The truce began today. I choose to call it this, since there is something ghoulish about the word “pause.” That sounds like a brief, unexpected, and unwelcomed interruption, like when the referee in a boxing match “pauses” the fight just long enough to be sure that one of the pugilists has not been so addled that he doesn’t know his own name, before starting it all up again so that his opponent can complete the task of delivering a catastrophic brain injury.

But maybe this truce is, indeed, a “pause” in just that sense; at some point, someone, to be fair probably someone in Jerusalem, will watch the clock count down and order the pummeling to start again. And that, more than anything about this truce, is what dismays me the most about the truce; any cessation in the death and destruction which, at this point has become meaningless, is welcomed. Yet, it will come down to an explicit human choice to resume it.

That chills me to the core: Someone will consciously choose gratuitous killing over not-killing when the four days are up.

I wrote this in social media on Friday, feeling simultaneously relieved and sick to my stomach. After a week of promises and negotiations, the State of Israel and Hamas – for those are the two belligerents, even if the dead and maimed are virtually all noncombatants – reached a deal. Four short days of quiet, if not really peace. The war goes on, suspended in the unreality of a commercial break: “and now a word from our sponsors.”

I took a brief pause from chronicling the horror in social media, as I have for the last five weeks, to lick my wounds, offer support to friends, and take some time to think about when this all will end, but the cacophony of killing has so overwhelmed my senses, and my sense, that I can’t imagine it. There can be no lasting peace without Palestinian freedom, there can be no freedom without an Israeli withdrawal from the Occupied Territories, there will be no withdrawal without a ceasefire, and a ceasefire seems utterly unimaginable.

All there is… Is a pause.

What follows is my continuing social media commentary from the last week.

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There is a very stupid map meme going around with some text commentary from one Dan Baxter which purports to prove that the territory of Palestine is, and always has been, Jewish land, and that much of the Mediterranean is occupied by Arabs, so they can live anywhere! My friend Marianne Ackerman shared the meme in order, I presume, to inspire some comment, so I commented. You can go to Baxter’s profile to see the meme yourself (https://www.facebook.com/DannyBaxter, I am not going to associate myself with something so utterly ignorant), but these are my comments on the share:

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One of the myths promoted by Zionism is that all Arabs are fungible and interchangeable. In this thinking, a Palestinian Arab is exactly the same as a Syrian Arab, as a Yemeni Arab, as an Iraqi Arab as… etc. And that it should be able to move these undifferentiated masses from one place to another. This is exactly how Euro-Americans in the United States and Canada narrated the indigenous people of North America. They were just “Indians,” who happened to be on the land. There was no difference between Haudenosaunee, Wendat, Cree, Lakota, Cherokee, Seminole, Cheyenne, etc. – the were all simply “Indians.” And as “Indians,” they could be mixed and matched and moved anywhere – so the Cherokee and Creek People, who happened to occupy lands in the Southeast desirable to Euro-Americans, could simply be forced to move to “Indian Territory” in Oklahoma. Theodor Herzl’s thinking was greatly influenced by the settlement of the American West and the settlement of South Africa by the Boers (as well as by German Volkisch nationalism). He cites them as models in his diaries. In Der Judenstaat, Herzl doesn’t even acknowledge that Ottoman Palestine is even occupied by humans, in much the same way that ideologues of the white settlement of the American West, like Frederick Jackson Turner, regarded Indigenous people as merely obstacles in the land that needed to be cleared away.

So, this map is not ideologically neutral; it promotes a very specific myth and, by sharing this map, you are, in fact, “advancing a POV.”

