I have been posting in social media about the War on Gaza, and collecting these posts in weekly installments in The Typescript for more than two months. It began as an act of witness and resistance. The Holocaust historian Yehuda Bauer wrote in Rethinking the Holocaust about the manifold forms that resistance to the Holocaust took, and settled on Amidah, the name of a sequence of prayers that Jews recite while standing.
“In this context it means literally ‘standing up against,’ but that does not capture the deeper sense of the word,” he wrote. What he meant was that “standing up against,” offering a resistance, no matter how futile, “sanctified life” as does the prayer. Use whatever word you must if “sanctified” does not suit your taste – respect, honor, glorify all work as well – but that is the ethical vocation. One need not believe that success is possible, or even likely. But one must stand up against.
So, this has been and continues to be my Amidah.
I have written more than 18,000 words on the War on Gaza in the last two months. That comes to something on the order of 65 double-spaced manuscript pages. And I have little doubt that the page count will grow longer still.
It is wearying. Writing is what I do and, I hope that, through my writing, I am able to do some good. I have heard from friends and strangers (many of whom have become friends) that I have been able to put what they are thinking and feeling into words and helping them to feel a little less alone, isolated, and marginalized. It is a great privilege to be able to do this, and the good wishes and expressions of support that I have received from many of you have been immensely gratifying.
Yet, at the same time, the abuse continues. I prune it regularly from the comments threads on my posts, and delete the personal messages, but it’s there. Like everyone, I have lost personal connections, including some that I valued very highly, and I don’t know if those can ever be repaired. It wears me down, just as it wears all of us down, even if I take comfort and strength from the little community – our republic of letters – that we have built together here.
What wears the most is the fact that the war grinds on with no end in sight. More than 20,000 Gazans have been killed and 50,000 injured, hundreds in the Occupied West Bank and Lebanon, far eclipsing the 1,100 Israelis murdered by Hamas terrorists on 7 October. It doesn’t look as if the killing will stop any time soon, and that fact beats down on me every day, robs me of sleep and even simple joys like celebrating Chanukah with my family.
I am well aware of my insignificance in all of this; social media posts and a journal of witness in The Typescript are never going to change the minds of the מלחמה־צינדערס (masters of war) in Jerusalem and Washington or inspire the soldiers in the field to lay down their weapons. I am shouting into a vast emptiness, from deep in the bottom of a well. And all that shouting is tiring.
I will keep shouting, as we all will. Maybe our collective insignificance can add up to something resembling significance. And maybe that will help to change things. Because this is what we do.
This is the collection of my shouting into the darkness, so far. Maybe it will inspire you – maybe it already has – to keep standing up to sanctify life and heal the world.
Many thanks to all my friends.
***
A few weeks back, I referenced Rashid Khalidi’s 2020 book The Hundred Years War on Palestine (along with James Gelvin) in a Jewish FB group. I was viciously attacked with the usual ad-hominems (“kapo,” “self-hating Jew,” etc.) and, very soon, banned from the group.
I guess that was to be expected. But what was unexpected was how many participants in my auto da fe, none of whom had actually read Khalidi, condemned the very idea of a Palestinian writing a history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. “They all hate us,” one of my torch-bearing interlocutors insisted. “Anything that an Arab [he used a slur rather than “Arab”] says about [the state of] Israel is a lie!”
This was unexpected because I really did not expect people to wear their abject bigotry so openly, or to be so unapologetic (even proud) about their ideological ignorance. But not surprising.
A friend’s recent post reminded me of this. You should read Khalidi.
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The US watered-down the UN resolution and then abstained. This is American moral courage in a nutshell.
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What is happening in Palestine is not a “crisis.” This is from the Greek κρίσις, which means a decision, or a change. The very definition of a “crisis” is that it reaches a “critical point,” and then passes. In a medical crisis, the patient comes through that point and is healed, or they die. A chronic condition, no matter how agonizing and wasting, is not a crisis.
The War in Gaza is not a crisis, it is the latest symptom of a long, ongoing, agonizing horror; a chronic affliction of oppression that will not pass without intervention. And that intervention still seems a long way off, so the wasting away, and the suffering of Gaza will continue, even when the State of Israel is satisfied with its current work.
Rather, what Gaza NEEDS is a crisis, that moment of decision and change, that will bring the affliction of oppression to an end.
