Fraught

Last night I finished reading Ta-Nehisi Coates’s The Message, which is divided into three parts: the first deals with his trip to Senegal, the second with time in South Carolina, and the third and longest, a trip to Palestine.

The book came out last year before the current ongoing destruction of, and genocide in, Gaza, but the message resonates even more because of what’s happening now. I am not Jewish, but I’m married to a Jew, and I find this is a fraught tightrope to navigate as a gentile. Netanyahu’s contention that any criticism of Israel or zionism is necessarily anti-semitic has been incredibly effective at silencing criticism. Yet criticism is there and hasn’t abated, as the recent protests throughout northern Spain during the Vuelta a España have demonstrated. The United States funds Israeli violence. I pay taxes which fund Israeli violence. I am complicit in the Palestinian genocide.

And I know this: my Jewish friends and relatives are in agony right now. They are ashamed of the atrocities being done in their name, they are terrified at the new wave of antisemitism the violence has dragged along in its wake, and they don’t know what to do about any of it. The horrors of the Holocaust were real and no amount of German reparations have been able to erase them, but as Mandy Patinkin says, why would you turn around and do this to somebody else? Below is a chart I made during a discussion of these issues a month or so ago from a Reconstructing Judaism perspective.

Ta-Nehisi’s final exhortation is to allow Palestinians to tell their stories. Ever since Edward Said’s death (he was an author of ours when I worked at Harvard University Press and cut a striking figure at conferences), celebrity Palestinian voices have been few and far between. So let’s let the ordinary people speak: those who were removed from their villages during the Naqba, during various violent flare-ups and wars since 1948, by settlers who claim that this land was given to them by God, even though it had been continuously lived on, loved and worked by Palestinian Arabs for over 1,000 years.

If Israel has a right to exist, does it through crimes against humanity forfeit that right? At what point does the international community step in and say Enough? The answer is, it doesn’t, because the United States is in the way. And the triumph of Evangelical Christian Zionism keeps the status quo.

Let the Palestinians speak. Let them tell their stories. Before they’re all wiped off the face of the Earth.