A Jew’s Reflection on Israeli Authoritarianism

What would you do if you realized that the ideology you were taught as a child, the ideology that forms your identity, was oppressing an entire ethnic group of people? That’s the question that keeps bouncing around my head today. I was raised Jewish. My whole family is Jewish. I went to Hebrew school and I heard time and time again of the miracle of Israel. I heard the story that after WWII, the Jewish people sought a homeland where they could govern themselves free from persecution. What I wasn’t told, was that that homeland was already occupied. That in order to create Israel, hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were forced from their homes or killed. I wasn’t shown pictures of the hundreds of Palestinian children that were killed in Israeli bomb strikes. I wasn’t told of the white phosphorus, that water rationing, or the bombing of journalist buildings. My story of Israel was a story of victimhood; how we suffer from relentless acts of terror and anti-Semitism seemingly from an unprovoked aggressor. The violence Israel does is an act of self-defense, of G-d’s will.

The truth is that the Jewish people, my people, are marred with a history of authoritarianism and racism. Last week the Israeli police attacked the al-Aqsa mosque with flash grenades and rubber bullets while Palestinians were praying for Ramadan. The evictions of Palestinians in the West Bank were just one of hundreds of forceful settlements by Israeli police to remove Palestinian from their homes in order to extend the tendrils of Israeli power. Ten Israelis were killed by Hamas in the last few days. In that same time 227 Palestinians were killed, including 62 children. The moral response to acts of terror is not more aggressive acts of terror. The Israeli government does not get a get-out-of-jail-free card because of the Holocaust. We don’t get to claim manifest destiny in an area that was occupied by Arab-Palestinians for 1300 years. The Jewish people have a right to a homeland. They have a right to live in peace and govern themselves. But they do not have the right to accelerate violence, bomb civilians, and hoard economic resources to establish that homeland.

I know I will get a lot of flak from my family for saying all of this. I will be called uninformed and anti-Semitic. I am a “member of the Tribe” and we don’t criticize Israel. But there needs to be a point in which we as a people reflect on what we are doing. At what point does the smashing windows and throwing Molotov cocktails at Palestinian owned businesses become eerily similar to Kristallnacht? At what point does restricting freedom of movement from Gaza turn into a concentration camp? At what point have we gone too far? Israel has the power to create peace but instead it has continually rejected Palestinian cease-fire agreements and settled land in violation of peace agreements. If nothing else, can we not realize that the world is watching and that committing war crimes is losing Israel’s moral authority? I love my family and I value our cultural practices, but we as a people need to take a step back and realize what is going on. Do we want to be a people that bombs media buildings to send a message? Do we want to turn down peace for the sake of vengeance? We need to be better. We need to recognize the humanity of the Palestinian people. We need Shalom Rav.