I have always expected a rupture in Am Yisroel; the definitive and irreconcilable cleavage between the Jews of Zionism and the rest of us. But I did not expect it to come so soon, or with such vehemence. I really don’t believe that there will be any going back after this. Samaria and Judah can no longer coexist and, as much as that realization pains me, it means that we have to find a way to build and nurture our own peoplehood.

I posted this in social media this week, as the War on Gaza raged on and the Palestinian death toll creeped toward 19,000 – including more than 7,000 children and at least three Israeli hostages gunned-down by the IDF soldiers whom they were approaching under a white flag. IDF representatives say that they have killed around 5,000 Hamas terrorists, although it is not clear whether that number represents members of the Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Brigades, or includes those members of Hamas who are members of the Gaza civil administration (doctors, public works administrators, dog catchers, etc.). Even if it’s the former, it is clear that Hamas remains an effective fighting force (the Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Brigades started the conflict with at least 15,000 fighters), while the State of Israel has proven itself to be extremely efficient at killing children, and the hostages it claims to be intent on recusing.

As the Christian calendar stumbled toward the Festival of the Nativity, I can’t help but recall St. Matthew’s description of the Massacre of the Innocents in the Christian Scriptures:

“Then Herod, when he saw that he was mocked of the wise men, was exceeding wroth, and sent forth, and slew all the children that were in Bethlehem, and in all the coasts thereof, from two years old and under, according to the time which he had diligently inquired of the wise men. Then was fulfilled that which was spoken by Jeremiah the prophet, saying, In Rama was there a voice heard, lamentation, and weeping, and great mourning, Rachel weeping for her children, and would not be comforted, because they are not.”

Biblical thoughts have been coming to my mind in the last two months, especially the sundering of the Kingdom of Israel into Judah and Samaria in chapter 11 of the first Book Kings. Unable to reconcile the diversity within the House of Israel, and unwilling to respect the interests and needs of all of its people, the unified Kingdom of Israel split apart:

“And when all Israel saw that the king hearkened not unto them, the people answered the king, saying: ‘What portion have we in David? neither have we inheritance in the son of Jesse; to your tents, O Israel; now see to thine own house, David.’ So Israel departed unto their tents… So Israel rebelled against the house of David, unto this day. And it came to pass, when all Israel heard that Jeroboam was returned, that they sent and called him unto the congregation, and made him king over all Israel; there was none that followed the house of David, but the tribe of Judah only.”

The past is prologue; what happened to us, as a people, before seems to be happening again. The rift between the Diaspora and the State of Israel, between non-Zionist Jews and Zionist Jews, between the generations who see the Zionist project through the lens of Sabras in bucket-hats singing “Hineh Ma Tov” in a desert wadi, and those who see it in the context of rabid, wild-eyed settlers with automatic weapons attacking a Palestinian village, has grown too wide to be easily bridged, if at all.

Among the many horrors of this war – and they are too many to enumerate – is that it has finally, perhaps irrevocably, sundered the House of Israel. And I am not certain that we will survive.

***

I have a social media friend who is both Israeli and Russian. Although we don’t agree on everything, I know her to be a profoundly decent, caring person committed to human rights and common decency, and I know that she wants peace and an end to killing. I cannot even imagine what she has been going through. She is caught in a bind between her convictions and the Hell of social media performative politics about the wars. If I have any hope for the future, it is because of people like her – more than people like me – and I always try to remember that, when evil is so prevalent, there is something truly heroic in just saying “no,” even at the cost of ostracism… and worse. I do not fully agree with my friend all the time, but I admire her more than I can say, and I wish I could ease the Hell that I know she is experiencing right now.

***

I do fear for the State of Israel and its citizens. The longer the War on Gaza continues, the more that Israelis will be isolated in the world. There is a significant generational divide between the perceptions of Israel, even among Diaspora Jews. Those who remember 1967, 1973, Munich, and Entebbe, tend to be more pro-Israel; those whose attitudes were shaped by the Intifadas, the failed peace process, the increasing brutality of the Occupation and the illegal settlements, and the on-again-off-again wars tend to be more pro-Palestinian – even anti-Israel. And now, Gaza.

