cross‐posted (heh) from: https://lemmygrad.ml/post/4960299

It was only one century ago that many would have been shocked to hear the phrase ‘Jesus was a Jew’, as it simply wasn’t something that ordinary churches enjoyed teaching. While a few premodern Christians (including the infamous Protestant pioneer Martin Luther, who responded with a massive wall of text after Jews kept telling him ‘nah, I’m good’) were aware of this knowledge, evidently nobody was really in the habit of emphasizing it either — quite the opposite of the current situation, where the phrase ‘Jesus was a Jew’ has become a cliché.

Since many churches considered anti‐Judaism part of their job, it made sense that they would have wanted to keep quiet about J.C.’s Jewish background, as it would have inevitably raised all sorts of awkward questions, e.g. ‘If Jesus was Jewish, why don’t we all convert to Judaism?’ However, since some Christians feel guilty about nearly two millennia of violent Christian anti‐Judaism, including the Shoah, and many other Christians want to show their support for Zionism, the teaching that J.C. was Jewish has switched from being an arcane detail to basic knowledge.

Now, certainly not all who repeat this trivia are directing it to Jews. In fact, a decade ago I usually saw it directed at blatantly antisemitic Christians, though I doubt that it was always persuasive (as one ‘political pastor’ painfully learned in 1939). This counterargument is also a little irksome in its own way, as J.C.’s Jewish background should not be the only, or even the main, reason why somebody should respect contemporary Jewish people. The paradox of Jews inspiring two overwhelmingly gentile faiths does fascinate me, but Jewish people have worth aside from that.

In any case, if you have been lurking Jewish communities for a while then you have likely noticed that when Jews mention this phrase, they tend to mention it unhappily. It isn’t just that the phrase has become cliché and pedantic, but mainly because the intentions behind it are almost always misguided. At best, telling Jews that J.C. was Jewish is only a quite minor, woefully inadequate way of expressing solidarity. At worst, it is an evasive rhetorical trick, basically the Christian equivalent to saying ‘I’m not racist, I have a black friend!’ or ‘I’m part Cherokee!’, hence why somebody deemed the phrase antisemitic. I find both of those authors harsh, personally, so this is my attempt at putting it more gently if anybody finds their tones too off‐putting.

While it delights me to see Christians who are sincerely interested in demonstrating solidarity with Jewish people, I suspect that all Jews would agree (for once) if I said that reminding others of J.C.’s Jewish background isn’t enough. Maybe better than nothing, but it still isn’t enough. How, then, should one go about it? Click here for my suggestions, zero of which involve supporting an antidemocratic régime! Evangelicals, take note! And if you want to discuss Christianity’s Jewish roots in a way that actually sounds sophisticated and interesting, Torah Praxis after 70 C.E.: Reading Matthew and Luke–Acts as Jewish Texts is arguably the way to get serious about understanding them. See? Christianity’s Jewish origins don’t have to sound like boring trivia!

If you tell a Jewish person that J.C. was a Jew, the politest response that you’ll get is simply ‘good for him’. Few people want to bluntly tell you ‘I don’t care’, let alone patiently and respectfully explain to a stranger why they find this knowledge irrelevant, so this my contribution for anybody who needed help. Hopefully I articulated this well!

it seems ordinary israelis really do be living in the alternative realm

kinda meandering family- and self-exploration piece, but i think its nice

Quoting Katherine Aron‐Beller’s Christian Images and Their Jewish Desecrators: The History of an Allegation, 400–1700, chapter 4:

A longer polemical folktale seems even more relevant for our purposes. Referring again to the thorn/burning bush, which here “radiated God’s presence,” Joseph describes his father, Rabbi Nathan, actually committing image desecration. He openly urinates on a cross in front of a Christian bishop, denying its sanctity and arguing that it should be considered putrid because it was the instrument that had caused the torture and death of Jesus:

Once my lord and father, Rabbi Nathan, may he rest in Paradise, was riding alongside the bishop of Sens.¹²⁰ The bishop got off his horse opposite a bush in order to urinate. My lord and father saw this, and he got off his horse opposite an abomination [a cross] and urinated on it. The bishop saw this and was angry. He said to him, it is not proper to do that, to make the cross smell bad. My father replied, “On the contrary, it was a foolish thing for you to do [Gen. 31:28]. You urinated on a bush, on which the Holy One, blessed be He, radiated His presence in order to bring salvation [that is, at the burning bush, Exod. 3:1–3]. But this [cross], on which you [Christians] say that [the god] you fear was defeated, stank, and rotted, it is right that you should expose yourself and urinate all over it!”¹²¹

The Jew holds the trump cards. It would, Rabbi Nathan argues, make more sense for the Christian to desecrate the cross himself rather than venerate it. He first criticizes the bishop for urinating on a bush when, according to the Christian argument, Christ revealed himself in one. Second, he contends that it makes no sense for the bishop to venerate an object that caused the death of his savior. If the bishop saw the bush as a place of Christian divinity, the Jew argues, then he (the Jew) has shown more respect for Christ by not urinating on the bush than the bishop who did! It might well be argued then, that Joseph the Official was responding to the spreading allegations of Jews violating Christian images and offered in this polemic an allegorical retort.¹²²

(Emphasis added.)

cross‐posted from: https://lemmygrad.ml/post/4654542

In July 1939, a group of Palestine‐born Jews, including key public figures and communal leaders, gathered in Jerusalem for the first meeting of the Natives of the Yishuv Federation (NYF; in Hebrew, Hitahadut Bney ha‐Yishuv). NYF was a political movement that sought to represent Jews of the “Old Yishuv” as an increasingly marginalized population in Palestine.^1^

In contrast to other movements and civil associations with similar aims, the NYF was not ethnically defined (e.g., Sephardi or Yemenite). Rather, it brought together a number of Palestine’s established Jewish communities under the category of “natives” (bney ha‐arets or ha‐Yishuv), clearly positioning themselves against European Zionist élites while relying on Ottoman practices of communal political organization that were viewed by the Zionist leadership as a direct threat to its authority.^2^

The NYF’s core members belonged to the pre‐Zionist Ashkenazi communities of Jerusalem. Joined by leading Sephardi figures, they also sought to draw closer the Yemenite, Georgian, and other communities. The federation claimed the independent status of a recognized political actor with its own social, economic, and cultural institutions, tied to a specific constituency.

