Marilyn Garson Opinion Israel Is Unabashedly Asserting Its Illiberal Power. We Liberal Jews Are Enabling It
Look back over the past eight months.
We, Jews, have acquiesced.
We shrugged off international law and all those diplomatic impediments, and accepted the unilateral gift of Jerusalem from Donald Trump. We may have cringed at the spectacle of Trump’s embassy opening, but we vociferously defended Israel’s killings of Gazan protestors on the same day.
We tolerated the targeting of human rights
organizations within Israel. We tolerated the exclusion from Israel of
those who oppose the occupation through boycott, like those big bad Quakers. The fine details of Israel’s creeping legal annexation of the West Bank are too complicated to generate much heat.
We do not peep at the eye-for-an-eyelash proportions of Israel’s violence in Gaza. IDF snipers fire at protestors and IDF jets bomb kite-makers, because that’s just Gaza and everything there can be Hamas’s fault. Let Gaza live with no crossings, if it doesn’t appreciate the one Israel lets it have. Let Gaza live with no American aid, if Hamas won’t gratify Donald Trump.
Many Jews protested against Israel's plans to deport refugees,
because that offended liberal values and everyone knows it. The same
Jews would have protested a few years ago, when countries like Hungary
muscled other refugees away, but Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban is a friend now and that’s a bit awkward. And speaking of awkward, can we please not discuss Poland.
We wrote some indignant letters about Israel’s new Nation-State Law, and really took to the streets to defend the rights of gay men, because those are liberal values and everyone knows it.
There were two massive bombardments of Gaza
this year, but that’s just Gaza. Fortunately, it has an endless supply
of "terror targets" for such moments. Besides, what with Iran and Syria,
it’s not a good time to be critical.
I think it’s an excellent time to be critical.
Basking in the shadow
of Trump, Israel is unabashedly asserting its illiberal power. In eight
months, we purportedly liberal Jews have gotten used to it. We object
episodically, as we are towed along. Grumble, donate, visit, defend,
repeat.
I remember evaluating
history’s joiners and bystanders as a child. I tried to frame questions
that left open the possibility of generosity, as well as condemnation. Did they not know, or
did they not want to? Were they not brave enough to stand up in
opposition? What were the rewards of joining, and what were the costs of
standing up?
I began to apply my
childhood lesson to my Jewish community when I left Gaza, where I was
working, for a break, near the end of the 2014 onslaught.
"I want you to know that I agonized," one liberal Zionist assured me.
My skin still bore
the burnt smells of the war. I inhaled them as I weighed the value of
liberal angst against the enabling fact of liberal inaction.
Gaza, I decided, is
the place where the Jewish callus formed. Its regime is the least
constrained project of Jewish power. There have been other wars and
other occupied places, but no other population has been so hidden, so
controlled, and so vilified for our consumption.
There,
we learned to discount lives. Although we know that the immiseration of
Gaza is wrong, we got used to a regime that classifies life, this one deserving of water and light, and those ones not. This one fully human, and those ones less. We live while they exist on sufferance.
If Gaza is the place
where we trained ourselves to acquiesce, then in Gaza we can recover our
footing. It is simple, really. If the value of human life is
indivisible, then the walls around Gaza must go.
Nothing less; not a
little more restraint with the snipers’ bullets, and not an extra hour
of electricity this week. No, each time we advocate for marginal
improvements to the lives that are being lived on sufferance, we
reiterate our power over those lives. That is the problem, not the
solution.
We can stand up and
declare that our lives have equal value, and we can begin to claw back
the losses of this ugly year. Or, we can ask ourselves what we will be
enabling in the coming months.
Marilyn Garson lived and worked in Gaza 2011 – 2015. She writes from New Zealand. Her blog is Transforming Gaza. Twitter: @skinonbothsides
Commenti
Posta un commento