Yesterday, I was one of those shouting at the men and women who had come with their Israeli flags, their righteous arrogance, their anger to disrupt our protest organized to declare support for the Freedom Flotilla and the Free Gaza movement.

Central to this story is that I am a Jew. I am a Jew who has spent four summers in Palestine witnessing the toll that more than 40 years of Israeli occupation has taken on a people and on a land. I am a Jew who has come to understand, as the sign I was holding yesterday attests, that we are forsaking Jewish values for the sake of a Jewish state.

Read the rest at Mondoweiss.

This piece was also posted on Mondoweiss.

I am a Jew. I am a religious Jew. I am an anti-Zionist Jew. I realize that to make this last claim is to risk that you will stop reading, as often any claim of anti-Zionism brings with it a label of traitor, anti-Semite, self-hating Jew. I hope, however, that you will give me the benefit of the doubt, at least for the few minutes that it will take you to read what I have to say.

I’ve been a Jew all my life although I was not raised with a Jewish education. In my late 40s, I began to study. I read, I joined a synagogue, I helped start a Talmud study group. I was and am drawn to the essential command, attributed to the great Rabbi Hillel, that our task as Jews is essentially to “not do to others that which is hateful to you.” I love how, in very Jewish fashion, Hillel tells us what not to do. I love and am daily challenged by how extremely difficult such a simple command can be.

I did not know much about Israel until I became more engaged as a religious Jew. The organized Jewish community teaches us that the Israeli narrative is the Jewish narrative. Support for Israel, the story goes, is synonymous with being a good Jew.

Now, some ten years and four trips to Israel/Palestine later, I invite you, if you think you can bear it, to hear why I care more about Hillel’s commandment than I do about a state.

With my partner who is also Jewish, I have just returned from 15 days of staying with friends, a family who lives in Samiramis, technically a Jerusalem neighborhood, but one that sits on the Palestine side of the Wall, less than a mile from the infamous Qalandia checkpoint.

Unlike previous years where we participated in delegations, house rebuilding, or activism related to our work with ICAHD-USA (Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions-USA), this time we frequently walked the streets of Ramallah, stopping for homemade ice cream at Baladna’s, shopping for shoes and handmade embroidery. We traveled north to Nablus and Tulkarem to visit family members and share succulent meals that left us bursting. We took one late night trip to Jericho to sit in the local park, drink cola, and talk; another to Jaffa Beach where we shared a picnic, conversation, laughter; we went to multiple weddings where men and women danced late into the night to the beat of loud, pulsing music.

We were privileged to see again what we have seen before — how rich and full and engaging life in Palestine can be, how the people here are like people everywhere, attempting to live with some degree of happiness in a culture that deeply values familial relationships, good food, education, meaningful work, laughter.

We also bore witness, as we do on each trip, to encroaching apartheid. As we drove deep in the West Bank along the road snaking north to Nablus from Ramallah, we could look up and see virtually every hillside topped by a Jewish settlement. In some cases, the settlement is recent, a few caravans dotting the hilltop, their electric lights strung from pole to pole, glowing bright yellow through the night, a display of dominance. More often, the settlements are permanent, neat rows of identical houses with their prototypical orange roofs, poised on the top of the hill, ready to dip down onto the Palestinian farmland below. These are announced by the row of modern streetlights on the two-lane road we are traveling, beacons proclaiming the presence of Israeli Jews on the landscape. The lights illuminate the stretches of Arab road where Jewish settlers have to drive because the infamous “bypass” roads (the Palestinians call them apartheid roads) have yet to be built, the ones that allow only Jews to travel from mainland Israel into the West Bank without encountering Palestinians.

The omnipresence of these smaller settlements on the road to Nablus is new since our last trip in 2005; a look at the latest UN map shows the Palestinian landscape dotted with them like an x-ray showing a virulent, spreading cancer.

When President Obama talks about stopping the spread of settlements most people probably have little idea of what he means. Somehow the word “settlement” invokes an image of tents, a kind of unstable, fragile community. The first settlement I ever saw had to be pointed out to me because it looked like any modern suburb in the U.S., row upon row of contemporary houses set along well paved roads. I certainly did not expect what I saw – a solidly interwoven infrastructure common to any town or city – housing, water, lights, streets, stores planted immutably on the landscape. I soon came to understand their function. The massively large ones, housing hundreds of thousands of Jewish settlers, are designed to penetrate deep into the West Bank. Pisgat Ze’ev, Mod’in, Ma’eleh Adumim – each is protected by the Wall whose crooked path illegally pilfers huge swaths of Palestinian land. Each functions to divide Palestine into separate cantons making a contiguous state impossible. The newer smaller ones, the ones I see on the hilltops between Ramallah and Nablus, act like beachheads, strategically positioned to continue the slow but sure process of Israeli land grab.