It seems significant to me that 153 countries voted in favor of the UN ceasefire resolution – including Belgium, France, Finland, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and many other countries in the US and NATO orbits – while only eight joined the United States and the State of Israel to vote against it. If I was an Israeli, I would be very worried about this. A tide has turned since the State of Israel could count on the clients of the American Empire to unquestioningly follow Washington’s lead, even in what was ultimately merely performative politics.

Many of the abstentions, like the UK, Ukraine, Germany, are significant, since they seem to say “we would have voted for the ceasefire if we could have” – Ukraine being constrained by its need for American support in its war with Russia, and Germany by the fear of being accused of “antisemitism” by Zionists and the State of Israel. And the tone of the global commentary – since the Euro-American North is not the whole world – has been strongly in support of a ceasefire and, increasingly, in support of Palestinian statehood.

These things have momentum and, as the CBC noted, the momentum in swinging sharply against the State of Israel. Even President Biden, the State of Israel’s biggest cheerleader among global leaders, has been tempering his words, noting last Tuesday that the State of Israel is “starting to lose… support by the indiscriminate bombing that takes place.”

I fear for the State of Israel because it is fighting a war that it cannot win and, in the broadest sense, it will inevitably lose. What will happen when it has lost even its staunchest sponsors and becomes a pariah throughout the international community? Israelis are already inclined to a kind of insular paranoia cultivated over the years of Benjamin Netanyahu using his bully pulpit to drive home the idea that they are existentially insecure and surrounded by enemies, from Palestinian terrorists, to BDS, to Diaspora Jews whose growing ambivalence is, in his terms, antisemitism.

What will happen to Israelis when they are all alone, isolated, and despised, just as Netanyahu has always said they were, with only American Christian Nationalists eager for the Rapture to support them as pawns of the Apocalypse? This war will destroy – is destroying – the State of Israel and the future of Israelis. And it is a ruin that the State of Israel will have brought upon itself.

***

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/dec/15/israeli-military-says-its-troops-shot-and-killed-three-hostages-by-mistake

This is so unbelievably depressing, but simultaneously completely expected. Israeli soldiers shot and killed three hostages in Gaza. It was a terrible incident of “friendly fire,” and the IDF has called it a “tragedy.” That seems appropriate, since a tragedy is a catastrophe or suffering brought about by human hubris; it is well worth asking what the hubris was in this incident. And… I can’t help but thinking that this is so reminiscent of the horrors and atrocities of the “free fire zones” of the Vietnam War, when American soldiers were ordered to shoot and ask questions later.

***

The myth promoted by Maximalist Zionists is that Zionism was an inevitable expression of Jewish history and identity. I just read a comment on a friend’s post that Zionism goes back 3,500 years in Jewish history.* And I think this myth is meant, in part, to elide the deep ambivalence, and outright hostility, that many European Jews had for the Zionist project, even after the Shoah. To acknowledge this, and to recognize that so many of our leading thinkers, from Sigmund Freud, to Simon Rawidowicz, to Aaron Samuel Tamares, to Albert Einstein and beyond, is to say that Zionism might not have been necessary, and the State of Israel (and the consequent oppression of Palestinians) might not have been inevitable. There was dissent and other possibilities before, and even after 1948. This 1938 report from the Jewish Telegraphic Agency is worth reading.

—

* Setting aside the fact that it is very difficult to make a claim that Jewish history goes back more than about 2,500 years (scholars from Josephus to Israel Finkelstein almost unanimously acknowledge a division between Israelite/Israelitish history, and Jewish history, which is post-Exilic), Zionism simply could not have existed before the mid-19th century, since the category of “the nation” and “the homeland” was not available before that time…

***

Stepping back from the War on Gaza, to see it all in a bigger frame, this report is utterly nauseating. Zionists and apologists for the State of Israel want to deflect attention from the larger issues by narrowing the timeline to start on 7 October in order to justify the use of overwhelming force of the invasion of Gaza, and by ignoring the systemic nature of Israeli abuse.

