This is a bit of an essay, but this has been percolating for some time. I sit with this duality, one that I think a lot of progressive Jews share, though I only speak for myself here. When it comes down to it, I see two truths from two sides, each wanting to deny the other, each wanting me to deny the other. And I just cannot do that. Because the reality is that I think both are true.
Antisemitism is real, and it remains far higher than it was before October 7, 2023. Israel was mercilessly attacked on October 7th, and the world, at least to me, seemed dismissive and hostile before Israel even responded. Hamas would like nothing more than to ethnically cleanse the Jewish people from Israel, at the least, and it has shown no hesitation about embedding itself among the civilians it claims to represent.
I believe the Jewish people have the right to exist safely and collectively in a homeland, in the State of Israel. My belief is not random or driven by colonial desires. It comes from centuries of displacement, exclusion, and violence. It comes from the reality of what happens when a people has nowhere to determine its own fate. It comes from my own family's stories!
That doesn't mean I don't care or that I don't want the best for the Palestinian people. The right to self-determination, dignity, and a homeland belongs to Palestinians too. We need to stop treating these as competing truths. Both are real. Both are needed. Being expected to deny the truth of my own people in order to acknowledge the truths of the Palestinian people is not solidarity. It's erasure with a different target. But it works the other way too: we cannot ask the Palestinian people to erase their truth in order to validate our own. Both are true. As a progressive American Jew, I think it is a grave injustice to deny either. We are not playing a football match here. These are people's lives, children's futures, and our future depends on finding peace with each other: acknowledging the other's truth, hearing it, feeling it, and, for G-d's sake, trying to find understanding.
This is what I feel many Jews need acknowledged: For the many centuries since the original displacement of many Jews (but not all) by the Romans, wherever we’ve been, we’ve been treated as outsiders, as “enemies of the state,” violently attacked, imprisoned, tolerated at times (this is very different from being accepted as full citizens), othered, targeted, taunted, and the list goes on. Jewish migration back to Israel did not start with the Holocaust either. Throughout history, periods of Jewish return and exile to the Levant have recurred. Waves of Jews began moving back again in the 1880s, driven in part by escalating pogroms across the Russian Empire, decades before the Holocaust made the need existential. Those who fled went wherever they thought they might finally find safety, but "wherever" wasn't much of a choice. America and other countries imposed increasingly restrictive immigration policies. People didn't get to choose. They went wherever a door was open, even a crack.
This included Ashkenazi Jews; many have stories like my own family's. My great-uncle was exiled to Siberia in the 1900s for his part in the Communist movement, while the rest of his family, my family, fled. He stayed, married, and raised his kids in Siberia. During Stalin's purges, he was arrested as an "enemy of the people" and executed. His son, my cousin, spent his childhood running from raids and was later drafted into a war that never trusted him with a weapon. It took more than fifty years, and a mass grave, before the family learned the truth of what happened to my great-uncle. Some Jews made it out. He never did. And, for many others in my family, we have absolutely no idea what happened to the siblings and parents of those who made it out.
Also, I think it is also important, and often completely ignored, that Ashkenazi Jews were not the only Jews fleeing. About 45% of Israeli Jews are Mizrahi. 32% of Israeli Jews are Ashkenazi, and the rest are from a variety of places, including India, Central Asia, and Ethiopia. Let’s talk about the Mizrahi Jews for a moment, as they are the plurality of Jews in Israel. 800,000 Jews from Arab countries were displaced from their homes in Arab lands when Israel came into existence. And, yes, this was mirrored by the mass displacement of the people we now call Palestinians. I say "now call" because pre-1948, the term was used for Jewish as well as Arab residents of the territory. For clarity, I’ll use the term the way it’s used today.
Here's where I think, speaking only for myself, the Jewish American community is falling short: what we must acknowledge to move forward together. In 1948, more than 700,000 Palestinians were displaced from their homes and towns as the State of Israel was created. My great-uncle’s story is my family's story to tell. I don't have that same right to the Palestinian story, and I won't pretend otherwise. They have a right to tell their story, and I have an obligation to recognize the pain they and their families have experienced, not just in the past, but in the story that continues.
Israel's military response to October 7th has devastated Gaza, causing catastrophic destruction and suffering for Palestinian civilians. While many Hamas terrorists were killed, many other Gazans, including women and children, were killed, injured, and displaced too, unable to get the food, water, education, health care, and a safe place to live that EVERY HUMAN deserves. Netanyahu has governed with a coalition of ultra-right-wing thugs, whose leaders would like nothing more than to ethnically cleanse the Palestinian people in Gaza and the West Bank, at the least. Ben-Gvir and other far-right ministers have renewed calls for the mass "voluntary emigration" of Palestinians from Gaza, while Smotrich has openly supported settlement expansion in the West Bank and said it would prevent the creation of a Palestinian state. Settler violence in the West Bank is abhorrent and disgusting and against the very values so many of us hold dear. We also need to acknowledge these truths.
As American Jews, we should, of course, stand up against antisemitism and support a peaceful, safe existence for all people who are not committed to the destruction of others, including Israelis and Palestinians. We can do that while also opposing policies and political leaders that threaten the safety, dignity, self-determination, or democratic rights of either people.
This isn’t about a choice between which people's suffering is real. I don't have to minimize October 7th to acknowledge what has happened to Palestinians, and I don't have to minimize Palestinian suffering to acknowledge what Jewish history teaches us about the danger of a world without a safe place for Jews. I can hold both. In fact, I think we have to.