The stories about how these settlers take over this territory deep in the West Bank are horrible. These are Jewish idealogues, often newly arrived from the U.S. Once they seize a hilltop, they move down the hill by harassing the unfortunate Palestinians who happen to live or farm the valleys below, sometimes poisoning their water and fields, killing their animals, introducing hostile plant and animal life, burning precious olive trees. Their goal is to intimidate farmers and families physically until they leave, making room for more settlement construction in their place. What you could not know, because no one ever says so, is that whenever a group of Jews establish a settlement, soldiers come in to protect them, making it possible for the Israeli government to hide this theft of land in plain sight.

As I ride along the road, any road, I realize that a Palestinian cannot drive from here to there anywhere in the West Bank now without encountering a settlement, or two, or three. I begin to take in how it feels to be surrounded, literally, by entitlement and hostility. I think about the ubiquitous story told in the Jewish community, crafted carefully by the ideology makers, painting Israel victim to a hostile Arab population that wants nothing more than to drive us into the sea. I don’t know whether to laugh or cry at the irony of such a story, for it’s not us, the Jews, who are being driven out. It’s us, the Jews, it’s Israel, the state designed for us the Jews, that is driving Palestinian people off of their land and into exile.

I think too, of the irony in the Israeli mantra that the Palestinians, the PLO, the PA, Hamas, all Arab nations, must recognize Israel, something that each of these groups has done in one way or another, although Israel refuses to acknowledge it. Again, I don’t know whether to laugh or cry at this recurring argument for the incursion of Gaza, the killing of innocent men, women, and children, the essential incarceration of a culture for over 40 years of Occupation. We have to do these awful things, the story goes, until they, the hated Other, recognize us, declare our right to exist. From my seat in the car, traveling to Nablus, looking up at settlement after settlement, it is not Israel’s right to exist that is in question.

The only way to justify this literal occupation of other people’s lives and land is to make them inhuman. Israel, with the help of AIPAC, B’nai Brith, the Anti-Defamation League, the Jewish Federations, and a myriad of other mainstream Jewish organizations, have done this well. In conversation after conversation here in this country, I witness their success as otherwise compassionate Jews deftly generalize about Palestinian men, women, and children in ways that we swiftly condemn when done about us. An elderly couple almost spits their anger at me, describing the fear their Israeli daughter feels living in such close proximity to the threat of rockets and suicide bombs.

I want to invite them to consider that their daughter’s fear is shared, often many times over, by daughters and mothers and sisters and sons in the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and Gaza. I want to invite them, and any of you who have never been, to come and live, as I did, for two weeks in Occupied Palestine. Come with me to the checkpoints, where you will be herded into metal troughs so narrow you can’t turn around, through turnstiles designed specifically to be too small for the average human body, yelled at by young 18, 19, 20 year olds whose contempt and disregard for those they control reeks off their skin like sweat. Come with me as we attempt to travel the short trip to Nablus on a Saturday to meet up with friends and family, only to find that Israel has closed all the roads leading out of Ramallah, a city of over 25,000 people, trapping us here on the Jewish Sabbath day without explanation or care.

Come and hear the stories, told at every gathering of Palestinians, of the latest injustice endured by a family member, a friend, at the hands of an Israeli soldier or settler. Point as I did, to inquire about a man dancing, full of joy, in a wedding picture. Hear the story of how he was taking his pregnant wife to Gaza to meet his parents, how he was stopped by Israeli soldiers, forcibly taken to Gaza while his wife was sent back to Ramallah. Two years have passed and he has yet to meet his young child because Israel will not give him the identity papers they require so he can see his family. Meet Fadi, a member of the family we are visiting, a young man in his late twenties who spends his days and many of his nights working, trying to make a living as we all have to do. Fadi cannot go with us to Jaffa Beach, next to Tel Aviv, literally half an hour from his home on the Palestinian side of the Wall, because he does not have and will never get Israel’s permission to go. These two people, and millions like them, are not a security risk of any kind; their crime is to be Palestinian.

