as they were leaving the Western wall the other evening (including 5 Americans, a pregnant woman, and at least one family from the anti-Zionist Satmar chasidic sect) because a Palestinian sprayed their bus with gunfire. Anyone talking about “an orgy of violence”? Anyone talking about “indiscriminate murder”? No, I didn’t think so. Your hypocrisy is showing.
It’s high time religious Jews started paying attention to Judaism. Thank you, Brant Rosen. And thanks to your congregation — if you have one! — for allowing you to speak truth.
As for Abbaofthree, first: if Israel did not react to nonviolent protests with violence, even lethal violence, you might have a valid argument. Second: The wrongs that Jews do are the business of Jews, even more than the wrongs done to us.
From David Ben Gurion
“Let us not ignore the truth among ourselves … politically we are the aggressors and they defend themselves… The country is theirs, because they inhabit it, whereas we want to come here and settle down, and in their view we want to take away from them their country. … Behind the terrorism [by the Arabs] is a movement, which though primitive is not devoid of idealism and self sacrifice.”
— David Ben Gurion. Quoted on pp 91-2 of Chomsky’s Fateful Triangle, which appears in Simha Flapan’s “Zionism and the Palestinians pp 141-2 citing a 1938 speech.
“We must do everything to insure they (the Palestinians) never do return.”
David Ben-Gurion, in his diary, 18 July 1948, quoted in Michael Bar Zohar’s Ben-Gurion: the Armed Prophet, Prentice-Hall, 1967, p. 157.
Naughty, naughty Israel!