Background on Israel, Palestine, Hamas, Hezbollah, and the PLO
Two weeks ago, Hamas broke through the border between Gaza and Israel. Terrorists entered Israel by air, ground, and sea. They chose Saturday, October 7, 2023 strategically. They attacked on Shabbat, the holiest day in the Jewish calendar. Many Israelis choose to separate themselves from technology for the 25 hours of Shabbat. Not only was it Shabbat, Israelis were also celebrating Simchat Torah, the culmination of the Days of Awe, a day to celebrate the joy of receiving G!d’s wisdom through Torah, through wisdom passed down from generation to generation. It was close to the 50th anniversary of the Yom Kippur War. Like the Yom Kippur War, this attack took Israel completely by surprise. Yet, there was something completely different about the Hamas attack from any other territorial breach Israel has experienced. The vast majority of people murdered by Hamas were not military targets. Instead, they targeted their civilian neighbors. Destroying neighboring farms was as important as murdering neighboring humans. Hamas officials understood that hundreds of young people were near them at an overnight peace concert and those peaceful humans were targeted and murdered.
No discussion of the history of the region can begin at this point in time without a full recognition of the brutality of that attack. Prior to October 7, there was a lot of turmoil within Israel. There are deep political divisions in the country and a wariness of the current government. Why was the border with Gaza so easy to come across? Some say it is because troops were repositioned to the West Bank to defend Israeli settlers. Others say it is because on religious holidays, all military bases have fewer staff because the government gives soldiers the day off to celebrate with their family. I am not a military analyst. So why keep reading?
Basics About the Hamas-Israel War
My Background
My undergraduate degree is in Peace & Justice Studies from Wellesley College in 2000. I spent over a decade as a peace activist with Women’s International League for Peace & Freedom. That activism got me placed on the Self-Hating Israel Threatening List, an early internet version of cancelling. Also part of the early internet, they couldn’t figure out my actual age or anything about me other than the fact that I was leading a national campaign, “Women Challenge US Policy, Building Peace on Justice in the Middle East.”
I attended a few international Congresses of WILPF. In 2007, I went to Santa Cruz, Bolivia and presented a workshop on blogging as a way to challenge foreign policy. I also worked with the international Middle East Committee and held a central role in creating dialog among differing factions of the community towards the WILPF Resolution on Lebanon. Following my work at the Congress, and as Program Chair of the US Section, I was asked to be part of an international WILPF mission to the region, in the hopes of building dialog between the Israeli and Palestinian Sections. Other members of the US Section of WILPF decided that I was too “pro-Israeli,” because I insisted on recognizing Israelis as human beings. These individuals had not attended the Bolivia Congress, but they ensured that funding for the international trip was rescinded. (Not my own funding — I was planning on taking an unpaid leave from working and paying for my travel on credit cards.) This marks the inflection point of my peace activism. After this experience, I began to understand that the indoctrination I received about “Zionism is racism,” was part of a global decision to denounce Jews and make Jews responsible for every ill in the world. But it did take me quite awhile to fully understand how much I had been deceived by the progressive left.
My day job was in direct marketing in 2007. Eventually, I moved into CRM, customer relationship management, and met my husband working in that realm of advertising. While engaged, I left my role as an account supervisor to work full-time for CODEPINK as their “Bring the War Dollars Home” organizer in 2011. My job was to draft a resolution for the US Conference of Mayors calling on Congress to end the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and use the money for the needs of US citizens. Because of how I drafted the resolution, it was debated in the Metro Economies subcommittee rather than in the foreign policy subcommittee. And it passed, marking the first time the mayors’ conference took a stand on foreign policy since the Vietnam War. “Calling on Congress to Redirect Military Spending to Domestic Priorities.” Unfortunately, twelve years later, many of those domestic priorities are still under-funded. I was involved in Occupy Los Angeles as a CodePink organizer. I served as one of the General Assembly moderators, based on my long history of working within consensus decision-making as a member of WILPF international, national, and local boards.
CodePink laid me off shortly after I returned from my honeymoon. I always preferred the WILPF democratic method of organizing over the CodePink funder-directed organizing model. I also was always more interested in using civil society to help government work better, rather than the disruptive and divisive methods CodePink is known for.