Come with me and talk to the family whose home, built on their own land, was demolished for lack of a permit that Israel will not give, a family who has only to raise their eyes to see Jewish homes constructed at a fervid pace on a Palestinian hillside a half mile away. Come with me to the fields of a man, the mayor of a local village, who has been separated from his fields by the Wall, forbidden to ever reach them again by an Israel who tells the world that all he has to do is petition for permission to get to them, when the reality is that his petition has been permanently denied without explanation. Come meet the grieving father and mother whose young boy was killed when Israeli tanks parading through the town sprayed bullets sending one through their gate and into their son’s back. These people, and millions like them, are not a security risk of any kind; their crime is to be Palestinian.

Come with me, I beg you, and tell me that your safety, mine, depends on treating people this way. I have not even spoken the worst of it. I have not described the legalized theft of water, land, crops, trees; the complex system of laws that rob Palestinians of both livelihood and a future. I grew up as a white girl in the Jim Crow South and I have spent my adult life in the study of racism; what I see when I go to Palestine is Jim Crow on steroids. What I’m saying to you, although I’m not supposed to say it, is that Zionism is indeed racism – the supremacy of one race over another for the benefit of the first.

The Jewish community is not in danger from Palestinians or Arab nations. We are in danger because we interpret “never again” to mean never again for us when we should mean anyone and everyone. We are in danger because we continue to engage in a community-wide denial about what Israel is doing in our name.

I remember the time when a respected member of the Jewish community in my town called me a “shonda” (shameful) when, with my partner, I talked to a Jewish Sunday school class about what we had witnessed in Palestine (an unusual occurrence, for few synagogues will allow us to speak). I was struck, as I have been when attempting to address racism here in the U.S., that the focus of his anger was not Israel’s transgressions but the fact that we were speaking about them.

What does it mean that we are silent while the very meaning of what it means to be Jewish is becoming irreparably damaged? Our survival does not depend on a state that violates our fundamental values; our survival depends on honoring those values, the ones that instruct us “not to do to others that which is hateful to you.”

I invite you to consider what I’ve witnessed, or, if you can, to go and witness for yourself. I invite you to consider what it means to be a Jew today, when literally millions of people experience us as a people who control their every movement, their ability to access water, farm their land, build houses, live their lives. I invite you to consider what you hope it will mean tomorrow and the day after. For me, the question is not what are we willing to do for the sake of Israel. The question is what are we going to do for the sake of Judaism?

ICAHD-USA would like to extend our congratulations and deep gratitude to them, as well as Christina Cowger, who also received the award on behalf of her work with NC Stop Torture Now.

Tom & Tema accept the Peacemaker Award (photos © Jerry Markatos)

We do this work because of where we come from. I grew up in a typical reform Jewish family, which means religious training, Hebrew school, a Bar Mitzvah, and, in my case, a confirmation. The Middle East politics of my family were Zionist; we supported the state of Israel without question. Tema grew up with a culturally Jewish father and a Methodist mother; her parents helped start a pro-integration non-denominational church where she spent Sunday school studying legal cases under the tutelage of law professor Dan Pollitt. Yet we both come from families deeply committed to social justice and to the Jewish notion of tikkun olam, or healing the world. We owe our families a huge debt of gratitude for passing their values of love and justice down to us.

We do this work because of our relationship with the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions (ICAHD) – and ICAHD-USA. We met ICAHD founder Jeff Halper during our first trip in 2002; he told us then that the Israeli government has relentlessly destroyed over 18,000 Palestinian homes in East Jerusalem and the West Bank. Jeff founded ICAHD to bring attention to both the devastating impact of this policy on Palestinian families and to show how house demolitions are really part of a larger Israeli government strategy. The Israeli government policy of home demolitions, along with government subsidies for the ever-expanding settlements, the building of a massive network of by-pass roads, and construction of a 30-foot high Wall that snakes deep into the West Bank, all result in a massive illegal landgrab that is laying the footprint for Palestinian apartheid.

Make a donation today in honor of Tom & Tema’s achievement!

Appalled by what Jeff showed us during our first trip in 2002, we, along with with Mary Lou Smith and Jack Holtzman, helped establish ICAHD-USA in 2005 to support ICAHD’s important work. During our last trip in 2007, we had the great fortune to be part of the Constructing Peace Campaign, a joint project between ICAHD and ICAHD-USA, during which we rebuilt homes for 100 Palestinian and Bedouin families. We look forward to returning to Palestine again this summer.

