Not in my name but on my conscience

The Ceasefire Now movement is urging everyone to write their congressional representatives and ask them to either sign on to House Resolution 786 calling for an immediate cease fire in Palestine or draft a similar resolution in the Senate.

I wrote Representative Teresa Leger Fernandez, a Democrat from Las Vegas who thinks of herself as a progressive, asking her to sign the house resolution. She (her office) wrote me back a letter full of pablum about how horrible war is, that Israel has the right to defend itself, and that President Biden is doing everything he can to provide needed supplies to the Palestinians at the Rafah crossing.

This is what I wrote back: “Your response to my letter is quite pathetic. As an American Jew and a Mexican American, you and I share the heritage of being both a victim and a perpetrator. By not agreeing to sign the House Resolution 786 you’ve chosen the perpetrator side with your unequivocal support of Israel. As a Jew, I stand against Israel as the perpetrator of apartheid and genocide. Without any acknowledgment of the history of how the Zionist movement began and turned Israel into the authoritarian, anti-democratic, nationalistic state it is now, your position is based on propaganda and lies. I’m enclosing this letter that was written to the magazine Consortium News, one of the few American publications that tries to tell the truth in a distorted corporate media world that regurgitates the American government’s position on Israeli.”

The letter I sent her was by two people named Ace Thelin and Forest Knolls. I have no idea who they are but the reason their letter in Consortium News impressed me is that they focused on the fact that Israel is the creation of western imperialism and settler colonialism, just like our own country, the good old USA. The same Manifest Destiny that white Europeans imposed on Indigenous and Mexican peoples to “bring civilization” to them is exactly what the Zionists brought to Palestine, to the people the Israeli government has lately been referring to as “human animals.”

It didn’t have to be this way. I recently read Amos Oz’s memoir, A Tale of Love and Darkness, about his upbringing in the city of Jerusalem in the era of the dissolution of Mandatory Palestine and the beginning of the State of Israel (his fiction book, Judas, also explores these themes). Oz’s family had emigrated to Palestine to escape Russian oppression and was living in close quarters with its neighboring Arabs. Many of the emigrant Jews were not Zionists: they were socialists, secularists, intellectuals, working poor, and a-political refugees who just wanted to live a quiet life. Although Zionism was actually founded by both secular and religious Jews, under the political machinations of Britain and the western powers, once the State of Israel became a reality, Zionism became an ideology, a national homeland with a national identity that to no one’s surprise is becoming a fundamentalist theocracy. And we know what happens when religious fundamentalism defines who is worthy and who isn’t: ethnic cleansing. Itamar Ben-Gvir, now the Israeli Security Minister was “convicted of incitement to racism, interfering with a police officer performing his duty, and support for a terrorist organization, Meir Kahane’s Kach Movement (he has also successfully sued the state for hundreds of thousands of shekels in compensation for wrongful accusations). Due to these convictions, the IDF thought it too dangerous to draft him when he was eighteen.”

And so the slaughter continues and the dangers of a full blown regional war increase daily. As a ground invasion impends, more terrorists will rise from the ashes. Benjamin Netanyahu and Joe Biden will share that legacy. And bear (remember the hug?) blood on their hands. Not in my name but on my conscience.