An American’s shattered faith

I am supposed to speak next week, in a Quaker room in Philadelphia, and I’m dreading it. I am in grief and shock, I am not sure why what I think matters.

I worry about friends in Palestine in the face of a genocidal army. I feel helpless against historical savagery, another Nakba before our eyes. I bless our staff for informing me but worry that my desire for information has exposed them to greater danger.

I’m in grief for my shattered faith. Maybe my dreams were the illusions of a privileged Westerner, but I believed in one state and the nonviolent Boycott-Divestment-and-Sanctions as the pathway. I felt we were delegitimizing Israel. We were increasing sympathy for Palestinians in the Democratic base, to 49-38. “We are winning,” was going to be the title of my talk. We were undermining U.S. aid. That process is over. I blame Hamas’s war crimes, the hateful actions they carried out against Israeli civilians. I resonate to Bernie Sanders’s and Juan Cole’s condemnations.

Nabil al-Raee, who co-created The Siege, a great drama about Palestinian resistance, says we cannot judge the militants’ actions. You are on our side or the other, he said. Certainly I would never tell Nabil how to feel or think. Israeli soldiers killed his nephew just a couple weeks back. He is Palestinian. He and his community are exposed to endless generational violence in a way I have only been for a split second here or there. I grant Palestinians the right to speak before others—and Nabil tried to tell Americans about the oppression and force them to take action, but his play was banned in many spaces.

No doubt many were thrilled by the Palestinian agency demonstrated by Hamas (I felt that myself, as did other supporters). And still I sit where I sit, not in a place of trauma, and feel what Hamas did was a grave mistake morally and politically.

For years I had a mantra that I got from a European aid worker in East Jerusalem 15 years ago. “Everyone talks about the peaceful resolution of the conflict. But you’ve been here. You can see, there is no peaceful resolution of the conflict.”  She meant that we were seeing apartheid imposed by religious fascists, before our eyes, and it had generated righteous hatred. And it would only be washed away by Very Much Blood, as John Brown once wrote. John Brown who determined the course of history in the U.S. more than anyone.

I forgot the mantra for years, in my hopes. Now I remember it. If Israel and Palestine do devolve into that, it will satisfy some of my friends. But I think I would turn away in despair. I won’t be a partisan for forces that are targeting families in their homes.

The left will divide over the Hamas atrocities. This happens in such momentous events; and not being very ideological, I will find my community. I will go with Juan Cole and Cori Bush and Cornel West and against leftwing solidarity groups at Harvard that blame Israel and leave out Hamas. (Though as for Palestinian groups that do that– I excuse them, they’re Palestinian, they must tell the truth of their trauma.) And when the left says that Israeli propagandists are overplaying what happened to Israeli civilians, I’m sure it’s true but I don’t care. Really bad things happened. Their position reminds me of when the Israelis talked about “Pallywood,” saying Palestinians had exaggerated atrocities. For the first time I think I retweeted something J Street said, about denial of war crimes.

Yet I am enraged by the liberal Zionists. They denied apartheid. They denied the nonviolent tools that Rosa Parks turned to, that any liberation movement turns to. They treated Palestinians with contempt, they crushed expressions of pro-BDS dissent in their youth branch. They exalted historic Jewish fears over Palestinian ethnic cleansing. They encouraged Jews to act out of inter-generational trauma again and again. They helped pile up the fuel of grievances that makes this situation so explosive.

They stood at Qalandiya that should be as hateful in the Jewish mind as the Warsaw Ghetto and didn’t bear witness.

I’m desolated when someone says that October 7 was the worst day for Jews since the Holocaust or when Blinken invokes his ancestors who survived the Holocaust. This is about Israelis not Jews. They are manipulating my history and the sacred memory of the victims of the Holocaust in Warsaw and Treblinka, which I have witnessed with my own eyes, and the murder of my relatives in Bialystok, in the burnt heart of Jewish civilization of the last 400 years– they are manipulating it to Zionist aims.

To justify a genocide that is now unfolding in Gaza.  

If there is one hopeful thing that has come out of this it is the glimmer of awareness of Palestinian history that is showing up in MSM. I see Noura Erakat and Mustafa Barghouti on the TV explaining the persecution of their people. The New Yorker is finally listening to Tareq Baconi. Brave Palestinian narrators are getting out reports from under the bombs.

People who didn’t pay that much attention are seeing the dead-end of Jewish religious nationalism.

This is what Zionism did to the Palestinian people. In the name of ensuring Jewish safety, Israel has ethnically cleansed, bombed, and persecuted a people for over 75 years because they do not accept Zionism. And still, those people are not converted to Zionism, and some of them react viciously with war crimes of their own. But still, the Palestinians will never be converted to Zionism because it means their own subjugation. They will never go away.

I implore my Jewish brothers and sisters in America, to whom I feel kindred in these days of grief, to abandon a hateful ideology in the name of peace.