When will Jewish Communal Organisations stand for peace?
JVL Introduction
The International Jewish Collective for Justice in Palestine, to which JVL belongs, published this statement raising our abhorrence at how Jewish communal organisations in most countries justify Israel’s horrendous bombardment and siege of Gaza. All lives are precious and of equal value and we mourn those killed, obviously this includes those civilians killed in the Hamas attack on October 7th last year: but we can mourn those deaths and also mourn the deaths and injuring of tens of thousands of Palestinians and be active to try to prevent further Palestinian and also further Israeli bloodshed; this is not something Jewish communal institutions seem able to do. We say peace with justice and “our” institutions seem to say “peace after revenge”.
We see western leaders, including in the UK, think that they are supporting the (sic) Jewish community but those institutions to which the leaders seem in thrall call Jews who march for a ceasefire and for a longer term and just peace for all “self-haters” at best. We will not be deterred and will continue to stand in the tradition of solidarity that many Jewish people have felt compelled to follow – as our slogan borrowed from Marek Edelman says “Always with the oppressed, never the oppressor” .
The UK Home Secretary referred to the marches as “hate marches” and the Leader of the so called Opposition has made similar comments; we will continue to march with our brothers and sisters from all communities in solidarity with the Palestinian people, as Jews we say “Not In Our Name”. We commend this statement to you and are delighted that it has been published by Mondoweiss.
LL
This article was originally published by Mondoweiss on Sun 14 Jan 2024. Read the original here.
Israel's War on Gaza and our Jewish communal institutions
We call on all Jews to reject the politics of Jewish exceptionalism and to hold our communities accountable for supporting and enabling Israel’s genocidal and wholly unjustifiable war.
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Keep engaging with left zionists you know, comrades; when the zionist narrative eventually unravels, they will recall your stand!
I can speak only for myself, yet my personal experience is surely not unique. A few short decades ago I would probably have felt (not thought, felt) similarly to those tribalist fellow Jews referenced in the Statement. It’s thanks to groups like Just Peace UK, Jews for Justice for Palestinians, Jeff Halper’s ICAHD and of course, later, JVL that I came across other ways of thinking. (My political education had in the same way been radically changed through membership of CND, volunteering for CAAT, MCANW &c) Two study tours of the oPt with ICAHD were crucial.
But one needs to be willing to face disturbing challenges to much-cherished, long-held beliefs and identifications, be able to cope with levels of social isolation and ostracism, particularly if you depend on a religious affiliation for a sense that your life has significance in a world of meaning, basically for your ontological security. And even after starting to change, it’s not always easy to be honest with yourself, cognitive dissonance is always lurking, one relapses — or simply rehashes the same old arguments, helping one electively simply not to see the Palestinian agony.
Some of us were, to use an old word, ‘brainwashed’ as kids and it’s a temptation to slip back into the old comfy cushions of in-groups and the seductions of behavioural reinforcement. So I have some sympathy with the fearful, indeed the neurotically hypervigilant programmed through historical conditioning to find antisemitism even where it doesn’t exist (and when it really does exist, intermittent reinforcement kicks in and the fear is amplified).
Perhaps I was a psychiatrist too long and think other Jews are psychologically as deluded as I once was. I always think of Philip Larkin’s ‘Aubade’, ‘An only life can take so long to climb / Clear of its wrong beginnings, and may never.’
I am still waiting/hoping for anything like Rabbis for Ceasefire to emerge in the UK
It’s only a thing if you think Jewish people are different from the rest of us
Obama and Thatcher were no friends of the Black Community or Women
If it lives, breathes and sounds like Fascism, then let’s get on with fighting it
What gets me is, how some of the pro-Israel Zionist crowd will accuse the left pro-Palestinian and anti or non-Zionist Jewish people of being “token” or will say the left use them as “good Jews” but never accept that’s exactly what they engage in – assuming that good true Jews support Zionism and Israel etc. Its pure projection.
And the cherry on the icing, is that the same people will, rightly, assert that conflating Jews with Zionism and Israel can be
antisemitic, but in the same breath call critics Israel and Zionism, antisemites. Which is it ?
I think it might be worth drawing a parallel with the Christian/christian world, where the Christian establishment, in its many guises, sees nothing odd about using the name of Jesus to extol the virtues of wealth, power and violence; and where there is nothing new about arguing – and more – about who has a claim to virtue, regardless of the original messages about humility, love, compassion and the evil of greed. There was a time when those on the wrong side of the fence were routinely burned alive.
And there is always hope. One of my very best friends is a Christian – christian, also, in the very best sense of the word. I once had the briefest of discussions with him about the nature of faith.
“Am I right in thinking,” I asked him, “that for you Christ is a living presence?”
“Yes,” he replied; “mostly.”
“Ah!” I said. “I get that. Doesn’t do it for me.”
“Yes,” said my friend; “I get that too.”
Like Brian Robinson (comments above) my childhood views have been overturned. It’s heart-warming to march alongside Jewish groups for peace in Gaza and gives me hope for a future for both Israel and Palestine to be two states in oeace
In reply to Amanda’s post above, though my secular background renders the religious preoccupations of rabbis largely alien to me, it seems probable that many, especially liberal rabbis, are also adopting what, out of fear, naivete or confusion, they see as safe political positions.
So I suggest that if there are any UK rabbis who are prepared to stray far enough from their comfort zones to read the posts on this website, let them be invited to watch the overwhelming video presentations of South Africa’s evidence to the ICJ by Tembeka Ngcukaitobi
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=grGHum5vU74
and Blinne Ní Ghrálaigh,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZS6IYp0BErg
and compare them to the shocking complicity of Rabbi Ephraim Mirvis’s address to Cranbrook Synagogue:
https://jewishvoiceforliberation.org.uk/article/no-moral-leadership-as-chief-rabbi-praises-israels-actions-in-gaza/
Then ask them the purely political question:
Which alliance will defend UK Jews from the genuine antisemitism which will be unleashed by Mirvis’s fanatic Jewish supremacism and his defence of the indefensible? Do they really believe that Israel’s and Mirvis’s de facto political alliance with the most cynical, corrupt and racist sections of the UK elite, with openly neofascist and murderous tyrants the world over, will protect UK Jews? Or will it instead come from the multiethnic humanitarian allies of the increasing community of anti-apartheid UK Jews, idiotically insulted and labeled as antisemites?
Is it not the latter who face the unvarnished evidence from the universalist viewpoint that was once a hallmark of the Jewish intelligentsia?