Last weekend, I marched in a pro-Palestine rally in Sacramento, California, side by side with hundreds of other supporters of Palestinian rights. Social justice, civil rights, and local Arab groups all came together to protest Israel’s oppression of Palestine and demand an end to the illegal occupation. Similar rallies have occurred all across the country and the globe, from the United Kingdom to Morocco.
I am an American-born Jew, a progressive, and a climate activist. I’ve donated to Palestinian charities (such as PCRF and MAP), supported anti-Zionist organizations, and tried to educate my friends and loved ones about Israeli’s apartheid against Palestinians. I now recognize that is not enough. There is no other choice but to stand up and loudly condemn the brutal violence that Israel is committing – in the name of Jews worldwide – against Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank.
There is no excuse for Israel’s blatant war crimes in Palestine, and there is no excuse for progressive Jews in America to support Israel’s government. Now, more than ever, it is uniquely incumbent on us to denounce Israel’s treatment of Palestinians. We must have the moral courage to act before further atrocities are enacted upon Palestine.
The rally I attended featured a diverse group of speakers, including David Mandel, an Israeli citizen, and representative for the Sacramento branch of Jewish Voice for Peace. He spoke about the importance of solidarity between Jews and Palestinians in this moment, and I felt inspired by his words and the vital energy of the rally.
Anyone with accurate knowledge of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and a correct moral compass should oppose the occupation, but after Israel’s current massacre of over 4,000 Palestinians and displacement of nearly a million more, American Jews must now feel a special duty to fight back against Israel’s government. We can not simply sit on the sidelines as Israel is on the brink of invading Gaza.
We should be disgusted by the knowledge that Israel’s oppression of Palestinians is being done in the name of the religion that many of us were born and raised with. Israel has used Judaism as a cudgel to implement its project of ethnically cleansing Palestinians. Western media, encouraged by the Israel lobby, has consistently repeated the bald-faced lie that anti-Zionism is anti-Semitism. Time and time again, this rhetorical device is cynically deployed to deflect any criticism of Israel’s crimes.
If American Jews do not act to end Israeli apartheid, we are abrogating our responsibility to Palestine. Some have recognized this fact and have been protesting in the Capitol throughout this week to demand a ceasefire.
However, there are still many Jews who believe they can occupy some mythical “middle ground” where both sides are equally at fault in this conflict. There is no longer any middle ground and no claiming ignorance. If you support Israel’s government, then you support the IDF’s mass genocide of Palestinians. You support a government that considers Palestinians “human animals.”
This declaration will no doubt make some Jewish readers, and perhaps even some of my Jewish peers uncomfortable. That is my goal. We must embrace that discomfort and face the reality that it is morally reprehensible to not act while hundreds of Palestinians are senselessly killed because Israel claims that their deaths make us safer.
Zionists are weaponizing Jewish identity to unleash “hell” on Palestinians. Progressive American Jews must denounce the dehumanizing policies of the Israeli government and fight tirelessly for a free Palestine. Liberal Zionism has always been an oxymoron, but following Israel’s most recent bombings in Gaza and the ratcheting up of anti-Muslim rhetoric both in Israel and the West, we can finally put to rest the notion that you can be a progressive and support Israel’s settler program and apartheid government.
As progressives, we are implored to condemn the violence on “both sides,” as if Israel and Hamas are equal combatants in a traditional land war. This couldn’t be further from the truth, and it’s crucially important to recognize the context of Hamas’ resistance to Israel’s decades of occupation. Many of the settlements that Hamas attacked on October 7 were formerly home to Palestinians. These Palestinians had their land stolen from them by Israeli settlers, and were displaced from their homes at the barrel of a gun. The United Nations have long recognized their right to return.
Equating Hamas and Israel’s violence erases that history, and serves to propagate the colonial narrative that Hamas, and by extension Palestinians, are merely inhumane killers whose only goal is destruction. This historical context is, of course, absent from the majority of mainstream Western coverage on Israel. CBS refers to Hamas’ attacks as a “murderous rampage,” and President Biden calls Hamas “sheer evil.” Yet denunciations of Israel’s war crimes against Palestinians are virtually absent.
Anti-colonial struggles are necessarily violent, and civilian noncombatants are often casualties of this violence. Progressive Jews can mourn the loss of their Israeli family, friends, and loved ones, while still recognizing that many of those Israelis can only live on their land because Palestinians have been forced out of it. Israelis and Palestinians both suffer because of the actions of an Israeli government that fundamentally does not respect basic human rights.
