October 3, 2024
Every year at
Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish new year, synagogues across the world sound the
shofar, a ram’s horn that represents the signature moment of the holiday.
Members of the activist group Jewish Voice for Peace join others in
protesting President Joe Biden's visit to Manhattan and calling for a
ceasefire between Israel and Hamas, on February 7, 2024, in New York
City.
Over the
centuries, Jewish commentators have offered a variety of explanations for this
ritual. Moses Maimonides famously called it a wake-up call to personal
atonement; others view it as a call to action or a tribute to God’s power. This
new year, however, I believe one reason stands out among all others. Today, we
sound the shofar as a call to moral accountability
At Rosh
Hashanah, we begin the holiest season of the year for the Jewish community: the
10 Days of Awe, which conclude on Yom Kippur (the Day of Atonement). Over the
next ten days, we will be challenged to break open the shells of inertia and
complacency that have built up over the past year. The shofar is sounded on
Rosh Hashanah to herald the inauguration of a deep, collective soul searching:
to look deep within, to face honestly what must be faced, if we are to truly
begin our new year anew.
I cannot
remember a Rosh Hashanah when the collective moral stakes were any higher for
the American Jewish community than this year. I would even go as far as to say
it may be the most morally consequential High Holiday season of our lifetimes.
As we begin this new year, the shofar calls us to account for a genocide,
ongoing even as we speak, perpetrated by a nation acting in the name of the
Jewish people.
How can we begin
to fathom a moral accounting of the genocide being waged in our names? Over
41,000 Palestinians killed in Gaza to date and over 95,000 injured, the
majority of whom are women and children, according to official reports.
According to one estimate, the ultimate death toll may already be closer to
200,000.
Whole extended
families, entire Palestinian bloodlines, have been wiped out completely. Much
of Gaza has been literally reduced to a human graveyard, with scores of bodies
buried beneath the rubble of destroyed and bulldozed homes. Neighborhoods and
regions have been literally wiped off the map.
Gaza’s
infrastructure and health care system has been decimated. According to the UN,
an “intentional and targeted starvation campaign” has led to widespread famine
and disease throughout the Gaza strip. Polio has now broken out, and relief
workers are struggling to deliver vaccines to children as bombs and missiles
fall around them.
Health care
workers, humanitarian workers and journalists are being killed, injured and
imprisoned in massive numbers. Human rights agencies have documented widespread
torture and abuse of prisoners, including sexual abuse, throughout a network of
torture camps.
Please note that
this unspeakable litany is not a review of the past year. It is a description
of a nightmare that continues in this very moment, with no end in sight.
As we
contemplate this inhuman status quo, it occurs to me that this Rosh Hashanah,
the broken sound of the shofar is more than a mere call to accounting. It is a
broken wail of grief — and a desperate moral challenge. This year the shofar
calls out to us in no uncertain terms: We Charge Genocide.
This is not a
point upon which we can equivocate. Not today. On this day, we face what must
be faced and say out loud what must be said. To argue this point now would
frankly be a sacrilege.
From a purely
legal point of view, a myriad of academic and legal experts have long since
confirmed the charge of genocide. As far back as October, Holocaust and
genocide scholar Raz Segal has called Israel’s actions in Gaza “a textbook case
of genocide.” On October 18, almost 800 scholars, lawyers and practitioners
called on “all relevant UN bodies … as well as the Office of the Prosecutor of
the International Criminal Court to immediately intervene … to protect the
Palestinian population from genocide.” More recently, Omer Bartov, a respected
historian of Holocaust and genocide studies at Brown University, accused Israel
of “systematic war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocidal actions.”
But beyond the
legal arguments, there is a critical, moral imperative behind this claim. For
many Jews, it’s impossible to imagine — let alone say out loud — that a Jewish
state, founded in the wake of the Holocaust, could possibly be perpetrating a
genocide.
I understand the
pain behind this refusal. I know it confronts many Jews with an unimaginable
prospect: to accept that we have become our own worst nightmare. But if we
cannot admit the truth on this of all days, then why bother gathering for Rosh
Hashanah in the first place? To dither on this point would make a sham of a
festival we dare to call the holiest season of the year.
Not long ago I
had a long conversation with my dear friend and colleague Rachel Beitarie,
director of the Israeli organization Zochrot. Rachel is among the precious few
Israeli activists who are in unabashed solidarity with Palestinians. Among
other things, she spoke about what it was like to be an Israeli activist for
Palestinian liberation who grew up on a kibbutz near the Gaza border, who
personally knew Israelis who were killed and taken hostage on October 7.
