Israel's Massacre in Gaza

After the October 7 attack, I was surprised by how much sympathy I felt for Israel. I wrote about it here. I acknowledged this was partly due to my Jewish background — I felt an almost epigenetic response to the initial footage from the attacks on the Supernova trance festival and the kibbutzes. Even though I grew up without Jewish religious practices, my mother is Jewish. I always identified with Jewish secular culture (Kafka, Allen Ginsberg, Freud, and so on). When I made one visit to Israel some years ago. I was very moved by what I found there — by the old city of Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, the Dead Sea, kibbutzes. On that short trip, I didn’t go to the West Bank or Gaza.

As time has gone on and the atrocities, deaths, and evidence of war crimes continue to mount, I no longer feel sympathy. It seems clear that a substantial portion of the Jewish population in Israel is gripped by the same level of homicidal mania we’ve seen in many ethnocides and genocides, including the Nazi genocide against the Jews.  Some Israeli Jews see the Palestinians as subhuman and want to eliminate them. I am very sad to realize this. I hate to recognize the situation is this bad.

In The State of Israel vs. the Jews, Sylvain Cypel, a former Zionist, writes that Israel, as it moves to the Right, becomes increasingly dangerous, not only for Israeli Jews but for Jews everywhere. Israel is “bad for the Jews,” he writes, because it latches on to “the emerging power of the new ethnic and authoritarian currents sweeping the planet,” which includes White Christian nationalism in the US. Under Netanyahu and his cronies, Israel “presents itself as a precursor and an original theoretician of this move toward separateness.” Reactionary, authoritarian movements based on religious or ethnic identities, similar to mid-century Fascism, are rising in power. They look to Israel’s apartheid practices as a model for the future.

For Cypel, the state of Israel forces Jews who continue to support it to abandon “that which made Judaism’s culture and glory in the modern age: the multifaceted engagement in progress, a belief in science over superstition, and a rejection of racism in all its forms.” I see this even in some Jewish online groups I am part of. They do not speak about the carnage that is being unleashed — the horror of it — but only about their worries over growing expressions of Anti-Semitism. They act as if the anger against Israeli policies — and, by extension, Jewish power — was happening in some kind of context-less vacuum.

Personally, I feel that progressive and liberal Jews need to do more self-introspection at this point. We need to take a more careful look at our cultural and religious sense of exceptionalism. This is, I suspect, a byproduct of the religious messianism, the belief in a future redemption, latent in Jewish identity, found in the myths around Israel. If our legacy allows for conscience-less slaughter, we need to ask why and how this is the case.

Among the news that finally melted my resistance was this: “Young Israelis block aid to Gaza while IDF soldiers stand and watch”, from The Washington Post on February 10. According to the article, Jewish teenagers are setting up blockades to keep food and other humanitarian aid from reaching the Palestinians in Gaza, who are starving. “Death to Arabs,” they cry. Meanwhile, other Jews, openly supported by the Far Right, plan to resettle in Gaza, once they have driven all the Palestinians out.