This rather radical position combined the struggle for native Jews’ political power with views of a shared Arab Jewish existence in Palestine, which were often expressed by the NYF founder and leader, Dr. Israel Ben‐Zeʾev, in meetings and in correspondence with high Zionist officials.

[…]

In addition to this large variety of private papers, I follow the official paper trail documenting the looting of Palestinian books during the 1948 war, focusing on Ben‐Zeʾev’s struggle against the Hebrew University and the Ministry of Education over the fate of these books that he had partly collected and assembled in Jaffa.

This conflict formed part of an older, fierce debate concerning the politics of (specifically Orientalist) knowledge, that is, who gets to hold, manage, produce, and disseminate knowledge, and which types of Orientalist knowledge should be promoted.

Ben‐Zeʾev opposed the treatment of the looted Palestinian books as dead cultural artifacts in the published work of a closed professional milieu at the university, struggling to keep them for use in his public educational projects and as part of a local, living Arab culture—albeit that by this point the books’ original owners were being displaced from their land and homes and this very culture was undergoing massive destruction.

[…]

Ben‐Zeʾev had a special relationship with A. S. Yahuda, an Orientalist trained in Germany (under the famous philologist Theodor Noeldeke) who spent most of his life as an academic in Europe and the U.S. and yet maintained a deep and ongoing interest in political and academic matters in Palestine.

A lengthy correspondence between them from the 1940s (when Yahuda lived in New York and Ben‐Zeʾev in Jerusalem) reveals the fierce criticism they shared of the Zionist leadership and the Hebrew University’s Institute of Oriental Studies (IOS) for marginalizing native Jews, and particularly the milieu of native scholars and their political and cultural views that stood in opposition to the Zionist colonial‐separatist agenda.^29^

Ben‐Zeʾev admired Yahuda and hoped to gain his support in his political and cultural projects, including the opening of a New York branch of his political movement of native Jews as well as a research institute on Arabic Jewish literature in pre‐Islamic times and in Muslim Spain, on which I elaborate in the next sections.

[…]

The collection of books in Jaffa by Ben‐Zeʾev was met with growing resentment by the university’s Orientalists and librarians, who were determined to bring the Palestinian books to the only place they deemed proper for them, the university library. Within a few years they managed to bring about the demise of Ben‐Zeʾev’s library, obtaining some seven thousand books from its collections.

They were assisted in this process by several government ministries and officials (in addition to Palmon), especially Ben‐Zion Dinur (Dinaburg) and Eliezer Rieger, who had served as senior professors at the university until their appointments as heads of the education ministry in 1951.^80^ With the latter’s authorization, university professors and librarians made frequent visits to Ben‐Zeʾev’s library, screening it for “important” books they wished to have at their disposal.

One year later, in late 1952, the Arab Library in Jaffa was finally closed down, despite Ben‐Zeʾev’s protests, without ever being opened to the public.

I am practically in shock right now. I know that there isn’t anything especially disturbing about this report, but the fact that Zionists can successfully hide Jewish history like this from the general public almost enrages me.

Alav hashalom.

Rabbinical students clutch pearls over the existence of anti Zionists in their class; complain about “communist literature.”

A new Jewish tradition is growing in those places where solidarity flourishes. Amid the ugliness and death, and as our institutions cleave to the mistaken idea that our safety comes from ever more brutal applications of state power, the future of our people is being written on campuses and in the streets. Thousands of Jews of all ages are creating something better than what we inherited. Our new Jewish tradition prioritizes truth-telling and justice, and in this way it is actually the old Jewish tradition, which has given us all the tools we’re using.

Ivisited the UCLA encampment on Wednesday night last week, hours before the police closed in. The mood was anxious—large formations of officers were stationed just outside as helicopters circled noisily overhead—but there were dozens of tents packed closely together and hundreds of people hanging out or doing various jobs, including distributing snacks, ferrying supplies, fortifying the perimeter, and shining a strobe light at the cops peering down at us from the windows of Royce Hall.

Your level of comfort in such a space might have depended on your level of comfort with duct tape and no official bathrooms; with chants ringing out over a snare-drum beat; with leftist graffiti scrawled on a stately Romanesque façade. The camp required an ethos of trust and mutual care. It also required bravery, given the way that counterprotesters had kept up a stream of hateful intimidation unimpeded by the university.

As it grew over the course of its week-long occupation of the normally brochure-gracing quad, the camp included a people’s library, teach-ins, art projects, and a screening of The Battle of Algiers. There was a Passover Seder (with olives, strawberries, and watermelon added to the ritual to symbolize solidarity with Palestine and Gaza) and a Kabbalat Shabbat service, which is Shabbat’s mystical, emotional, Hebrew-heavy expression.

Aliyah, a medical administrator at [the] UCLA Medical Center who asked that I not use her last name—she is Muslim and fears harassment—told me that the Kabbalat Shabbat service was her first-ever experience of Friday-evening Shabbat. (The Shabbat downtown, where we met a week later, was her second.) “There were Muslims sitting down with Jews. There were Christians sitting down. We were just learning about it,” Aliyah recalled. “And at the same time, Muslims had their prayers.” (The daily prayers of Islam appeared alongside Jewish ritual on the agenda.) “It was beautiful.”

