Jewish Voice for Peace RI holds solidarity fast for Gaza; Raise money for hungry, suffering Palestinian children

"...across the country over the past month, people of conscience outraged at the deliberate starvation and genocide of Palestinians in Gaza have turned to hunger strikes..."

From a press release:

On Saturday, 100 Rhode Islanders began a 24-hour fast in solidarity with the people of Gaza, who are suffering under a militarily enforced famine and will have endured 100 days of the Israeli state’s near-total blockade of food and humanitarian aid.

According to Jewish tradition, the fast began at sundown and continued until sundown on the following day. Fasters and allies gathered on the Providence Pedestrian Bridge at sundown on Saturday to kick off their fast and hear from speakers from Jewish Voice for Peace - Rhode Island (JVP-RI), the Rhode Island Deportation Defense Coalition, and a dietitian discussing the impact of starvation on the body. Rabbi Lex Rofeberg led attendees in havdalah, a Jewish ceremony marking the end of the Sabbath.

“Whether you are choosing to fast alongside us, participate in our programming over the weekend, or just happened to join us, we are grateful that you are here,” said Kate, a member of JVP-RI who co-emceed the event with Lilian. “We are exactly 20 months into Israel’s horrific and escalated genocide against Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank, and almost a hundred days into the forced and weaponized starvation of Gazans as a tactic of ethnic cleansing with U.S. support and complicity.

“We are here this weekend fasting in solidarity with Gaza and to be in community with one another as we share our grief and rage, learn and make art together, and recommit ourselves to Palestinian liberation by unequivocally saying, ‘Stop starving Gaza, let Gaza live.’”

Here’s the video:

Participants reconvened on Sunday morning at India Point Park for a full day of public teach-ins, art-making, and community action in solidarity with the Palestinian people. Events will include teach-ins, kaddish (a Jewish prayer of mourning), workshops on seed planting and storytelling, and a performance by a local Dabke troupe (a traditional Palestinian dance). They concluded with a somber breaking of the fast around 8 pm.

“My father was born in Germany in 1947 to two parents who barely survived the Shoah,” said Joshua Blaine, Community Songleader & Ritualist. “I heard stories from my grandmother, Dina, and many others, who have written and spoken about the role of hunger, starvation, and the withholding of food in that catastrophe. I am here saying, ‘Not in my name and not in my lineage do we do this to the Palestinian people.’ We now have a hundred of us in Rhode Island who have committed to standing in solidarity. Monday marks a hundred days of withholding food, water, supplies, and aid to the people of Gaza.

“I’m a student of the Torah of Nonviolence. What does that mean? I have been initiated into a new pilgrimage order, which Rabbi Lynn Gottlieb initiated. This order now comprises approximately 50 of us around the country who are walking this path that deepens our commitment to revolutionary Jewish nonviolence.

“A hunger strike is one of the tactics, one of the techniques, that has been leveraged, going back to before Gandhi,” continued Blaine. “Gandhi is a giant in the lineage of nonviolence and famously used hunger strikes, but many other movements have used hunger strikes as a last resort. A key tactic of nonviolence, the hunger strike is an act of desperation when times of desperation call us to do more, to put our bodies on the line. Rabbi Lynn wrote recently, ‘Words are empty bones in this time. We can’t just speak words. We need to put our bodies on the line. We need to act in ways that materially show that we stand with the people of Gaza and the Palestinian movement for liberation.’”

Participants have contributed more than $3,000 to the Middle East Children’s Alliance (MECA) to support efforts to supply food to starving Palestinians. JVP-RI is encouraging participants and supporters to donate the money they would have spent on food on a typical day to MECA.

“This solidarity fast is part of a wave of hunger strikes and political fasting spreading across the country, demanding an end to U.S. backing for the genocide in Gaza and the Israeli state’s renewed campaign of famine and forced displacement,” said Jackie Goldman, a JVP-RI member and fast participant. “From students hunger striking at universities across California to demand divestment from their institutions and an end to U.S. complicity to veterans hunger striking on the steps of the United Nations demanding action to end the genocide, to dozens of activists joining them in Maine — across the country over the past month, people of conscience outraged at the deliberate starvation and genocide of Palestinians in Gaza have turned to hunger strikes, a tactic that has been used time and again by Palestinians deprived of human rights or due process in Israeli prisons.”

Monday, June 9, marks 100 days since the Israeli government began a near-complete blockade of food in Gaza, weaponizing what meager aid they allow in as a tool to contain and exterminate the Palestinian population. On June 7, Al Jazeera reported that 118 starving Palestinians had been shot while gathering at distribution sites of the U.S.-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation.

“We’re gathered here today in solidarity with the Palestinian people of Gaza who are being actively starved by the Zionist entity, who are being attacked at sites where they’re told there will be aid,” said Milo, speaking on behalf of the Deportation Defense Network. “In just the past week, more than 600 people were wounded or killed at these so-called aid distribution points. We know that these past 20 months of genocide are only the latest phase of the ongoing ethnic cleansing that has been happening since the beginning of the Zionist Colonial Project, which started in the late 18 hundreds and intensified dramatically with the Nakba of 1948.

