Never Again Holocaust Remebrance Day

Yom HaShoah

On this Holocaust Remembrance Day it feels more important than ever that we understand how such a nightmare could happen so that we ensure it doesn’t happen again to anyone.

It breaks my heart to see Jews taking away the lesson that it’s us against the world (as Prime Minister Netanyahu said today) instead of taking away the lesson that we must not allow fascists to divide us and turn us against each other by fighting over scraps of land and resources.

Yom Hashoah 5784

they told me

never to forget the Shoah and then reminded me every day

i have never needed their reminders the Shoah lives always in me in my life far, far way from the shtetl and in the absence left by family i never met and in the righteousness cradled deep in my heart and in the fear that clings to my doorstep like grave dust and that every morning i try to sweep away

they told me, cynically that we would never let it happen again but deep in their hearts, they cradled the fear and flocked to false idols

now i am reminded every day by images beamed to me across seas from the phone of a journalist murdered in my name

i feel the terror and confusion of unarmed men loaded onto flatbeds i feel it through remembrances of my great grandfather, who i could never know he was loaded onto a truck by men with guns and never seen again

i am reminded how we found his final resting place a mass grave in the forest floor just a few miles from the shtetl just a few days later they did not try very hard to conceal their crimes

that which is buried must always be unearthed that which is obscured, brought into the light

today they closed the offices of the journalists they have not yet murdered they have remembered, cynically and melted our memories into a golden idol shrouded in cloth, blue and white

Yom Hashoah 5784, by Noah Gordon
A crowd of protesters photographed from above. Some are wearing Jewish prayer shawls and yarmulkes. IN the middle is a sign with large letters reading "JEWS SAY CEASEFIRE NOW!"

Ceasefire yesterday. Ceasefire now. Ceasefire for the future.

There are many many of us Jews that don’t feel that our own safety depends on the control or suppression of others. While many of the refugees who came to Palestine as pioneers after the Holocaust had intentions to live peacefully in harmony with the Palestinians*, almost every action of the Israeli government since it was founded has been to treat Palestinians just as badly as we had been treated in Europe.

The ultimate consequence of this has been to harm and dispossess several generations of Palestinians which is extremely effective at ensuring they continue to resent Israel’s existence and feel that they must do anything they can by any means necessary to ensure the survival of their people. If Israel can’t exist peacefully with Palestinians, what gives Jews the greater “right” to the land than they have? How can we go from being refugees with no safe place to go, to violently forcing the exact same situation upon another people just for the gall of wanting to continue to exist with their families on their own ancestral land?

Even if I was a Zionist I would think that the last 6 months were creating long term curse on the country of Israel by creating a whole new generation of Palestinians with nothing but rage for Israel and nothing to lose. You can look at even the most sanitized accounts of the assault on Gaza see absolute cruelty on the part of the IDF as well as no concern for human life or international law.


(*) For anyone interested in the politics of Israel’s founding, I highly recommend I. F. Stone’s book Underground to Palestine about the heroic (as he tells it) journey of Jewish refugees trying to reach Palestine in 1946. In 1978 it was republished with 2 new essays from him. One about how Zionism was hijacked by Jews with no regard for Palestinians’ rights or well-being, and the other about how it has become completely impossible to have rational conversations that are critical of Israel.

Square image with test that begins "if our survival is to be Jewish by tema okun"

we have become / the pharaoh

I have been so incredibly grateful for the leadership and energy of people like Jewish Voice for Peace who are making it abundantly clear that there are many many of us American Jews that do not support Israel at the expense of Palestinian human rights. The best time to make this clear would have been decades ago but the second best time is right now.

For years I have been called “antisemitic” by Jews who conflate Israel with the Jewish people. Not only do we not owe any loyalty to that colonial apartheid state, I believe Jews are actively harmed by their actions as Israel rightly becomes a global pariah and claims to be acting for US!

Tema Okun is a long-time anti-racist trainer and changemaker. She is the author of the widely circulated article “White Supremacy Culture” which was originally written and published in 1999 and continues to educate and transform the way white people understand ourselves and our impact in the world. Last week, Tema offered us this poem, “If our survival is to be Jewish.”

If our survival is to be Jewish

i

my tears are crying
I am drowning

no longer wandering
in the wilderness
we have become
the pharaoh

ii

centuries of
sacred celebration
and suffering
sunk into strident subjugation

the mirror is cracking

iii

my despair is desperate
I am trembling

our prayers
so full of longing
mock us

we chant
in the shade
of a homeland
shuttering for half a century
the lives of humans
we push out of sight behind
(prison) Walls

iv

my anger is angry
I am shaking

our silence grows deadly
with the deal we’ve made
to defend our hearts
from knowing
they love their children
their laughter their lives
as much as we do

v

my rage is raging
I am bent
over

Jewish godmother to
an exuberant Palestinian boy,
now a man

my love for him
a kind of genesis,
his love for me a kind of grace

he would hate us
otherwise

not any kind of anti-Semitism

consequences
for making of him a demon,
and discarding him daily in the dust
of so many, too many checkpoints

vi

my trauma is traumatized
I am broken

we condemn them
for making corpses of
our children
as we make corpses
of theirs

the math of it
is bleeding us

dry

vii

my people, my Jewish people,
I don’t know how to reach you

our fear is afraid
and forgets
we are the ones
settling, seizing, sequestering

we pile fear upon fear like
stacks of rubble from
houses demolished
dreams destroyed
for decades

viii

my grief is grieving
I am wailing

we did not outlive
the horrors of holocaust
to hoard survival
like this

to hollow ourselves out

ix

or did we

x

my people, my Jewish people,

tell me it is not too late
to choose another way.

Tema Okun, Oct. 26, 2023