Many experienced a kind of mourning after the camp was destroyed. Two UCLA students I met Thursday afternoon outside the Twin Towers jail—they had driven there to support those who’d been arrested earlier that day—seemed overcome by sorrow and anger, sometimes collapsing into each other’s arms. They seemed like longtime friends, but they told me they’d barely known each other before spending the previous day building wooden fortifications in the aftermath of the pro-[Zionist] mob attack.

The cooperative spirit of the camp was “one of the most amazing things I’ve ever seen,” one of them, Isabelle, told me. “And simultaneously, there were some of the most horrific things I’ve ever seen. I think that was probably the hardest part, just the whiplash.”

In Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination, Robin D.G. Kelley writes that the best social movements “do what great poetry always does: transport us to another place, compel us to relive horrors and, more importantly, enable us to imagine a new society.” Kelley is a professor of US history at UCLA and a founding member of its Faculty for Justice in Palestine chapter; he described the student encampment as a “huge success” when I spoke to him by phone after the police raid.

“I was involved in the anti-apartheid movement back in the ’80s at UCLA,” he said, “and that kind of solidarity, that kind of cocreation of community—we didn’t have it like that. These students were far more advanced.”

[…]

We said the blessing over the challah in honor of those who are starving in Gaza. We pinched off pieces of the passed loaves and sang “Ceasefire Now” as the daylight faded. It got chilly, all of a sudden, after sundown.

Quoting Katherine Aron‐Beller’s Christian Images and Their Jewish Desecrators: The History of an Allegation, 400–1700, page 143:

This fight against idolatry, which was a central issue in biblical religion, lost importance as a national concern during the period of the Second Temple.⁹ Only a few cases are described by Titus Flavius Josephus (37–100 CE), born Yoseph Ben Matitiyahu, in his works. In 5 BCE Judas, son of Saripheus, and Matthias, son of Margalothus, attempted to remove King Herod’s golden eagle, which had graced the great gate of the Temple for some time.¹⁰

Both Philo and Josephus described how, when serving as prefect or governor of Judea (26–36 CE), Pontius Pilate sent images of Caesar, known as “standards,” into the city of Jerusalem at night.¹¹

Josephus reports: “This excited a great disturbance among the Jews when it was day; for those that were near them were astonished at the sight of them, as indications that their laws were trodden under foot, for those laws do not permit any sort of image to be brought into the city.”¹²

Josephus reported how Jews gathered from all over the countryside outside Pilate’s headquarters in Caesarea, staging a passive demonstration by lying down on the ground for five days and nights.

When Pilate finally agreed to hear their complaint in the marketplace, he took precautions and surrounded the protesters with armed soldiers: “Pilate also said to them that they would be cut into pieces, unless they would admit of Caesar’s image, and gave instruction to the soldiers to draw their naked swords. Hereupon the Jews, as it were at one signal, fell down in vast numbers together, and exposed their necks bare, and cried out that they were sooner ready to be slain than that their law should be transgressed. Hereupon Pilate was greatly surprised at their prodigious superstition, and gave order that the ensigns should be presently carried out of Jerusalem.”¹³

(Emphasis added.)

cross-posted from: https://hexbear.net/post/2436007

I don't normally like Vox.

But this was a good article, if a bit liberal.

I'm reading Levy's The Dawn of Agriculture and the Earliest States in Genesis 1-11 and thought I'd share this screenshot. Really well written and researched book. Levy cites the midrash (fn77) from:

Pirqe Rebbe Eliezer, 24. [Heb], editio princeps, Constantinople, 1514. folio 16b. Digitized Copy, Hebrew Union College, Klau Library, in the Pirqe Rabbi Eliezer Manuscript Database.

One of the symbols on the Passover Seder plate is “karpas”- a spring vegetable. (Parsley, celery, or boiled potato) which is dipped into salt water.

One explanation for “Karpas” כרפּס is the the first three letters spelled backwards are פּרך, Parekh, or harsh labor which is the term for how the Israelites were overworked in Egypt.

After reading Kapital part 1, I’ve been thinking of how capitalism necessitates Parekh: unnatural labor, labor without limit, labor without purpose, labor without regard for the humans doing it, labor that only exists to be stolen. And I fervently hope for a future where Parekh is abolished and obsolete.

Happy Passover comrades!

cross‐posted from: https://lemmygrad.ml/post/4339383

Passover (Hebrew: פֶּסַח Pesach) commemorates the story of the Exodus, in which the ancient Israelites were freed from slavery in Egypt. Passover begins on the 15th day of the month of Nisan in the Jewish calendar, which is in spring in the Northern Hemisphere, and is celebrated for seven or eight days. It is one of the most widely observed Jewish holidays.

As a gentile with an interest in the history of labor, the story behind Passover interests me. Some Jewish historians have come to the conclusion that Exodus was a dramatization of real events: there are certainly truths at the story’s core, but the story itself is probably best interpreted as largely symbolic:

“It’s not a historical event, but it’s also not totally invented by someone sitting behind a desk,” explains Thomas Romer, a renowned expert in the Hebrew Bible and professor at the College de France and the University of Lausanne. “These are different traditions that are brought together to construct a foundation myth, which can be, in a way, related to some historical events,” he says.

[…]

[I]f the Israelites were just a native offshoot of the local Canaanite population, how did they come up with the idea of being slaves in Egypt? One theory, proposed by Tel Aviv University historian Nadav Naʻaman, posits that the original Exodus tradition was set in Canaan, inspired by the hardships of Egypt’s occupation of the region and its subsequent liberation from the pharaoh’s yoke at the end of the Bronze Age.

A similar theory, supported by Romer, is that the early Israelites came in contact with a group that had been directly subjected to Egyptian domination and absorbed from them the early tale of their enslavement and liberation. The best candidate for this rôle would be the nomadic tribes that inhabited the deserts of the southern Levant and were collectively known to the Egyptians as the Shasu.

