As bombs rained, Jews in Santa Fe grieved for Gaza
As the first bombs rained down on Gazan civilians, Santa Fe Jews held an improvised Mourner’s Kaddish at the Railyard. We sang and wept; someone played a shofar; we read the Kaddish and named our grief aloud.
Echoing a long Jewish tradition, we placed stones on an altar, one for each hundred people who had died since Oct. 7. Even at that early date, the pile of Palestinian stones loomed excruciatingly large. Today the Palestinian stones would not fit on that altar. Today we would struggle to carry them.
Since then, a group of us have come together as anti-Zionist Jews within the larger movement for Palestinian liberation. We believe in the transformative potential of grief. We also abhor the longstanding weaponization of Jewish grief against the Palestinians who lived for centuries in Al-Quds, Haifa, Yafo, Beyt-Lahm, Nablus, Al-Khalil, Ramallah, Khan Yunis and in the surrounding orange orchards, olive groves, mountains and deserts.
What we are witnessing today in Gaza is the latest, most vicious episode of a history in which Jewish suffering has been used to obscure unthinkable brutality toward Palestinians.
Objective historians agree Israel was built on the foundation of ethnic cleansing, first during the 1948 nakba (catastrophe, referring to the expulsion of 750,000, or 75%, of Palestinians from their homes) and then in the 1967 war, which turned Gaza into a refugee camp in perpetuity. And yet this story remains untellable, in part because of Israeli propaganda and in part because of the deeply flawed belief that to oppose Israel’s policies is to deny the horror of Jewish experience in the 20th century.
As Jews we believe that healing grief requires truth-telling and a witnessing of Palestinians’ stories on their own terms. What has occurred in Palestine is a genocide in every aspect of the definition given by the word’s Polish-Jewish author Raphael Lemkin: “a coordinated plan of different actions aiming at the destruction of essential foundations of the life of national groups, with the aim of annihilating the groups themselves.” What is occurring at present is not a “war” in any sense of the word. It is an act of collective punishment whose ultimate aim is to finish what began in 1948: the effort to manufacture “a land without people for a people without land.”
We call for an immediate cease-fire and humanitarian aid to Gaza. As Jews we also believe our obligation goes further. The Martinican writer Aimé Césaire wrote long ago of the links between Jewish suffering and a longer history of racial extermination. The concentration camp was not invented in Europe but in Cuba, German South West Africa, Algeria, Fort Sumner and many other parts of the colonized world.
For Santa Feans, visiting the remains of concentration camps is as easy as driving through the Casa Solana area, where Japanese immigrants once were interned.
We call on fellow Jews to transform their grief into solidarity with all those who have been killed, forced into concentration camps, divested of land and home, and silenced by efforts to create racially and religiously homogeneous societies. Above all, we demand an end to using our grief to justify the ongoing ethnic cleansing of Palestine. Solidarity in grief is the most abiding Jewish value.