Jews Say Stop Arming Israel
I’ve been thinking about Moses and his rage when he came down from the mount to find the Israelites worshipping a golden calf.
The ecofeminist in me was always uneasy about this story: What kind of God is jealous of animals? What kind of God wants to hoard all the sacredness of the Earth for himself?
Lynne Foster
But there is a less literal way of understanding this story. It is about false idols. About the human tendency to worship the profane and shiny, to look to the small and material rather than the large and transcendent.
What I want to say to you tonight at this revolutionary and historic Seder in the Streets is that too many of our people are worshipping a false idol once again. They are enraptured by it. Drunk on it. Profaned by it.
That false idol is called Zionism.
It is a false idol that takes our most profound biblical stories of justice and emancipation from slavery — the story of Passover itself — and turns them into brutalist weapons of colonial land theft, roadmaps for ethnic cleansing and genocide.
It is a false idol that has taken the transcendent idea of the promised land — a metaphor for human liberation that has traveled across multiple faiths to every corner of this globe — and dared to turn it into a deed of sale for a militaristic ethnostate.
Political Zionism’s version of liberation is itself profane. From the start it required the mass expulsion of Palestinians from their homes and ancestral lands in the Nakba.
From the start it has been at war with dreams of liberation. At a Seder it is worth remembering that this includes the dreams of liberation and self-determination of the Egyptian people. This false idol of Zionism equates Israeli safety with Egyptian dictatorship and client states.
From the start it has produced an ugly kind of freedom that saw Palestinian children not as human beings but as demographic threats — much as the pharaoh in the Book of Exodus feared the growing population of Israelites and thus ordered the death of their sons.
Zionism has brought us to our present moment of cataclysm, and it is time that we said clearly: It has always been leading us here.
What kind of God wants to hoard all the sacredness of the Earth for himself?
It is a false idol that has led far too many of our own people down a deeply immoral path that now has them justifying the shredding of core commandments: Thou shalt not kill. Thou shalt not steal. Thou shalt not covet.
It is a false idol that equates Jewish freedom with cluster bombs that kill and maim Palestinian children.
Zionism is a false idol that has betrayed every Jewish value, including the value we place on questioning — a practice embedded in the Seder with its four questions asked by the youngest child.
Including the love we have as a people for text and for education.
Today, this false idol justifies the bombing of every university in Gaza; the destruction of countless schools, of archives, of printing presses; the killing of hundreds of academics, of journalists, of poets — this is what Palestinians call scholasticide, the killing of the means of education.
Meanwhile, in this city, the universities call in the NYPD and barricade themselves against the grave threat posed by their own students daring to ask them basic questions such as, “How can you claim to believe in anything at all, least of all us, while you enable, invest in and collaborate with this genocide?”
The false idol of Zionism has been allowed to grow unchecked for far too long.
So tonight we say: It ends here.
Our Judaism cannot be contained by an ethnostate, for our Judaism is internationalist by nature.
Our Judaism cannot be protected by the rampaging military of that state, for all that military does is sow sorrow and reap hatred — including against us as Jews.
Our Judaism is not threatened by people raising their voices in solidarity with Palestine across lines of race, ethnicity, physical ability, gender identity and generations.
Our Judaism is one of those voices and knows that in that chorus lies both our safety and our collective liberation.
Our Judaism is the Judaism of the Passover Seder: the gathering in ceremony to share food and wine with loved ones and strangers alike, the ritual that is inherently portable, light enough to carry on our backs, in need of nothing but each other. No walls, no temple, no rabbi, a role for everyone, even — especially — the smallest child. The Seder is a diaspora technology if ever there was one, made for collective grieving, contemplation, questioning, remembering and reviving the revolutionary spirit.
So look around. This, here, is our Judaism. As waters rise and forests burn and nothing is certain, we pray at the altar of solidarity and mutual aid no matter the cost.
We don’t need or want the false idol of Zionism. We want freedom from the project that commits genocide in our name. Freedom from an ideology that has no plan for peace other than deals with murderous theocratic petrostates next door, while selling the technologies of robo-assassinations to the world.
We seek to liberate Judaism from an ethnostate that wants Jews to be perennially afraid, that wants our children to be afraid, that wants us to believe the world is against us so that we go running to its fortress and beneath its iron dome, or at least keep the weapons and donations flowing.
That is the false idol.
And it’s not just Netanyahu, it’s the world he made and that made him — it’s Zionism.
What are we? We, in these streets for months and months, are the exodus. The exodus from Zionism.
And to the Chuck Schumers of this world, we do not say, “Let our people go.”
We say, “We have already gone. And your kids? They’re with us now.”
This is a transcript of a speech delivered April 23 at the Emergency Seder in the Streets held in Grand Army Plaza near Sen. Chuck Schumer’s home where approximately 200 of the demonstrators were arrested.
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As Israel orders the evacuation of Rafah, many Palestinians are returning to their destroyed homes in Khan Younis after Israeli forces left the city on April 7. Bisan returns to Gaza’s second-largest city, which once had a population of around 400,000 people. Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians sheltering in Khan Younis were forced to flee in February when Israeli forces besieged the city for months. Now, as Israel bombs Rafah, many Palestinians are being forced to evacuate back to Khan Younis.
Bisan visits a mass grave site behind Nasser Hospital where almost 400 bodies have been uncovered. Despite the destruction, Bisan interviews Palestinians who are determined to rebuild the city.
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23.5.2024: TTV: In reply to Jure Grbavac: In theological terms Jure, the 'New Covenant' replaced the Old one. The Old Covenant' or 'contract' was with Abraham and his descendants. Religious Jews rejected Jesus as Christ (and still do) The New Covenant was with all believers - Jews and Gentiles. As to the current Zionist occupiers of a territory, they are largely atheists, so to rely on Old Testament history and Divine prophesy, can only be hypocritical and false. In fact Hasidic Jewry appears to pour scorn on the current political Israel. You will remember that Moses struck dead the man that mistreated another and God in the Bible condemns outright the sort of behaviour the Zionists have demonstrated throughout their brief history . To equate them with any divine status or future is I believe a grave error. It has allowed America, founded on Christian principles, to to back mass murder and destruction, not seen on such a scale since Iraq and Libya. "By their works ye shall know them", and by that standard it is clear, if there is a Devil, they are its children. In the words of Christ, as they are recorded: "I know that ye are Abraham's seed; but ye seek to kill me, because my word hath no place in you. Ye are of your father the devil, and the lusts of your father ye will do. He was a murderer from the beginning, and abode not in the truth, because there is no truth in him. When he speaketh a lie, he speaketh of his own: for he is a liar, and the father of it. He that is of God heareth God's words: ye therefore hear them not, because ye are not of God." How could I better that?
23.5.2024: As Mearsheimer has pointed out there are four obvious scenarios: A two-state solution based on pre-1967 borders; A united Israel/Palestine replicating current 'greater Israel'; the occupation and subjugation of Palestine in an apartheid state; or another forced 'Nakba'. Despite pretending otherwise the Zionists will never agree to 1. Nor will they agree to 2 as this would involve affording equal rights and likely control to Palestinians. So they have opted for 3 and 4, the terrible consequences of which we have all been witness to. The scenario he does not allude to is either an economic or military collapse of the State of Israel itself, in which case it would be back to the drawing board for all. https://veaterecosan.blogspot.com/2024/05/say-stop-arming-israel-may-17-2024-from.html
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