By EVA PESKIN
I submit this writing as a practice of Tochecha (loving rebuke). I invoke this Jewish name for a concept shared by many traditions of offering critique when someone is missing the mark as an act of radical love.
In fact, according to Vayikra (Leviticus) 19:17, I am obligated to provide feedback when I perceive wrongdoing by none other than HaShem (the ineffable expression of the divine conversation among self, earth and cosmos often represented in English as “God”). As James Baldwin put it, “If I love you, I have to make you conscious of the things you don’t see.”
Every day for the last 10 and a half months, I have seen parents rocking in grief over the bodies of their children wrapped in small white shrouds. I have seen children trembling in hallways of hospitals in shock from airstrikes, screaming as their limbs are amputated without anaesthesia, thousands now carrying the horrific designation “WCNSF” (Wounded Child-No Surviving Family). Over the weekend, the Gaza Health Ministry reported the first confirmed case of polio in a 10-month-old child after Israel’s utter destruction of Gaza’s health, hygiene and waste management infrastructure has produced the conditions for an epidemic.
This is only a tiny fraction of the devastation currently unfolding as the so-called civilized Western world will not stop sending the perpetrators of these atrocities weapons, nor implement the ruling of the International Court of Justice, which on July 19 declared Israel an apartheid state, illegally occupying Palestinian territory, and demanded that all states party to the court cease supplying Israel material support immediately.
Meanwhile, self-described Zionists on Salt Spring and around the world antagonize and demean those of us who take a public stand against this nightmare. Maybe you did not see me at the Pride march a few weeks ago. Maybe your attachment to Zionist outrage prevented you from entertaining the possibility that there might be Jews chanting “Intifada, revolution!” and “Land Back” alongside our Palestinian and Indigenous comrades. (Intifada is an Arabic word that means to shake off one’s oppressor, the same word used in Arabic to describe the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising.) Maybe the propaganda upon which Zionism is built has confused you about the distinction between Zionism and Judaism, such that you cannot see how (dare I say) antisemitic it is to erase Jews who don’t conform to your worldview.
But Zionism is not Judaism. Judaism is a pluralistic, multi-thousand-year-old religious and cultural tradition with a wide variety of expressions throughout a diaspora that spans every continent. Zionism originated among European Christians in the 16th century, based in the belief that Jews who refused to convert and assimilate needed to be expelled from Christian Europe. Currently, the largest demographic of Zionists are Evangelical Christians, who believe Jews must be returned to the holy land to usher in the apocalypse, when all the heathens burn in hell on earth while the true believers ascend to heaven in the rapture. Just ask Pastor John Hagee, president of Christians United For Israel, a U.S.-based organization boasting more than 10 million members (there are only about 15.5 million Jews of all political/theological persuasions worldwide). Hagee has said that Jews caused the Holocaust and Hitler was sent by God to help create the state of Israel. He was celebrated as a keynote speaker at the “March For Israel” rally in November in Washington, D.C.
Zionism caught on as a Jewish nationalist movement in the late 19th century in reaction to European antisemitism. Founders of the Zionist political project openly described their aims in terms of colonization, explicitly predicated on the dispossession of Palestinians from their land with the help of Western imperial powers, summed up by Israel’s first Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion in his diary in 1937: “the compulsory transfer of the Arabs from the valleys of the projected Jewish State . . . We have to stick to this conclusion the same way we grabbed the Balfour Declaration, more than that, the same way we grabbed at Zionism itself.” The Balfour Declaration of 1917 was the arrangement by the British ruling class to seize the land of Palestine and “give” it to the Zionists to colonize. Notably, the only Jewish member of parliament at the time, Edwin Montagu, decried the declaration as antisemitic, a means to isolate and expel Jews from Britain.
But there was another conversation happening among European Jews at this time, anchored in the concept of doikayt, a Yiddish word that translates to “hereness.” Opposed to the “thereness” of Zionism, doikayt was a rallying cry for the Bundists, the Jewish labour movement which believed that their home was where they lived and their struggle was against fascism alongside their neighbours who were also oppressed by capitalism and imperialism. Doikayt meant pride in Yiddish culture and language, joy in welcoming the stranger, and determination to stand up for the most vulnerable. Zionism sells Jews a self-annihilating story: You are small, weak, alone. Your neighbours will turn on you and no one will come to rescue you. You must destroy your enemies before they destroy you.
My commitment to opposing Zionism is unshakeable, as it comes from the deepest self-love. I believe we can choose to be on the side of life, standing with the people of the global majority, fighting to end oppression, taking responsibility for what is ours to repair. I believe we all belong in Olam Haba, the world to come.
The writer is a Salt Spring Jewish community member who has a Ph.D. and experience as a teacher, movement researcher and community-based art maker.
Wow! Thank you for breaking down the unknown and authentic history and traditions of Jewish and Yiddish culture. I really appreciate this view because more than ever, conflating what Zionism deems as “antisemitism-Z” is covering the rise of real antisemitic , Islamophobia, racist and right wing fascist tendencies on the rise. This contributes to the ignorance we see here on Salt Spring Island and in the West. This is not about religion! This genocide by the settler colony Israel is supported by the settler colonial traditions of Canada, America and Europe, because it is that strategy to create a European settler colony on the lands and bodies of the Indigenous populations.