The following
are remarks I gave on an August 27, 2025
panel discussion entitled: “Atoning for
Gaza: North American Jews and the Work of
Teshuvah.” The event was sponsored by Reconstructionists
Expanding Our Conversation on
Israel/Palestine.
It is great to be here, and
thank you for inviting me. There are four
points I want to share about teshuvah
(repentance in Hebrew) and Jewish atonement
for Gaza: 1) We must acknowledge the grief
surrounding us, the trauma and damage
inflicted by Jews committing a genocide
against the Palestinian people; 2) We must
address the historical harm caused by Zionism,
which is racism and is replacing Judaism, and
has resulted in genocide and famine; 3)
Atonement for genocide and famine comes in the
form of restorative justice and a free
Palestine, and 4) There are concrete things we
can do now.
1. We must
acknowledge the grief surrounding us, the
trauma and damage inflicted by Jews
committing a genocide against the
Palestinian people
We must acknowledge that Jews
are committing a genocide against the
Palestinian people, one of the great
atrocities of the 21st century, and some of
the Jewish community and its leadership have
been gaslighting those who have been calling
out the genocide.
Erich Goldhagen, my professor
from Harvard and a pioneer in Holocaust and
genocide studies, himself a Holocaust
survivor, died last October. He said: “Never
before have murderers so faithfully recorded
their deeds, have they laid bare with such
accuracy the manner, the method, and the
magnitude of their crimes. But the suffering
of the survivors, their agony, their ordeal is
far less known. Very few diaries, very few
documents have survived from that period. What
we know has come down to us only in very
fragmentary form.”
His quote dealt with the Shoah,
and made me reflect on the current genocide of
Palestinian people by Israel. This is the
first livestreamed genocide, with the
journalists murdered, and the Israeli
officials telling us what they intended to do,
as they bomb and starve people to death. In
justifying mass murder in Gaza following the
October 7 Hamas attack, Israeli officials have
invoked racist dehumanizing language used by
European colonizers against Black, brown and
indigenous people for centuries.
President Isaac Herzog declared
that ‘It’s a war that is intended, really,
truly, to save Western civilization, to save
the values of Western civilization.’
Additionally, Defense Minister Yoav Gallant
remarked that “This is a war between the
children of light and the children of
darkness” and also said “We are fighting
against human animals.” These Orientalist
tropes, which white colonizers have employed
for centuries, depict Arab men as rapists and
terrorists, with language depicting Israel as
a beacon of Western civilization - White folks
- and Palestinians as criminals and
barbarians.
Israelis have protested and
spoken out, but the genocide was not possible
without widespread support in Israeli society.
And in the heart of the empire here in North
America, Jewish protest and opposition to the
Gaza genocide has been robust and pivotal,
even as many legacy Jewish communal
organizations and leaders, and the Jewish
community has been complicit in that genocide
by supporting US foreign policy, standing in
solidarity with white nationalists - Christian
Zionists who want all the Jews dead so that
Jesus can return, not the Black Palestinian
Jesus but the white MAGA one who wants to
deport the immigrants - and caping and
covering for Israel’s apartheid regime and
colonial occupation.
This week is my son Ezra Malik’s
yahrzeit, or death anniversary in Hebrew. 17
years ago he died, a baby, and his death has
taught me a lot about grief. And over the past
two years, many of us have been grieving in
the streets over the tens and hundreds of
thousands of babies, children who have been
orphaned, wounded or murdered, many without
the dignity of their white burial shroud -
whether through bombing, IDF sniper fire to
the head, neck, legs or genitals like a
perverse game, or a policy of hunger and
famine. Some were lured to their deaths while
lining up for food, not unlike the Nazis
luring Jews onto the trains with food, as Dr.
Gabor Mate noted.
And we should embrace all of
these children as our own. As James Baldwin
said: “The children are always ours, every
single one of them, all over the globe…” And
very recently, Omar El Akkad wrote: “And it
may seem now like it’s someone else’s
children, but there’s no such thing as someone
else’s children. The problem with fixating on
the abyss into which one’s opponent has
descended while simultaneously digging one’s
own is that, eventually, it gets too dark to
tell the difference.”
2.
We must address the historical harm caused
by Zionism, which is racism and is replacing
Judaism, and has resulted in genocide and
famine
We must address the historical
harm caused by Zionism. The Jewish community
has done specific things over the past two
years:
· Standing with Israel, even
providing material support to the IDF as
Israel murdered children, celebrated the rape
of Palestinian hostages, destroyed mosques,
churches, schools and hospitals and murdered
nearly all of the journalists in Gaza.
· Welcoming Israeli officials into
the U.S. as they were wanted for war crimes by
the International Criminal Court.
· Contributing to the undermining
of a system of international human rights law
to prevent genocide, which was created by a
Polish Jewish lawyer named Raphael Lemkin.
· Rewarding U.S. officials for
continuing the weapons flow to Israel.
· Volunteering for the IDF to
commit atrocities in Gaza.
