About 10 years ago, I posted a series of diaries that were my older daughter’s written record of her experience in Israel and Palestine. The first one in the series was:
The recent horrible battle between Israel and Gaza has made our whole family feel sick. Our daughter has been out on the streets because of this and she wrote the following record of the protest last week (she’s going to another protest tonight).
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Last Friday night I attended a rally, "Shabbat Against Settler Colonialism," organized by Jewish Voice for Peace's New York chapter and held in Brooklyn, New York. We were told that 500-700 people showed up, mainly Jews, with some allies. We wanted to stand "in unequivocal solidarity with Palestinians from Sheikh Jarrah to Gaza." There were American Jews, Israeli Jews, Mizrahi and Sephardi Jews, Jews of color, Queer and Trans Jews, disabled Jews, interfaith Jews, rabbis, elders (including a 90-year-old!), and children, all rejecting Israeli apartheid and demanding Palestinian liberation.
That felt like the most hopeful moment for me in this struggle of the past 10 days and maybe even of the past 10 years since I spent a few months in Palestine and Israel, because our circle of Jews demanding freedom for Palestinians is widening I think, little by little. As my therapist says, "this is a big fight," so I often feel hopeless and helpless in the face of 73 years of Israeli apartheid, 72 years of U.S. funding for the Israeli military, another bombing campaign by the 4th largest military in the world against an unprotected civilian population in Gaza, and in the face of the fear, racism, narrow-mindedness, rejection and/or Islamophobia that too many American Jews and Americans in general express when I try to speak out on this topic. I am clinging to moments like this rally, hoping that our solidarity as Anti-Zionist Jews might mean something, that we might be able to help reimagine and rebuild something new together. Judaism is ancient, after all. The state of Israel is younger than my father. I have to believe that our ancestors did not go through enslavement, wandering in the desert, antisemitism, pogroms, the Holocaust, just for us to become the oppressors of an entire other people.
As my best friend Julia, an American Jew who worked for two years for Palestinian political prisoners and human rights in the West Bank says, "You can be proudly Jewish and work every day to dismantle white supremacy, which necessarily includes dismantling Zionism. You can be proudly Jewish and speak up in our institutions, speak up to family and friends, speak up with where you spend your money. You can be proudly Jewish and actively stand against apartheid, colonialism, and genocide. Tune in to the movement’s asks:
-stand up in Jewish spaces and call for a radical change of rhetoric and an end to financial support for Israeli institutions
-add your body to protests
-boycott, divest from, and demand sanctions against Israel
-call your reps and demand they actively work to end funding to the Israeli military
Today today today."