Ted Schmidt, Toronto, ON

It is almost impossible to convey to most people in a brief essay what is transpiring in Israel/Palestine. I wrote my first article on this issue in the Catholic New Times in 1987, followed by three trips in the next 30 years and a regimen of intensive reading. This is the best I can do in the generous space ICN has provided. I am now finishing a second book wherein I flesh out some of the following.

For a popular understanding of Zionism and its settler colonial and national movement go to my book I Was a Catholic Zionist at thebookband.com

October 7, 2023 was a shocking day for Israeli Jews and indeed for the diaspora in Canada for obvious reasons. Totally ignored were October 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1, 1967, 1948.

To understand the state of Israel today, you need to know two Hebrew words, hafrada (basically segregation) and bitahon (security).

2.

The state through the massive illegal wall, Jews-only roads in the illegal occupied territories, segregated areas in mixed Israel cities has attempted to separate Jews from Arabs “not only physical walls, but mental walls” as Haaretz reporter Gideon Levy maintains. Add to this Levy’s “systematic dehumanization of the Palestinians. They are not human beings like us.”1

The result: the indigenous Palestinians have become “the other.” With the unknown you can easily transfer your worst fears because you simply do not know them. All you know is the colour, religion, ethnic origin etc. This was Jim Crow in the USA, whites imposed their own “hafrada” on black citizens, dispatched them to another part of town and hence allowed fear to grow.

Now “bitahon” (security) was shattered on October 7. The vaunted Israeli Defense Force (IDF) was missing in action having been transferred as an army of occupation against defenseless Palestinians in the West Bank. Hamas easily broke through what had become a jail for Palestinians.

Israel had total control of every coming and going of the 2.5 million Gazans who not only were locked up in the world’s biggest prison but had been victims of a brutal 17-year siege. Hamas exploded with an atavistic fury slaughtering at last count 1,000 and grabbing over 250 hostages. These are war crimes, a veritable slaughter of innocents worthy of total condemnation.

3.

The shock in Israel has been profound and to a lesser extent in the diaspora. How could this have happened they wondered. Netanyahu always promised bitahon. Sirens now were going off in Tel Aviv, in the north Israelis were moving south terrified of Hezbollah rockets. Their lives had become topsy turvy, a daily experience of Palestinians.

Prime Minister Netanyahu as cynical as ever had nowhere to go but where he had always gone, stoke up hatred not only of Hamas but of the Palestinian people, all to take the heat off himself and his egregious failure to safeguard bitahon.

Shameless as ever, Netanyahu played the Amalek card (October 29,2023) actually likening Palestinians to Israel’s traditional enemy Amalek (1 Samuel 15:3) Now go and smite Amalek, and utterly destroy all that they have.

Netanyahu: You must remember what Amalek has done to you says our Holy Bible. We do remember. Our brave troops are joining this chain of heroes 3,000 years ago from Joshua ben Nun to the heroes of 1948.

Here was the Prime Minister whipping up genocidal language among a terribly vulnerable people all the while invoking an ancient biblical text to practice revenge not on the military wing of Hamas, but on innocent civilians “not human beings like us” as Gideon Levy, the brilliant Haaretz journalist who for 35 years has been a weekly, sometimes daily visitor to the occupied territories.

Now writing in late November we cannot but help observe a scorched earth policy, revenge driven, Dahia doctrine driven, state violence against a defenseless people living under a 17-year siege. The dogs of war are unleashed to pay for the fury of humiliating the most sacred institution in Israel, the army.

Assaults took place not on October 7 but on October 6,5,4,3,2,1, 1967,1948 when not many were paying attention. Palestine was far away and off most people’s radar. Too many people saw only October 7 devoid of any context. Murderous, savage, evil, to be condemned as a war crime-absolutely. Amira Hass, another brilliant Israeli reporter wrote about the daily lives of Palestinians.

What is reported in Hebrew in Haaretz passes as if it was never written, and it too is just a thousandth of a percent of the acts that the direct descendants of the Jewish refugees from Europe and Arab countries are always carrying out.2

That’s right – one thousandth of one per cent of Israel’s massive cruelty.

The aforementioned Gideon Levy courageously writing after October 7 reminding us of the context.

“In a few days Israelis went through what Palestinians have experienced as a matter of routine for decades, and are still experiencing – military incursions, death, cruelty, slain children, bodies piled up in the road, siege, fear, anxiety over loved ones, captivity, being targets of vengeance, indiscriminate lethal fire at both those involved in the fighting (soldiers) and the uninvolved (civilians), a position of inferiority, destruction of buildings, ruined holidays or celebrations, weakness and helplessness in the face of all-powerful armed men, and searing humiliation.

Therefore, this must be said once again – we told you so.”3

Zionism the false creed which replaced Judaism

It is impossible to write cogently for people with no history and no memory — of what? As the brilliant Israeli historian Ilan Pappé wrote:

1948 marked the worst chapter in Jewish history that Jews did in Palestine what Jews had not done anywhere else in the previous 2000 years. From 1 February 1948 Jewish troops were going from one house to the other, from village to village and were expelling by force people massacring those who resisted and looting everything…Nobody in the western world wanted to report that story. This was a conscious decision by the political elites of the west to atone for what Europe did to the Jews in the second world war. The price was very clear, the dispossession of Palestine. It was suggested to them that’s so few years after the holocaust it’s not a good idea to portray the Jews as murderers, expellers looters, occupiers, and colonizers.4

The Palestinian people, an Arabic, brown and largely Muslim people, were cast aside by the West and became the second victims of the Nazi holocaust, given up to atone for the horrific suffering of Jews in the Nazi holocaust.