· Using the media to promote
racist tropes and lies about Arab men raping
women and beheading babies, painting
Palestinian men as criminals and terrorists
when the terrorism is coming from inside our
own house.
· Weaponizing antisemitism in the
service of MAGA white nationalism, to
dismantle higher education, academic freedom,
DEI and the free press; expel, suspend,
arrest, detain, imprison and deport student
activists and professors, and threaten the
lives and livelihood of Palestinians and their
allies here in North America who dared to
speak out against the genocide.
First a note on Zionism, which I
believe is the problem and is threatening to
replace Judaism and must be properly critiqued
and dismantled as part of teshuvah: Alon
Mizrahi, an Arab Jewish Israeli writer of
Moroccan and Palestinian ancestry, called
Zionism “white supremacy for Jews.” Zionism
has taught Jews to hate Arabs, leading to a
marginalization of Jews of color. The Israeli
Black Panthers, who modeled themselves after
the Black Panther Party in the U.S., were in
solidarity with Palestinians. Israeli Prime
Minister Golda Meir said they were “not nice
people.”
I will not forget the videos of
IDF soldiers, including those of visible Arab
and Ethiopian origin, ransacking Palestinian
homes and desecrating the underwear of women
who might as well have been their wives,
daughters, sisters, nieces, aunts, mothers,
and grandmothers.
Some would argue that genocide
is the logical end result of Jewish
ethnosupremacy. Martin Luther King said “Our
Nation was Born in Genocide when it embraced
the notion that the original American, the
Indian, was an inferior race.” “Racism is evil
because its ultimate logic is genocide,” he
said, noting how denying fundamental rights to
a people is a prelude to denying their right
to exist.
Antizionism was once robust and
dominant in the Jewish community. The founders
of Zionism like Thoedor Herzl and Vladimir
Jabotinsky spoke of their project as
colonization. Jabotinsky said Israel needed
“an iron wall which the native population
cannot break through” and said “there has
never been an indigenous inhabitant anywhere
or at any time who has ever accepted the
settlement of others in his country. Every
indigenous people will resist alien settlers
as long as they see any hope of ridding
themselves of the danger of foreign
settlement.”
3. Atonement
for genocide and famine comes in the form of
restorative justice and a free Palestine
As we consider teshuvah and what
atonement looks like right now in light of the
famine and genocide in Gaza, we must consider
the historical harm Jews have caused, and what
justice looks like with Jewish values.
Next I want to discuss a need
for justice that addresses trauma and grief
caused by violence and supremacy: Restorative and transitional
justice: truth, accountability, reparation,
reconciliation, conflict resolution and
democratic participation.
UN High Commissioner for Human
Rights Volker Türk said: “Justice is a
prerequisite for ending cycles of violence and
for Palestinians and Israelis to be able to
take meaningful steps towards peace.” There must be an
accounting of what taken place historically,
and we should seek accountability for the Gaza
genocide, the decades long occupation and
apartheid system, and the Nakba which
displaced 750,000-1 million Palestinians.
Restorative justice is required.
Atalia Omer said justice in Israel-Palestine
from a Jewish lens means grappling with Jewish
state power and violence, and achieving a just
future by focusing on peace and democracy, and
seeking restorative accountability for past
injustices.
Omer says Zionism has replaced
Judaism and has offered us an erasure of
history that justifies the genocide of
Palestinians and hides the crime of settler
colonial dispossession. I’d argue “never
again” in this context does not mean no more
genocide for anyone, but a Jewish
exceptionalism, a permanent victim status, and
a need for self-defense against a constant
threat of antisemitism and future genocide.
Israel is justice for Jews, and redemption
from the ashes of the Holocaust. Jews were
most certainly the victims of Nazi Germany,
but they are not the victims now in Israel.
Palestinians are not the Nazis, they are
indigenous people who have been eliminated and
displaced. Genocide of Palestinians,
atrocities, killing of Amalek becomes Jewish
self-defense, safety and security.
True Justice means addressing
the displacement and depopulation of
Palestinians, and centering Palestinian
people, Mizrahi and Ethiopian Jews, and other
victims of modern Jewish history.
On the importance of free
Palestine: You cannot claim to support Black
Lives Matter or LGBTQ+ rights, support freedom
of speech and democracy and yet you do not
believe that Palestinians are entitled to
equal rights and self-determination.
Journalist Abe Marquez said of
free Palestine “It involves rejecting the
politics of ethnic supremacy, or an
ethnostate, and instead embracing a future
based on equality and justice for everyone.”
4. There are
concrete things we can do now
Finally, as we consider atoning
for Gaza, consider cutting ties with the state
of Israel, BDS, fighting to dismantle Zionism
and all systems and structures of oppression.
Help the Palestinians but don’t dictate. Help
Israelis who want a better future. At a time
when national borders become meaningless, we
must atone for building our homes on mountains
of children’s corpses, whether in Palestine or
North America, and instead seek peace and
democracy, address the wrongs and seek healing
and repair. Justice means justice for
everyone, not just Jews, breaking down the
national and ethnoreligious barriers and
seeking solidarity with everyone.
