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Jewish Voice for Liberation

Resistance to Pharaoh in Jenin

Published by Richard Kuper

JVL Introduction

Rabbi Brant Rosen of the avowedly anti-Zionist congregation Tzedek Chicago writes about his shock at the latest massacre of nine Palestinians, including an elderly woman, in the Jenin refugee camp.

While the Israeli government justifies this violence as “security measures to fight terrorists” and the mainstream media describes these events as “clashes,” writes Rosen, he opts for a different power analysis: “this is state violence, full stop.”

“[A]ny state — even a Jewish state — that builds its statehood on the backs of another people can become a Pharaoh.”

This article was originally published by Shalom Rav on Thu 26 Jan 2023. Read the original here.

Resistance to Pharaoh in Jenin

by Rabbi Brant Rosen, Shalom Rav

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  • As an atheist I find myself in complete sympathy with the prayer – any conception of “G-d” must inevitably be flawed but that need not prevent message from our own consciences from being heard.

    of course it is an excellently articulated blog. Thank you.

    Shalom!

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  • What a stupid man

    The operation was to prevent an Islamic Jihad operation to kill Israelis

    7 of the 9 were claimed by various terrorist organisations, & the odds are high that the other 2 were killed by Islamic Jihad terrorists.

    I wonder what this Useful Idiot & you will write about the massacre in Jerusalem

    Probably you’ll both blame them for being Jews

    You won’t print this anyway because you only print stuff that supports your warped worldview, but hopefully it will shame you.

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  • How relevant this post suddenly is as the politics in Israel seem to be fanning the embers of emnity

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  • It’s no mystery that one of the most famous tracks recorded by Desmond Decker was called ‘Israelites’ and that the oppressive establishment is nicknamed ‘Babylon’ by many Jamaicans and members of the Jamaican diaspora, in resistance to state power.

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  • Tony R, your comment uses stronger words than I would have but I applaud JVL for publishing it.

    The context of the Jenin operation is important: it was carried out to prevent murders by Islamic jihadists who then resisted attempts to arrest them. Any responsible government would have tried to make the arrests in Jenin and no pleasure is derived from dead bodies, jihadists or civilians. However the deliberate murder, truly a massacre, of Jews in a synagogue on Holocaust Day is being loudly and proudly celebrated by many Palestinians. And the 13 year-old who then tried to murder more Jews declared that he would make his family proud. These are absolute hate crimes.

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  • I wonder if Tony R has ever tried to, or ever will look at the Palestinian/Israeli disaster from the Palestinian viewpoint? Can he ever imagine how he would feel and react as a Palestinian if his people had been and is being cruelly treated by an occupying regime which is slowly and determinedly displacing more and more Palestinians in order to occupy more and more of the land in which he and his forbears had lived, farmed and worked for centuries? Who now is the David and who is the Goliath?

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  • In response to Tony R and Jaye, here is Peter Beinart in his weekly podcast on 230th January:

    There’s been a rising—as I tape this on Sunday [29 Jan]—we just seem to be in a period of escalation where every day brings new incidents of violence, more of them against Palestinians, as is usually the case, but also against Israeli Jews. And, at moments like this, I find myself a little bit paralyzed and really struggle to know how to respond to someone who kind of comments on these things. Not intellectually. Intellectually, I feel like the basic analysis that I hold I think does help to explain events like this in a way that makes sense to me, which is pretty simple. It’s a kind of a language, a kind of perspective that I take from Martin Luther King and many others, which is that if you have a system of violent oppression which denies millions of people their rights, that that violence is also going to be visited, sooner or later, in some way or another, on the people who benefit from the system of that violence. That doesn’t mean that that’s good. It doesn’t mean those people deserve to suffer violence. Of course not. It simply means that if one wants to tackle the problem of violence, get to the roots of the cause of violence, including the violence that that hurts people like Israeli Jews, or in case of the United States, white Americans, one has to deal with the roots of the violence that are visited on the population that is being oppressed, that is being denied basic rights, which in this case is Palestinians.
    But that’s intellectually. You know, emotionally, like when I came to shul on Saturday and was told that there had been Jews in East Jerusalem shot outside of the synagogue, and then there I was in synagogue, and then we were saying Tehillim. We were saying psalms because that’s what Jews traditionally do when other Jews are in distress. In that moment, I feel it becomes really challenging to balance the anger and frustration I have about the Israeli policies that I believe have set these terrible dynamics into motion, and also to find some way of just expressing my own solidarity with my fellow Jews…

    Beinart’s solidiarty with his fellow Jews does not blind him to the root causes of the conflict…

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  • A futher comment. Tony R takes it for granted that “The operation was to prevent an Islamic Jihad operation to kill Israelis”. Jaye knows that “it was carried out to prevent murders by Islamic jihadists who then resisted attempts to arrest them”.

    Muhammad Shehada reports on it like this was in the Forward:

    “Dozens of Israeli armored military vehicles, bulldozers, drones as well as armed troops from the military, border police and Shin Bet, raided the West Bank city of Jenin Thursday morning. All to allegedly take down three Palestinian militants.

    The damage was like nothing Jenin has seen in over two decades. Nine Palestinians, including an elderly woman, were killed by Israeli forces. Dozens of cars were flipped over and crushed, homes were heavily damaged, and patients had to run away from tear gas shot at the Jenin hospital.

    The excessive show of brutality and disproportionate violence was deliberate. Following the most deadly year since 2005 for Palestinians, and massive protests across Israel against Benjamin Netanyahu’s judicial overhaul, the assault on Jenin is meant to put the nation in a state of emergency and thus undermine the pro-democracy protests.”

    It’s their absolute belief that Israel is the good guy and wouldn’t dream of harming a fly (“the most moral army in the world”) – in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary day after day, week after week, month after month…

    How can you have a “moral” “temporary” occupation, now in its 56th year…

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