Palestine/Israel

There is a GENOCIDE happening in Gaza. 

The Nazi atrocities are being carried out once again, this time against the Palestinian people, a GENOCIDE committed by the state of Israel with the political and financial backing of numerous other countries. A GENOCIDE. And a large percentage of the world supports it, denies it, justifies it, is blind to it. 

WHAT KIND OF WORLD ARE WE LIVING IN?

I was asked to give a talk about what caused me to wake up to what zionism truly is after years of indoctrination. The short answer is: I met Palestinians. What follows is the long answer. Part of this text was part of the talk I gave at the Palestine encampment at the University of Sevilla in Spain.

 My People

I don’t know what to write. I don’t know what to write. I don’t know what to write.

My ninth grade English teacher asked his students to keep a journal. If we didn’t know what to say, he asked us to write, “I don’t know what to write,” again and again, until the words came. I’m employing his technique now, because I don’t know what words can make a difference, SEVEN MONTHS into a GENOCIDE. What can I say, write, scream, weep, that I, that MILLIONS of people, have not already said? No one wants to hear about genocide anymore. So I’ll write a love story instead. A love story about a Palestinian family in Haifa who saved an American Jew’s humanity. 

I was raised to be an observant Jew, and in the synagogue I was taught in, where religion and politics merged completely, being a good Jew meant being a zionist. Zionism, from its beginning until today, was and is a racist, settler-colonial movement that has stolen Palestinian land, and slaughtered, kidnapped, humiliated and tortured Palestinians for more than 76 years, and forced the Palestinians not killed or violently displaced, to live under an apartheid regime and military occupation. But this, of course, is not how zionism is taught. I was a zionist without even knowing what zionism was. I learned a narrative that had nothing to do with reality, including lies such as “the land which is Israel was given to the Jews by the U.N. as reparations for the Holocaust” and “without the state of Israel, Jewish people will never be safe.” Question the state of Israel’s right to exist? That would have been like questioning the United States of America’s right to exist. Of course, the U.S.A. is another settler-colonial state whose foundation is genocide, in addition to slavery. Many histories have been whitewashed. To quote James Baldwin, “The state of Israel was not created for the Jews. It was created for the salvation of Western interests.”

In my childhood and young adult years, along with learning Hebrew prayers and longing to become a rabbi, I also dreamed of settling down in Israel and making a safe home amongst “my people”. And along with love for Judaism, love for the Jewish people, and love for the state of Israel, I was also taught another emotion connected to being Jewish: fear. Fear that is passed down from generation to generation based on genuine trauma, and fear born of the lies that zionism is based on. My grandparents and great-grandparents left Europe long before the Holocaust due to pogroms. In America, they found the safety they sought as long as they assimilated. I learned about the Holocaust, in great detail, as a child. I was told more than once that Jews in the Holocaust “went like sheep to the slaughter” and the “brave Israeli soldiers” cut a stark contrast to powerlessness. I was also taught, again and again and again and again, “Arabs hate Jews, and that’s why they attack Israel.” I never believed that teaching–at least, I told myself I didn’t.

Judaism and Israel lived side by side in my soul, one a way to walk through this world, and the other the place I dreamed of walking to: my lifelong plan, from the time I was a teenager, was to eventually settle down in Israel.

Life changes you. I started to lose my faith in my religion in my twenties. As I had dreamed of becoming a rabbi for so long, it was a devastating loss, and I didn’t know what to do with all those broken pieces inside me: how to build a new life from dead faith. The dream of Israel promised me all was not lost. I could still speak Hebrew every day. I could be surrounded by melodies to the prayers I could no longer chant but still longed to hear. Throughout many points in my life, reality felt absolutely unbearable, and the Israel that had been taught to me was, above all things, a hope and a promise–that one day, reality would be better. At least, my reality. I had never heard the word Nakba. The first time I learned the word Palestine, I was 18. And I thought the “conflict” in Israel was about religion with equal atrocities committed by both sides.

