Open Letter, Part 2: Who That Wasn't For

A response to commentary and feedback

I wasn’t talking to Anti-Zionist Jews. If you’ve been doing your work and acting on praxis, you don’t need to be told that you should support and center the political self-determination of Palestinians while pushing against the occupation and the US government. This doesn’t change and will never change.

I wasn’t talking to Christian Zionists. I am fully aware they outnumber Jewish Zionists 10:1, financially 100:1, and have the institutional reigns of power here in the United States. That’s why I explicitly named Christian supremacy as the primary culprit of harm against Jews in the world, especially here in the States, because they’re the fanatics who will refuse de-escalation and pressure Trump to keep going. They would never listen to me, so why would I write anything for them?

I was talking to Jewish Zionists and Jewish sympathizers of the state of Israel, who may or may not self-identify as Zionists.

Because even though they have less structural power than Christian Zionists, that doesn’t mean they have no power at all. There are enough who do have some influence that, with enough leverage, it could change the equation of power on the ground in Israel politically.

They have the power of their relationships and communal connections. They have the power of interpersonal care and consideration. They have the ability to encourage, organize, persuade, and pressure the people they are in community with to use their power to do the right thing — and also, along the way, to defang any remaining arguments that allowing the state of Israel to continue on, and to continue down this path with the US, is about anything other than US imperialist capitalist interests and the maintenance of white and Christian supremacy, here and world-over. It is now extra especially abundantly clear that Jewish safety or any those (has always been a crock of bullshit) arguments are null when we’re all trapped on this speeding locomotive to ecological and economic collapse that will make the Great Depression look like Disneyland.

Feigning powerlessness because one has less power is a recipe for apathy, destruction, and absolutely ZERO chance of changing anything at all. And coming from fellow leftwing Jews, that’s absolutely appalling, because not only have we been waging a campaign of liberation against this shit since the colonial project began… what the fuck is our ancestral story but a bunch of power-filled, but systematically less powerful, people, overcoming tragedy, violence, and oppression, and continuously managing to move forward and press for better and for change DESPITE that messy, unequal, and dastardly ass playing field?

The thing about accountability and responsibility is that it puts into sharp relief who isn’t taking ownership of their contributions in a situation, and who does have the greater amount of systemic power. That was the point: the United States and Christian Zionists are, in majority, responsible for the continued existence of the occupation and the survival of Zionism as an ideological and literal weapon against the Palestinian people and those who stand with them, because Zionism is separate-but-equal white supremacy for some Jews (heavy emphasis on some), who are willing to be lapdogs and do the dirty work of the Christian Zionists and (white supremacist) capitalists of the United States AND Europe.

Also, for the record: I AM JEWISH. I was raised in a Jewish home. My parent was an Anti-Zionist. My husband is a rabbinical student who has been organizing for Palestinian liberation since he was a college student. I let those words move through me with clarity and intention, even if they weren’t read with clarity and intention.

Agency still matters even when the fascists want you to think you have none.

So again, I ask: American Zionist Jews, use yours to do the right thing.