***
One of my cousins sent me a PM basically saying that they were cutting me off. There was no explanation, just a terse couple of lines. This cousin is quite observant Modern Orthodox and we have had disagreements in the past about Zionism and the State of Israel, but we have always been able to agree to disagree – and I wish we still could. But that option, the respectful disagreement that has characterized so much Jewish life and culture for so long, no longer seems available to many Zionist Jews. (In fairness, I seem to be able to maintain relationships with other Zionist shvesterkind, whatever our differences.) I cannot enter their mind to see what I have said or done precipitated this break; do they think I support Hamas, or do they believe that any criticism of the State of Israel – particularly at this moment – is grounds for cherem? I wish I knew, and that I was able to discuss this with them.
Still, my cousin did not unfriend me, they simply said that they would not talk to me. So maybe there is hope that this is temporary, and more in the character of a nezifah. A slap in the face for my insolence. I’ll take that and stay insolent.
***
A friend, whose identification with Judaism has always been a bit tenuous and attenuated despite his family background, asked me if I could suggest any reading about “how to be Jewish without believing in ☁️.” I’m no rabbi, of course, but I suspect that why he asked me, of all people is that I’m a Jew who doesn’t talk about God. I sent him after Sherwin Wine (especially his book A Provocative People) and Mordecai Kaplan’s The Meaning of God in Modern Jewish Religion (Kaplan does believe in God, but the way he works through the question is very enlightening), and I invited him to come by for beer and pizza to talk, since this question is not easily addressed in txt messages.
But I find this request interesting and, in some way, hopeful. I don’t believe that you need God to be a Jew, or any particular, nailed-down “God idea.” As Kaplan himself wrote, Judaism is a rich, complex civilization in which faith is only a part. Hell, I’m not even sure that Moses de León and the authors of the Sefer Zohar believed in God in any way that modern Orthodoxy would understand. As pretty much every historian of Jewish life (with the exception of Simon Schama) would say, “it’s complicated.”
And it is difficult for me to ignore the historical context of the request. The War on Gaza has challenged many of our ideas about who we are as a people, and as individuals in relation to a people. The bloodletting has revealed contradictions and aporia that many of us have taken for granted, and has forced us to reevaluate what we mean when we say something as simple – yet as profound – as “I am a Jew.” And, for many of us, those meanings resonate with moral and ethical ideas and traditions, the prophetic tradition rather than the messianic promises of naked ethnonationalism.
And I think that’s where my friend is coming from (I’ll know more after beer and pizza). This historical moment, where years of open antisemitism often tolerated and even cultivated by the State of Israel and its Zionist proxies has converged with the horror of Gaza being perpetrated in our name, is asking us all to take a stand. And one way to take a stand, as the Holocaust historian Yehuda Bauer wrote, is to make an Amidah, the most Jewish of sanctified acts.
The only question for many of us is “how do I do that?”
***
One of the things that I find most maddening about the vilification by many Zionist Jews of non-Zionist and anti-Zionist Jews who dare criticize the State of Israel is that differences of opinion and criticisms of power are kind of the most Jewish things in the world. As Abraham Joshua Heschel wrote, ours is a prophetic culture where we are not merely allowed to speak up, but actively enjoined to. If the books of the Nevi’im are to have any meaning for us, it is that speaking up is a human obligation – and you don’t even have to be perfectly or absolutely right, since perfection and absolute truth are properties of the divine. Make a mess, yell, scream, complain about people in power, criticize the priests and kings for failing to walk the righteous path; THIS is how we articulate our Jewishness as a legacy of the prophetic tradition.
We can criticize each other and disagree without denying the legitimacy of our disagreements. I am not a Zionist and I denounce the State of Israel – a geopolitical entity and not a person – but I will not deny the Jewishness of my fellow Jews who are Zionists. Yet so many of the Zionists, particularly those in positions of influence and power in our community, have the chutzpah to deny the Jewishness of those Jews who don’t just stand in line with the State of Israel.
That is the most un-Jewish thing in the world.
***
This is just one symptom of the reckoning that is coming in the Diaspora Jewish community. I, too, remember being fed a narrative meant to engender unquestioning support for the State of Israel and a blind embrace of Zionism. I still know the Hebrew words of “Ha Tikvah” by heart, and remember singing the anthem at summer camp, as the Blue-and-White went up the flagpole alongside the Canadian flag in the morning, and came down, to be folded in triangles with military precision in the evening.
