registering dissent

The death toll in Gaza nears 400 as I sit here, with hundreds more critically injured and something like 1,000 wounded. This is the most devastating violence that the Palestinians have seen in 40 years.

Even as I write those words, I hear my father's voice. He is there, as he always is, with his anger rising and his conclusion incontrovertible. Of course Israel has the right to bomb, strafe, kill! The Arab nations would rather see all Jews pushed out of the Middle East and Israel wiped out of existence! This tiny nation is surrounded by hostile forces! Of course it is within the bounds of normalcy for Israel to defend itself! That's what he's saying.

He's also saying, near-shouting by now, why does the international community always point its finger at Israel, when so much violence and destruction has been directed at Israel by the Arabs, since the moment of its founding? Someday the world will wake up, he says, and see how wronged the Israelis have been, and how righteously they acted.

And he shakes his head in seething disbelief at the Jewish anti-occupationists and anti-Zionists in Israel and America. Self-hating Jews -- how can they turn against their own State, their own family? How can they align themselves with neo-Nazis, racists, people who equate Israel with Jews and want to eradicate both from this earth?

My father's voice scorns the depictions of olive groves being uprooted to make way for settlements; he decries the liberal media's portrayal of the Palestinian situation as poetic, poignant, when, in his mind, Palestinians as a people must be contained to ensure the survival of the Jews. Palestinian bloodlust justifies bloodletting of Palestinians by Israelis.

This is his voice. It is strong in my mind. I have long wrestled with it.

I remember being in high school and feeling that it was very important to have a position on this issue, just like it was important to have a position about abortion, the rainforest, and the existence of God. So I took my father's position. I was Bat Mitzvah in Israel, after all, and I had family there. And how could the Jews, the intellectual Jews, the successful Jews, the contributing Jews do anything wrong!

In college I studied abroad in Israel, moving along a corridor from Beer Sheva to Tel Aviv to Jerusalem to Sinai, marvelling at the young soldiers who polished their rifles sitting next to me on the bus. My world there was mostly filled with white people, but I did meet and talk with some Israeli Arabs in a seaside town called Akko. At a music festival there, on the roof of an ancient fort, I heard Palestinian music and stood in a crowd of young men and women who called out 'aiwa' as the Greeks might call 'opah.' Mostly, though, I stayed within the contours of the myth of Israel as I had always understood it.

Some of my close friends are deeply involved in the anti-occupation movement. One friend is a human rights attorney in Israel who works for justice on behalf of displaced Palestinians, another is a Reconstructionist Rabbi who has developed an anti-occupation education curriculum for religious schools, another writes missives for Moveon.org.

Over the years, and because of these friends, I have read, thought about, questioned deeply, struggled with Israel's aggressive actions, its systemic dehumanization of a populace, its violation of the basic human rights to food, water, medical care, livelihood for thousands of people living in what amounts to many-hundred-square-mile ghettos that are appended to Israel proper. I have turned over and over in my mind the shattering contradictions, the impossibility of reconciling the dream of Israel with the nightmare of Palestine, the truth that Arab nations support the destruction of Israel and the truth that Israel supports the destruction of Palestine.

As deeply as this situation has pained me as I have learned more and more about it, as many movies as I have watched and articles I have read and analyses I have considered, I have never been able to betray my father by taking a non-Zionist stance. Instead, I have done the discursive equivalent of throwing up my hands: it's not a black and white situation, I can't take sides, it's just a tragic situation and me speaking out about it one way or the other won't do anything.

Whenever we discuss it, my father and I, I choose my words with the utmost care. My main concern in those moments is keeping a smile on his face, that slight satisfied upturn of the corners of his mouth when I align with his views. At home last week, my mother asked me what I think about the situation in Israel. I couldn't answer her. I was unable to speak, unable to formulate a reply that would satisfy the censors who stand watch at the gate of my own mind.

And now, faced with the unassailable truth of the situation in Gaza, I find myself still rendered silent. There is a part of me that is pleased, even, in the face of this massacre, that I am keeping the small smile on the face of my father and so many others whom I love, whose own love for Israel blinds them entirely. I find myself inside a room and leaning against a locked door, a door that I have slammed on the wailing masses outside, relieved to be safe inside the room. The show must go on. The Jews must go on, at all costs. Otherwise, what would be left of us? Were these walls to crumble, this door to come off its hinges and fall to the floor, what -- who -- would save us from annihilation? NO ONE! my father shouts. No one would save us, so we have to save ourselves. Be silent, then, and turn your face away from the horror that ensues.

But I cannot. I cannot turn my face away. I have to look, to recognize. Selfishly, for the sake of my own humanity, my own realness, I have to enter the naked truth of this sweeping destruction. I have to acknowledge what torments the Jews are inflicting on the Palestinians, and what torments the Arab establishment inflicts in return. I have to bear witness to the ways that these cousins wound themselves, over and over again, mortally.

And I have to register my own dissent to this violence; I have to speak, to say that this is not in my name, this is not the door that I want the people of my faith to pass through on our search for sanctuary in a deadly world. I cannot stand by and swallow this great misery as if it were simply a bitter medicine to precipitate healing. No. There is no healing, no peace that can come from this. I refuse to accept that this is for the good.

I say no to the massacre of Gaza.

My words here travel out into the nothingness, reaching a handful of people, bringing no salve to the bleeding wounds of the people of Gaza. Were this to reach my father, it would simply anger him. No change can be wrought from the saying of these words. I say them, nonetheless, because I must.

"I have come into this world to see this: the sword drop from men's hands even at the height of their arc of anger because we have finally realized there is just one flesh to wound" ~ Hafiz