Originally written December 2023
“Fight the real enemy” - Sinead O’Connor’s words when she spoke out on SNL against abuse in the Catholic Church. Rest in power, Sinead.
Speaking from own life, I have never experienced an anti-semitic word from a single Palestinian, but I have been called a disgrace and spat at by white gay Jews. I’ve never been even mildly insulted by a Muslim and/or Arab person, but I can’t count the number of white Christians who have bullied, threatened, and harmed me simply on the basis of being Jewish. The same is true when I overlay my experiences as a transgender person - all of the slurs and threats, exclusions and intimidation, have come almost solely from white Christians, save for a handful of cisgender gay people.
My first experiences of elementary school were anti-semitism: being told I killed Jesus, being asked about my “horns”, and eating lunch in the bathroom everyday. At home, my father always told me not to sit on the edge of my chair, at an angle and ready to go, because it reminded him too much of his grandmother. She made it out of the pogroms in Eastern Europe and to the U.S. in the 1910s but lost most of her family in the holocaust. I never met her, nor my great grandfather, but I found the latter’s death certificate which says “Palestine.”
Intergenerational trauma is real. I have to remind myself to not hear “Jews” when people say “Israelis,” I am aware of my own internalized anti-semitism when I tell myself not to make a fuss, not to make us “look bad.” I am acutely aware of my own privileges and otherness when I feel the “what-about-me-and-my-pain” come up. I have to discern what part of pain to tune into and treat, versus what part of pain is a growing pain that I will fumble through teeth gritted. I still have a lot to learn.
For self preservation, I’ve learned to sniff out a barely perceptible whiff of anti-semitism (or transphobia or ableism or homophobia…) So I can understand the fears many Jews have of critique of Israel somehow bolstering the ludicrous anti-semitism long stoked by the right wing. But I have to challenge suspicions about anti-semitism lurking in the corners of Palestinian freedom movements. The truth is it just isn’t there in a significant way, and it’s a wonderful distraction from the powerful Amerikkan anti-semites among. Of course there are extremists and bigots in every movement and every country, AND in the past five decades the largest and most powerful seats of anti-semitism and Islamophobia have resided squarely in the U.S. and U.K.
What I am afraid of right now, what we know is growing, is an anti-semitism stoked for hundreds of years by White Christian Nationalists. What I find terrifying is how white supremacist Evangelist movements have figured out how to ally with anti-trans feminists and conservative Jews, while simultaneously believing both groups will perish in the rapture, necessary sacrifices to enact Christ’s holy plan. What I stay up at night thinking about is how Jews and Muslims are being wedged apart by an imperialism that will ultimately dispose of us all.
Mel Gibson working again in Hollywood is a greater threat of anti-semitic violence than Palestinian solidarity movements have ever been. I remember in 2004 when a synagogue in Denver not far from where I live was desecrated with vile graffiti. It was one day before the “Passion of the Christ” opened in the theaters and anti-semitic billboard by an evangelist group coincidentally had gone up. In 2024, Gibson will release a sequel to the Passion of the Christ where Jim Cavizel reprises his role as Jesus. Caviezel recently portrayed Tim Ballard, white savior of trafficked children in a propaganda film titled “Sound of Freedom.” Ballard is being sued by multiple women for sexual abuse, coercion, and grooming. These are some of the perverse minds doing everything possible to turn the U.S. into a Christian theocracy.
Who owns Christian film production companies peddling anti-semitic, Islamophobic, and anti-trans propaganda films? Who marched in Charlottesville chanting “Jews won’t replace us” in 2017? Who murdered eleven Jewish people in the Tree of Life synagogue in 2018? Who put those murderous ideas in their heads? Who systematically slaughtered millions of Jews between 1941-1945? What world powers colluded to allow that holocaust to persist for years? The answer to none of these questions is Palestinians. None.
Furthermore, it is undeniable that Muslims and Arabs, like Jews, are targets of these same white supremacist Christian Nationalist actors. There is a shared thread of oppression uniting us - as someone said at a recent Palestinian and Jewish solidarity action, “we know that the people desecrating our menorahs are the same ones calling in death threats to our mosques.”
It is fair to be angry, to be scared, to be exhausted, overwhelmed, confused. But I don’t want us to let ourselves be fooled about who is the real enemy of peace and liberation. I hope and pray we don’t fall for it. The U.S. is teetering dangerously on a fascist cliff, and how Israel’s actions play out will be another indication of what we collectively allow, of how easily we are duped by propaganda. I join the chorus of Jews saying we are only made less safe by U.S. support of Israel’s brutal siege which is starving 90% of Gazan civilians and claiming at least 19,000 civilian lives. (I had to update these numbers several times in the course of writing this because the violence is so brutal.)
Consider joining me in directing anger not at the Palestinian people, but at the U.S. government for putting our tax money to fund a far right regime in Israel. Direct rage at organizations like ALEC, AIPEC, The Heritage Foundation, National Association of Evangelicals, Fox News, and others who’ve been intentionally weakening U.S. democracy and weaponizing anti-semitism. Direct ire at Speaker of the House Mike Johnson, Pastor John Hagee, Mel Gibson, Donald Trump (remember how he and Netanyahu were BFFs?).
The white supremacist Christian Zionists and evangelicals who actually want us dead are thrilled when we believe the lie that Hamas is the single greatest threat to Jews worldwide. Right-wing Republican Trump ally Rep. Elise Stefanik who held the farcical congressional hearing with university leaders on “anti-semitism” has herself peddled anti-semitic replacement theory, including in the wake of white supremacist terrorism in Pittsburgh and in Buffalo. Stefanik and others are simply using this as an opportunity to limit the ability to protest and to chip away at free speech.
It is past time to widen the conversation to the global patterns of right wing extremism and fascism we are currently living within. It is a time of such unspeakable heart rendering mind altering grief, such exhausted terror, and hissing hot rage. The time on the clock of the world (Grace Lee Boggs) I hope is one of fertile opportunity when more and more people realize that systems of domination will never protect us. They never have protected us, and never really protected even the dominators.
I dream and imagine that one day there will truly be a “never again.” One day people may not even be able to fathom the existence of such violence as ethnic cleansing. People will puzzle over how those in the 2020s could possibly believe that there wasn’t enough for everyone. Maybe they will mourn for us, learn from us. Maybe they will write a religious parable - a sprinkle of historical truth with a good helping of magic, politics, and an over-embellished core lesson. Or maybe the most widely read volume in the world will be poetry. Or art. I hope that what persists are the stories of Palestinian endurance, Jewish solidarity, Black power, and a global intersectional movement against borders, militarism, and imperialism.
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