Most scholars, from Josephus to Israel Finkelstein, mark the beginning of Jewish history at the end of the Babylonian Exile in 518 BCE. While the Israelite civilization in the Levant was the ancestral civilization of the Jews, in much the same way that the Germanic tribes of northern Germany were the ancestors of the English, they were not, in fact, Jews. Proto-Jews, perhaps. Most scholars call them Israelites, or Israelitish Canaanites. So Jewish history, per se, does not actually reach back to 2000 BCE. Israelite history, which began after the Bronze Age Collapse around 1200 BCE doesn’t even reach that far back. Mr. Baxter does not appear to be a historian (I am), or know much about history, since virtually all of the “history” in his timeline before the 8th century BCE is documented only in the Tanakh, which very few historians today regard as a reliable historical source. Finkelstein, the Israeli archeologist I mentioned above, has in fact cast doubt that the unified Kingdom of Israel, or its Kings Saul, David, and Solomon, ever actually existed.

Moreover, what he fails to acknowledge is that there was a large Jewish population in the Levant even after the complete expulsion of Jews from Judea proper in 135 CE. Most historians today agree that most, though certainly not all, of this population converted to Christianity throughout late antiquity, and then to Islam in the 7th and 8th centuries CE. Lester Grabbe has estimated that at least one fifth of the population of the Eastern Roman Empire by 70 CE was Jewish, living in places like Egypt, Cyrene, Syria, Greece, as well as Roman Judea. The best estimate available is that there were, in fact, 7,000,000 Jews in the Roman world, including 2 million in Egypt alone, in the first century CE. Even assuming 500,000 casualties in the three Jewish rebellions, one would have to wonder how the Jewish population plummeted to somewhere between 750,000 and 1 million by the early middle ages, and no more than 100,000 in the Levant. There are, in fact, very few accounts of genocidal violence against this community under either Byzantine or Muslim rule, while there is ample evidence of extensive and widespread conversions among local Christian and Jewish populations in the region to Islam in the 7th and 8th centuries. So, one must conclude that this vast Jewish population simply assimilated into the Levantine Muslim population.

So… Palestinian Arabs are almost certainly the descendants of a long-resident Levantine population and, thus, the descendants of the Levantine Jews who lived there. If Jews, by virtue of their ancestry, have a right to the land, then the Palestinians, by virtue of their ancestry, do, too.

Finally, Baxter says that “In 1948, the UN established the State of Israel, the nation of Jews.” United Nations Resolution 181, in 1947, does in fact authorize the creation of a Jewish state, the wording is, in fact fairly explicit and it commits the UN to: “carry out measures for the establishment of the frontiers of the Arab and Jewish States” in the British Mandate for Palestine. What this means is that, if the State of Israel is a legally legitimate state under international law, then so is a Palestinian state. In fact, the State of Israel is illegally occupying the territory designated for a Palestinian state under international law. So, Baxter’s warning “Don’t buy the Palestinian lies that they are entitled to the land. It simply is not true” is, itself, a lie, and simply not true.

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The great Jewish philosopher Simon Rawidowicz was skeptical about the State of Israel; he accepted that it existed (although he was appalled that Zionists had named it “Israel,” and had a lengthy correspondence with David Ben-Gurion in which he protested that fact), but worried about what it might become. In 1949, he wrote:

“Our mothers and fathers always blessed a child: ‘May he grow up to be a Jew, an honest Jew, a good Jew’; we should also say the same prayer in the State of Israel: ‘May he grow up to be a Jew.'”

I believe that Rawidowicz would have been disappointed.

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If you have never read UN Resolution 181, you probably should. It forms the legal basis for the existence of the State of Israel. There is a whole lot that we can say about UN partitioning this territory, and whether or not it was philosophically or ideologically sound, but that is a conversation for another time. And I will delete comments that get into the weeds about that because what is important for me is that the Resolution that established a Jewish state under international law also established a Palestinian state. If the State of Israel is a legally legitimate entity, then so is the Palestinian state that was supposed to have been established in the territories that the State of Israel now illegally occupies.

It is worthwhile reading, and contains much worth considering, including, but not only: “No expropriation of land owned by an Arab in the Jewish State (by a Jew in the Arab State)4/ shall be allowed except for public purposes.  In all cases of expropriation full compensation as fixed by the Supreme Court shall be paid previous to dispossession.”

