Originally written October 2023
My heart is beating fast and my jaw is tight. At this time when so many cultures recognize the “veil is thin” I feel death all around me, and thousands of miles across the world. I have spent my entire adult life learning about Palestine and Israel, and I am still a beginner. I have spent hours every day since 10/7 reading and studying, hoping I will find a perfect way to communicate. Is there a new way to say what I’ve already said? Is my voice necessary? It’s up to you to continue reading and decide.
If you don’t where to start and you’re seeking reliable resources, I recommend: Al Jazeera’s Simple Guide, Amnesty International’s overview, Human Rights Watch’s Q&A, Jews of Color and Sephardi/Mizrahi Jews JVP Caucus statement (2016), and heck even Britannica’s article on the British Mandate for Palestine provides some useful background.
If you’re more into books, booksellers like Haymarket and Marcus Books are offering curated reads as well. There are also numerous historical perspectives available to read from U.S. Jews like Leslie Feinberg and Howard Zinn, as well as Black feminists including Angela Davis, June Jordan, Audre Lorde and many others.
There is so much I want to say, but it’s difficult to put into words like those aforementioned authors. Especially today when words are twisted and made binary, people are being doxxed or fired for being in solidarity with Palestine. Activist phrases like “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” are cast as antisemitic (this is indeed not antisemitic.) Despite U.S. media reports, many Israelis do not support Netanyahu’s far-right Israeli government, and many Israeli survivors of the Hamas attack do not want revenge.
It is painful to sort through and communicate when propaganda masquerading as news is more abundant than ever. People generally believe the news they consume, most of us are consuming radically different news sources, and the need for media literacy on Palestine and Israel has never been clearer. Each day there is a new example, such as on November 4th in Washington D.C., when 300,000 people marched in the largest pro-Palestinian action in U.S. history, but most mainstream news sources have ignored this or are reporting much lower numbers.
I first became a “real” activist when speaking at a youth-led march to protest the invasion of Iraq in 2002. Today I remain an activist called to speak on genocide in Palestine. I see white Jews like myself reacting to the Hamas attacks from a place of trauma, comparing the kibbutz death toll to that of Nazi Germany. At the same time, thousands of Palestinians are being murdered in Gaza, a literal concentration camp, and not mourned widely in political statements or all-staff emails. In part because Palestinian resistance has been inaccurately portrayed as terroristic and Jew-hating.
Of course, I feel the epigenetic fear, I feel an ache when the Jewish deaths are not mentioned or mourned, and of course it is easier to feel like the victim than to sit with my own areas of dominance. I try to feel compassion for my fellow white Jews who are feeling a deep sense of fear, and I try to reframe the convenience of a good/bad enemy. The enemy to me is oppression, and the state of Israel was first created by British and French occupiers to get rid of their Jews, now serving the U.S. and U.K. as a center of power over resources and Arab peoples. Jews have a long history of resistance to Zionism. Israel does not equal Jewishness.
I love being Jewish. I grew up rural, bullied as one of few Jews, and had little Jewish community until my adult life. But I always associated Jewishness with social justice and I’ve come to believe that my childhood instinct was right. In the U.S., Jews have long occupied a liminal space of oppressor and oppressed. Antisemitism runs deep in many white nationalist conspiracy theories, both historic and current. And at the same time, European Jews were largely subsumed into the U.S. definition of whiteness by the 1950s, and many of us have intentionally or automatically assimilated. We carry privilege and trauma and stories and violence, and we are part of a diaspora across the world, on every land. Including Palestine, where there have been Jews living with Muslims and Christians for generations.
White Christian Nationalists and Evangelicals have been successful in moving the judicial arm of the U.S. via the Supreme Court and state courts. In the last few years alone, suppressing basic racialized history of the U.S., eradicating legal rights to abortion, and targeting young trans people. These same hateful Evangelical forces have long been supportive of Israel while being both antisemitic and Islamophobic. Right now, they are overjoyed that the decimation in Gaza may be ushering in their end times and rapture. From childhood to today, I understand that white fundamentalist Christians do not want any part of me to be saved, from my queerness to my Jewishness to my disabilities.
I hope this offering of the personal and political is something you can use to continue these conversations. If you disagree with my perspectives here, I am open to dialogue. My only ask is that you engage with at least one of the relevant resources included in this email so that we can begin our conversation from the same material.
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