During our
recent conversation, Rachel and I talked in particular about how Israel
metabolizes the traumatic memory of the Holocaust as a way to rationalize its
genocidal violence in Gaza. In a follow-up letter after our conversation,
Rachel wrote the following words to me:
As years go by and most Holocaust survivors are no
longer with us, the identification and reliving of the trauma of former
genocide seem to only grow, in direct relation to the crimes committed under
the excuse of the right to defend ourselves and “prevent a second Holocaust.”
Because of this unrelenting propaganda, the linkage
of the Hamas attack of October 7 to the Holocaust, was made immediately, even
though it was logically bogus. It
was understandable at first, especially from people —
many of my friends and acquaintances among them — who personally
experienced the horrors of that day, waiting for help that took many hours to
come.
Having grown up in Israel, exposed as we are to
retraumatizing Holocaust education, the associative connection was almost
inevitable. Soon however, it became clear that this linkage was being overblown
and manipulated to justify the annihilation of Gaza; to justify, dare I say it,
another Holocaust.
Many outside
Israel have made the linkage between October 7 and the Holocaust as well.
Almost immediately in fact, the terrible massacres of that day were openly
characterized as “the single worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust.” As
Rachel pointed out, the two events have nothing to do with each other
whatsoever. Still, it is indeed painfully poignant to consider that this mass
killing occurred in a state founded in the wake of the Holocaust in order to
safeguard Jewish lives once and for all.
As we start to
reckon with the terrible events of October 7, I would suggest that the first
step would be to admit that this date was not a starting point. If we are to
truly and honestly commemorate this anniversary, we must understand it in the
context of the ongoing violence and injustice known as the Nakba — a nightmare
that began decades ago and is still ongoing.
As Israel’s
violence in Gaza escalated during the final months of 2023, the board of my
congregation, Tzedek Chicago, had numerous conversations about whether or not
to issue a congregational statement. As an anti-Zionist congregation that has
been very active in the Palestine solidarity movement, we felt we had a unique
voice to offer on this issue. And so, in December 2023, we released a statement
entitled, “In Gaza, Israel is Revealing the True Face of Zionism.” Here’s an
excerpt:
We … know there was a crucial, underlying context to
[the] horrible violence [of October 7]. We assert without reservation that to
contextualize is not to condone. On the contrary, we must contextualize these
events if we are to truly understand them — and find a better way forward.
The violence of October 7 did not occur in a vacuum.
It was a brutal response to a regime of structural violence that has oppressed
Palestinians for decades. At the root of this oppression is Zionism: a colonial
movement that seeks to establish and maintain a Jewish majority nation-state in
historic Palestine.
While Israel was founded in the traumatic wake of
the Holocaust to create safety and security for the Jewish people, it was a
state founded on the backs of another people, ultimately endangering the safety
and security of Jews and Palestinians alike. Israel was established through
what Palestinians refer to as the Nakba: the ethnic cleansing of 750,000
Palestinians from their homes in 1948. And since that time, Israel has
subjected Palestinians to a regime of Jewish supremacy in order to maintain its
demographic majority in the land.
This ongoing Nakba is the essential context for
understanding the horrifying violence of the past three months. Indeed, since
October 7, Israeli politicians have been terrifyingly open about their
intentions, making it clear that the ultimate end goal of their military
assault is to ethnically cleanse Gaza of its 2.2 million Palestinian residents.
One prominent member of the Israeli government put it quite plainly: “We are
now rolling out the Gaza Nakba. Gaza Nakba 2023. That’s how it’ll end.” More
recently, Prime Minister Netanyahu was reported as saying that he is actively
working to transfer Palestinians out of Gaza. The problem, he said, “is which
countries will take them.”
Israeli leaders are being true to their word: we are
witnessing the continuation of the Nakba in real time. As in 1948, Palestinians
are being driven from their homes through force of arms. As in 1948, families
are being forced to march long distances with hastily-collected possessions on
their backs. As in 1948, entire regions are being razed to the ground, ensuring
that they will have no homes to return to. As in 1948, Israel is actively
engineering the wholesale transfer of an entire population of people.
It is now eight
months since we released that statement, and I believe it is more accurate than
ever. In her letter to me, Rachel observed the irony that more and more
Israelis are now threatening a “second Nakba” when “until recently Israelis
denied that the Nakba ever happened.” Now however, many Israelis are using the
term with unabashed vengeance. Through word and deed, Israel’s ultimate end
game is becoming all too clear: It is the ethnic cleansing of Gaza.
