On Kinship, Justice, and Israel-Palestine

Rabbi Laurie Zimmerman
Congregation Shaarei Shamayim
October 3, 2024

“On Kinship, Justice, and Israel-Palestine”

We gather this morning on Rosh Hashanah to mark the promise of a new year. We recite, “Hayom Harat Olam - Today the world is born.” It is a world full of hope and possibility, a time to chart a new path forward.

Yet this is a time of darkness, just four days before the anniversary of October 7th, as war rages in Gaza–and now in Lebanon. It has been a year of devastation. A new world, a more peaceful and just world, eludes us.

We live thousands of miles from Israel-Palestine, and here, in the safety of our community, we gather to reflect on a year of complexity and pain. We do this not to find solutions, but to become more connected with one another. To think deeply about the meaning of kinship and of justice. To become more committed to our deepest ideals.

After October 7th, my father-in-law made ample use of group texting to express his support for Israel’s war in Gaza. Sometimes I read the articles he sent. Sometimes I ignored them. We both found it too hard to talk, so we didn’t. But when I visited him in February, we couldn’t keep up our silence. “Maybe we should talk about it?” I offered. We did. We went to a bar, and we talked for two hours. The next night we went out again.

I think we both wondered how we could care about each other so much, but have such profound disagreements about the lessons of Jewish history; our obligations to the Jewish people; the politics of safety, security, and war; and basic questions about what is right and what is wrong.

The attack on October 7th and ensuing war has created, or maybe unleashed, deep polarization–in families, among friends, in congregations, and in the larger community. It widened the discourse to the point where I have heard people I know and love say things that are untrue, conspiratorial, hateful, and bereft of the basic values I had thought we all shared.

This past January I attended the first session of a monthly dialogue group organized in part by one of our members about the October 7th attack and the war in Gaza. By the end, it had devolved into shouting.

I was used to being the one to defend Palestinian people, to argue for their political rights. This time, in a group of 30—some Jews, some Muslims, some others—I’d been the one arguing that in targeting civilians, Hamas had violated international law. Yes, Israeli women had been raped. And no, it was not credible to compare the attack on October 7th to the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising.

I continued attending the monthly dialogue group. I hated it. When I saw it on my calendar I tried to find excuses not to go. But I went. And I stretched myself.

It has become so difficult to speak with each other - not only beyond, but within the Jewish community. Since when did “Zionist” and “anti-Zionist” become slurs? We assume we can know everything we need to know about what a person believes by these nebulous labels that few people can easily define. We have calcified our positions and separated each other into the categories of “good Jew” and “bad Jew.”

“Hayom Harat Olam - Today the world is born.” At this time of Rosh Hashanah, a time of hope and possibility, what if, instead, we tried to understand one another’s perspectives in the most generous way possible?

First, the perspective of Jews who support Israel unconditionally, who tend to be older, but not always. Their narrative goes something like this:

Israel marks the redemption of the Jewish people out of the ashes of the Holocaust. The Jewish state is a brave experiment that has revived a dead language, established socialist kibbutzim, and created massive advances in technology. God gave this land to the Jews, and the land has flourished.

Hamas’ attack on Southern Israel was an attack on all of us, the worst slaughter of Jews since the Holocaust. Over 1200 people were massacred, including children and old people. There were systematic, widespread rapes. Hamas took two hundred and fifty hostages into Gaza; they are held in underground tunnels, and some have been tortured. So many are still languishing there, if they are even alive. These are our family members and friends and friends of friends.

Over 200,000 people have been displaced in southern and northern Israel. Hamas is an existential threat, and their actions forced Israel to strike Gaza. Israel can’t help it if the Hamas fighters are living among the civilian population. Israel must show the rest of the Middle East that they will fight back at any cost and inflict disproportionate damage.

The world does not care about the Jews. Where was the rest of the world as six million perished in the Holocaust? Now, when we defend ourselves, they tell us we are committing genocide. This is bald-faced antisemitism. We must use our community resources to wield power and fight antisemitism. Jews are only 0.2% of the world population. For Jews to survive, Israel must be strong.

Some of us believe part or all of this perspective, or perhaps we were raised with these ideas. It’s quite different from the perspective of Jews who oppose the war, or the Jewish state. They tend to be younger, but not always. Their narrative goes something like this:

The destruction of Gaza will plague the Jewish people for decades to come. In Hebrew school we were taught to make peace and pursue justice. We went through years of Holocaust education, and we internalized the message, “Never Again.” Never again for anyone. There is a genocide unfolding, and you taught us not to remain silent.