I did not attend a Jewish day school, but the afternoon Hebrew school I attended at Temple Rodeph Shalom in Dollard des Ormeaux, outside of Montreal, featured a significant amount of Zionist education, too. It was unquestioning, and I remember being taught that Palestinian Arabs fled the Israeli partition in 1948, despite the entreaties of the Israelis for them to stay, because they were commanded to by their leaders like the Grand Mufti Amin al-Husseini.
It did not occur to me at the time to question why the Palestinians were so frightened that they would “willingly” leave their homes, or why my teachers assumed that they were so devoid of thought and agency that they would simply do what their leaders told them to do. Those teachers were mostly young Israelis who had been hired on a kind of work-study, paid largely by Zionist organizations and funded in part by the State of Israel’s Ministry of Education and Culture. That was the narrative that they, certainly, had learned in school, and passed along to us.
In the years after 1967, the State of Israel became increasingly involved in shaping the narrative in the Diaspora Jewish community, taking advantage of the surge of Zionist pride following the Six-Day War, and the intimate relationship with the US government forged by Richard Nixon and Henri Kissinger. Before 1967, it was possible – indeed, not uncommon – for Jewish institutions like shuls and schools to treat Zionism with benign indifference and the State of Israel with little more than curiosity. The postcards of the beaches at Haifa and the Gates of Jerusalem inspired fascination rather than allegiance.
Even community organizations like the American Jewish Committee, today one of the most strident voices for Zionism in the Diaspora, was largely agnostic about the State of Israel and even hostile to Zionism and regarded its mandate as advocating for American Jews in America. There was a space for Jews outside of the State of Israel and outside of Zionism at that time.
But that had changed by the time that I was in Hebrew School. Jewish popular culture was permeated with the dialectic of Jewish victimhood, like the 1978 Holocaust melodrama on NBC,* and Zionist heroism, like 1967 and especially the “daring rescue at Entebbe” where Yonatan Netanyahu (Benjamin’s big brother) became an Israeli martyr for the ages. It was clear, in everything that I was taught, and everything that I read, that the former could only be redeemed by the latter. And, most importantly, Jewish victimhood imparted on the State of Israel and Zionism a halo of moral faultlessness.
So, we never learned about the Naqba because there could not have been one in that moral universe, and we did not know that the State of Israel went to war against the Arab world in 1956 as the catspaw of dying European Imperialism, or that the 1967 war was an act of naked aggression. The State of Israel was morally immaculate, and anything that it did, it did for the best possible reasons, and if thousands of Arabs died, and millions of Palestinians were oppressed, it was because they deserved it.
This was – and still is – the hegemony that the State of Israel, through its Zionist proxies exerted over my Hebrew School education and the education of the Jewish day-schoolers in this article from The Forward. To question the basic premise of Zionism – that the State of Israel is an absolute good, and that it is the agent of the Jewish people – is to question reality itself. Yet… As time goes on, and the universe reveals itself to be far more complex and nuanced than the simple pieties that we were taught, many of us are questioning State of Israel and the shibboleths of Zionism.
This is our collective prophetic moment, as when Jeremiah spoke truth to the King in Judah:
“This is what the LORD says to you, house of David: Administer justice every morning; rescue from the hand of the oppressor the one who has been robbed, or my wrath will break out and burn like fire because of the evil you have done— burn with no one to quench it.”
For this, he was thrown into a well to languish. Yet, he spoke his truth to power and revealed the leprotic rot of those who would rule us.
—
* Recently rewatched this miniseries, and it was much worse than I remembered.
***
Even before a ceasefire people are already arguing about whether there should be a one-state, or a two-state solution. This seems like jumping the gun at the moment, since it is very clear that the State of Israel wants its OWN version of a one-state solution – that one state being the State of Israel, with no Palestinian autonomy or statehood. Still, it is good to dream and think about what might be possible if the war ever does end, and the State of Israel is restrained from doing its worst.
I recognize that it is not my place to say what kind of solution should or will follow the present nightmare. But, if we are going to speculate and dream, I would have to say that I find the very idea of religiously-exclusive ethnostates utterly repugnant. It offends me philosophically and morally. So, in the most ideal circumstances, since that is what I’m talking about here, I can dream that the State of Israel might someday become a fully-inclusive, diverse, liberal state embracing Israelis and Palestinians as equal citizens.