I attended the 100th anniversary Congress of WILPF at The Hague in 2015. For a brief time, I was involved in international governance work for the organization. Ultimately, in 2016, I decided to renounce my lifetime membership of WILPF because of its biased positions on Israel. With WILPF, I had been part of the original Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement, based on requests from Israeli WILPF members. By 2016. I realized that the only thing the BDS movement had accomplished was radicalizing the progressive movement into denouncing Israelis specifically and Jews generally as unwanted in the feminist, progressive, peace movements. Reading the recent WILPF statement on the Hamas terrorist attack, you’d think Israeli civilians asked to be hunted down in their homes and murdered.
Israel: The Indigenous Homeland of Jews
It’s strange to me that this fact is disputed. The name “Jews” comes from Judea, one of the two ancient Israelite kingdoms. The other kingdom was Israel. Collectively, our name has been Hebrews and Israel for far longer than it has been Jews. Our prayers speak of us collectively as Israel. Our longing for our indigenous homeland has never ceased. Our scholars poured over agricultural laws for the land of Israel for over a thousand years before we regained our sovereignty. Our three major holidays have their roots in the agricultural cycle of the land of Israel: the barley harvest (Passover), the wheat harvest (Shavuot), and the autumnal harvest (Sukkot). We do a rain dance during Sukkot (waving the lulav and etrog) to pray for rain in the land of Israel.
Regardless of your position on Israeli settlements in the West Bank, there is an indigenous reason for their existence. Before the area was known as the West Bank (of the Jordan River), it was known as Judea and Samaria. Please understand: this statement is not meant to reflect a definitive assessment on the status of the West Bank or the legitimacy of Jewish-only roads and settlements in that area. Rather, my goal is to help people understand that Jews have deep and ancient roots to that specific area of land.
Inflammatory Rhetoric
Regardless of our skin tone, Jews are not occupiers. We are not colonialists. The situation cannot accurately be described as “white colonizers vs. Brown indigenous people.” Regardless of skin color, Jewish whiteness is always conditional.
Judaism is not a religion. Claiming that Jewishness is akin to being a Christian or Muslim negates our origins. Judaism has existed longer than Christianity or Islam. The modern idea of “religion,” has its origins in Christian supremacy. It is a way to separate an ethnic group from its spiritual beliefs. Saying that Judaism is an ethno-religion means emphasizing the ethnic nature of Jewishness. Cultural Jews are as Jewish as any other type of Jews. Whether you are a matrilineal Jew or a patrilineal Jew, Jewish roots begin with Jewish family.
I do not write this to disparage or diminish the Jewishness of Jews who convert to Judaism, HaShem forbid. Rather, I am acknowledging that throughout our history, ethnic identity has been central to Jewish identity. Further, hegemonic rulers — whether pagan, Christian, or Muslim — always distinguished us as a people first and foremost. The reason it is so easy to distinguish Ashkenazi roots in a DNA test is because pagan and Christian rulers of Europe kept us separate from the rest of the population. We had fewer rights than serfs: we were chattel, seen in the eyes of the law as being owned by the ruler in whose lands we lived. This led to forced migration across Europe, massacres of Jews by Crusaders in Europe, and starvation and death in England.
Then, when modern nationalism began in Europe, our ethnicity was used against us to denounce the possibility that Jews could be citizens of the countries in which they lived. Though we were a people without a nation, we were distrusted so much by our neighbors that the first ruler to push forward incorporating Jews as equal citizens was Napoleon Bonaparte. Throughout the centuries, Europeans and Arabs have treated Jews as vassals. Yet, once we formalized our sovereignty in our homeland, the tables were reversed and many people declare us to be white colonialists in our indigenous homeland.
Further, nothing is said about the continuous forced migration of Jews from Middle East and North Africa nations. Jews were forced from their homes, not allowed to take their possessions, their money, or retain ownership of their land. That is the reason so many Israeli Jews are Mizrahi.
Controversial, Yet Fact-Based Statements on Palestine
The name Palestine itself is a testament to Roman colonialism.. The Roman Empire attempted to annihilate Jews and renamed our homeland after one of our ancient enemies, the Philistines. That’s where the name Palestine comes from. For what its worth, the Philistines lived in what is currently known as Gaza. Though Arabs are not direct descendants of Philistines.
