The Jewish New Year has begun, and we are living in a nightmare. A year since the attack in southern Israel by Hamas, and the beginning of the genocide in Gaza, mass death and violence continue to flood our screens, now accompanied by a war on Lebanon. We are numb, overwhelmed by the catastrophe unfolding before us, with no time to mourn. At the root of this, as with most other injustices in the world today, is a politics based on supremacy, ethno-nationalism, and racism. This is not a recent phenomenon. It did not start on October 7, 2023, or September 2024. It is the consequence of a long history of crimes: settler colonialism, European antisemitism and the Holocaust, imperialism, colonial violence, and the Nakba.
Growing up in Jewish communities in Australia and the UK, Israel was central to our identity. It functioned either as a Jewish Disneyland or the answer to an existential fear of annihilation – a fear deeply rooted in my grandparents’ experiences during World War II. This fear shaped my early understanding of Zionism, leading me to proudly identify as a Zionist, attend Zionist summer camp, and recite prayers for the Israeli Defence Forces in my synagogue. Palestinians, on the other hand, were either absent or presented as an existential bogeyman, molded in the image of a post-9/11 world rife with anti-Arab racism and Islamophobia. The sight of a Palestinian flag filled me with fear.
My awakening to the reality of Israel was gradual, marked by several pivotal moments. Sitting in Ofer Military Court at 22, I watched Palestinian men, handcuffed in a line, charged for the simple offense of not renewing their permits on time. A PowerPoint presentation on villages destroyed during the Nakba revealed that the land I had used for team-building exercises with Jewish teenagers was the Jewish National Fund British Forest, a chilling juxtaposition. In 2016, during my first solidarity trip to the West Bank, I sat in Umm al-Kheir in the South Hebron Hills and listened as a Bedouin elder described the “inconvenience” of her house being regularly demolished by the Israeli army. I experienced the familiar cycle of anger followed by shame. How could destroying this woman’s home make me safer as a Jew? Even if it did, even if bombing campaigns, genocidal destruction, occupation, and apartheid in some perverse universe kept Israelis and Jews around the world safe, the moral cost is simply too high.
Despite the claims of those who profess to speak on behalf of our community, neither Jews nor Israelis have a unique claim to safety. All human beings deserve to live with freedom, dignity, and safety. This includes Palestinians and Lebanese people, it includes Israelis. Our collective security and liberation are interconnected – we must dismantle the systems that harm us all and hold accountable those who seek to wreak destruction and violence upon civilian lives.
How must it seem to the families of those taken hostage in Gaza, who have been leading protests against their own government’s disdain for their repeated demand for a ceasefire and hostage deal? It is shameful how, for years, but particularly this year, so many politicians have ignored or justified the mass death of innocent people, or called for “hate marches” to be banned, by positioning themselves as standing up for the Jewish community or fighting antisemitism. These tactics speak to a broader exclusionary politics that degrades and dehumanizes Palestinians, Arabs, and Muslims, and that has disastrous consequences – as we saw with the race riots this past August.
At a time when both antisemitism and Islamophobia are rising, pitting different minority communities against each other while backing violation after violation of international law feels particularly dangerous. As many other paradoxes began to flourish in recent months – peace is war, protest is repression – so too did the discourse around Jewish safety. What is of more risk to Jewish people? A protest encampment at an Ivy League university? Or a nation state armed to its eyeballs that carries out genocidal destruction in the name of Jewish people?
I yelped as Jonathan Glazer made his courageous intervention at the 2024 Oscars, watching his acceptance speech in bed on my phone and frantically texting friends and colleagues. There it was, clear as day; how we must refute our Jewishness being used to justify this brutal assault on Gaza, an ongoing occupation, and apartheid. That anyone can be a victim or perpetrator of dehumanization. “Never Again” was the rallying cry of our Jewish lives – we have a duty to take a stand against genocide. Since October 7, that duty seems to have a caveat: except for Palestine. In both its egregious actions and its moral core, Israel has failed to be the solution to the question of Jewish safety.
So, now what? In an attempt to practice, as abolitionist organizer Mariame Kaba argues, hope as a discipline; what would it mean to see Jewish liberation as contingent on the liberation of all people, including Palestinians? We have a responsibility to reject the siloing of our own vulnerabilities or communal fears, and to push towards a vision of collective safety for our future. It begs the question of what it would mean for Jews to see Palestinians as fellow travelers in the struggle against nationalism, the war machine, and the legacies of colonialism, rather than as an existential threat to our existence. Jewish security will never be predicated on the oppression and subjugation of another people. To truly understand this is to open up the possibility of a new future.
It allowed me to find new communities that did not force me to leave my values at the door in order to belong. It became the basis of my life as an organizer and led me to find other Jews who are committed to creating a different kind of Jewish life, one predicated on justice and equality for all – including Palestine. The days between Rosh Hashanah, Jewish New Year, and Yom Kippur, the day of atonement, are some of the holiest days in the Jewish calendar. It is a time for reflection and repair. The American Rabbi, Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg, posted on Instagram words that I have continued to come back to over the past year. “When I look through our Jewish texts, I keep looking for the fine print that says ‘except for Gaza’ and not finding it.” May this next year prove that our belief in the sanctity of all human life is not naive, but rather a rallying cry for our collective liberation.
