Watching this speech feels like such a historic moment. It is an airtight case. It is powerful. It feels like a swelling moment. Like surely the narrative of the world must allow this to work. Surely the tide will turn.
The most haunting moment for me personally was the clip of the singing and dancing soldiers. Because I could not fully distance myself from them. The song they sang was so distinctly and recognizably a Jewish melody. The way they danced was so recognizably a Jewish way to dance. I am not used to hearing music that sounds like this outside of a synagogue or a wedding. This type of folk music does not exist in mainstream American culture let alone anywhere else. And yet here it is, this scale, sung by soldiers declaring their intent to joyfully enact genocide. “Wipe out the seed of Amalek.” “There are no uninvolved civilians.” Even the format of the song. Alternating singing with words and singing wordless. This is how we sing in shul. This is a distinctly Jewish way of singing. Across the ocean. Diverging lineages. Surely we are fourth cousins. Surely we both carry the same generational trauma. How could you be dancing, excited to murder children. How could you become like this. What happened to you. I always thought of my culture as one that values inquiry, scholarship, justice, integrity, learning, gentleness, and questioning. What happened to that culture? You have destroyed it. You have abandoned it. You call blood libel but here you are, dancing and thirsting for blood.
Throughout the entire speech, names of politicians are read again and again. Hebrew names. Names where I intuitively know their meaning because I know these words. I know what is being referenced. Names I am not used to encountering in a context like this. Yet they are held by people who are calling for genocide. People who are massacring children. Your mother named you “Amichai” meaning “my people are alive.” Your mother survived the holocaust. And here you are now, a fascist, enacting genocide.
There is a video of a soldier blowing up a village. I haven’t studied “Modern Hebrew” this constructed language they speak in Israel. I only know what I’ve learned of Biblical Hebrew. But still it was similar enough that I could recognize and understand certain things that were said. He ends the video “Am Yisrael Chai” as smoke billows in the air. How many times have I said chai. How many times have I said Shalom v’Al kol Yisrael and I meant our people. Who are you. You are a stranger to me. What is Yisrael to you. It makes me want to change the Kaddish. To skip Yisrael. To just say yoshvei teivel. How could you hold this shared identity with me. If this is Yisrael I do not want to pray for it.
Genocide as a word was invented to describe something that was done to us. How could you so gleefully bring about a genocide in our name? Never again means never again to anyone.
Looking at the South African party in the court I feel the deepest of gratitudes. Please. Save Gaza. Please this has to work. This has to make this stop. I cannot bare to continue to watch them dying, let alone for them to die in my name. This bloodshed this massacre this spectrum of ever kind of death the quick and brutal and slow and painful. To children. The deprivation of all resources. The starvation and dehydration. This is what they did to us. This was the ghettos. This was the camps. How can you do this and say it is for our people. This corruption of my people, my culture, my religion, my music, my language. Make it stop. I want so badly to say that they are not my people. That Israelis are monsters who have stolen our names. Yet here they are, singing to the same musical scales. We clearly share a common ancestor. We look the same and sound the same. I want to disown them. I want nothing to do with them. I have been banned from synagogues for speaking against them across my whole adult life and I feel helpless and like there is nothing I can do. When I have tried to act against them it is I who is labeled not truly Jewish. A half breed. An Americanized diasporic assimilationist. Who are you. You have destroyed yourself. You have become monsters. You are dybbuks.
I wish there was anything I could do to influence the ICJ. This needs to work. The tide needs to turn. Every day on the side of the Weitzman Museum of American Jewish History I see a giant painted Israeli Flag with the words “WE STAND WITH ISRAEL.” Who are you. What is wrong with you. In that museum is all of our history. We were union organizers. We were civil rights leaders. We were abolitionists. We were war protestors. We were great writers and scholars. How can we now be genociders and you still stand with them? For the sake of these 2.375 million people this needs to work. For the sake of forcing us to finally turn our backs on fascism this needs to work. There must be a day when the Jews of the world see the Nakba and the occupation as the Germans sees the Holocaust. As South Africans see Apartheid. As Americans see slavery and the trail of tears. As Canadians see the residential schools. As we see the Rwandan genocide. How do they not all already. How have you become so numb to suffering and so eager to dehumanize. When did you come to only feel for those who look like you.
In seventy years, have we diverged this much? I wish you were strangers to me, so I could say we share nothing. Yet you are fascists. Is it telling, that you name your boys Ze’ev while we name ours Hershel. But no culture no religion is immune to the infection that is fascism, the generational trauma of the Holocaust gave us no immunity. Amichai… but at what cost.