Zionism was the reigning ideology which allowed for the erasure of Palestine from world maps. The state of Israel was built on the dispossession of the indigenous people of Palestine. It had nothing to do with Judaism which had been successfully suborned by eastern European Jews which had long given up on the historical faith. Today diaspora Jews are wrongly held hostages to Israel’s behaviour.

Radical change in Jewish identity

In 1967 with the blitzkrieg Israeli victory in the Six Day War, many Jewish commentators from rabbis, academics etc., began to realize that many American and Canadian Jews caught up in Jewish military success as America looked to this victory as “a miracle” over the huge Arab world. They adopted pro-Israelism as a surrogate form of religion (Dov Waxman) or “Israelotry,” as the scholar Daniel J. Elazar put it. Israeli leaders knew that victory was never in doubt, but cynically they played “another holocaust” card to get the diaspora on board. Hence, Jewish identity rather quickly began to morph into Zionism and a state in the Middle East which had brutally dispatched the indigenous became central to what a Jew was.

Yakov Rabkin, the public intellectual, professor emeritus of history at the Université de Montréal, summarized the confusion among young Jews in this way:

‘Israelism’ has replaced traditional Jewish identity, making it difficult for Jewish students to distinguish between divergent political views and attacks on their identities… Many Jews have simply not noticed that their traditional religious and ethnic identity has morphed into a new political one.5

With the arrival of the computer and social media, Israel’s brutality became all too obvious and many Jews, secular or otherwise, understood at a basic level, Jews don’t do this. Several religious voices recoiled in horror Jewish Voice for Peace, Independent Jewish Voices (IJV) emerged both in Britain (2007), Canada (2008) and Australia(IAJV). If Not Now, horrified at the massacre of 560 children in Operation Protective Edge (2014) and appalled at the hawkish response of traditional Jewish organizations had three demands: Stop the War on Gaza, End the Occupation, and Freedom and Dignity for All. In November it was Ceasefire Now.

Israeli historian Shalom Sand’s prescient observation stands out:

“No Jew, who lives today in a liberal western democracy, would tolerate the discrimination Israelis who live in a state that is not theirs, but Zionist supporters among the Jews around the world, like most Israelis, are quite unconcerned, or do not wish to know that the “Jewish State” because of its undemocratic laws could never have been part of the European Union, or one of America’s 50 states.” 6

The way forward advocated by many Jews is the break from the ethnocentric tribalism of Zionism to the universal values always associated with Judaism. The state of Israel is not central to Judaism. This has been growing in the diasporic Jewish world. Jewish novelist Jacob Bacharach sums this widening trend: a confident coherent and vigorous test for Judaism unconnected from the terrible burdens of Israel.7

The hallmark of the Jewish people has always been Torah as the late rabbi Jonathan Sacks wrote:
“You cannot ignore a command repeated 36 times in the Mosaic books. Do not ill-treat a stranger or oppress him for you were strangers in the land of Egypt.” 8

Conclusion

The genocidal assault on the innocent Palestinian people of Gaza is merely the latest criminal attack on Palestine. It is there for all to see even the major US networks cannot hide what Israel has done. The bodies of children wrapped in white about to be buried in a mass grave was too much for me. It brought back the mass graves of Jews I forced my students to view when I was teaching the Nazi holocaust, Never again — to anybody.

As described earlier, the western world could not hold Israel to account for decades. This changed with the advent of social media when it became patently obvious what was really happening on the ground, indeed had been happening for several decades.

Canada and settler colonialism

The point of this essay is straightforward. Canadians may have a better entrée than most in understanding the present moment in that collectively we now understand the shadow side of our narrative in that our indigenous people were the victims of settler colonialism.

Europeans came and overwhelmed the indigenous, setting up structures which disrespected the tradition and culture of our First Peoples. Australia, the United States and South Africa were classic examples of settler colonialism. Israel is now recognized as a particularly brutal form of the same.

The good news is that South Africa and Canada are dealing with this. Both have had Truth and Reconciliation Commissions. These are painful but necessary events in a country’s narrative.

As Dr. King often quoted, no lie can last forever and we are closing in on this truth as the three best known human rights organizations Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International and Israel’s own B’Tselem have all concluded after years of study: Israel apartheid against Palestinians: a cruel system of domination and a crime against humanity. B’Tselem the courageous Israeli human rights group calls Israel “a system of Jewish supremacy from the Jordan river to the Mediterranean Sea. This is apartheid.”

No. Israel and Israel firsters shout antisemitism proving that denial is not a river in Africa.

The final thing to say is the sadness that we feel that the institutional Catholic church has not joined the United Church “to recognize the genocide and uphold international human rights and humanitarian law, without exception and call for an immediate ceasefire.”9

Occupation must end, international law must be honored, and Palestinian self-determination respected.

End notes

1 hrw.org/report/2006.
2 Amira Hass, Haaretz, Feb 5,2018.
3 Yakov Rabkin, +972 Magazine, Dec.8.2017.
4 Ilan Pappé, https://al-awda.org/learn-more/video/ilan-pappe-on-the-nakba-of-palestine/.
5 Yakov Rabkin, +972 Magazine, Dec.8.2017.
6 Shalom Sand, The invention of the Jewish People, Verso, 2009, p.309.
7 Jacob Bacharach.
8 Jonathan Sacks, the Guardian, Aug.27, 2002.
9 Dear Prime Minister, the United Church of Canada, November 18, 2023.