In 2009 I made plans to settle down in Israel. My plan was to volunteer at a women’s and children’s shelter for a month, then take an intensive Hebrew course, then stay forever. I spent time researching a shelter that was not just for Israelis but for Palestinians as well. My own housing fell through on day two, and I arrived at the shelter with no place to stay. The first staff member who greeted me was an Israeli. I explained my situation and her response was, “chaval”, what a pity. The second staff member who greeted me, Wafa, was a Palestinian. She called her brother and told him I needed a place to stay. He offered me an apartment he was renting.

And this is the gut response I had, after years of zionist indoctrination: “Arabs hate Jews. Say no. Why would they help me? ‘My people’ will help me.”

Babies and small children embrace each other without a single thought to a person’s tribe, race, class, religion or any of the other barriers to humanity that these things often become. How long does it take to teach someone to respond to kindness with fear? How long does it take to uproot those teachings?

“My people” did not help me find an apartment. And when I returned to Wafa three days later, in tears, asking for help, asking for forgiveness, without a single word of reproach, without a single unkind look, she called her brother, who rented me the apartment.

I had been taught fear, hatred, and lies. Wafa had learned love. What a tremendous difference our teachings make.

On my first night in my apartment in Haifa, Wafa’s niece, a tenant in the building, invited me to dinner. The following weekend was spent in Wafa’s village: meeting her family and friends, learning their history, learning about what their lives in my “dream country” were like, and speaking English with Wafa’s daughter Yara. Wafa and her family did not treat me like a guest. They treated me like family.

It was a weekend that changed my life. I never moved to Israel. I understood it was Palestinian land and it was not my right to claim it. I started a process of unlearning the lies and fear and hatred that had been indoctrinated into me from childhood.

Looking back on why I took so long to wake up to the reality of Israel, I think it was much more than a refusal to see the gutting truth, and everything that seeing that truth would come to mean. I think it was much more than the weight of years of being surrounded by the western media’s sick promulgation of zionist lies. More than the false and disturbing teaching of extreme individualism, that you can somehow manage to be OK even if those around you are not. I think I could not believe the truth about Israel because I could not believe that a people that had survived a genocide would be capable of doing to others what had been done to them. 

During one of my days volunteering at the shelter, one of the women asked me, “Why are you here?”

“To help out,” was my reply.

“Bullshit, habibi,” she told me. “You’re looking for shelter, just like the rest of us. I’m sorry to tell you, but shelter doesn’t exist anywhere in this world.”

And I was indeed looking for shelter. Long before arriving in Israel, I had been working on a book about sexual violence, trying and failing to deal with personal, ancestral, and worldly trauma of the most intimate and savage kind. And in that moment when everything was falling apart within me, Wafa and her family gave me the human decency that the state of Israel denies them. 

Wafa and her family taught me who “my people” truly are.

It is my HUMAN sisters and brothers who are being tortured, raped, slaughtered, and starved in a GENOCIDE in Gaza, and arrested, beaten, raped and killed in the West Bank. And it is my human sisters and brothers who are committing this GENOCIDE.

I cannot reciprocate the kindness Wafa and her family offered me, and provide them with the shelter from the world’s storms that they gave me, in a moment when I desperately needed it. But maybe I can do for another what Wafa and her family did for me, and remind someone who has forgotten, of the humanity inside every single person. For no matter who you are or where you are from, it is your human sisters and brothers who are being murdered in a GENOCIDE in Gaza, and it is your human sisters and brothers who are killing them. 

A GENOCIDE is happening in Gaza. It is not a war or a conflict. And without funds, weapons, and complicity from countries around the world, especially the United States, this GENOCIDE would not be possible. The worldwide repression of any support for Palestinians should also make it clear that this slaughter is about something much, much larger than stolen land in Palestine.

I wish I had a different story to tell. I wish I could tell you that I saw through the lies of zionism from the beginning, and that nothing of that evil had ever taken root inside me. But my story is only one of the countless stories in this world that I wish were different. So one of the things that I hope you take from this, is that you reject every teaching that is not rooted in love for all life: people, animals, our earth. I also hope you remember this: dead bodies cannot be brought back to life. Dead humanity can be resurrected.