Another Jew Against Israel

It was over thirty years ago, and the writing was on the wall – literally.

I was living in Jerusalem, and throughout the city, on various walls in numerous public places, were the graffitied words spray-painted in Hebrew: “mavat l’araveem.” Death to Arabs. Surely, I assumed, someone would quickly wash away such genocidal hatred; if not the city, then some concerned citizens, right? Nope. The menacing scrawl stayed put, day after day, week after week, month after month.

But it wasn’t just the graffiti that bode of evil. It was also the Israeli political party Modelet’s posters, glued here and there, that proudly declared “transfer” as the best way to ethnically cleanse Palestine of its inhabitants. It was the various rallies I witnessed, where thousands of Israelis chanted the same slogan, over and over: Death to Arabs! And when I tried to engage and challenge these zealots face to face, they shouted me down or threatened me with violence. I had never personally experienced such venom before. But it lurked in the rocks that I saw Jewish kids throw at a Palestinian child pushing a cart full of bread in the Old City; in the newspaper cartoons that depicted Arab children as terrorists; in the lectures at university that explained why Jewish nationalism was legitimate whereas Palestinian nationalism was a sham; in the various Israeli outposts dotting the occupied West Bank where water was diverted from old Arab villages into newly built “Jewish-only” illegal settlements; in the jokes told about Arabs being expendable; in the chopping down of Palestinian olive orchards that had been passed down from generation to generation.

Since then, the lurking hatred has become openly triumphant. Israel today is more vicious than ever. More religious. More nationalistic. And genocidal. Thanks to the financial and military support of the United States, and buffeted by a vocal minority of politically influential Christian nationalists and Jewish organizations such as AIPAC, Israel has built more and more illegal settlements every year, bulldozed more and more Palestinian homes, imprisoned and tortured more and more Palestinian civilians, and is now committing genocide against the Palestinian people: starving them, bombing them, shooting them, maiming them, killing them, and developing plans to ship the desperate survivors away to South Sudan. It is barbarism.

To be sure, Israelis have a long list of grievances and sufferings of their own. Their Jewish ancestors have been hated, excluded, persecuted, ghettoized, slaughtered, and annihilated for centuries. The grandparents and extended families of many Israelis were exterminated in Europe during the Holocaust; others’ families were expelled from Arab lands; still others were tormented in the former Soviet Union. Israel has been attacked by neighboring armies many times. Palestinian leaders have been corrupt and unwilling to compromise. Many offers of peace have been rebuffed. Islamic dictators embed Jew-hatred in school curricula. Israelis have been butchered and blown up by terrorist attacks year after year. Israel’s good-faith withdrawal from Gaza in 2005 was met with scorn and increased aggression. On October 7, 2023, Israel was deeply mauled by Hamas’s henchmen to such a vicious and inhumane degree that no people could or would tolerate it or allow it to happen again.

All of this is true. And more. But none of the above excuses the ongoing theft of Palestinian land and excessive violence that Israel is visiting upon the Palestinian people. None of it justifies such wanton destruction.

I am often asked these days: how can Jews, of all people – who have themselves been so victimized – do this?

There is no single answer. But I’d offer a couple speculations. One is this: just as abused children often grow up to become abusers themselves, it seems that heavily traumatized people, when given enough power, can become oppressors themselves within but a couple generations. Another contender: when you mix extreme nationalism with righteous ethnocentrism and add a heavy dose of Biblically-based baloney and pious Theo-babble, the result will be bloody for those who are deemed to be in the way, or lesser than, or not fully human in some deity’s eye.

Fortunately – and hopefully not too late – the writing I see on the wall today is different. On college campuses, on hand-held protest signs, at pop music concerts, and in newly-emergent legislation the world over: Israel must be stopped. Palestine must live. More and more Jews – and even Israelis – are acknowledging the moral necessity of these imperatives.