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“The anti-Semites will have carried the day. Let them have this satisfaction, for we too shall be happy. They will have turned out to be right because they ARE right.” – Theodor Herzl on removing Europe’s Jewish population of Europe to a Jewish State, 1895.

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Two months ago, almost all of my Jewish shvesterkind regarded Benjamin Netanyahu as a corrupt crypto-fascist who was destroying the State of Israel. Today, most of those who incline to Zionism regard him as an infallible Kohen Gadol whose every word is the truth.

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As Chanukah approaches, and I think about how the narrative of the Maccabees has been deployed over the last 2,000 years as a struggle for liberation from domination, I find myself wondering if, this year, we can reconfigure it to relate to the struggle of Diaspora Jewish liberation from Zionist domination…

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I do not believe that the State of Israel is my homeland, though a fair number of my friends do. I do not believe that Jesus is the savior and the son of God, though a fair number of my friends do. I can accept and respect our differences in both cases. What I cannot tolerate is when Zionists and Christians do not respect our differences and try to force their beliefs on me.

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It amuses me that, while I am very comfortable with being social media friends with Zionists whose opinions I do not share, provided that they don’t advocate for mass murder or call me a Nazi (and some do, sadly), most of my erstwhile Zionist friends (at least those to whom I am not related) seem to have unfriended me. I can only guess that they regard advocating for peace and human rights and criticizing Zionism and the State of Israel’s policies as unpardonable sins. In their minds, they can denounce me as an “un-Jew,” but I can’t promote the Jewish principles of Tzedek, Chesed, and Pikuach Nefesh.

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I might be wrong but creating 12,000 martyrs in order to defeat an extremist movement motivated by a narrative of martyrdom seems like a bad strategy. 🤔

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For those of you following along with your scorecard, the bill is now 13,300 Palestinians dead. Amnesty International is not mincing words here, but I suppose that Zionist apologists will simply denounce the organization as antisemitic. The blind obedience of so many Disapora Jews to the State of Israel, and to Binyamin Ha Kohen Gadol, whom they condemned as a wannabe dictator two months ago, is both shocking and dismaying.

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Most of my extended family stopped listening to me in 1982, when a letter to the editor I wrote appeared in the op-ed section of the Montreal Gazette. In it, I expressed horror at the Israeli invasion of Lebanon and the subsequent massacre of Palestinian refugees by their Christian Militia allies, while IDF soldiers watched. It was a rude awakening for teenaged me to learn that the country that I had been taught was my ancestral homeland, and populated by idealistic kibbutzniks in bucket hats who sang “Hinei Ma Tov” sitting under palm trees in desert wadis, was just another military aggressor.

There was some muted outrage from a couple of relatives when we met at my Zeyde’s for Rosh Hashanah treats. What was, for me, naked militarism, was justifiable self-defense for them. “What if someone deliberately spills their coffee on your sofa?” My aunt asked the following Sunday in my parents’ living room, smiling in that way that kindergarten teachers do when they teach particularly slow children complex ideas with simple parables. She waved her coffee cup over the couch. My mother cringed, no doubt considering the exact same question as the liquid precariously slopped over into the saucer.

“What if they keep doing it, and keep doing it? Won’t you try to stop them?” she continued, reducing the complexities of Middle Eastern geopolitics to an analogy of hot beverages and suburban furniture. In fairness, the point wasn’t totally lost on me. Munich, the Maalot Massacre, the Golan Heights – these were Israel’s Alamo. The conventional wisdom, shared by virtually every fellow Jew that I had ever come across, was that Lebanon was a dangerous back door for terrorists, and it had to be closed.

But I had to question whether self-defense had no limits; if violating a neighboring country’s sovereignty, empowering one faction in a complex civil war, and then letting them loose to commit an act of savage brutality on civilians, was a legitimate part of it. That troubled me, and most of my relatives stopped listening to me, concluding that, while I might be bright, I was “too clever” for my own good. From that point on, we have maintained our warm relations mostly by ignoring my heresies and not listening to anything that I might say – especially on Zionism and the State of Israel. I’m pretty sure that all but a small number have unfollowed me in social media.

