Jewish Voices In Support Of Occupied Palestine

As Israel’s War on Gaza intensified and the Western leaders and governments came in open support of what they called “Israel’s right to defence”, hundreds of Jews across the world raised their voices under the slogan of “Not In Our Name”.

Take the example of Dr Gabor Mate, a survivor of the Holocaust. When he was asked by Piers Morgan on his show about Israel’s right to defend itself, he responded by saying that most Israelis are not aware of the history of what Palestinians have suffered. “They don’t know in 1948 there were multiple massacres of large numbers of people by Israeli forces.”

Announcing a hunger strike for a permanent ceasefire, actress Cynthia Nixon said, “Never again means never again for everyone. As the mother of Jewish children, whose grandparents survived the holocaust.”

While Israeli historian Prof. Ilan Pappé was seen on almost all TV channels defending Palestine, others like Miko Peled, author of books like ‘The General’s Son: The Journey of an Israeli in Palestine’, were also on the different news programmes putting forward the case for Palestine. Pappé said, “The Palestinian National Movement is not a movement of terrorism. It’s an anti-colonialist movement that has not stopped fighting.”

Peled tweeted: “Hostages vs terrorists is how the world is describing the exchange taking place now in Gaza. Not a word about the immense suffering of Palestinian families, mothers whose sons and daughters are held and tortured for years by Israeli authorities.”

Israeli journalist and author Gideon Levy is one of the prominent voices within Israel asking for an end to the occupation of Palestinian territory. He went further in one of his interviews and said in the last one and a half months, the Israeli society has shifted even more towards racism.

“It (the peace) will not come from Israeli society. Israelis will not wake up one morning and say, ‘The occupation is too cruel, apartheid (racist regime) is illegal, let’s put an end to this,’” said Levy. 

In his latest article in Haaretz, Levy wrote, “A bereaved father, whose eight-year-old son was shot dead by soldiers, stood this week at the entrance to his home at the border of the Jenin refugee camp and stated the simple truth: ‘These children will never forgive the soldiers. You’re raising another generation of resistance. Now our children want Israeli children to be killed too.’

“An unbridled and terribly cruel attack against Gaza creates hatred of Israel at levels we’ve never seen before, in Gaza, in the West Bank, in the Palestinian diaspora, in the Arab world and everywhere in the world where people are seeing what the Israelis don’t see and don’t want to see. And what’s even more terrible is this hatred will be justified. Nothing will be more justified.”

In an interview with an Indian news channel on October 19, Levy told the Indian anchor who told him that many in Israel and India would describe him as anti-national as he calls Gaza “cage” and “open prison”: “How else you can define Gaza? There is no other way to define Gaza than a cage. It is closed from all directions… Nobody can come in, nobody can leave without permission of Israel…How long do you think human beings live like this.”

These are not isolated voices.

Dr Gabor Mate said: “Look, I used to be Zionist. I am a Holocaust survivor and Zionism was important for me as a salvation for Jewish people until I found out that the state was founded based on expatriation, the expulsion, and multiple massacres of the local population and that is not historically controversial. So I am taking a longer view on this. I am saying that the present situation cannot be understood without looking at the historical context.”  

Mote went on to say there was no co-existence, not even fragile co-existence. 

“There was oppression, periodic massacres, land occupation, in the West Bank continuous expulsion of population from their homes. I visited the occupied territories three times now, the first time during the first Intifada period, I cried every day at what I saw. So this cannot go on. …how about returning the land that has been stolen from Palestinians, I am not talking about the state of Israel, I am not talking about 1948, I am talking about 1967 and what is going on right now,” said Mote.

Amanda Gelender, who is a writer, poet, and also calls herself Jewish queer and anti-Zionist wrote: “I generally like to stay in my own lane, but where is the mass movement of Christians resisting Zionism and Israel’s genocide? Jewish people play a specific role in upholding Israel’s settler colony, but the majority of Zionists globally are Christian.”

In her piece titled ‘Kaddish for the Soul of Judaism: Genocide in Palestine’, she wrote, “As I write this, the wheels of genocide are turning. As I write this, I am preparing for Shabbat…When I see Gaza, I see my own people languishing in concentration camps. I see a world that has turned its back on us, letting us be slaughtered en masse because we aren’t quite human enough. I am having a nightmare, can you wake me up? I’m dreaming that the Star of David is not sewn onto our clothes but affixed to the genocidal soldiers who bomb hospitals, schools, and churches with no regard for life. Who round up entire communities and shoot kids dead in the street.

“I remember there was talk of Tikkun Olam and Tzedakah — is our humanity buried somewhere under the rubble? Is anyone still breathing under there? I scour bombed remnants of residential buildings for shreds of Judaism’s soul. I thought it was still here. I thought so many things that evaporated in the dust of an air strike.

“We built institutions and monuments to ‘never forget’ but look at us now. It seems we left our humanity outside the door of the holocaust memorial museum. Jews are a diasporic miracle trapped in a nation-state of lies. Israel has sacrificed our humanity at the altar of nationalism.

“I don't condemn the resistance for hitting back at an occupying force that annexed their land and murders tens of thousands of civilians cyclically. From Warsaw to Gaza blame the genocidal racist state not the victims of it for fighting back.”

Jewish Voice for Peace, an NGO that works for “Palestinian liberation and Judaism beyond Zionism” pleaded for a ceasefire and organised protests for the ceasefire. Jewish Currents, a magazine founded in 1946 committed to the “rich tradition of thought, activism, and culture of the Jewish left”, advocated for Palestine. On November 20, the magazine published a poem by poet and essayist Mosab Abu Toha after he was arrested in Gaza while fleeing with his family:

Palestinian Painter

Two birds
leave their nest,
singing a song, perhaps

for the artist working

in what used to be

a well-kept old garden.

He’s painting a new house,

even a new garden.
Without shrapnel,

without twisted metal beams,

without broken bricks and loose

electrical wires.
But then I see him hesitate,
looking at a headless doll

lying in the rubble.

I’m wondering if he’ll paint it

as part of the new house and the
resurrected garden.

It might destroy

its harmony.
It might disturb

visitors from abroad.