We do this work to acknowledge our common humanity. During the height of the Gaza madness this winter, I had a conversation, more of an argument really, with an elderly Jewish couple participating in a local “Stand with Israel” rally. They walked past us as we stood with a small counter-demonstration sponsored by our Jews For A Just Peace group. They literally spat their indignation at us, their passion coming in large part from concern for their daughter, who lives in Israel and experiences a fear for her safety that I do not know. They were livid about her exposure to danger, furious in their assumption of our indifference.

What I wondered that day, what I wonder every day, is why it is so hard for these otherwise caring people to see that their fear is the very same fear of the Palestinians they so despise. While I do not know their daughter, I have met Palestinian families whose homes were demolished without warning, sending mothers, fathers, and children to the hospital from the sheer shock and despair of witnessing a home reduced to rubble. Their only crime, as is the case for virtually all Palestinian homes destroyed by the Israeli government, is that they built on their own land without a permit that the Israeli government refuses to issue. I have stood at the checkpoints and seen elderly men and women, mothers with children, young teenage boys, anxious, jostling in the hot sun, waiting to see if a young Israeli soldier is in the right mood this day to let them pass to go to work, get to an urgently needed doctor, visit family. I have talked with the father who tried in vain to protect his young son from the bullets of an Israeli Army tank, the doctor forbidden by Israeli troops from treating dying men just yards from his reach, a couple forced at gunpoint to sit for hours on their bed while soldiers blew holes in their walls to move from house to house.

I do not live in Sderot and I do not live in Gaza. Yet I wonder what it will take for us to see beyond our own fear and suffering to acknowledge the fear and suffering of another.

Our friend and Jewish activist Adam Horowitz reflected recently on the meaning of Passover, which we celebrated just last week. Adam reminded us that the Passover story is told and retold over the centuries as a story of “redemption and liberation.” He noted how central this story is to the Jewish ethic of justice, evoking Exodus verse 23:9 that instructs us to “not oppress a stranger, for you know the feelings of the stranger, having yourselves been strangers in the land of Egypt.”

Adam talked with great sadness about how “the war in Gaza is not only a devastating event for Palestinians but also the moral challenge of our time” to a Jewish community “whose leadership supported the onslaught publicly and loudly.” He warned us that we cannot tell this Passover story in the same way any more, for we are no longer the slave of the story; we have become the Pharoah.

I read that in Gaza some Israeli soldiers are wearing t-shirts bearing the silhouette of a Palestinian woman and child centered behind a target and underlined with the slogan “two for one.” This is the logical and terrifying consequence of forgetting our own history in order to believe that safety and security can be bought by threatening the safety and security of another.

Tema & Tom accept the Peacemaker Award (photos © Jerry Markatos)

Tom and I are not afraid for Israel’s future. We are afraid for the future of Judaism and the Jewish people. As a student of racism in this country, I see how here we are still reeling from the repercussions of indigenous genocide and the enslavement of people forcibly taken from Africa. A firsthand witness to how oppression initiated over 200 years ago continues to reverberate through the decades, I fear that the Jewish community will never recover from what is being done in our name for the sake of a state.

So we do this work because we are concerned about our collective future as Jews (those of us who are Jewish), and our shared future as human beings (which is all of us). As long as we continue to respond to human suffering with hatred and indifference, we are consigning ourselves to a bleak destiny, doomed to repeat the history from which we cannot seem to learn.

We do this work to lend our Jewish voices to the growing criticism of Israel’s increasingly oppressive policies and practices affecting Palestinians and Palestine. We want the world to know that Jews are not of one mind about Israel. We are so lucky to be part of a community of Jews in the Triangle, and throughout the country, who oppose the Occupation, oppose the Israeli lobby in Congress, oppose the systematic and state-sponsored violation of Palestinian rights, and support human dignity and rights for all people.

We do this work to make room for others to find their voices, to help protect those who are not Jewish from charges of anti-Semitism when they are critical of Israel. We do this work because it brings us into relationship with Palestinians like the Abu Sharif family, who have become our close friends.

We do this work to be connected to the people who make up ICAHD-USA. In addition to Mary Lou and Jack, we have been blessed to roll up our sleeves with the organization’s coordinator, Elyse Crystall, our web master, Dave Reed, Board members such as Howie Machtinger, and so many others.

We do this work to bring us into relationship with members of Jews for a Just Peace. These folks feed our need to be in community with kindred Jewish spirits who are willing to go public with their criticism of the Israel Occupation.