October 7th didn’t come out of nowhere. Over 700,000 Palestinians were displaced or expelled in 1948. In 1967 Israel conquered the West Bank and Gaza Strip and began to build settlements. The Jewish state is guilty of the crime of apartheid against the Palestinian people in creating a system of discrimination and oppression. The Palestinians did try to protest peacefully. The Oslo Peace Agreement failed. The boycott, divestment and sanctions movement failed. The Great March of Return failed.

What Hamas did was a war crime. But we have to understand that Gaza was dying. The United Nations had declared it “unlivable” in 2020. With Israel’s blockade of the air, land, and sea in 2007, Gaza became an “open-air prison” and a humanitarian catastrophe.

Because of the actions of Hamas, Israel unleashed collective punishment on 2.3 million Gazans. Israel has killed more than 40,000 people; over a third are children. There is no electricity. There is no clean water. Famine is widespread. Disease runs rampant. Most of Gaza’s health facilities have been destroyed. Most of Gaza’s homes and schools, and all of its universities, have been destroyed. Thousands of Palestinians have been taken into
detention facilities, held without charge or trial, and often tortured.

Some of us believe part or all of this perspective as well. What I have learned from talking with my father-in-law this year is how important it is to try to understand–not to try to find agreement.

“Hayom Harat Olam - Today the world is born.” At this time of Rosh Hashanah, a time of hope and possibility, we must listen with open hearts so we can feel some empathy for the people with whom we disagree.

In May I received a text from a member of Shaarei Shamayim: “Laurie, you need to go down to the encampment on Library Mall. There’s going to be a Liberation Shabbat.” I had disliked so many of the encampment’s slogans and chants: “There is only one solution: intifada revolution.” But she was persuasive, and I was curious - so I went.

A group of about a hundred people had gathered. I had never attended a Shabbat service on Library Mall. I had never attended a Shabbat service next to a huge Palestinian flag. A young undergraduate was speaking: “Yisrael does not only mean Israel, the state. It also means Jewish people.” I spotted an Iraqi man I had met in my monthly dialogue group. I stood beside him and explained what was happening in the service, which was mostly in Hebrew and led in part by one of our members. He told me his story of coming to this country as a refugee.

After the service ended, and volunteers passed out Zatar challah, the Iraqi man left to get ready to lead the Muslim call to prayer. I joined a group who formed a square around a tarp, facing outwards and linking arms to give the Muslims who were praying some privacy. On one side, I linked arms with one of the Muslim women I had argued with in the dialogue group. On the other side, I linked arms with the young undergraduate who had spoken in the service. “What brought you here?” I asked.

“Oh, I grew up supporting Israel, but I started reading about the history when I got to college. I changed my mind. I wanted to come down and see what this was all about.” It was one of the most moving Jewish experiences I have had.

I do not know what the Jewish community will be like in the next twenty or thirty years, if its elasticity will usher in exciting experiments in Jewish practice, politics, and culture or if its brittleness will lead to rupture and decline.

I do know that we all need more political discussion and education, not less. We need to struggle together, across generations, with historical questions and ethical dilemmas. What should our parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents have done when they were faced with terrible choices? Do our commitments to justice extend to only some people or to everyone? How do we tend to the fabric of our own society in the midst of paralysis and confusion?

One of the greatest threats to the Jewish people is that we will stop caring enough to deliberate on these concerns. If we cannot ask each other challenging questions and explore uncomfortable answers, then Jews will look elsewhere for meaning and community.

“Hayom Harat Olam - Today the world is born.” At this time of Rosh Hashanah, a time of hope and possibility, we can have these hard conversations.
This summer I led a discussion about Israel-Palestine with a group of parents and educators at a congregation in Philadelphia. I asked them, “What is the range of discourse that you feel comfortable with in a classroom? Which ideas are worthy of discussion or debate?” I imagined that they would weigh in on the big topics of the day: Zionism and anti-Zionism, international law, hostages, war, and human rights.

“That’s the wrong question,” a teacher stated, with a defensiveness that did not mesh well with the cheese and cracker platters and friendly hugs I had witnessed just minutes before. “Kids need to know whose team they’re on.”

The room got quiet. “Zionism is the answer to antisemitism,” he continued. “So we make flags in my classroom.”

“This isn’t soccer,” I thought bitterly. All the nuance, all the complexity, all the attempts to break the binary of “us” versus “them” dissolved.

I have thought about this interaction frequently, because he did raise an important question: Whose side are we on? Should being a member of the Jewish people, or living in a home with someone who is Jewish, lead us to root for Israel?

My answer used to be an easy no. I do not share even the most basic values with Jews who rampage through Palestinian villages in the West Bank, who sing and dance on sites that are sacred to Palestinians. But this year I have struggled again and again with the question, “What is our commitment to our people?” After October 7, when I read about the destruction Hamas had wrought on the communities of southern Israel, one of them stood out to me: Ofakim.

