Reflections of a Student Rabbi Against the Occupation of Palestine for Shabbat Shuvah

These holidays have been particularly hard. The difficulty comes not only from the added, expected stress of increased responsibilities in the planning department.  As someone preparing to enter the rabbinate, I have many friends who are rabbis or cantors or Jewish educators or who are, like me, currently in school to become Jewish professionals.

As in any community of shared purpose and interest, we exchange thoughts and writings.  Among those writings are the High Holy Day Israel sermons I have dreaded since adolescence, when my curiosity about where the trees we raised money to plant in Israel uncovered the horrifying truth.  We were taught to think about the Jewish National Fund (JNF) both as an environmental organization and part of the Zionist effort to make the desert bloom, which, in and of themselves, are two oppositional ideas.  Because we were taught that the JNF was beautifying our homeland, to discover that the real purpose, now extremely well-documented, of this beautification, much like beautification projects in our major cities, is the continued displacement and erasure of its prior residents.  The ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian people by the JNF, the Israeli government, and other Zionist organizations, is a Jewish communal wrongdoing I could not unsee - that I would not unsee.  So to see my colleagues and friends embody and enshrine the concept of "progressive except Palestine" 

I am deeply bothered by the content of these sermons.  They often conflate anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism, or, worse, redefine anti-Semitism as anti-Zionism, thus ignoring the very real ways anti-Semitism persists as a system of oppression independent of Israel's existence and independent of her actions.  They fear-monger about open discussion of Palestine on college campuses, urging congregants to empathize with Zionist students over and against Palestinian students and those in solidarity with them, including a growing number of Jewish students against the Occupation.  They tell, essentially, conversion stories of Zionism.  These stories explain the exceptional spiritual experiences of spending time as a Jew in Israel.  Even as liberal, marginalized Jews in the Jewish state, they were able to appreciate the modern-day miracle of having a Jewish state in a historical Jewish homeland.  In none of these stories do the authors stop to consider Palestinian experience.  A few share stories of spending time with Palestinians in the West Bank, stories of Palestinians being peaceful, stories of Palestinians graciously allowed by the Israeli government to inhabit their own land, stories of Palestinians providing hospitality, of baklava, kanafeh, and Turkish coffee, stories which strip Palestinians of power and agency and leave them backdrops for an empathetic Jew.  They share the trauma of the Holocaust to justify the existence of the state of Israel.  Again and again, Western Jewish experience is privileged over indigenous Palestinian experience.

Fewer of these sermons focus on the demographic threat and the urgency of a two-state solution the way such sermons did before the incursion in Gaza in 2014, now a yearly summer ritual of the IDF.  Fewer focus on oppressions within Green Line borders like sexism, racism, and xenophobia.  None focus on the problem of Occupation.  Instead, in a globalized world, they focus exclusively on Zionist Jewish concerns.  Some on the need to oppose Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions.  Some on the need to oppose #BlackLivesMatter.  Some on pinkwashing.  But don't say they're Islamophobic because they think Arab Muslims throwing rocks are more inclined to violence than white Jewish soldiers with M-16s.  Don't say they're racist because they're willing to throw away half a century of solidarity over the exclusive right to use the word genocide.  And they certainly aren't using LGBT people as pawns to deflect from other human rights abuses.  See, they're liberal Jews which means they treat everyone equally and God is on their side.

Worse than the content of their sermons is the framing.  There's the coded language of "starting a difficult conversation about Israel."  I wonder if they learned that phrase in school, or from AIPAC or J Street.  It's doublespeak for silencing dissent.  There's the Israel-has-problems-but-so-do-we, a kind of deflection which is often used by domestic abusers to distract from their own wrongs.  And there's the gross manipulation of the recent lost of Shimon Peres, z"l.  Ignoring the complexity of a peacemaking leader who participated in the Nakba, ignoring the failures of the Oslo Accords and the decades since then, ignoring that Peres' understanding of the solution to the Israel-Palestine conflict (that is, land in historic Palestine being controlled by Palestinians), has never truly been implemented, and ignoring that the lack of implementation of that solution is Israel's fault, my colleagues are using congregants' grief over Peres' death as a political tool of redoubling support for Israel.  That most of these sermons were for Rosh Hashanah rather than Yom Kippur strikes me as telling on an ethical level.  How can one truly repent while transgressing?

I have become increasingly skeptical about the utility of so-called dialogue about Israel in American Jewish communities.  The privilege and oppression dynamic that exists between Jews and Palestinians means at best we are like a bunch of suburban white folk discussing the impact of racism in American cities.  Plus, the people leading these so-called open dialogues are often the authors of the sermons people like me walk out of.  In the year ahead, I think we should move more toward a model of uplifting Palestinian voices, of hearing from those targeted by the Occupation.  Of reminding ourselves over and over that Jewish opinion and reaction is not the point.

The broader context of "discussion of Israel" in American Jewish life has made me even more grateful to be a part of Tzedek Chicago.  The Pro-Israel hegemony in American Judaism and the way that hegemony is increasingly detracting from our ability to be engaged progressively in other realms (#BlackLivesMatter being the most notable case) are our most pressing collective wrongs.  I am blessed to be part of a community that sees that.  I look forward to another year of working for justice together.

As fellow Tzedek member Adam Gottlieb said in his interpretive Haftarah for Rosh Hashanah,

This is the year the whole system is indicted!

Adam, from your lips to God's ears.