Jews Against the Occupation

Is it Anti-Semitic to be Anti-Zionist?

 

 

Why For Me Being a Jew Means Being for Palestine

By Rachel Neumann

“While there is a lower class, I am in it; while there is a criminal element, I am of it; and while there is a soul in prison, I am not free.”—Eugene V. Debs, 1913

When I was sixteen years old, I was on the Berkeley City Council’s Peace and Justice Commission. This was before I knew that most cities in America didn’t have Peace and Justice Commissions, much less ones with “youth representatives.” This was during the first intifada in Palestine and we were voting on whether Berkeley should become a sister city with Jaballia, the largest and most densely populated refugee camp in the world, in Gaza. We had an open meeting and so many people came that we had to move from the South Berkeley Senior Center to a larger space across the street. The meeting was full of shouting, banner waving, and impromptu impassioned speeches. The vote came down to three in favor of the sister city, three against. I was the deciding vote. To me it seemed simple. People were living under occupation, people were resisting (primarily nonviolently) and being murdered, and here was a clear way to show support. When I voted for the sister city, the room broke out in fights, a few people started yelling that I was a self-hating Jew, and I had to be ushered out of the room with escorts. This was my first introduction to the politics of the Israeli occupation.

I was not raised with any religion except that of justice. My father’s parents escaped Germany at the beginning of the Holocaust. They were both devout atheists and Marxists. My mother’s grandmother came here to escape the pogroms in Russia. She became a Christian Scientist. Her father came here from Poland to escape poverty and anti-Semitism. I was raised around hippies, Buddhists, lapsed Catholics, and atheist Christians and Jews. I didn’t know there was such thing as “being Jewish” until I was a teenager and then I knew it by this family history of escaping oppression, by the stubbornness of my hair, my olive skin, by my love of arguments and outsiders.

What I have since learned is that being a Jew means, in part, being scared. Actually, being human in an inhumane world means being scared (and angry and murderous and loving) and Jews are no more or less scared (or angry, or murderous, or loving) than anyone else. Like people of color, like women, like poor folks the world over, people in power have tried to get rid of Jews and survival has become our knock-bottom response. But the Israeli Occupation does not keep Jews safe anymore than this war-without-end, this “war on terrorism” keeps America safe. Our survival cannot depend on another people’s oppression. True safety only comes with justice and equality.

I have never felt more Jewish than when fighting for Palestinian freedom. By this I mean fighting for the right of Palestinians to live without occupation, to decide their own futures, to have equal access to water, to land, medicine and health care, to be able to walk down the street and buy a piece of fruit without fear of being shot. It is important to clarify that this does not mean supporting the eventual Palestinian state. I am concerned--and as the intifada, the suicide bombings and the invasion continues, I am more concerned--that the eventual Palestinian state is not one I would support. There is evidence at this point, much more so than during the first intifada that this state will be fundamentalist, corrupt, and very likely undemocratic. Still, Palestinians have the right to a viable state and to make their own choices about what kind of place it is. Once they have it, I may be out there fighting to make it something different as well. In my ideal world, neither Israel nor Palestine would exist as they are or even as they imagine themselves eventually to be. But I will take this first step, of two viable states, to get to the next possible place.

There are those who say that critiquing Israel is anti-Semitic, not just anti-Zionist, and there are those that say that critiquing Israel is just critiquing an oppressive power, that it has nothing to do with Israelis being Jewish. Both are wrong. There are many times when I wish Israel wasn’t a Jewish state. If it was just any other oppressive state, I’ve thought, this would feel so much less complicated. But of course it is and things are happening there the way that they are happening because it is a Jewish state and because of anti-Semitism and racism and the way they fit together.

Israel was created, at least in part, because of anti-Semitism; because Europe and the U.S. wanted a dependent ally in the Middle East, a non-Arab proxy that could be counted on to represent their interests in the oil-rich region. Why did they pick the Jews? It is not because of their great love for the Jewish people that Israel, whose population is 0.1% of the total world population, receives roughly one-third of all US foreign aid. In part, there may have been some guilt over the Holocaust, but in large part, the Jews were used to keep a power structure in place.

Jews are often used as the “public face” of the oppressor, allowed to survive and succeed just enough to be the middlemen, the shopkeepers, the ones who are required to be in the trades considered too “dirty” for non-Jews—but not allowed real power. They have a long history of both rejecting this role and working side-by-side with people of color and other oppressed groups, and of going along with it and trying (vainly) to get in good with their oppressor.

Because of this history, the situation in Palestine is said to be complicated. Complicated, however, can be an excuse for inaction. There is no excuse for the occupation, and so much less so for this current bloodthirsty invasion. This does not excuse the deaths of Jewish civilians. Rather it acknowledges that Palestinians have been under illegal occupation, harassed, starved, tortured, and killed for the past fifty odd years. Over 1286 Palestinians have been killed in the latest intifada, at least four times as many as Israelis. This is not a balanced or particularly complicated situation. Sharon’s vision, of a Palestine without Palestinians, is disturbingly simple. I focus on Israeli fundamentalism because it is the dominant, powerful, and currently the most violent vision, certainly not because it is the only fundamentalism at play here.

There once was another country (and yes there have been many), founded by people escaping persecution who, in the processing of forming their own state, committed a genocide and the oppressed became quite quickly, quite easily, the oppressor. Here, in America, we not only fund the occupation, we recognize in Palestine and Israel our own history. For me being Jewish means being human, no more no less. And if I really believe this equation than I—we—can and must see the links between anti-Semitism, racism, colonialism, and capitalism as forces that keep us feeling both helpless and hopeless. Supporting the freedom of the Palestinian people and demanding an end to the occupation is one key way to remember our humanity.