Jenn Steinfeld: Why I Stand with Palestine

"The Palestinians are no longer passively accepting their unjust plight. I do not agree with their methods, but I understand their urgency."

Patch by Solomon Brager reading “we will outlive them” “mir veln zey iberlebn” in English and in Yiddish

[This piece was first published here, and is republished with permission.]

I am an antizionist, anti-imperialist American Jew who believes fully in the value of human life. I cannot stand quietly by while genocide is committed in my name and with my tax dollars. What happened in Israel was a horrific act of violence. Responding to it with more state-imposed violence does nothing to bring back the dead or free the hostages. Israel committing an ethnic cleansing campaign in Gaza is a shame upon all of us.

I wish it went without saying that my valuing Palestinian life doesn’t mean I devalue Israeli or Jewish lives. That my horror at the lives lost outside a hospital in Gaza does not lessen my concern for the Israeli hostages. That my opposition to genocide in Gaza doesn’t mean I support Hamas and the murders of Israelis. But it unfortunately doesn’t.

Jews around the globe have culturally tended and nurtured the trauma of the Holocaust to ensure it never happens again. Many of us have used this shared history to stand up against other state-imposed and ethnically or racially motivated violence. We are involved in human rights movements, investigating war crimes, and opposing ethnic cleansing around the globe as part of our calling to heal the world, tikkun olam. Yet when it comes to Israel, this nation created in the name of our liberation by exiling others from their homes, so many of us have a willful, reflexive blindness. This is not an accident — it is an intentional process of indoctrination linking the secular democracy of Israel to the generalized existence of Jewish people.

When Hamas came across the Gaza border on October 7th and murdered 1,400 civilians, that was a horrific act of violence. The stories of what happened are harrowing. The families of the hostages are suffering, not knowing what happened to them. Many thousands are injured, many more than that are impacted.

This was a terrible thing. It was not a second Holocaust.

To suggest that this single act of violence by a terrorist group could compare to the systematic, state-imposed removal and extermination of MILLIONS of Jews across Europe and North Africa is a shande. It is also the result of feeding the embers of that collective trauma, and all the Eastern European pogroms that predated it, and the legacy of the Alhambra Decree removing Jews from Spain in 1492, and any number of other ways we have been told we are not welcome through the ages.

We have so committed to never forgetting that we have forgotten to collectively heal.

From a very young age, we are taught implicitly and explicitly that we must uphold Israel, and that to critique it is antisemitic. For those of us who are also queer, we are fed additional propaganda about the permissive enclave of Israel in a suppressive Arab region.

Looking at footage from Gaza, I see a ghetto. People whose rights have been stripped away by an occupying power, whose homes were seized, and who were forcefully relocated. People who are not free to leave their restricted zone, enforced by a government that doesn’t recognize their citizenship. People who are under daily threat from the military might of the nuclear power that has taken over their land. From my privileged space on the other side of the world, it is obvious that resistance to occupation often results in violence against the oppressor.

When people call for a return to peace in Israel without calling for an end to the occupation, I think of this line from Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s Letter from Birmingham Jail: “I had hoped that the white moderate would understand that the present tension in the South is a necessary phase of the transition from an obnoxious negative peace, in which the Negro passively accepted his unjust plight, to a substantive and positive peace, in which all men will respect the dignity and worth of human personality.” The Palestinians are no longer passively accepting their unjust plight. I do not agree with their methods, but I understand their urgency. I hope from the depths of my soul that any resolution focuses on bringing about the presence of justice. I don’t know the right answers, but I know that change is necessary.