One of these tribes is listed in Egyptian documents from the Late Bronze Age as the “Shasu of YHWH” — possibly the first reference to the deity who that would later become the God of the Jews.

These Shasu nomads were often in conflict with the Egyptians and if captured, were pressed into service at locations like the copper mines in Timna — near today’s port town of Eilat, Romer says. The idea that a group of Shasu may have merged with the early Israelites is also considered one of the more plausible explanations for how the Hebrews adopted YHWH as their tutelary deity.

As its very name suggests, Israel initially worshipped El, the chief god of the Canaanite pantheon, and only later switched allegiance to the deity known only by the four letters YHWH.

“There may have been groups of Shasu who escaped somehow from Egyptian control and went north into the highlands to this group called Israel, bringing with them this god whom they considered had delivered them from the Egyptians,” Romer says.

This may be why, in the Bible, YHWH is constantly described as the god who brought his people out of Egypt — because the worship of this deity and the story of liberation from slavery came to the Israelites already fused into a theological package deal.

I hope that I don’t offend anybody by proposing a reinterpretation of Exodus as mostly symbolic. My intention is not iconoclasm — quite the contrary! Looking behind the scenes make me appreciate it all the more, and in any case it is absolutely true that some of your ancient ancestors endured slavery… repeatedly.

That leads me to my next point: the Bronze Age was not the last time that you endured slavery. You endured it again… and again… and again. Whether it was Rome:

when Titus sacked Jerusalem in 70 CE, he carried off 97,000 Jews into slavery

Per Catherine Hezser’s Jewish Slavery in Antiquity, pages 240, 253:

It is likely that the supply of Jewish slaves was much larger than that of gentile slaves in Roman Palestine of the late first and second century CE. […] After the Bar Kokhba revolt in the second century CE Jewish slaves are said to have been sold by the Romans at markets in Gaza and Hebron.^35^

Malta:

A community of up to 1,000 Jewish slaves on the archipelago of Malta, east of Tunisia and north of Libya, established over the course of two centuries by the Knights of St. John, a Catholic order of pirates left over from the Crusades, was officially abolished on this date in 1800.

Poland:

In September 1941, 24,000 employees were engaged in the ghetto’s own operations, working for the Wehrmacht, police, and SS, and later for the private companies with workshops there. Nine thousand were employed by Jewish institutions.

We can find cases of Jewish serfdom in, for byspel, Georgia, but this topic is not meant to be exhaustive. Nonetheless, I do want to touch on neoslavery today:

Passover can be a difficult time of year for Jewish inmates. First of all, the prisoners may particularly miss their families during the time of this family holiday celebration.^225^ Furthermore, the irony of the prisoners’ situation—celebrating a ritual of liberation inside prison—is not lost on them.^226^ Sid Kleiner, longtime director of Beth Tikvah Jewish Prisoner Outreach,^227^ explains:

Along with separation from family, there is a painful theme to the holiday—redemption, freedom from bondage and captivity. Jewish inmates gather around the Seder table and declare that, “this year we are free.” It isn’t easy to make this declaration with barbed wire, high walls, and correctional officers in view.^228^

And finally, your Palestinian kin:

Workers consistently and overwhelmingly claim that having no other choice is the reason behind them working in the [Zionist] settlements and putting up with the exploitative work conditions that are part and parcel of the settlement employment sector for West Bank Palestinian workers. The work, they say, is not a free choice but a necessity where no other options exist; a way to put food on the table, and scrape a living in the fragile, poverty‐stricken, and often dangerous environment of the occupied West Bank.

It’s not hyperbole. There is no free or genuine choice regarding employment for many workers who have been systematically streamlined into settlement work. Who are, due to circumstances forced on to them, unable to turn down the exploitative and politically damaging settlement work or find any alternative. This idea of no choice has come about due to a combination of several [Zionist] policies that have purposefully stifled Palestinian development and growth throughout the occupied West Bank, in particular in the rural (read: Area C) communities that have suffered substantially from land annexation.

Yet while the situation looks severe, the Palestinians have inherited much from you, and because of that I have no doubt that they’ll overcome their oppression, as you repeatedly have.

Have a wonderful Passover!

Reposting my essay in commemoration of the anniversary of the start of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising.

The Spirit of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising is Alive in the Al-Aqsa Flood

During the German annexation of Poland in WWII, hundreds of thousands of Jewish refugees were herded to Warsaw. As the Nazis approached the capital, they pulled the noose tighter and tighter around the Jewish population. They faced growing violence and degradation: the nazis rationed food, banned communal prayer, curtailed business, robbed homes, and so on. As their grip became certain, they forced the construction of a walled ghetto around the Jewish district. The Nazis expelled all Jewish people from the rest of the city, confiscating their land, homes, and possessions.

Conditions in the Warsaw Ghetto were dire and extremely overcrowded with more than 400,000 people forced into a 3.3 square kilometer area, 9 people to a room.1 Rations were carefully kept at or below the survival level.2 Virtually no medical supplies or cultural materials were allowed into the ghetto.3 The means of survival let alone full human life were non-existent.

In 1942, one quarter of the ghetto's population were sent to their deaths in Treblinka under the guise of "resettlement". This lie was uncovered, and the Nazi-imposed Jewish government lost all credibility. The leader, Adam Czerniakow, committed suicide. At this point, resistance factions became the dominant political force. Residents in the ghetto realized anything short of all-out mobilization was tacitly accepting their genocide. They would not do this.

Sparsely armed, on 18 January 1943 resistance fighters engaged the nazis in direct armed struggle. They were able to prevent or delay the deportation of 3,000 people and condemn the silence of the world. Battles continued off-and-on until late April. Rather than quietly shuffle a compliant population into cattle cars. the resistance fighters compelled the Germans to announce their genocidal intent to the world and burn them out, block-by-block.