There was no Palestinian identity before Israel existed. There was a pan-Arab desire for a single, Muslim state across the region. This is the reason for what is seen now as inflammatory rhetoric of supporters of Israel who claim the Palestinian identity doesn’t exist. It does exist in 2023. It did not fully exist in 1948.
In the seventy-five years of its existence, Israel’s neighbors have been slow to recognize it as a sovereign state.
In its 1968 charter, the Palestinian Liberation Organization called for the “total liberation of Palestine and the destruction of the State of Israel.” This is the true meaning of the chant “Palestine from the river to the sea.” At its core, the reason there is no Palestinian State is that Palestinian leaders refuse to accept the existence of Israel.
Prior to 1968, Israel was negotiating its borders with Egypt and Jordan. It is true that Israel could have created a peace plan with Jordan and Egypt prior to 1968 that would have expanded the territory of Jordan and Egypt, that is — made the West Bank part of Jordan and Gaza part of Egypt. But, Egypt didn’t want to absorb Gaza into its territory. It’s not the most comprehensive source, but Wikipedia does have an entry on the Six-Day War.
I learned Jewish history from Dr. Joel Gereboff and Dr. Robert Levy, tz”l. Of particular relevance to this blog post are the following books:
Righteous Victims: A History of the Zionist-Arab Conflict, 1881-1998 by Benny Morris and The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World by Avi Shlaim.
The Hamas Covenant of 1988 calls for the obliteration of Israel. The terror of October 7, 2023 was the point. Hamas is a terrorist organization and has been ruling Gaza since 2007. They are financially supported by Iran.
Hezbollah is a terrorist organization in Southern Lebanon that is also financially supported by Iran.
Terrorism, Democracy, Genocide
Many Americans are protesting the US foreign policy of supporting the democratic state of Israel. Many Americans are demanding an immediate cease fire. Further, they claim that Israel’s response to terrorism is “genocide.”
US President Biden has unequivocally declared that the United States supports Israel in its fight against terrorism. On October 20, the White House issued a Fact Sheet, “White House Calls on Congress to Advance Critical National Security Priorities”
You may recall that foreign policy is the realm of the administrative branch of the United States government. This is in part because the national interests of a sovereign country do not change as quickly as domestic political agendas. Israel is an ally of the United States because it is a democracy and because it shares core values with the United States. Territorial integrity is one of those core values. Fighting terrorism is another core value. Terrorists and dictators are enemies of democracy and freedom. This is why fighting terrorists is justified under international law. When a neighboring entity enters your territory, slaughters civilians, and takes hostages, a country is justified in responding with its military.
These may not be the decisions we would individually choose. Perhaps you are against war, regardless of the reason. Perhaps you think Israel should not exist. That despite Jews’ indigenous claim for their land, despite their 75 years of being a refuge for displaced Jews worldwide and a parliamentary democracy, Israel shouldn’t exist.
Whatever your opinion on the choice to fight Hamas, the Hamas-Israel War cannot be described as genocide. Claiming that Israel is enacting genocide is more anti-Jewish rhetoric.
Yes, many Palestinians in Gaza have died in this war. Hamas uses civilians as shields. Hamas is a terrorist organization. And yet, mainstream media is more likely to take the word of Hamas officials over Israeli ones. Just consider what we each think we know about the bombing at or near a hospital in Gaza.
Moving Forward: My Five-Fold Prayer
First and foremost, I pray for the immediate release of all hostages.
Second, I pray for the lives of Israelis, Palestinians, Lebanese, Jordanians, and Egyptians. May they live long lives and may their shared existence lead to expanded freedom and democracy throughout the region.
Third, I pray that people begin to understand that Zionism is not a dirty word. It has nothing to do with racism. Zionism is the self-determination of Jews in our ancestral homeland.
Fourth, I pray that people recognize Hamas and Hezbollah as terrorist organizations funded by Iran.
Fifth, I pray that the people will stop using the color of Jewish skin against us. Whether we are white-passing or not, our identity is separate from whiteness. Yes, I have white skin privilege. And, Jew hatred is much more clearly categorized as racism than it is as religious hatred. It is not just our beliefs people dislike (frankly, we don’t have dogma), its our people’s existence separate from hegemonic powers. We are an extremely small minority population. We believe in wisdom. We believe in science. We believe in humanity.
Amen. Selah.