Israel’s most potent weapon is Jewish trauma
Jews are no strangers to grief. It is woven into their heritage and their prayers. It is also entangled in a decades-long campaign of imperialism.
The Jewish people are hyper-vigilant, and rightfully so.
Around the globe and throughout time, we have been lynched and demonized, exiled and massacred. On the other side of suffering, it seems, is always another tragedy.
Thriving Jewish communities have been marauded, victim to the perception that Jews are too controlling. It’s a conniving caricature to preserve a sense of order. But real or imagined power is hardly the only harbinger of future devastation.
The Jews’ mere existence has inspired repeated efforts to replace us.
At the core of each injustice leveled against the Jews is humiliation. This stench of mockery emanates from ancient Roman coins portraying bound Jewish men and women and postcards of Leo Frank’s body shipped from the Jim Crow South. The debasement seeps out of train cars and gas chambers, naked, battered souls rendered superfluous.
Hubs of Jewish life and culture in places like Wootch, Poland, and Harbin, China, have been thoroughly stomped out. Countries like Saudi Arabia, pressured by Islamist regimes, have erased remnants of their Jewish roots. In America, neo-Nazis are waved off as “very fine” by a president, and politicians running for office find competitive advantage in altering the facial features of their Jewish opponents to fit their visage into a stereotype.
It is the everlasting struggle of the Jewish people to reclaim their dignity from the mighty forces aiming to destroy it.
On October 7th, Jews recoiled once again when Gaza’s hermetic dam burst open and a gush of Hamas militants swarmed into the Holy Land. Festival-goers were shot while seeking shelter in portable toilets. Kibbutzes were set ablaze. One posted photos of a slain elderly woman on her Facebook, to the shock and horror of her family and friends. More than 1,400 Israelis were brutally killed in the rampage and more than 200 hostages were taken.
When Jews say they cannot stop shaking and crying, it is because they are carrying too much grief to bear. To watch helplessly as a country built explicitly for their kind is purged of children, peace activists and Holocaust survivors in the most grisly manner imaginable compounds on the Jewish people’s perpetual despair.
Mourning the inhumane treatment of Jews is like morning, as sure as sunrise. Hamas’s assault triggers painful flashbacks of the violent pogroms in Baghdad, Tripoli and elsewhere. It reignites the Jewish diaspora’s commitment to Zionism.
And it provides Israel its most potent weapon of all: another layer of generational trauma.
In Western secular schools, students learn of the Jews through the Holocaust. In religious schools, Jews are introduced to the creation of Israel through a strictly Zionist lens. Absent from the teachings is the Nakba, the murder and forced expulsion of Palestinians from their homes, and the constricting military blockade Palestinians now live under in the Gaza Strip.
A curriculum has been developed around the persecution of Jewish ancestors, but Jews are shielded from the deadly attacks being levied against Palestinian farmers on a regular basis in the West Bank. They are expected to revere the Israel Defense Forces and marvel at the natural beauty of their homeland. At synagogue, Jews are prompted to pray for peace in Israel, a small imperial favor for the ever-expanding sovereign state in the Middle East.
Meanwhile, the Palestinian people are crushed by the vice grip of occupation and constant bombing. They rebuild their cities only to watch buildings crumble again. The residents of Gaza and the West Bank, many of them descendants of refugees — or refugees themselves — who were driven out of their homes by the Israelis, ache for some semblance of freedom. To move. To breathe clean air. To make it to adulthood.
At the storefronts of Berlin, the film studios of Hollywood, and everywhere in between, Jewish integration has been met with some form of backlash, from ridicule and conspiracy to state-sponsored genocide. This understanding helps form the framework for Zionism. Unhoused Jews, reeling from the decimation of the Holocaust and denied an easy path out of poverty, yearned to be free.
But Palestine was not their home, despite what biblical prophecy and the Balfour Declaration claimed. The land was seized violently and illegally, a phenomenon not foreign to Israel’s settler colonialist allies. For 75 years, native Palestinians have been gradually choked out of their homeland, forced to flee to increasingly crowded regions, where they face limited resources and invasive checkpoints. Since 2007, Gazans have endured a land, air and sea blockade that prevents their ability to leave to receive proper medical care or pursue an education, among other basic needs. When bombs fall, the citizens of Gaza have few places to hide.
Palestinian writer Hala Alyan posited this week that “Palestinian slaughter is too often presented ahistorically, untethered to reality: It is not attributed to real steel and missiles, to occupation, to policy.” Palestinians, mired in a lifelong plea for liberation, are routinely pressed to answer for the militant faction of Hamas, as if they had signed off on the incursion themselves. How do YOU suggest the Israeli government respond?
The answer is the same now as it has been for decades. They wish for the fences to fracture, to be unshackled from their open-air prison.
Their demand is simple: One war crime should not beget a far more fatal one.
It is tempting for the Jewish diaspora, especially in places like the U.S. and the U.K., to elide the Palestinian narrative when forming their own opinion about what must happen next. The searing videos of families torn apart and the spraying of indiscriminate gunfire in southern Israel has led many Jews to zero in on a lone solution: the eradication of Hamas.
The thought is well-intentioned and supported not only by the devastation Hamas left in its wake on Oct. 7, but of a near eternity of cruelty toward the Jews. For a hopeful yet beleaguered people, who are in the minority everywhere but Israel, the fear that terror could one day arrive at their doorstep is visceral. The bursts of anti-Semitism over the past two weeks have only driven home the point that vengeance is the only option to ensure the safety that Israeli Jews and their religious counterparts scattered across the planet desperately covet.
The Israeli government has weaponized this grief and dread to clench its fist even tighter around the Palestinian people. Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his lackeys are rallying around the myth of self-defense — the Israeli military was caught flat-footed and ill-prepared, not under-manned or under-funded — and the known fact that Hamas hides itself and its weapons behind its civilians to promote a relentless siege on Gaza. The U.S. has tepidly stood by Israel’s apartheid regime, acknowledging the unimaginable humanitarian crisis facing Gazans while supplying Israel with resources to continue its onslaught.
It feels un-Jewish to be so critical of a nation expressly created as a safe haven for Jews, who have pinballed from continent to continent for centuries seeking refuge. Israelis deserve a better life than one that revolves around militarism and ducking into bomb shelters when sirens roar. And to label each individual IDF member fulfilling their duties as a villainous oppressor broaches into anti-Semitic territory, even if their actions as a collective are often abhorrent.
Stripped of context and feeling, it is easy to use the words “genocide” and “ethnic cleansing” when defining what Israel is currently doing to Gaza. When emotions reach a boiling point, as they have this month, that conversation becomes fraught at best.
But ascribing distinct language to Israel’s three-quarter century’s worth of atrocities is absolutely necessary, and now is as good a time as any. Because this is no way for Palestinians — or Israelis, for that matter — to keep on living and dying. Because Gazans, nearly half of whom are children, remain in dire need of assistance, as ceaseless bombardment, diminishing fuel and food and contaminated water leave them cut off from the rest of the world, susceptible to disease, and vulnerable to death. Because no human being, Jew or Arab, should be consigned to a fate in a mass grave for crimes they never supported and had no part in committing.
As Jews drape themselves in the Israeli flag to comfort their trauma, let it not drown out the screams of the helpless Palestinians still trapped under the rubble.