The remainder of the ghetto residents were martyred as they would have been without struggle, but the world could no longer ignore the Nazi genocide. The partisans of the Warsaw Ghetto will be remembered as heroes for all time. They proclaimed their pride, their dignity, and their humanity until the end.

Now the Zionist Fascists invoke this memory and the holocaust to justify their own genocide. The Zionist fascists invoke this memory and order over a million people to move into a smaller section of their own walled ghetto. Now the Zionist Fascists invoke this memory and bomb hospitals. Now the Zionist Fascists invoke this memory and call Palestinians "subhuman animals".4 It is an abomination. It is every Jew's responsibility (mine included!), to condemn this anti-Semitic invocation of our past. We must declare ‘NOT IN OUR NAME!’ as the Zionist Fascists do everything in their power to play out the role of the Nazis.

The tragedies the Zionists inflict on Palestine mirror the tragedies the Nazis inflicted on the Jews. As the Nazis cheered the demolition pf the Warsaw Synagogue, IDF soldiers recorded themselves applauding the demolition of the Palestinian Justice Palace.5 It is important to note that Judaism is not Zionism and Zionism is not Judaism no matter how loudly the Israelis proclaim it. Nor was the special feature of Nazism anti-semitism. Instead their special feature was fascism: the construction of a ethnonationalist garrison state organized for the destruction of a racial enemy as a false solution to its internal contradictions.

The Zionists do not have the same enemy as the Nazis, but their ideology is the same. We should not see resistance against one any differently than resistance against the other.

While aspects of the resistance actions of October 7th are horrible, they must be understood in the context of a people facing genocide. The reaction of the Zionist entity confirms this. They have shown the world who the true 'terrorist', the true fascist, the true victim is.

At time of writing, more than 18,000 Palestinian people—principally non-combatants and children—have been killed under weeks of relentless bombing.6 Every institution of Palestinian civil society is labelled a ‘Hamas Base’ and rendered into dust. And when international investigators fail to find the promised evidence of military installations hidden below ruined hospitals, ruined lives, the Zionists shrug.7 At most, one or two squeamish Americans shoot and cry while Washington and Berlin proclaim “an absolute right to self-defense”.

As the Seleucids turned our Second Temple into a stable, settlers in the West Bank evict Hebron’s Ibrahimi Mosque to proudly hold and record dance parties.8

One popular slogan holds “resistance is justified when people are occupied.” This sentiment is encapsulated in a speech given by PFLP Leader George Habash to western hostages taken as a reprisal for refugee camp bombings in June 1970 titled "Our Code of Morals is Our Revolution."

He begins:

I feel that it is my duty to explain to you why we did what we did. Of course, from a liberal point of view of thinking, I feel sorry for what happened, and I am sorry that we caused you some trouble during the last 2 or 3 days. But leaving this aside, I hope that you will un¬derstand, or at least try to understand, why we did what we did. People living different circumstances think on different lines… After 22 years of injust¬ice, inhumanity, living in camps with nobody caring for us, we feel that we have the very full right to protect our revolution. We have all the right to protect our revolution. Our code of morals is our revolution. What saves our re-volution, what helps our revolution, what pro¬tects our revolution is right, is very right and very honourable and very noble and very beautiful, because our revolution means justice, means having back our homes, having back our country, which is a very just and noble aim.

Now the occupation is in its 75th year. Unlike Habash’s day, the recent decades of resistance have taken the form of political negotiations and peaceful protests. They did nothing to gain the world's attention or support for Palestinian liberation. Clearly, only armed struggle against imperialism can win liberation. Thank God the Palestinians have more than the few handguns and makeshift explosives available to my people 80 years ago.

The Spirit of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising is alive in the Al-Aqsa Flood!

Long live Palestine!

Footnotes & References 1 — Compare to 2.3 million people sharing 360 square kilometers (about the size of Detroit) in the Gaza Strip concentrated into a few overcrowded cities void of open space. https://apnews.com/article/israel-gaza-hamas-war-90e02d26420b8fe3157f73c256f9ed6a 2 — Israel (which controls all imports into Gaza) closely restricts the amount of food allowed in to survival levels calculated at 2,300 calories per day per person. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2012/oct/17/israeli-military-calorie-limit-gaza 3 — Regular and acute drug shortages in the occupied territories were a fact of life prior to the 2023 invasion. Article below for-instance. https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2023-06-08/ty-article/.premium/palestinian-authority-blames-israel-for-acute-medicine-shortage/00000188-9773-df21-a1b8-b7ffbba40000 4 — Jerusalem’s deputy mayor Arieh King: “They are not human beings and not even human animals, they are subhuman and that is how they should be treated.” https://www.middleeasteye.net/live-blog/live-blog-update/israeli-municipality-official-calls-burying-alive-subhuman-palestinian Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu (A Philly native) on the will of the Israeli people: “They are committed to completely eliminating this evil from the world,” https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2023/11/benjamin-netanyahu-amalek-israel-palestine-gaza-saul-samuel-old-testament/
SS Solider Jürgen Stroop describing slain ghetto fighters: “180 Jews, bandits and sub-humans, were destroyed.” https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/the-stroop-report-may-1943 5 — Demolition of the Justice Palace https://www.timesofisrael.com/liveblog_entry/footage-shows-idf-demolishing-main-hamas-courthouse-in-gaza/ 6 — Palestinian Death toll https://www.aljazeera.com/news/liveblog/2023/12/14/israel-hamas-war-live-rain-brings-misery-to-displaced-in-gaza
Even the most skeptical Israeli sources place the Palestinian death toll at 4x the number of Israeli dead. https://www.newsweek.com/real-gaza-civilian-death-tollwhat-we-know-1849655 7 — No evidence of ‘Hamas Command Center’ found below IDF-bombed Al Shifa hospital https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/11/16/what-has-israel-found-in-gazas-al-shifa-hospital IDF soldier claims a calendar found at the hospital is a ‘Hamas Names List’. One instance of the farce. https://www.france24.com/en/tv-shows/truth-or-fake/20231116-idf-claims-to-find-list-of-hamas-names-but-it-s-the-days-of-the-week-in-arabic
8 — Israeli settlers hold dance party in Hebron’s Ibrahimi Mosque April 18th https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3gS_jgsd4JM https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20220419-israel-closes-ibrahimi-mosque-to-palestinian-worshippers-holds-concert-for-settlers/

cross‐posted from: https://lemmygrad.ml/post/4280603

The capitalist media (example) have been playing down Iranian Jews’ approval of the counterattack, claiming that Tehran is figuratively holding a gun to all of their heads to appreciate it.

