This is for many of the European Jewish people who I grew up with, went to Shul with, went to school and summer camp with- including myself.
We grew up in our towns, schools, and universities as members of a minority living in the aftermath of genocide and felt the sense of vulnerability that came alongside our exposure to ongoing antisemitism in Christian states. We were told by our school teachers, our camp leaders, and our rabbis that there was a theological line from the end of the Shoah to the birth of the State of Israel- our liberator, protector, and promissor of messianic time.
This notion of the State of Israel as our salvation from traumatic history and the repository of a liberated Jewish future gave many of us one of the most potent emotional attachments we had ever experienced- an ecstasy of song, dance, and spirituality. We felt alive, recognised- even as we remained in diaspora.
As a result of the mental cocktail that was given to many of us by our schools, summer camps, and synagogues, our very fields of vision changed no matter how left-wing we understood ourselves to be.
It became very difficult, almost impossible, to see what was in front of our eyes. Zionism remade the ways in which we apprehend violence against those we were told stood in the way of our liberation, our safety, our humanity- Palestinians.
When someone would say to us “open your eyes and look at what is really happening in Palestine” we would not refuse, we would open them widely. What we saw would simply show us what we expected to see. We would feel personally attacked by the suggestion that our eyes were not open. We had been to Jerusalem. “It is they that ought to look closer.”- we would say.
Zionism made us see and sense an antisemite in the Palestinian who wants to destroy walls. In the Palestinian who wants to return home. In the Palestinian who wants to thrive.
Forced displacement, lynchings, murder. Ethnic cleansing. These acts are being carried out by people whose senses have also been warped, though in this case by and in a system that affords them racial supremacy. A system that they have wilfully chosen to participate in- they have agency- they are not dupes. Were we that different to them? If so, how were we different- were we dupes? What made our Zionism- the Zionism of Jewish European longing- more pure, less violent- than theirs?
As young Israeli Jews chanted “Remember me! Strengthen me! Just this once, God, that I may with one blow take vengeance on the Palestinians (may their progeny be erased!) for my two eyes!” at the Kotel while trees outside the Al Aqsa Mosque burned- many of us could not believe our eyes. I certainly could not.
Why? We reject the words when we find out what they mean- of course we do- but many of us know the tunes, we relate to the sound. We have been on an Israel Tour. How can a song feel so beautiful and so nauseating at once? What does complicity look like?
Perhaps I should have been able to believe what I saw at the Kotel last week. It should not be a surprise after what I know about my own Jewish education. I still cannot fully see- my visibility is still blurred- the force of ideology continues to make the reality hard to comprehend.
How can we begin to see what is in front of us? Perhaps some never will be able to see- that is the force of ethnic nationalism- that is the force of particular kinds of supremacy, of racism itself. But just because one may never fully see does not mean that one cannot act.
European Jews must support the movement to Free Palestine. If we do not we will continue to dehumanise those whose suffering we have contributed to and that we have been so incapable of seeing with our eyes open. Enough.
