After Palestinians, Zionism’s next victim is the Jewish faith
JVL Introduction
Amanda Gelender deplores the way in which quintessentially Jewish symbols are being appropriated by the Israeli Occupation Army.
The menorah, symbol of light and hope, and the Star of David now become glorified signifiers of death and destruction meted out by Israeli soldiers – in the name of saving Jews everywhere from another genocide.
The reverse is true as they try to make us all complicit: “So long as Israel massacres Palestine using the Jewish faith as a weapon of war, people will falsely conflate the global Jewish community with Israel.”
RK
This article was originally published by Middle East Eye on Sun 24 Dec 2023. Read the original here.
War on Gaza: After Palestinians, Zionism's next victim is the Jewish faith
Israel’s use of religious symbols in its genocide of Palestinians is an affront to Judaism and has robbed Jews of a faith practice divorced from nationalist barbarism
Israel has stolen and appropriated Jewish symbols we hold dear, politicising them as markers for state-sponsored genocide. Palestinians continue to suffer for western empire’s spoils, under the guise of safeguarding the Jewish people.
After Palestinians, Zionism’s next victim is the Jewish faith.
Israel and Zionists around the world weaponise Jewish symbols to intimidate, humiliate and lay claim to that which they deem theirs. Israeli soldiers have branded the face of a Palestinian prisoner with the Star of David. Israeli forces notoriously make blindfolded kidnapped Palestinians wave or wear the Israeli flag – emblazoned with a blue Star of David – videotaping the humiliation to disseminate online for Zionists to join in the jeering.
Israelis taunt Palestinians with cheers for a “Happy Hanukkah” while launching air strikes on communities dying of starvation and disease. How is this honouring the Jewish faith?
How will Jewish people being inextricably tied to mass murder “protect Jewish people” globally?
‘Symbol of violence’
As Jews around the world prepared for the start of Hanukkah this year, Israel murdered a beloved powerhouse intellectual, a Palestinian professor who represented the soaring voice of Gaza. The poet and educator Dr Refaat Alareer – and six members of his family – were “surgically targeted” and assassinated by Israel in his sister’s home in Gaza City.
As I and many other Jews made arrangements for our annual festival of lights, Israel brutally assassinated Refaat as part of an ongoing campaign to snuff out the storytellers and journalists of Gaza. They claim to do this in our names.
Near the site where Israel assassinated Refaat, Zionist soldiers marked the first night of Hanukkah by erecting a gigantic menorah in the rubble of decimated homes, where the unrecovered bodies of loved ones remain trapped.
Instead of the menorah representing the hope and spirit of our people at this moment, it proclaims to the world a colonial military victory – a symbol of violent conquest in a place where a poet’s passionate dissent was exterminated by Israel’s death machine.
“A 13 meter high Hanukkah Menorah in the heart of Shejaiya, inside the Gaza Strip.” Credit: Israel’s i24 news
In the legendary story we celebrate every Hanukkah, a tiny amount of oil miraculously provided the Maccabees eight nights of fuel to keep their temple lit. It has become a celebration of their faith and perseverance as Jewish freedom fighters facing down violent tyranny. Refaat and so many others martyred by Israel echo the resistance of these Jewish rebels – immortal symbols of light in the face of state terror and a reminder that the Palestinian spirit can never be extinguished.Zionism was once a fringe nationalist political movement within Judaism: only when its interests aligned with western imperialism did it receive the necessary backing to colonise Palestine. But so long as Zionist nationalism has existed, so have anti-Zionist Jews, rejecting the notion that our people should murder and displace Palestinians to build a western-backed settler-colony.
This genocide is a ceaseless nightmare with frightening echoes of the Holocaust. Zionist weaponisation of the Star of David is reminiscent of jeering Nazis who wielded the (stolen and appropriated) swastika symbol to humiliate Jews before mowing them down in the streets.
I am continually struck by the glee with which Zionists abuse Palestinians and make a mockery of our sacred symbols and prayers. The Israeli occupation forces recently raided a mosque, detaining and abusing Palestinians while hijacking the mosque’s speaker system to sing Hebrew prayers.
This is an affront to the Muslim Palestinians praying in their sacred place of worship and an insult to every single Jewish person of conscience who rejects the weaponisation of our faith by Israeli fascists.
‘Politicising Judaism’
Zionists drag Judaism through the mud by graffitiing and searing the Star of David to assert dominance over Palestinians while holding a literal knife to the neck of our Torah scrolls. But the symbolic death of the soul of Judaism pales in comparison to the material, ongoing devastation of the Palestinian genocide.
Israel has murdered more than 20,000 Palestinians and counting. It has displaced almost two million people more and intentionally destroyed homes, the ecosystem and infrastructure to render Gaza uninhabitable for those who manage to survive starvation, dehydration and carpet bombing.
So long as Israel massacres Palestine using the Jewish faith as a weapon of war, people will falsely conflate the global Jewish community with Israel.