Iranian Jews don’t have to lie! Even here in the North, where the capitalist media dominate, there are thousands (maybe scores of thousands) of anticolonial Jews who loathe Zionism’s neocolony, and I suspect that they would be at least understanding if not approving of the Iranian counterattack. So claiming that the Islamic Republic of Iran must be forcing its Jewish population to appreciate these well aimed blows on an antisemitic régime is utterly laughworthy.

cross‐posted from: https://lemmygrad.ml/post/4269754

(Mirror.)

After 1953, Jews and Armenians continued to be disproportionately overrepresented in various underground political parties and anti‐Shah circles.^39^ On par with their political activism during the Pahlavi period, Jews were part of 1970s revolutionary movement groups in addition to the Tudeh, such as student organizations and the Association of Jewish Iranian Intellectuals. They, too, took to the streets and participated in political demonstrations supporting a wide variety of revolutionary movements.

It is difficult to quantify the extent of Jewish participation in the revolutionary movement, but sources suggest that it was not inconsequential. In March 1978, nine months before the shah left Iran, Jewish radicals, some of whom were socialists and republicans, won the elections for the leadership of the central organization of the Jewish communities, defeating the old guard establishment that was identified closely with the shah and his alliance with [Zionism].^40^

These activists formed the aforementioned AJII. Later in 1978, particularly in September and December when the demonstrations grew larger and more frequent, there are multiple reports of thousands of Jewish protestors marching in Tehran, and the Jewish hospital in the city operated rescue teams together with the leadership of the revolutionary movement.^41^

It should be noted that from that moment on there were no official voices in the community in support of Zionism. There were myriad motivations and reasons for Jews (and non‐Jews) to support the revolution, some more prosaic than others.

[…]

One of the highest profile trials and executions was that of the industrialist […] and Jewish community leader, Habib Elghanian, on 9 May 1979. Given the […] fabricated charges of being a “friend of God’s enemies, spying for [Zionism’s régime], and spreading corruption on earth,” Iranian Jews feared that if the new government executed Elghanian no Jews would be immune from such treatment.^43^

Shortly afterward, the Iranian Jewish leader Hakham Shofet led a small delegation to Qom to meet with Ayatollah Khomeini to seek clarification. The meeting helped to allay the Jewish community’s concerns.

In his proclamation, Khomeini acknowledged the deep roots of the Jewish communities in Iran, underscored the elements of monotheism present in both Judaism and Islam, and distinguished between Zionism and Judaism: “We know that the Iranian Jews are not Zionist. We [and the Jews] together are against Zionism. […] They [the Zionists] are not Jews! They are politicians that claim to work in the name of Judaism, but they hate Jews. […] The Jews, as the other communities, are part of Iran, and Islam treats them all fairly.”^44^

At the same time, this societal chaos produced euphoric dreams for the postrevolutionary republic. In less than two years, from February 1979 to summer 1980, Iran witnessed its broadest political participation and freedom of the press that resulted in hundreds of new publications, which in turn helped to inform and shape public opinion. Such participation and euphoria were enjoyed by all the religious minorities, including the Jews.

The Jewish community’s leadership now had direct relations with the revolutionary leaders, and they were given a place to represent the Jews and other religious minorities in shaping the character of the new republic. One of its community’s leaders, ʻAziz Daneshrad, an ex‐Tudeh activist, was elected to represent the Jews in the Constitutional Experts Council (Majlis Khobrigan‐i Qanun‐i Asasi). The council’s main rôle was to write the republic’s new constitution and bring it forth for referendum.^45^

At the same time that news reports [under Zionism] and around the world claimed that Iran was building extermination camps for Iranian Jews, Daneshrad as a sitting member of the council raised the idea of revoking the reserved seat for the religious minorities, allowing minority candidates to compete in the general party lists. To his disappointment, the measure was not approved.

[…]

Iranian Jews are not hiding in taqiya mode. In present‐day Iran, those who remain speak up against injustices. They express a desire to be part of the Iranian nation and maintain independent positions relative to the Islamic Republic, as well as to [Zionism] and Jewish issues worldwide. The Iranian Jewish response to an ongoing discourse of “rescue” has been far less enthusiastic than expected.^79^ In general, Iranian Jews living in Iran want to remain Jewish and Iranian without compromising any component of their identity.