This past
August, in fact, the Israeli press revealed the presence of a government plan
for Israel’s long term occupation of Gaza on “the day after.” According to the
plan, as described in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz:
Israel will control the northern Gaza Strip and
drive out the 300,000 Palestinians still there. Major Gen. Giora Eiland, the
war’s ideologue, proposes starving them to death, or exiling them, as a lever
with which to defeat Hamas. The Israeli right envisions a Jewish settlement of
the area, with vast real estate potential of convenient topography, a sea view,
and proximity to central Israel.… The southern Gaza Strip will be left for
Hamas, which will have to care for the destitute residents under Israeli siege,
even after the international community loses interest in the story and moves on
to other crises.
In other words,
a “real time Nakba” is being discussed openly in Israeli political and academic
circles. More recently, on September 15, professor Uzi Rabi, a prominent
researcher at Tel Aviv University, actually said these words in a radio
interview: “Remove the entire civilian population from the north, and whoever
remains there will be lawfully sentenced as a terrorist and subjected to a
process of starvation or extermination.”
Indeed, from the
very beginning of this genocide, Israeli leaders and politicians have been all
too transparent about their intentions. Just as the founders of the Zionist
movement themselves, from Theodor Herzl to David Ben-Gurion promoted the
“transfer” of the native Palestinian population to make way for a majority
Jewish state. Then, as now, we must take these leaders at their word. We must
take them very seriously. We can never say we didn’t know.
More than ever
before, this High Holiday season calls for Jewish communities to reckon
seriously with what Zionism has wrought. Not only in Gaza, but throughout the
West Bank, where violence and ethnic cleansing is running rampant, and in
Lebanon, which is now experiencing its own carnage and displacement, bringing
the entire region ever deeper into war.
How could it be
otherwise? This is what comes of an ideology and movement that from the
beginning viewed Jewish safety as zero sum; in which our security can only be
achieved at the expense of others, empowerment gained through the sheer power
of superior military technology, stronger weapons and higher walls.
And finally,
this High Holiday season, we must take this opportunity to ask ourselves
collectively: Where have we fallen short? This is a critical question,
particularly for those of us who have been active in the Palestine solidarity
movement.
If this is
indeed the season for hard truths, we must face the fact that despite all our
efforts this past year, we failed to stop a genocide. For all our calls for
ceasefire, on street corners and in the halls of city governments, for all of
the mass protests and acts of civil disobedience, for all of the courageous
student activism, a ceasefire seems farther away than ever at the moment.
This is not to
say that there has not been genuine progress this past year. But how do we
measure these successes against the mass killing that has occurred and
continues to occur every single day?
Sumaya Awad of
the Adalah Justice Project offered a powerful challenge on this point at the
Socialism 2024 conference in Chicago last month:
We know that there has been a massive shift in the
United States around Palestine. We have seen poll after poll show that the
majority of Americans support an arms embargo, the majority of Americans don’t
want to support Israel, are critical of Israel and yet we haven’t seen that
translate into the mass action we need.
Despite this massive shift, we grapple with the fact
that this shift came at the expense of how many lives lost? How many people
murdered? Who paid the price for these people to shift? And it’s not to say
that this shift is not tremendous and incredible and good — it is all of those
things, but we must also grapple with the fact that lives are being lost on the
daily. And that it is all by design and that it all can be stopped in basically
a moment.
And I say all of this not to pity Palestinians,
quite the opposite, nor that we must grieve more. Grief is necessary, but
that’s not the answer. I say it all because … we have to keep asking ourselves
— you have to ask yourselves — what am I doing with this knowledge? What am I
doing with this education? How is it translating into action? How does it
translate into action that does not preach to the choir, but preaches to those
who are not yet where we need them to be?
And you have to have an answer to that question.
Because a year from now, when you are back here, you have to have an answer.
Don’t find yourself just asking the same question. Be ready to answer, what
have I done in the last year?
I find these
words deeply appropriate to the sacred imperative of this new year. A year from
now, when we are back here, we will have to have an answer. We can’t find
ourselves just asking the same question. We must be ready to answer: What did
we do in the last year to bring this genocide to an end?
And years from
now, when the history of this genocide is written, we will be asked: Did we
speak out? And if so, what did we say? What did we risk?
For now, that
book is still open, even if every new page is becoming increasingly unbearable
to read. Even if the world would rather move on to another story.
We all have a
part to play in bringing this genocide to an end soon, in our own day. How will
we write ourselves into this book when it is finally recorded?
May we all play
our part in bringing this book of the genocide to a finish. May it come to an
end soon, in our own day. And when it does, may we come to understand it was
only part of a larger story — an even greater book that will conclude with
these glorious words: “Then Palestine was finally free, from the river to the
sea.”
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