The International Jewish Collective for Justice in Palestine (IJCJP) wishes to express our abhorrence for the many ways in which Israel-supporting Jewish organizations in our countries have stoked the flames of racism and have embraced genocidal military violence through their support of Israel’s war on Gaza. It is unfathomable that Jewish leaders choose to justify Israeli violence when two million Gazans are starving, displaced, ill, wounded, and in mourning for the nearly 25,000 Palestinians killed by indiscriminate Israeli bombing and land incursions. The International Jewish Collective for Justice in Palestine fully supports South Africa’s case in the International Court of Justice accusing Israel of genocide in the Gaza war and calling for an immediate suspension of its military campaign.
Jewish community leaders have vilified those protesting the war by labeling them “terrorist supporters,” “gangs,” “mobs,” and other epithets intended to operationalize the anti-Palestinian racism and Islamophobia so ubiquitous in the West. Our communities have also been deeply implicated in the suppression and criminalization of speech on Palestine, which disproportionally impacts racialized individuals. Dissident Jews who are demonstrating openly in their tens of thousands worldwide against this immoral war have not been immune to slander from Jewish institutional leaders and are characterized as “useful idiots,” “self-haters,” “un-Jews,” and worse; this betrays the long Jewish tradition of theological debate and political diversity.
While millions around the world march in the streets demanding an end to the inhuman devastation of Gaza, many of our communities choose to characterize this unprecedented demand for an end to genocide as antisemitic. We are appalled that there is not even a glimmer of humanity or compassion expressed for the thousands of Palestinians killed and the families who have been decimated in this horrific war. Jews who are challenged in the streets with vocal opposition to Israel’s genocidal violence and eliminationist racism are portrayed as victims for whom the sight of a Palestinian flag or the sound of chants for Palestinian freedom pose an existential threat despite little evidence that this is true. In the meantime, attention is diverted from the actual threat of antisemitic white supremacism, which is growing exponentially.
Histories of Jewish suffering must never be used to justify inflicting unimaginable misery on the civilian population of Gaza. We call on all Jews to reject this politics of Jewish exceptionalism and to hold our communities accountable for supporting and enabling this wholly unjustifiable war, a war that is destroying Palestine and imperils Jews while defiling our prophetic tradition.
Signed by:
International Jewish Collective for Justice in Palestine
(Canada, U.S., UK, Ireland, Germany, France, Luxembourg, South Africa, New Zealand, Israel, Australia, Brazil, Chile, Argentina)
I posted the following comment on Jewish Voice for Labour who reprinted it here http://tinyurl.com/y5zkjct3
I can speak only for myself, yet my personal experience is surely not unique. A few short decades ago I would probably have felt (not thought, felt) similarly to those tribalist fellow Jews referenced in the Statement. It’s thanks to groups like Just Peace UK, Jews for Justice for Palestinians, Jeff Halper’s ICAHD and of course, later, JVL that I came across other ways of thinking. (My political education had in the same way been radically changed through membership of CND, volunteering for CAAT, MCANW &c) Two study tours of the oPt with ICAHD were crucial.
But one needs to be willing to face disturbing challenges to much-cherished, long-held beliefs and identifications, be able to cope with levels of social isolation and ostracism, particularly if you depend on a religious affiliation for a sense that your life has significance in a world of meaning, basically for your ontological security. And even after starting to change, it’s not always easy to be honest with yourself, cognitive dissonance is always lurking, one relapses — or simply rehashes the same old arguments, helping one electively simply not to see the Palestinian agony.
Some of us were, to use an old word, ‘brainwashed’ as kids and it’s a temptation to slip back into the old comfy cushions of in-groups and the seductions of behavioural reinforcement. So I have some sympathy with the fearful, indeed the neurotically hypervigilant programmed through historical conditioning to find antisemitism even where it doesn’t exist (and when it really does exist, intermittent reinforcement kicks in and the fear is amplified).
Perhaps I was a psychiatrist too long and think other Jews are psychologically as deluded as I once was. I always think of Philip Larkin’s ‘Aubade’, ‘An only life can take so long to climb / Clear of its wrong beginnings, and may never.’
Reply to Jon S do you honestly believe your military and your government care about their Israeli hostages? They believe Hamas and other resistance groups are embedded in the Palestinian population so therefore they believe they will kill the hostages. They don’t care. You’d better shout out loud and clear to your government to stop this genocide.Shame on you that only your hostages matter. In case you’ve forgotten we all have a shared humanity.
I just sent this to a Zionist. I doubt that he will read it, though.
Not even a mention of our kidnapped hostages.. Children and women and men, Jews and Arabs and foreigners, civilians and soldiers, sick and wounded…our sisters and brothers….starved and abused and neglected.