Ofakim is a small town, with many Mizrachi Jews and a high poverty rate. Most Americans have little reason to visit. But when I attended the University of Haifa, my roommate, Cochy, grew up in Ofakim. I would travel there for Shabbat with her and her family. It had been 30 years, and we
had lost touch. I didn’t know if she still lived there, and I didn’t even remember her last name.

This summer, when I was working at my kids’ Jewish summer camp, I ate my meals with an Israeli couple from Beer-Sheva, only twenty minutes from Ofakim. Anna started talking about a relative who lived there. I responded off-handedly, “I used to have a friend from there.”

Surprised, she asked, “Who?”

“Cochy,” I responded. And then, out of some deep part of my memory, came her last name. Anna looked her up on Facebook. Soon Cochy and I were exchanging heartfelt emails. On October 7, Cochy lost her younger brother, her uncle, and her cousin.

Extremist settlers and soccer teams aside, my connections to Jewish Israelis are much deeper than they are to Palestinians. So many of the people who were killed on the kibbutzim looked like me. They dressed like me. They were much more familiar.

What, then, is the implication of this? Does this mean I should root for my team?

I read the most beautiful response to these questions in a Facebook post. My colleague, Rabbi Esther Hugenholtz, who grew up in Holland in the shadow of the Holocaust, wrote:

We Jews are kin. We are a tribe. I don’t believe the purpose of kinship is to obscure the value of other humans who are not our kin. Rather, it’s [to] create circles of proximity and support that allows us to build healthy forms of kinship at scale. I love my kids more than other kids and invest resources into my love for them - but that doesn’t mean I don’t care for other people’s kids at all. I love them too; just at a scale that is more
manageable and appropriate. Kin is about support and solidarity; be it kin by blood or choice, actual and imagined, nuclear or extended, local or transnational.

She affirms that if we do have connections to Jewish Israelis, or to the culture, the land, and the history of Jewish Israel, they can be real and meaningful, rooted in deep relationships, important experiences, or simply a comfortable familiarity.

Rabbi Hugenholtz continues:

But what [kinship] isn’t about is supremacy and dehumanization. That is the morally catastrophic dichotomy I categorically reject...Kinship cannot be an excuse for the violation of the rights of others. If my child is a bully, then my kinship obligates me to reprimand my child and restitute their victim.

What she’s saying, I think, is that as we navigate our grief and anger, our feelings of connection, discomfort, and estrangement, we can feel strong kinship and also uphold our values of human rights, civil rights, and the belief that all people deserve to be safe and free. Our values obligate us to say no to supremacy and dehumanization.

We do not have to choose between our values and our kin. The only difference between an Israeli Jew and a Palestinian is that a Palestinian may be a little further outside our kinship circle than an Israeli Jew. We might feel closer to Israeli Jews, but we have the same ethical responsibilities to both.

Rabbi Hugenholz concludes:

I will not abdicate my kinship with the Jewish people just because it has become weaponized by power, corruption and wickedness. And I will not walk away from my Jewishly-informed humanitarian love of all humanity, including my Palestinian human family.

She raises two challenges for me: The first is to embrace kinship in all of its complexity. To fully affirm our connection to the Jewish people, and to Israeli Jews. But kinship also requires us to deepen our critiques, not to soften them: If we are connected, and we care deeply, then we can and should speak up when we disagree with our kin. And we must live with the dissonance and discomfort it produces.

The second is that if Palestinians are farther away in the circles of proximity and support, we have to work harder to embrace their humanity. So many Jews are ignorant about the nuances of Palestinian life, culture, politics, and history. We should read Palestinian novels, admire Palestinian art, study Palestinian history, and sit with the horrific reality that thousands of Palestinian children are starving and dying in Gaza. We must deepen our empathy, not lessen it.

“Hayom Harat Olam - Today the world is born.” At this time of Rosh Hashanah, a time of hope and possibility, let us remember that there are seven million Jewish Israelis and seven million Palestinians who share the land of Israel-Palestine. These 14 million people deserve to live in peace, to live in a just, democratic, and equal society. They deserve freedom and self-determination.

Let us not forget that their future is intertwined with our future.

Let us create these kinship circles of proximity and support, embracing the humanity of Israeli Jews and Palestinians.

Let us create a world where no one lives under domination.

Let us mourn every human being who has died in this last year in Israel and Palestine due to violence, revenge, and hatred.

And let us remember that there is another way. “Hayom Harat Olam - Today the world is born.”

L’shanah tovah – May it be a year of hope and possibility.