After Ahmadinejad’s two presidential terms, Iranians elected a pragmatist, Hassan Rouhani. Under his leadership (r. 2013–21), Jews experienced a number of political and cultural achievements. In December 2014, the government unveiled a monument with Persian and Hebrew text that commemorated the Jewish soldiers who sacrificed their lives during the Iran–Iraq war.^80^ In addition, the Majlis passed new laws that corrected prevailing inheritance laws, which prioritized Muslim heirs over their Jewish relatives, and another law that excused Jewish students in public schools from attending classes on Shabbat.^81^

Under Rouhani’s tenure, the president and his foreign minister made it a tradition to bless the Iranian Jewish community on their official Twitter accounts on Rosh HaShana.^82^ In one of his many Twitter threads, Foreign Minister Javad Zarif referred to the former president’s Holocaust denial and countered: “Iran never denied the Holocaust. The man who denied the Holocaust is now gone. Happy New Year.”^83^

Although Zarif meant to draw a line between Ahmadinejad as the most prominent Holocaust denier and the Rouhani administration that he (Zarif) was part of, it is important to note that Holocaust denial remains prevalent in the ranks of the Iranian government. Iran’s Supreme Leader, ʻAli Khamenei, has himself engaged in Holocaust denial and such references remain on his social media and official website.^84^

Zarif’s point, however, has some merit in that Holocaust denial is not as dominant as in other Middle Eastern societies.^85^ Even during Ahmadinejad’s presidency, state‐run TV aired the drama Zero Degree Turn, based on the story of Abdol Hossein Sardari, the Iranian diplomat in [Fascist]‐occupied Paris who forged passports for French Jews.^86^ […] Iranian Jews speak and write, and their views, opinions, struggles, and actions can represent their complex experiences of living in Iran. Scholars can understand Iran and Iranian Jews better when they listen to Iranian Jews when they speak and write about their experiences of being Kalimian in Iran.

(Emphasis added.)

"Like many others, I now find myself standing outside ​“the Jewish community,” fearing that there are few Jews I can be shoulder-to-shoulder with in Dag Hammarskjöld Plaza if they can call only for the release of hostages without a word for the many, many, many Palestinians killed by bombs and dying of starvation."

cross‐posted from: https://lemmygrad.ml/post/4188616

For Alexandrov, only public condemnation of rabbinic injustices could regain the public’s trust and convince them that Alexandrov and his peers would not manipulate their flock for material gain. Alexandrov put this idea into action in his sermons during Shabbat services, in which he harshly attacked “those impudent dogs, the guardians of practical religion who are far from any sense of true belief. Only because of them has religion deteriorated, as everyone can see how these holy mice strive only to collect their breadcrumbs” (Alexandrov 1932, p. 85).

This kind of criticism of the traditional rabbinate is directly borrowed from the arsenal of Soviet propaganda, as Alexandrov himself noted in another letter to Krasilshchikov:

The more I contemplate the spiritual condition of our people in this day and age, the more I realize that the Marxist perspective is right in explaining historical developments as products of class struggle for their economic wellbeing. That can explain how communal leaders, who have no godliness and love of the Torah in their hearts, are appealing to the masses’ orthodoxy in order to preserve their economic and material condition. (Alexandrov 1932, p. 64)

[…]

Nineteenth‑century thinkers such as Aaron Shmuel Liberman (1845–1880) and Elia Benamozegh (1823–1900) had already tied Kabbalah to Marxist and universalistic aspirations, and twentieth‑century Jewish thought expanded on this trend when thinkers such as Avraham Yitzhak Kook (1865–1935), Yehuda Ashlag (1885–1954), Leon Askenazi (1922–1996), and many others claimed Kabbalah as the centerpiece of their Jewish politics.

Ashlag, in particular, is famous for promoting “altruistic Communism” through a new understanding of the Lurianic corpus,^19^ and like him, it is no accident that Hilewitz likewise used Kabbalistic language to defend historical materialism. For him, historical materialism took the Hasidic worldview of Habad to its logical conclusion: if God is indeed one, if his presence is everywhere and in everything, then there is no difference between stating that “everything is spirit” or “everything is matter”; it is all but one substance which manifests itself in every part of reality.

However, Netanyahu’s objection elides the passage’s violent legacy, which is not an exclusively Jewish one. Europeans used it to justify murdering Native Americans, and Hutus used it to justify massacring Tutsis. It’s been deployed against Catholics, Protestants, Muslims, and Jews (sometimes by other Jews), and quoted by Afrikaaners, Germans, and other European colonial powers against those who resist colonization.

Still, the passage’s most significant and potent repurposing has been by right-wing Jewish extremists in Israel: It likely influenced the actions of Baruch Goldstein, who murdered 29 Palestinians while they were praying in the West Bank city of Hebron on Purim morning in 1994, and was invoked by settlers last year as a rallying cry for the pogrom committed in the Palestinian town of Huwara.

[…]

The rabbinic tradition’s reckoning with the biblical text does provide some solace. In this canon, the understanding of Amalek is not fixed, but understood and interpreted variably. (The Israeli right consistently chooses to return to the Bible while eschewing the rabbinic tradition that has interpreted it, even though it’s hard to think of anything less Jewish than sola scriptura—the Chrisian idea that the Bible alone has sole authority.)

Crucially, the rabbis chose to preserve the voices of those who expressed discomfort with a text that commands murder: The Talmud, for instance, imagines King Saul arguing with God over the injunction. And as early as the Mishnah, written some 2,000 years ago, the rabbis insisted that Amalek no longer exists as a distinct entity, thus obviating the commandment; later commentators note the ethical challenge this passage poses and warn against celebrating or sanctifying it.

In some cases, the tradition reworks the basic moral logic of the text. An interesting strand of interpretation blames not Amalek but the Jews themselves for Amalek’s deeds.

The Talmud, for example, states that the mother of Amalek, the progenitor of the nation that later bore his name, sought to convert to Judaism but was rejected, leading her to have a child with Esau’s son instead. Other texts similarly place responsibility on the Jews, whether for spiritual shortcomings—such as being lax in their observance of Torah and mitzvot or being ungrateful, disobedient, or not trusting of God—or for ethical shortcomings, like being unjust in their business dealings or not taking care of the vulnerable.

There is also a long and rich history of reading Amalek symbolically, such as a strand of Hasidic thought in which Amalek represents the ongoing struggle of eradicating the evil inside of ourselves.