Israel cannot continue its oppression of Palestinians without the direct support of the American government. In addition to the billions of dollars the United States already sends to Israel yearly, the Biden administration has pledged billions more in weapons to fund Israel’s upcoming ground invasion of Gaza. The U.S. government does this, in part, because Israel claims it has a mandate from Americans Jews.
Progressive American Jews obviously cannot reverse decades of pro-Israel U.S. foreign policy by ourselves. However, we can use our collective voice to vocally condemn Israel’s apartheid of Palestinians and demand an end to occupation, call on our government to stop sending military funding to Israel, and support movements that pressure the Israeli government such as Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions. Moral clarity demands that we stand with Palestine until it is free from the river to the sea.
You’d think our colleagues at Hasbara U would actually be relieved – after a long and bloody war Israel will destroy Hamas and after that it’ll be smooth sailing for the Jewish state, no more problems after that, because Hamas is the problem!
This is a good time to introduce Peter Beinart’s essay from 2021 –
If Israel Eliminated Hamas, Nothing Fundamental Would Change
https://peterbeinart.substack.com/p/if-israel-eliminated-hamas-nothing
A powerful progressive declaration! Thank you!
Biden should also be pressed to put meat on his 2SS…. as Greater Israel presses a military solution which Biden wants to cover the cost for.
The US media has an obligation to also shift its language in regards to Israel to be more inline with the ENTIRE region. More so than ever!
If the US is going to back and protect Israel unconditionally, despite its Apartheid, war crimes, illegal invasions and annexations, oppression, supremacy, mass murder and displacement of people, eternal occupation, and approve yet another $14 billion dollars to Israel, on top of the hundreds of billions we’ve supplied to date, we have to also begin adopting the language we reserve for Israel’s neighbors.
We can’t keep referring to the likes of Syria, Lebanon, Yemen, and Gaza as “proxies of Iran” and “Iranian-back forces”, without also referring to Israel as an undeniable “proxy of America” and “American-backed forces”, and “American satellite militia”.
Until the US, just like Iran, stops directly and overtly injecting itself into every aspect of Israel’s hegemony and underwriting every one of Israel’s actions, interferences, and malign influence in the region, and framing it as “self defense”, we in the US will remain complicit enablers of ALL of Israel’s transgressions both within and without its borders. Period!
We effectively treat Israel as a de facto satellite and outpost of US policy, influence, and and unofficial arm of our military in the region. We couch it in terms like “democracy”, “shared values”, “self defense”, “shared interests”, and “ironclad support”, yet utterly fail to see how every single other nation region sees OUR behavior and projection of power for what it is.
And how is that? Exactly how we frame the narrative and perceive, report on, and talk about Iranian and Saudi influence in our own media and politics. Are they not allowed to support, back, and defend their neighbors and themselves from foreign interference and hegemony? Are they not protecting the preferred political structures, “shared values”, “shared interests”, and “ironclad” support of their own regional allies and neighbors?
I can guarantee you that the likes of Iran, its allies, and all the people of the Middle East see absolutely no difference between Israel’s so-called “democracy” and their own flawed, supremacist, ethno-theocratic, ultra-right-wing, equally rigged, faux-democracies. They are two sides of the exact same coin. Just because the US keeps calling it “democracy” in Israel, and desperately tries to ignore the glaring Apartheid, doesn’t make it so. The facts on the ground speak for themselves and everyone in the Middle East, including hundreds of thousands of Israel’s that were protesting in the streets until Oct 7th, can see it!
Only bought and paid for American politicians and, by proxy, the majority of the sheltered and highly misinformed American people live under the delusion and reality distortion that Israel is any different from its neighbors across the border or in Iran and Saudi Arabia.
For decades it has always been alarming and disappointing to me and others that our Jewish friends and family members, especially those who consider themselves to be progressive to chose to stay willfully ignorant about what Israel and the I lobby were actively doing to Palestinians. Given the history of the pain of Jews via pogroms, Holocaust, historical hatred. Always shocking more Jews were not pushing, protesting, lobbying Reps, U.S. administrations to be honest and fair about the I/P issue. Instead, many sent donations etc to the apartheid government of Israel. I know about intergenerational trauma etc. Still I found so many willfully ignorant.
The situation has changed over the decades. No “Jewish Voice For Peace” protesting or being arrested during Cast Lead. This time around….a difference. Necessary changes, hopefully headed towards justice for Palestinians. Peace for both Israeli’s and Palestinians is what most of us wish, work and pray for.
What is terrifying right now is how many Palestinians will be slaughtered in Israel’s need for revenge. Right now three times more Palestinians have been killed. I believe it is likely those numbers may double. Horrifying…Hamas’s heinous actions…..Israel’s what appears to be a commitment to wipe out Palestinians