Of course, such a state would not be the State of Israel anymore, since the latter is, by definition a religiously-exclusive ethnostate – as enshrined in its declaration of independence and the Basic Law: Israel as the Nation State of the Jewish People.* Thus, such a state would inevitably mean the end or, polemically, the “death” of the State of Israel. I don’t personally have any trouble with that, since it is clear to me that the Zionist experiment has run its course and failed. It’s time to try something new. Ɨ
The problem is that I am pretty sure that the vast majority of the 9.5 million people who actually live in the State of Israel would demur (I’m pretty sure of it, in fact). People tend to be attached to their countries, whatever they are, and however they constitute themselves. With this in mind, I don’t believe that the vast majority of Israelis would consent to national suicide – which is how they would see it. They might be wrong, motivated by narrow, parochial nationalism, and all the rest, but any solution to Palestinian statehood will have to consider this.
In practical terms, there does not seem to be any mechanism to impose a one-state solution on the State of Israel and compel Israelis to accept it, whether it is diplomatic, a question of International Law, or a matter of force. In moral and ethical terms, I don’t see how it is any less egregious to deny Israelis their self-determination (which clearly determines to maintain their country as a religiously-exclusive ethnostate) than to deny Palestinians theirs. (That categorical imperative is a harsh mistress.) Moreover, I don’t believe that it is my place to deny Iranians or Pakistanis their right to determine to live in Islamic states, or Georgians and Armenians to determine to live in Christian states.
Such religiously-exclusive ethnonationalism frankly nauseates me, but I have to acknowledge that imposing my ideas of liberal, western secularism and multiculturalism on these people, to whose communities I do not belong, is a particularly egregious form of colonialism rooted in western privilege. Moreover, after living as a Jew in the United States and Canada, I am well-aware that western secularism is neither ethnically nor religiously neutral. There’s a bit of a glass houses thing here.
Thus, a one-state solution, no matter how desirable, seems not only extremely unlikely to me but functionally impossible. A two-state solution, which would be unsatisfactory on so many levels and would legitimize Zionist ethnonationalism, only seems unlikely and very, very, very difficult. And, given the choice, I would support the unlikely over the impossible.
Moreover, as a historian, I am well-aware that all national states are temporary. While some – big ones like the United States and the United Kingdom – are relatively long-lived, very few last with stable borders and populations for more than 200 years. Czechoslovakia existed from 1918 until 1992; Pakistan, in its original form, from 1947 to 1971; the Republic of South Africa, as a white nation-state, from 1910 until 1994. The People’s Republic of China is 74 years old, the Russian Federation is 30 years old, even Canada is 156 years old (and perpetually on the brink of dissolution). The State of Israel is 75 years old.
One lesson of history is that it is the nature of all states to be temporary and to change and evolve into other things as time goes on. The great Neo-Babylonian Empire that destroyed the First Temple and took the elites of the Jewish people into captivity, lasted 90 years, the Neo-Assyrian Empire that preceded it and destroyed the northern kingdom of Israel had existed for 300 years, and Alexander the Great’s empire did not outlive him.
So, expecting change, I find that I can contemplate a two-state solution as an unsatisfying and very, very, very-difficult-but-maybe-possible preparatory step in the evolution toward a fully-inclusive, diverse, liberal state embracing Israelis and Palestinians as equal citizens. Although, admittedly, this is something that I would almost certainly not live to see.
Still, at the end of the day, this all comes down to playing with abstractions and what-ifs. I am not in a position to tell either Israelis or Palestinians how they should determine their futures. At the end of the day a one-state or two-state solution will have to come down to Palestine and Israel, not some privileged, bourgeois intellectual in the United States. Yet, whatever the solution, there will be none without a ceasefire, an Israeli withdrawal from Gaza and the West Bank, and the evacuation of the illegal Israeli settlements. And that, at this moment, and in that order, is what I believe that I should help work for.
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* As a member of the Jewish people, I don’t recall being consulted when this legislation was passed five years ago.
Ɨ If I am going to be honest, I would probably have supported the creation of the State of Israel – at least in theory – had I been alive in 1947-48. But that for a different time.
***
“The state of Israel remains the state of Israel, but it is not identical with Judaism. Judaism cannot be constructed on the basis of this state without ceasing to be a religion.” – Yeshayahu Leibowitz, 1968