States Of Disarray
The main topic this week is an almost impossible one to write about, but I felt like I needed to address it. Of course I can’t cover everything but I’ve done my best to present it fairly. Like I said last week, it’s not getting solved in this newsletter but hope you learn something or at least see a new perspective.
COVID: I’ll be brief since there’s a long section coming up, but it’s pretty much all good news on this front. The CDC has changed their mask guidelines, saying what we all sort of realized, that the fully vaccinated don’t need a mask for health reasons. While some are worried about people lying about getting vaccinated and not wearing a mask, to a certain degree, you don’t need to worry. Yes, they are being selfish and prolonging the pandemic, and possibly killing more people with their actions, but if you are vaccinated, you will not get seriously ill from Covid. There are some instances where people in rural areas or with mobility issues haven’t gotten a vaccine and want one, but it’s easier than ever to get a vaccine. This weekend in Sheep’s Meadow a doctor was walking around inviting people to a pop up vaccine site right next to the field. We could maybe even start doing house calls for those who need vaccines brought to them, and we certainly have the infrastructure to get that set up. NYC will even be giving vaccines to tourists. As teenagers start getting vaccinated, it’s clear the pandemic is waning in the US, and we should be thankful that the current administration made this their almost singular priority, and hope they can approach other issues with the same vigor.
DEMOCRACY: To be honest, it was a bad week for democracy in the US. On Wednesday night, on the eve of a vote that would remove her from Republican leadership, Liz Cheney gave a speech on the House floor again denouncing Trump and election lies, and saying her party was straying from the Constitution. It was a powerful statement that fell on deaf ears, as her colleagues walked out before she even began speaking and removed her the next day by voice vote. Her replacement, Elise Stefanik, is a previously moderate Republican who in her first speech in leadership said Congressional Republicans would “work with” President Trump, even though he has no role in government.
It was further evident that the Big Lie has become a central GOP policy during a hearing to examine the slow response to the insurrection at the Capitol. While Democrats pressed former Trump officials on their lack of communication, preparedness or response (and those same officials declined any responsibility for their mistakes/failures), Republicans promoted a variety of ridiculous theories and opinions. Among these were that the insurrectionists looked like tourists, that Trump was not responsible for the riots at all, and that BLM protests in Portland over the summer were comparable. To be clear, these are sitting members of Congress, defending a mob who violently breached the room they sat in during an insurrection which attempted to stop the peaceful transition of power after a free and fair election, and possibly injure or kill their colleagues. It was a terrible day for America, and it’s being made worse by the fact that Republicans at best avoid talking about it and at worst praise the attackers.
ISRAEL: Over the past week, violence in Israel and Gaza has accelerated at a surprisingly rapid pace. What started as an aggressive Israeli police response and assault on protests at the Al-Aqsa Mosque (the third holiest site in Islam and holiest site in Judaism) in response to evictions of Palestinians has ballooned into full scale rocket attacks from Hamas and retaliatory airstrikes from the IDF, both of which are much more intense than any in recent memory, and has resulted in the deaths of over a hundred Palestinians, a dozen Israelis, and the destruction by Israeli airstrike of a high-rise in Gaza that housed the AP and other news outlets.
I am Jewish and went to Hebrew school throughout my childhood, had a Bar Mitzvah, read tons of books on the Holocaust, and met a Holocaust survivor when I visited Israel, where we also went into the West Bank briefly to see holy sites in Bethlehem. Throughout all of this, I was taught Israel is a refuge for the Jews, our birthright, a safe haven, and a blessing that we could return to our ancestral homeland after centuries of oppression and particularly after the genocide of the Holocaust. But after seeing the asymmetric violence over the past week (and that has been occurring over the past decade especially) I had to reflect on whether these things are true. American Jews mostly have a favorable view of Israel, but the idealistic Israel we learned about is a very different one than the Israel of 2021.
Right now, based on pretty much any unbiased observer, Israel’s government is engaged in ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, who have been living in an apartheid state which has gotten increasingly worse over the past decade, and the actions of the IDF are disproportionate to the threats posed to Israel in the 21st century. Particularly in Gaza, which is twice as dense as Manhattan and has been under blockade for 12 years, conditions are appalling and the Israeli government is directly responsible. Benjamin Netanyahu and his government have moved to the far-right, and it is in his political interest to maintain conflict with Hamas, as he gains support for looking strong and solidifies his base of hard-right Israeli nationalists. There are frequent terrorist attacks on Israel — the thousands of rockets being fired by Hamas are aimed at civilian centers with intent to kill Jews — and while the expressly stated goal of Hamas is to exterminate Jews, it isn’t an existential threat to the nation. The rockets are mostly disarmed by a missile defense system that is partly funded by US aid, and the entire population goes through military training. Israel is backed almost unconditionally by the largest military in the world, and has technology and capabilities much more powerful than any other nation in the region. This was not the case when Israel was founded in 1948; it was immediately attacked by Arab nations with much larger armies, and it didn’t have any real allies in the fight. Looking at the death toll of any fighting over the past decade though, is indicative of how one-sided the conflict has become, and while there is certainly danger of death by rocket attack and Israelis have spent much of the past week running to bomb shelters, terrified of being killed by an enemy who wants your entire people destroyed, Palestinians living in Gaza are experiencing that same feeling, and they don’t have bomb shelters to hide in or even a way out of the country.