While I’m grateful to have the richness of the rabbinic tradition to complicate the biblical text, I also mistrust my own impulse to seek relief in it. Given the calamity of the present moment, it feels insufficient to embrace a tradition that “fixes” the problem. Part of me actually feels more partial to confronting this disturbing biblical text directly—the pain of reading it matches more faithfully the pain of this moment than the satisfaction of an erudite explanation that explains it away. […] This is another way of understanding Zakhor: We remember Amalek because it hurts on every level—Amalek’s attack against the Jews, the bloodthirst against the Amalekites that followed, and the legacy of living on with this commandment.

And still, at its best, interpretation is not simply a way of explaining away difficulties; it is a project of world-building—of letting texts be changed by the world and the world by texts. Taken as a whole, the rabbinic tradition offers a model for inventive reading that breaks down the rigidity of a decisive command. Examining past rabbinic treatments of earlier texts helps to make clear our own positionality as active participants in the chain of tradition.

Returning to that lineage provides a path toward an alternative understanding of the command to destroy Amalek. Several rabbinic commentators, attempting to explain why Amalek’s actions were so reprehensible, argue that Amalek ambushed the Israelites for no reason and without warning, attacking the weakest and most vulnerable. The commentator Nechama Leibowitz picks up on this linkage of the gravity of Amalek’s sin to their disregard for the vulnerable.

She observes that the Torah describes Amalek as “lo yarei Elohim” (lacking fear of God) and notes that other biblical uses of the phrase “fear of God”—when Abraham expresses his fear that a foreign kingdom would kill him, when Joseph agrees to release his brothers after accusing them of spying, and when the midwives refuse to murder the Israelite male infants in Egypt—refer not to belief in God or fear of God’s wrath but to the subjects’ attitude toward the vulnerable.

“The criterion for ‘fear of God’ in a person’s heart is in relation to the weak and the stranger,” she writes. The sin of Amalek, then, is one that remains pervasive today—the use of force against those with less power. That is a force worth eradicating, “a war against Amalek in every generation.”

This helps explain Rashi’s comment that “God’s name and God’s throne are not complete until Amalek’s name is fully wiped out.” This work of making God’s name whole is not in God’s domain to enable: What is required is actually a human change, a reordering of our society and how we treat one another.

cross‐posted from: https://lemmygrad.ml/post/4062599

When I became anti‐Zionist in […] ’72, fifty‐one years ago, my father’s first reaction was calling me a terrorist. And so for some years we just had a shouting match. I was all the time telling my dad that [this neocolony] is not satisfied with a ’67 occupation and not with the Nakba. But that it also wants to occupy Lebanon. And he dismissed it, no way. So when in ’82, [neocolonists] invaded Lebanon, clearly with a view to occupy Lebanon, […] that was a massive shift in my father. And after that, he became my biggest supporter.

In the ’80s, he was saying that how he suffered from antisemitism as a child [under German Fascism] was nothing as the racism that [Zionist settlers] have against Palestinians.

Happy Purim to all my Hexbear comrades! Have a joyous holiday however you celebrate. In spirit, I’ve baked a special batch of hexentaschen for all of you.

The good part about history repeating itself is that you can know that the warmongerers will get themselves all killed, and the quiet, more studious part of Yisroel will get to keep chilling.

cross‐posted from: https://lemmygrad.ml/post/3888839

Quoting Steve Cushion in On Strike Against the Nazis, pages 11–2:

On 11 February 1941, about fifty WA [Weerbaarheidsafdeling, a fascist paramilitary] members marched through Amsterdam to Waterlooplein, a neighbourhood where many Jews lived, putting up signs saying ‘No Jews Allowed’ as well as vandalising the old Jewish quarter. In response, Dutch opponents of the occupation, both Jews and others, created knokploegen, self‐defence groups that became involved in violent confrontations with the WA.

In one of these fights, WA member Hendrik Koot was wounded and died a few days later. In response, the [Axis authorities] temporarily closed off the Jewish quarter. On 19 February, a massive fight broke out in the Jewish ice‐cream parlour Koko after the police tried to enter but were confronted with a knokploegen self‐defence unit from the neighbourhood, injuring several officers[.]

The [Axis authorities] used the incidents as an excuse for the first round‐ups of Jews. On 22 and 23 February 1941, 425 young Jewish men were rounded up, beaten and taken away. To resist this growing [Axis] repression the Communist Party of the Netherlands (CPN) held an open air meeting at the Noordermarkt. There, they discussed how to stop the persecution of the Jews and the institution of forced labour.

The 250 people present decided to call a strike. On Tuesday 25 February, the tram workers went on strike, while dockers and shipyard workers walked out in Amsterdam Noord and marched across the river. The strike spread to other trades and the strikers marched through the streets, calling on people to join in.^12^

Journalist Salomon de Vries wrote in his diary:

The news ran round through the city. The Amsterdam Dry‐dock Company, the shipbuilding industry, Vries Lenz, Fokker — they’re on strike everywhere! The ferryboats aren't running! The trams aren’t running!

Mientje Meijer worked in a clothing factory. Her husband was one of the organisers of the tram strike.

I kept walking to the window. Finally I saw him, and he nodded. I could feel my heart freeze. I looked into the shop and saw all those girls and the boss. I wasn’t at all accustomed to speaking before a group. I said, “Ladies, all of Amsterdam has come to a standstill because they’ve been rounding up Jews and taking them away. We’ve got to join in”. To my surprise everyone took to the streets. I thought, “now I’m going to be sacked”, but even the boss went along! We went to the Noordermarkt and the procession just kept growing. It was overwhelming.^13^

Over 300,000 workers in Amsterdam and Utrecht went on strike that day and the next in what was effectively a regional general strike. The [Axis] quickly responded with great ferocity, opening fire and throwing hand grenades, killing nine and wounding about thirty‐five other demonstrators. The mayor was forced to resign and many city workers were sacked. Many Communists were arrested, some deported to Buchenwald and a handful executed.^14^

But news of this action quickly spread to neighbouring Belgium.

(Emphasis added.)