We do this work because the only way we know to move into the possibility of a different world is to be in community with people who understand the imperative to love the stranger as we love ourselves. We need to be in community with people like you, who see through the cultural conditioning of fear and act instead into and out of an ethic of love. What an irony to receive a reward for work that has only made our lives richer.

We do this work because, as Rabbi Hillel so famously said, If I am not for myself, then who will be for me? And if I am only for myself, then what am I? And if not now, when?

As I write, Israel is pounding Gaza with bombs and bullets, not yet satisfied with having killed and injured 1500 people, over a third women and children. Israel claims they don’t target civilians. Six little girls in one family were shot dead in front of their house, making this claim meaningless. The U.S. media tells us Israel is “at war” with Hamas. To call the relentless bombing of a 139 square mile area by the world’s 4th largest military “war” is ludicrous, just one more trick to keep us distracted from thinking too long or hard about the power imbalance of a 4-decades long inhumane Occupation.

I can hear the howl of protests now from the organized Jewish community, which would prefer to label me a self-hating anti-Semitic Jew than face the realities of how Israel is changing the face of Judaism. We forget that less than 50 years ago the Jewish community was hotly debating the pros and cons of statehood; we were free to argue either side without the vicious labels that function as labels always do – to stop people from thinking about what is being said and instead focus on the person saying it. The anti-Zionist arguments of the ‘30s and ‘40s have become dangerously and heartbreakingly realized – we are so obsessed with the mechanisms of statehood that we have willingly forsaken the meaning of our identity as Jews.

Every bomb dropped, every concrete slab of wall built, every acre of land illegally taken, every demolition of a Palestinian home, should force us to come to grips with the fact that to be Jewish in 2008 is no longer about our cultural ties one to the other, our shared values, our collective history. To be Jewish is now measured by our allegiance to Israel; if it was more than that, then our communities would be alive with protests about what we are doing in Gaza.

We are like the child who has been abused and grows up to recycle the abuse on a less powerful woman or child. We make all kinds of excuses for why we have to be abusive; we run the familiar tapes about the threat of anti-Semitism, the hatred of Hamas, the continued shelling of rockets from Gaza into Israel… the list is long and familiar. Yet I have not met a single American Jew (or American, for that matter) who has spent any time in Palestine who continues to recite this list. I do not claim that Israelis live in the kind of stability most of us know here or that the solutions are simple. I do claim, however, that the life Israel forces on the Palestinian people in the name of safety and security is not one any of us would be willing or able to endure.

For the most part the Jewish community here doesn’t know, doesn’t see because to know and to see would mean admitting that we are paying too steep a price for this homeland, this state. We have become comfortable believing that a Jewish life is worth more than a Palestinian one. I’ve sat across the table from devout Jews screaming at me that all Arabs do is breed suicide bombers, without seeing that their screaming hatred of Palestinians is the flip side of our experience. I’ve been called names by respected elders in the Jewish community because I dared to speak about the inhumanity I witnessed in Palestine with my own eyes; this in a community once proud of its ability to argue multiple sides of any issue. I’ve had Jewish leaders of all kinds tell me to keep quiet, now is not the time, don’t speak of it, urging a conditioned silence that is terrifyingly familiar.

As a Jew, I take to heart the teachings of Rabbi Hillel, who instructs us across the ages not to do to others that which we would not want done to us. As a Jew, I understand our invocation of “never again” as universal, a lesson from the Holocaust we should apply to all people. As a Jew, I am proud of our strong cultural commitment to justice. I thought once that these were the things that defined what it meant to be Jewish.

I no longer think so, for what seems to matter most to us now is our unquestioning allegiance to a state that does horrific things in our name. Judaism is not at risk from Hamas, Palestinians, or anti-Semitism. Judaism is at risk because we are silent when we should speak up, blind when we should see. In our haste to be like every other nation, to be powerful regardless of the price, we are indeed killing the very thing that makes us who and what we are. Bent on achieving a security bought with the lives of innocent people, we can’t seem to grasp the age-old lesson that raw force only strengthens the resolve of people to resist. I can’t help but wonder what we have saved, what we have made secure, when the only experience that literally millions of people have of us is one of daily injustice and oppression.

I refuse to conflate Judaism with Israel. I am driven by my deep concern for our future as a people. We may have already gone too far to reclaim Judaism to itself. I do not know. I only know I do not want us to lose ourselves to the continued justification of that which cannot be justified.