That’s okay. I use the unfollow feature a fair bit, as well as the restricted lists to keep “friends” out of my restricted feed while not necessarily unfriending them. I reserve unfriending for those friends who express racist, homophobic, transphobic and antisemitic ideas. In those cases where someone – even a fellow Jew – accuses me of being a Nazi, or a “kapo,” which has happened a great deal lately, I don’t even ask for an explanation. If they are saying it, they have been thinking it, and if they have been thinking it, then even if we have been real-life friends since childhood, they were never really my friends at all.

The fact is that friendship is complex, and we all have a hierarchy of friends, starting from those closest to us, with whom we share history, ideas, tastes, and values. Then, there are those friends who might not mesh perfectly, but who are fun to be around, or who bring ideas into our lives; these are the ones to whom you give the benefit of the doubt, cut some slack when they’re being dumb, and thank when the offer enlightenment – or just a good idea. There are friends who are just kind of there; like the work buddies, classmates, teammates, and neighbors with whom we share witticisms and pleasantries. And then there are the acquaintances that we say hi to in the dog park but know nothing about.

And, if we all naturally make hierarchies of our real-life friends, then why not with our fictive friends in the attenuated environment of social media? It doesn’t really bother me if I’m not your best friend, or if I’m on your restricted list, or you unfollowed me. It doesn’t even bother me when you unfriend me (just spare me the long flounce in a PM where you call me a “kapo,” a “moron,” or a “fucking asshole”). I do sometimes wonder how I offended them, but I get over it.

It is different with family, however. No matter what my relatives say in social media, I feel an obligation to maintain a connection with them. Okay, there are limits but, as far as I can tell, none have even approached them. They are family, and they are all I have left of the dozens of cousins, aunts, and uncles with whom I celebrated Passover and Rosh Hashanah in my childhood. I don’t have to listen to them when they say things that I find… er… problematic, nor do they have to listen to me.

Though… Some do.

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I did once entertain the thought of visiting the State of Israel. It is not my homeland, and I do not approve of its government policies, but neither are places like Turkey, Uzbekistan, India, etc., and I would very much like to visit them. But this war and the toxic Zionist campaign against critics and Jewish dissenters has made it hard for me to imagine ever visiting the State of Israel. And that makes me inexpressibly sad.

Samarkand, here I come.

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Whether or not Eretz Yisrael is the Jews’ “ancestral homeland” is utterly irrelevant. (And it is a far more complex question that you might think.) The State of Israel exists as a positive creation of international law. That is the beginning and the end of any question about the legitimacy of the State of Israel, and I wish Zionists would simply stop mobilizing their primordial fantasies to justify what needs no justification.

The thing to remember, however, is that UN Resolution 181, which is the basis for the legal legitimacy of the State of Israel, is also the basis for the legal legitimacy of a Palestinian state. If you deny the latter, you deny the former; if you deny the former, you deny the latter.

The photo is of Gregory Peck as King David in David and Bathsheba (1951), one of many primordialist-Zionist cinematic epics produced by Hollywood after 1948. Significantly, while the producer, Daryl Zanuck, was Jewish, not a single member of the cast or senior crew were. The screenwriter, Philip Dunne, was an Irish-American Catholic, and the director, Henry King, was an Episcopalian from Christiansburg, VA.

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When I say that the State of Israel will someday cease to exist, I am not saying that I wish it would cease to exist. It is merely an observation that states have finite lifespans. Canada will someday cease to exist, so will the US, Burkina Faso, Italy, the United Kingdom, Indonesia, and every other state, just as the Roman Empire, Burgundy, Joseon, Thebes, Wilusa, etc. ceased to exist. This is merely something that happens. It’s like saying “I will die someday” does not mean that I wish to die. I know that Zionists believe that the State of Israel is an exception to everything, but please don’t send me messages accusing me of (a) supporting Hamas, and (b) antisemitism.