Equating Israel to all Jews is dangerous, and while we can condemn the actions of the government without denouncing the Jewish religion, Judaism and Israel have become so tied together that anti-Zionism does lead to anti-Semitism, whether purposeful or not. When Israel kills children in Gaza with airstrikes, the reaction is that the Jews are killing Palestinians. Many anti-Zionist and pro-Palestinian activists use “Jews” and “Israelis” interchangeably, and protests to support Palestinians have devolved into anti-Semitism. This does not mean that criticism of Israel is inherently anti-Semitic, just that it can lead to it, especially when the majority of Jews attempt to defend all Israeli actions. Jews should stand up against Israeli oppression of Palestinians because it is not reflective of the values of Judaism, and we need to destroy the narrative that the Jewish people are oppressors. It’s not worth defending Israel if they are not acting morally and simultaneously making the world a more dangerous place for Jews by their continued perversion of Jewish morality.
That’s not to say Israel shouldn’t exist, because if not there, then where should Jews go? We have had to flee nearly every country we established a significant presence in, and anti-Semitism is one of the factors that sent Jews out of the Arab world upon the founding of Israel. It is also a reason Israel receives disproportionate attention on their human rights abuses as opposed to those of Saudi Arabia, another US ally who is committing atrocities in Yemen, funded by our tax dollars, and has not been the target of widespread BDS movements. The state of Israel is not comparable to other “settler colonial” European projects, because none of those conquests involved a group indigenous to an area returning after years of exile and persecution. However, the methods for establishing and maintaining the state are based in colonial practices of violence and land theft. Jews have finally returned to Eretz Yisrael, fulfilling a yearning thousands of years in the making, but at what cost? Israel has become the oppressor, and it is hard to look at Gaza and not be reminded of Jewish ghettos in Poland. Just because criticism of Israel is often anti-Semitic does not mean we should ignore or push back against those criticisms if they are based in fact.
The state of Israel has given Jews security, something they haven’t known for 3000 years. Judaism is both a religion and an ethnicity, and saying that it’s not an ethnicity is wrong. In Nazi Germany, you were considered Jewish if just one grandparent was, whether or not you were practicing, and 22% of American Jews consider themselves Jewish culturally but not religiously. Since it is not a proselytizing religion, basically anyone who is Jewish has ancestry that they can connect to ancient times. But Palestinian identity is defined by that same method, and they also trace their ancestry to the same time and land as Jews. Jews and Palestinians likely have the same ancestors, and were only separated because some fled when Judea was conquered throughout history while others stayed and assimilated, primarily into Arabic culture. Jewish identity is also formed around our historical oppression — because we trace our roots back 5000 years, the Jews who were exiled, executed, and oppressed By Egyptians, Romans, Spanish, Germans, Arabs, etc. throughout time are part of our extended family tree, and our holidays remember their struggles. But now that we have returned to our homeland, we are inflicting that same pain on Palestinians, and in their stories thousands of years from now, it will be Israel destroying their holy sites and killing their ancestors, just as we remember when the Romans and Egyptians destroyed ours.
The Jewish religion has survived all this time in exile, stateless, fleeing genocide from one country to another. There has been no time and place in history for Jews to really be secure, yet we’ve managed to survive and maintain our morals and culture. Is it worth finally having a state of our own, in the land we have longed for, if in doing so we’ve forgotten the values that have guided us across centuries? Havlagah, a moral stance in military operations by the Haganah (the precursor to the IDF) strongly opposed retribution against civilians and advocated restraint, neither of which are being followed right now, especially when you look at events like the destruction of the AP’s HQ in Gaza City. Maimonides and other prominent historical Jewish scholars have said that in warfare a city should only be besieged on 3 sides, and because Israel is cooperating with Egypt to blockade Gaza in all directions and Palestinians have nowhere to flee violence, any military action against the region is a direct violation of Jewish law. If the self proclaimed Jewish state is abandoning not only Jewish morals with oppression of Palestinians but even the Jewish principles of warfare that their army was founded on, why should Jews continue to defend their actions?
All civilian deaths in the conflict are immoral, and continued violence in the region won’t benefit either side. There are no winners in the current fighting, other than perhaps Israeli nationalists who are able to take more land as Palestinians abandon it, Hamas militants who can use Israel’s aggression as a recruiting tool, and weapons manufacturers. There is a path for Israel to exist at peace with a Palestinian state, and maybe there is even an idealistic re-unification of the ancient peoples of the Levant, where Jews and Palestinians can embrace their shared ancient roots. That path is not through violence, and as the nation with the stronger army, and basically all the power in this situation, Israel needs to stand down. It feels wrong, after centuries of fighting against people who have expressed their desire to exterminate Jews to now let another group, Hamas, attempt to do the same. If I had to run to a bomb shelter every day, I would certainly want to eliminate those trying to kill me. But Hamas wants to exterminate Jews, and will not stop sending rockets no matter how often they are bombed, and with each apartment complex destroyed more people are radicalized to hate Israel. Counter-intuitively, Israel has to be the first to stop fighting. This is not to say it should be defenseless, it should continue to invest in the Iron Dome, and maintain a military, because there are threats to the nation, but airstrikes in residential areas will not bring peace. For the cost of one, just one, Iron Dome defense unit, Israel could vaccinate all of Gaza from Covid-19. Israel could even set up vaccination clinics manned by the IDF, a much better step towards improving their image than making TikToks. A step like that could be the first path to ending this unnecessary and immoral conflict.
When Jews pray, we turn to face Jerusalem, and for literally thousands of years, that was as close as we came to the city. Israel is central in Jewish life and being able to live freely and safely in our holiest city is a miracle and we should do all we can to enable that. Israel’s oppression of Palestinians is not improving the safety of Jews or the ability of Jews to live and worship peacefully in Jerusalem, and anyone living under the control of Israel — Jewish, Muslim, Palestinian, or otherwise — should have the same rights that Israeli Jews currently do. So until Palestinians are liberated from oppression, and Israel returns to following the laws and code of ethics demanded of it by Jewish laws and principles, Jews should not blindly defend the nation governing our ancestral homeland.
