#attending a zionist synagogue because they have no alternative

[therainingkiwi]

I am a Jew.

I did not know that civilians lived in Palestine until i was probably sixteen. SIXTEEN. You know when I first learned that Palestine existed? Oh, probably when I was three or four, in Hebrew school.

I was literally taught that Palestine is a nation of terrorists. I thought it was basically one giant army base where Hamas planned attacks, rather than a real country with hospitals and cities and schools. Again: I did not know that civilians and everyday non-terrorists lived in Palestine until I was a fucking TEENAGER (and even then, it was despite my synagogue's best efforts, not because they changed the shul curriculum or anything).

I'm not saying this because I'm proud. I am DEEPLY ashamed to have once believed this. It's why I focus my anti-Israel activism around the Jewish community in particular: I do not trust myself around Palestinians because I fear I haven't rooted out my prejudices enough for them to be safe in my company. I'm not sure I ever will.

But you need to know how intense Israeli propaganda is. You need to know WHY so many people can't distinguish between anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism. Israel has spent lots of time and money on its international image. They've spent possibly even MORE time and money to smear Palestine into the mud. Israel relies on the world seeing their colonization as valiant Jews holding steadfast against evil Islamic terrorists. Without their indoctrination, they don't have power.

I hope Palestine rises higher and freer than Netanyahu's worst fucking nightmares.

I was asked why there's a zionist claim that the Palestininian identity is not legitimate. And I think it's important to understand why Palestinians as a whole are seen as a threat by Israel. To understand why it's not about Hamas.

The claim is that the Palestininian identity was made up in order to push us out. Palestinian existence is a threat to the legitimacy of Israel as a country.

I was taught in school that Palestine was empty when we got here. They used a Mark Twain quote. It was a barren land full of swamps and some nomadic people (Beduins) but as soon as we wanted to come here, the awful antisemitic Arabs sent people to settle here before we could to take up the space. I was in school in the settlements though. I was taught the most extreme version of this.

Another version of this is that Palestine was never its own thing, they're just Arabs the same as all Arabs from the surrounding countries. So they could just... scooch over and give us the space, please and thank you. In Israel no one uses the term Palestinian. If I do, people roll their eyes and dismissively go "Arab." An Arab is an Arab. It's a way to strip away their unique identity and blend them in with the rest to say they could always move to Jordan, or Syria, or Lebanon, and it's all the same to them.

It's a way to make Palestinian existence by itself into a malicious plot to deny us a homeland.

Because if Palestinians exist as a distinct group of people, we aren't the only ones with a connection to this land. And you don't create an ethnostate by sharing.

You still hear echoes of this mentality. Why won't all these Muslim countries take the people of Gaza as refugees? That's asking why they won't let Israel make its ethnic cleansing more neat and convenient. Yes, refugees should be taken in and given shelter. But this question shifts responsibility away from Israel. Palestinians shouldn't be forced suffer either ethnic cleansing that leaves them as refugees, or a genocide.

[thoughtlessarse]

As a rabbi, I’ve devoted my life to tending to the well-being of the American Jewish community. That community is now collapsing in on itself in a moment of true rupture—and that, I believe, is not only necessary but a blessing. Usually, Jewish homes are full of extended family at this time of year. It’s the season of the High Holy Days, Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, and for Jews of all backgrounds this means getting together and, often, going to synagogue. On these holidays, many Jews who otherwise forgo religious services break out the prayer shawl they wore at their b’nai mitzvahs and pray. They fast. They atone. But many people won’t be attending services at their family’s synagogue this year because it has a large “We Stand With Israel” poster out front or an Israeli flag on the podium next to the rabbi. They won’t be intoning a prayer for Israel—with no mention of Palestinians—alongside the rest of the congregation. Instead, these Jews, many of them young, will be turning to alternative services that are explicitly non-Zionist or creating their own ways to observe the High Holidays. What is typically a time of unity in Jewish communities will this year be a time of separation. For many in the establishment Jewish community, this is a source of deep anxiety. In May, as a human-made famine was taking hold in Gaza, and as students were protesting across US campuses, Rabbi Jill Jacobs wrote in The Forward: “A panic has developed within much of the Jewish community as more and more Jews—mostly, but not entirely young people—have declared themselves to be anti-Zionists or non-Zionists.” I share Rabbi Jacobs’s sentiment that there is indeed a moral crisis at the heart of mainstream Jewish life. (I also appreciate that she argues against formally excommunicating non- and anti-Zionist Jews, even as we have long been unwelcome in supposedly progressive spaces.) However, I believe our panic should not be over the waning support for Zionism among Jewish young people. Instead, the crisis is that the Jewish state that was founded in the shadow of the Holocaust has been found guilty of its own plausible genocide. Our Jewish community should break apart when so many of our leaders and institutions go along with or even champion Israel as it maims, tortures, starves, and kills Palestinians, including tens of thousands of children.

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