Never Again for Anyone. Cease-Fire Now.

What should this blog say about the ongoing slaughter in Gaza? So much is already being written that adding my voice may be redundant, especially since there are others better qualified to write about many facets of the issue.

Possibly I should just insist on three basic points and then shut up.  

• Never again… for anyone.

• Stop cheapening the serious matter of anti-Semitism—ongoing traumatic legacies of things like the Holocaust or neo-Nazis chanting “Jews will not replace us”—by conflating it with common-sense dissent against war crimes and right-wing Israeli politicians. 

• Nationalisms (Black, Zionist, Palestinian, Ukrainian, US, Lakota, etc.) are a mixed bag. They are fully understandable and often commendable as vehicles for proper pride and warranted self-defense. That’s if the people (Black, Jewish, Palestinian) are really underdogs and doing something constructive—not crossing over into aggression that makes everything worse. In short: when underdogs punch up that’s quite often fine, but punching down not so much.

None of the horrific crimes in Gaza since October 7 (yes, I condemn crimes on that day too) are making anything better—obviously not for the Palestinians under the bombs, not for the US which is paying for it, and not even for Jewish self-interest.  

All this seems so obvious to me as to be nearly banal…but I keep running into friends for whom it isn’t, so I need my talking points.    

Then I remember how long it took me to get here. It meant undoing decades of one-sided indoctrination and complacency in church, school, and media—much of it obfuscating issues and carrying forward a common sense that took root well before massive changes on the ground in Israel/Palestine after 1967, after 1982, and now. (These changes betrayed whatever promise that left-trending Zionism held at its best.) I suppose my job which required me to research and teach this history focused my attention more than most.

Still there is a tangible danger that my voice will be redundant. For example, we're in the aftermath of a Congressional hearing that attacked Ivy League presidents for (ostensibly) abetting the harassment of Jewish students. (How much was substantive harassment? How much no more than critiques of the war? How much literally no more than criticism by Jews to uphold Jewish self-interest?) The clear backstory—whatever the complexities from case to case—is wealthy donors orchestrating a full-court press to control the limits of dissent, especially in the press. Rather than reading more from me about this, consider this transcript from Democracy Now, where Peter Beinart lucidly frames the issues:

This isn’t really about [the university leaders], it’s about the fact that given the extraordinary slaughter that’s happening in Gaza, there is a movement on college campus and across America for a ceasefire and to end American complicity in the slaughter. And in response to that, the effort is now to try to limit the ability of people who want to protest U.S. policy and support Palestinian rights from being able to organize… [This is] to set a precedent and bring in people who will be tougher on restricting [those who organize] against this war. This is what this is about.

The piece goes on to clarify, with equal lucidity, why it's so dishonest to declare all uses of the words “intifada” (referring to all kinds of uprisings, many non-violent) and “from the river to the sea” (used by Jews and Palestinians alike in many senses) as if they were obviously or necessarily calling for genocide. As Omar Bartov says, “no one should condone genocide, not of Jews and not of anyone else. [But] if you’re speaking about intifada or about political slogans, you have to explain…how we understand them.” The Israeli talking points about this are like “saying that any Ukrainian uprising against Russians...would be an attempt at Russian genocide.”   

By flagging this interview here, I’m already a day late and a dollar short. And by no means is this the only recommendable thing I’ve read lately. Each of these examples is worth its own post, but you could just click on them and skip the middleman. Here are courageous Jewish students at Brown University explaining what they actually mean by “from the river to the sea.” Here is Hamilton Nolan’s “The Sin Eraser,” on how appeals to “exigencies of war” normalize sickening brutalities. Here is an study of the evolving role of Palestinians in the Israeli economy—shifting from people exploited for labor power (like Native Americas in colonial Mexico) to people deemed superfluous and merely in the way (like Native Americans according to Manifest Destiny ideology). Here is one of many gripping appeals to Christians in the US from Christians in Palestine. Here is a detailed summary of how Israeli settler colonialism has used misleading racist language over the years. Of course this list could be much longer.

In forthcoming posts, I will make a couple of arguments where I have distinctive scholarly expertise to add. More than most people I’ve read amid the recent flood, I’ve long followed debates internal to both US Christianity and US Judaism—long-running and robust debates about Zionism in general and Israeli policies specifically. If you’ve gained an impression that these two faith traditions have fairly unified majority positions—overwhelmingly pro-Israel—this is highly misleading. Such internal diversity is not the highest priority to focus on now—that would be an immediate ceasefire to stop the slaughter, linked to constructive visions for a way forward—but it’s a non-trivial piece of the puzzle where I have some distinctive things to contribute. Stay tuned.

To conclude today:  Never again for anyone. Stop trivializing anti-Semitism. Don’t use nationalisms to punch down at all, much less with mass murders. Cease-fire now!