“Our hearts are in a vice”

A message from a Jewish friend

Ngā mihi to my friend, a Jewish mum living in Aotearoa, for writing this - she asked to be anonymous for obvious reasons. I have only added definitions in italics. I’ll pass you over now, and thank you for reading and sharing.

You might be asking: How your progressive Jewish friends might be feeling right now?

OK, so, the Jewish community in New Zealand is tiny (about 5000) and you might not know anyone Jewish, but suddenly some people are saying you’re antisemitic because you don’t want kids in Gaza to be bombed and you’re like - whaaaaat no I’m not?! But also, wait, how do Jewish people feel about this? Like surely they’re also against war??!!

Well hi. Here goes.

Many of us have family connections in Israel, and many of us will know people who were affected by the Hamas attacks a few weeks ago. The Israeli government is extremely far-right, off the charts by New Zealand standards. Instead of allowing any time for grief, their immediate decision to start bombing thousands of people in Gaza has left progressive Jews worldwide feeling like our hearts are in a vice. 

We know this conflict deeply. We know that Bibi (Benjamin Netanyahu, Prime Minister of Israel) is a warmonger and we’re horrified at the assault he was already making on the vestiges of Israeli democracy and pluralism before the bombs started raining down. 

Some of us have family living in kibbutzim (a collective community/commune) just a few hours drive away from Gaza. Some of us have cousins who’ve already fought in previous wars and will be called up again for this one. 

We know that Gaza is very, very small. We know the bombs can’t be targeted at Hamas even if the IDF (Israel Defense Forces) was trying to do that, and we know they’re not trying. When Biden said that Israel has a right to defend itself, instead of saying that Israelis have a right to live in peace, we knew instantly it was going to be seen by the far-right coalition as carte blanche to completely flatten Gaza. Instantly we imagined the conversations we would be having within the Jewish community, with people who would be tying themselves up in absurd knots to try and justify killing children. 

You know how you might have an uncle who thinks co-governance is going to somehow take his water?  Well imagine that uncle is the son of someone who survived the Nazis and he thinks Hamas is going to wipe out the entirety of the country where his sister lives. And imagine it’s not just one uncle, it’s most of your community. Yeah. Those conversations. Those important, essential conversations that we need to have over and over again until we're all out of breath because every single Palestinian child needs us to have those conversations. 

Imagine people who you know are good people in almost every context are suddenly trying to find ways to explain how some bombs are terrible but other bombs are just fine. And you want to shout out “KILLING CHILDREN IS ALWAYS WRONG” but your heart is in a vice, so instead when you most feel like the words of the Shabbat service would be comforting, you stay home. And think of the people in Gaza. 

Because we live here, we know how easy peace is. How lucky are we, what could be easier? But somehow it's not easy, because people in charge say so, while babies born in Gaza at the beginning of the blockade are teenagers and have never known freedom, and it's apparently easier for the international community to turn a blind eye to the intolerable than to uphold human rights. 

We see the incredible work being done by Jewish Voice for Peace and If Not Now in the United States, and by B’Tselem and Omdim Beyachad and Rabbis for Human Rights within Israel. We draw hope from it, we draw strength to act from it. Yet we feel isolated, powerless - a small community in a small country, far far away. Maybe we read the news obsessively, or maybe we don’t read anything because the story is too familiar already. 

And we know that the only way this bombing ends is with clear international pressure - particularly from the United States. The only way there is any hope for the people of Gaza is through action by the international community. So we call for that, call for the US not to block action at the Security Council.

What are peacekeepers for if not this? 

But we also see Israel as a country born of trauma, and trapped in a cycle of devastating escalation. It’s only an accident of fate that means my children were born here and not there, and I’ve never had to run with them to a bomb shelter. So when we hear Pākehā call Israel racist - well yes, it is, but this is stolen land too, and the people who were released from concentration camps at the end of WWII (like my children’s great-grandmother) and landed in Israel might have preferred to go somewhere else but no-one else would let them in. 

For three generations, Israel has been training teenagers to fight, normalising a state of perpetual war, and getting further and further from Jewish values which are unequivocally against any of this. Three generations. The whole of living memory has been intermittent war. No-one alive in Israel or Palestine right now has ever known what it’s like to live in peace. 

And the US and the UK and the EU have blood on their hands, and they see this as a geopolitical crisis not a humanity crisis, and babies are dying, children are dying, teenagers are dying, adults are dying, and when does it end, and how does it end, and we are so so sorry, and our hearts are in a vice.