That abuse is real, and intentional, and goes as far as Israeli security personnel inscribing numbers on the bodies of Palestinians – including children – whom they have detained without charge or trial. “They kept saying, ‘You are all Hamas.’ They wrote numbers on our arms. My number was 56.”

We should stop and think about that. Inscribing numbers on people is not a neutral act in Jewish history. One cannot simply say that it is a bookkeeping practice, or necessary to keep track of a large number of illegally detained people. Etching numbers on skin has a deep, and traumatic meaning that all Jews know. It is the ultimate symbol of dehumanization. As Primo Levi wrote in If This Is a Man:

“I have learnt that I am a Haftling. My number is 174517; we have been baptized, we will carry the tattoo on our left arm until we die.”

This horrifies me because it is clear evidence that the State of Israel and its security forces know exactly what they are doing. And this is no hearsay, this practice has been documented before. What else can it possibly mean than the State of Israel, which claims to be the homeland of all Jews, and the protector of the People of Israel, has chosen just this practice to degrade and dehumanize Palestinians?

***

If you unpack the rhetoric of “rampant antisemitism on campus,” you’ll find a whole load of contradictions, obfuscations, and paradoxes. Who, after all, are these agents of antisemitism supposed to be? Are they Palestinian or Muslim students, who make up about one percent of the entire student population of the US, or maybe Palestinian or Muslim faculty, who make up an even smaller proportion of the professoriate?

Or, maybe they imagine that the agents are from the traditional and historical constituency of antisemitism – white Christians – who happen to be leveraging anti-Israel rhetoric to make their antisemitic claims. Setting aside for a moment that antisemitism correlates inversely with level of education and exposure to cultural diversity and, thus, one would expect to find fewer antisemites in diverse populations in educational institutions, it is necessary to point that that this constituency of antisemitism – white Christians – has been around for centuries, and has probably not experienced any more of a surge than it did over the last few years as part of the movement that brought politicians like Elise Stefanik to power.

Perhaps they mean non-Muslim students and faculty who are critical of the State of Israel, but do not necessarily bear any animus toward Jews? In this case, the argument as to whether such public rhetoric does reflect an increase of antisemitism depends on whether one equates the State of Israel with the Jewish people as a whole – and that is a specious and ideological argument. Indeed, it would mean that a Jewish student or faculty member – both represented at far higher levels in the student body and professoriate than Muslims – who criticizes the State of Israel is, somehow, an agent of antisemitism.

Make no mistake: Antisemitism is a thing, but it is not the thing that Zionists and antisemitic reactionary politicians like Rep. Stefanik claim it is. For Rep. Stefanik, it is merely a convenient code for “those Jew-dominated universities are full of Jewish liberals, and need to be shut-down,” which is, after all, antisemitic.

Think about that when you applaud her, my Zionist friends.

***

The people making the biggest fuss about “campus antisemitism” have neither been on an actual campus in 30 years, nor have they experienced antisemitism. 🤔

***

Antisemitism is a thing, and it always has been. But the myth of rampant antisemitism promoted by the State of Israel, its Zionist proxies, and neo-totalitarian redhats like Elise Stefanik ignores something very important. The actual victims of violent hate in America in the last two months have been Muslims: three Palestinian college students who were shot in Vermont, and a child who was stabbed to death in Illinois.

***

Elise Stefanic, the antisemitic member of the House of Representatives who has reinvented herself as a heroic opponent of antisemitism white, at the same time, never repudiating her embrace of the “Great Replacement” conspiracy theory, is the manifestation of all that has happened to my people. We no longer exist as an autonomous community, but only as a floating signifier to be deployed by Zionists, the State of Israel, and neo-totalitarians. We have become vacated of all meaning, erased by cultural and political appropriations even more thoroughly than by any of our historical tormenters and enemies.

So, if you wonder why I am appalled by Gentiles who have appropriated our practices, like lighting the chanukiah, “in solidarity,” this is why. This is how they efface the reality of our otherness.

***

Those Zionists who say “there were no Palestinians before 1948” as if it’s some kind of slam-dunk have it backward. There were no ISRAELIS before 1948, but there were a whole lot of Palestinians. And some were Jewish.