In politicising Judaism, Zionists have robbed Jews of a faith practice divorced from nationalist barbarism.
Antisemitic western countries are completely satisfied to have Jewish people act as moral cover and human shields for their imperialism. These are the same countries like the US that rejected entry for Jewish Holocaust refugees but without hesitation poured billions into Israel’s military expansion project.
Zionism is no longer a fringe ideology within Judaism: we grapple with genocide and occupation that the majority of our community supports. This is a result of ongoing Zionist indoctrination that dehumanises and erases Palestinian life, teaches entitlement to Palestinian land, centres fear and Islamophobia, and sanitises Israel’s brutality.
Nothing helps the “fight against antisemitism” more than using the Star of David by the Israeli army spoxperson in propaganda clip as cross hairs for Palestinian homes before flattened on top of families and tearing children into pieces pic.twitter.com/b9Cb4PRSKQ
— Tameem | تميم (@TameeOliveFern) December 19, 2023
Part of stepping into Jewish anti-Zionism is accepting the fact that our religion has been hijacked by fascists who commit ongoing genocide on behalf of colonial powers.
If Jewish people don’t want to be incorrectly associated with Israel’s tyranny, the answer is to be vocally anti-Zionist and work to dismantle both Zionism and Israel’s settler-colony. As an anti-Zionist Jew, I eagerly embrace integrating Palestinian liberation into my faith practice.
Decoupling Zionism from my Judaic rituals isn’t a burden: it fills my Judaism with the divine energy of Tikkun Olam – the Jewish moral imperative to repair the world.
Disentangling Zionism from Judaism deepens my connection with my Jewish ancestors who, like Palestinians, fought with every dying breath to resist annihilation. Judaism will outlive violent Zionist nationalism and when Palestine frees itself, it will free us all.
The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.
Amanda Gelender is a Jewish American anti-zionist writer based in The Netherlands. She has been part of the Palestinian solidarity movement since 2006. She tweets @agelender.
Reproduced here with permission from Middle East Eye
When I first read this article, I had to read it again. I had to ask: When Amanda Geleneder, asserts:
“Part of stepping into Jewish anti-Zionism is accepting the fact that our religion has been hijacked by fascists who commit ongoing genocide on behalf of colonial powers.”
Does she mean that the point has been reached, where Judaism has to reassert itself? To redefine itself in opposition to its Fascist Hijackers? To distance itself openly from the Star of David and effectively reject all those traditional symbols of the Jewish faith? Or does she mean reclaiming the cloak of the Jewish faith, used by the Fascist Zionists, to disguise their increasingly open colonial settler apartheid project?
Thank you very much for this insight. You are right the Jewish religion and its symbols being used to justify a genocide upon the Palestinian
People. This all seems to me to have been planned The ramping up
Of West Bank atrocities at the same time as the assaults on Gaza is no coincidence. (I’m not forgetting the Hamas assault on Israel). There are stories on Social
Media that this has been in the planning for 15 years. The Gazans will never get back. They will be refugees and Israel will take over Gaza which is what they have always planned and they then have the whole country. Sorry I
Am getting off the point. The Jewish religion will be used to justify it and the fact that they are ‘Gods Chosen People’.
I welcome this insight, I hope it is shared widely.
I do strongly sympathize with the author, and not only because I could not agree more on the content of her contribution, but I do also admire her for the fact – that she is openly coming out as protagonist for the cause of anti-Zionism, just at a time, that anyone even seemingly slightly sympathizing with the fate of the heavily oppressed autochthonous inhabitants of Palestine by the supremacist allochthonous Zionist-Jews (and their Christian Zionist accomplices) is almost automatically vilified by a violent mob of radical pro-Israel lobbyists.
However (almost) nobody seems to know nowadays, that her ideas and counter (Jewish) mainstream activities, in reality is built on a small, but strong tradition of like-minded people : She for example has been preceded by the anti-Zionist activities of the (Jewish) father of the world famous violinist Yehudi Menuhin, (his father) called : Moshe Menuhin.
Moshe firstly did study Zionism rather thoroughly for ten years and subsequently decided to publicize his findings through several books. He, living in the USA, though had to overcome major obstacles, such as finding a publisher, courageous enough, to give a podium for anti-Zionism. And after his first publication, Moshe did meet the strongarm tactics of the mighty Pro-Israel lobby, which did try to prevent any newspaper in the USA, to give even a reviewing platform to the books of Menuhin.
He finally succeeded, after overcoming all kinds of opposition, provocations and threads, where Jacob Israel de Haan – also a vocal anti-Zionist, but then at the time of the roaring Zionist twenties, because De Haan (an ardent follower of the anti-Zionist Edah HaChareidis) did consider the Zionist settler colonial project, an anti-Judaic enterprise – most literary had been assassinated by the Hagana, for nothing more, but to suggest a strong cooperation between Jews and Arabs.