“I’m speaking today about the Deportation Defense Network because we know that to fight the forces of colonialism and imperialism abroad effectively, we must also fight them here at home,” continued Milo. “Our only hope for creating a world without imperialist violence, a world where Palestine is free and all oppressed peoples are free, is deep international solidarity against all forms of imperialism.”

“The bulk of my work is supporting people who are recovering from eating disorders as well as malnutrition, for any reason,” said Leila, a Palestinian-American nutritionist. “For many years, this topic felt personal AND individualistic, like something I was trained to help individuals overcome. The eating disorder field, although very white, is typically not afraid to get political. We talk about racism, health inequity, body diversity, food insecurity, and feminism. But when Palestine came up, when starvation came up, my calls to rise against systematic starvation and hold our government accountable for it was met with at best silence, ‘we’re choosing to stay neutral on this topic,’ and at worst met with victim blaming for the systematic starvation of its people.”

Leila continued:

“I wish I could say this shocked me, but it didn’t. It’s happened before. Every time Palestine comes up in these spaces, there’s radio silence or there is condescension. Starvation, malnutrition, refeeding syndrome - all the things we work on with our patients every day to heal are being manufactured by a genocidal colonial project that we all pay into - but we’re choosing to be neutral as if that’s a possible stance.

“Food is deeply political. When Israel shuts off the water, it’s to starve our crops. When Israel creates a blockade, it’s to starve our brains and bodies. And when Israel steals our cuisine, our traditions: olive trees, figs, dates, oranges, and humus, the lifeblood of Palestine, they attempt to steal our very souls. We see not just agricultural destruction, but the attempted destruction of identity and security in our sense of self, with a concern of lack of water because Israel has so creatively demolished the irrigation systems in Palestine so they can shut it off whenever they want. There’s also a concern about foodborne illness and poor sanitary conditions. If people don’t get sick from the scarcity, they could get sick from a secondary circumstance. Israel has completely ruined Gaza’s economy so even where there is some food, people don’t have money to buy it.

“Something we see frequently in eating disorders is a destabilized identity. ‘Who am I? What are my values? How do I fit into my community?’ This is all triggered by a starved brain. The neural pathways shut down and cognition decreases. This creates a disconnect between our community and ourselves.

“This is a common colonial tactic. It’s not a new one. We’ve seen it before in many colonizations. In 2006, an Israeli senior official noted a specific policy to put Palestinians on a diet, but not to make them die of hunger. Israeli authorities drew up a document calculating the minimum caloric intake necessary for Palestinians to avoid malnutrition without causing outright death. At this point, they’re not holding back anymore. They’ve made it clear that starvation is their goal and they have no issue with it - not that they ever did. They’ve made that clear enough to us.

“What starvation does to the body is completely incalculable. It creates intrusive, ruminative, and suicidal thinking. Enhanced trauma symptoms cause emotional regulation, hormonal dysfunction, organ deterioration, impaired wound healing, cardiac and neurological issues, and risk of death. Upon refeeding an individual with slowed healing, there is a much greater risk for infection. As we know, there are many thousands of Palestinians recovering from amputations and all kinds of injuries from bombs that cannot be cleaned and sanitized without water and cannot be healed without food.”

“We’re about to take on a ritual called havdalah, and it’s appropriate for this moment in a number of ways. One is that it’s done every week,” said Rabbi Rofeberg. “When you’re on the precipice between Shabbat and the rest of the week, havdalah means differentiation. It marks the meeting point, the collision between Shabbat and the rest of the week.”

Rabbi Rofeberg continued:

“First off, we’re literally on a bridge between two sides of something, which I think is worth inhabiting as a signifier, not just for this Havdalah ritual where it is on a precipice between two markers of time: Shabbat and the rest of the week, but also because Havdalah is a meditation on more than just the separation between Shabbat as sacred time and the rest of the week as differently sacred time: mundane time.

“It’s also a moment where we sit in the differentiation, the separation between that which we are and that which we want to be. I’m going to ask everybody to take a second and hold whatever your Shabbat is. I know many here are Jewish and many here aren’t. But you’ve had a past 24 hours. I hope that you’ve had something within it that you can hold and channel into the coming weeks, months, and years of this fight in solidarity with Palestinians for a world where they have the freedom and dignity that they deserve, which Israel is depriving them of.

“Take a second and breathe in the aspirational world that you’re hoping to create and some sliver of something that you held with you in this Shabbat. Hold it. And then in a couple of minutes, as we embark into the rest of the week, figure out a way, in the next 24 hours ideally, to take a tangible step to channel that into the creation of a better universe, into the creation of a universe where Palestinians are not being forcibly starved and killed by the Israeli government every day.”

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JVP-Rhode Island is the local affiliate of Jewish Voice for Peace, the largest progressive Jewish anti-Zionist organization in the world. JVP is organizing a grassroots, multiracial, cross-class, intergenerational movement of U.S. Jews in solidarity with the Palestinian freedom struggle, guided by a vision of justice, equality, and dignity for all people.