Open Letter to My Friends in the Progressive Movement

An open letter written by a religious Jewish person who is involved in the progressive movement in the United States and has written to co-workers. The person requested to remain anonymous:

Saturday morning, Hamas, a terrorist organization that daily and full-throatily calls for the death of the Jewish People and the destruction of Israel, the Jewish Peoples’ ancestral homeland, attacked Israel. Hamas launched thousands of missiles and set about barbarically kidnapping, raping, torturing and massacring hundreds of civilians, among them infants, tiny children, elderly women and men whose villages were invaded and who were torn from their homes, and more than 260 attendees of a peaceful music festival-much like Burning Man-were killed in cold blood.

Scenes of horror, brutal violence and misogyny filled the media, with images of terrified women being captured violated, beaten, then paraded unclothed through the streets of Gaza – while Palestinian onlookers spit on and desecrated their prone, unconscious, brutalized bodies.

Where is the statement of solidarity? Who so far in the leadership or brother/sister/theyhood of the justice-loving progressive movement has had the temerity and love of humanity to speak up for them? Justice for all…or almost all…er…everyone except Jews, right?

The one entire group of people it seems politically okay to hate or at least quietly cheer, or perhaps openly jeer when they are hurt or brought down a few pegs. Those pesky Jews deserved it, right?

Yale students and supporters of the Palestinian cause demonstrating on other campuses, on city streets in the US celebrated, even gloated over the violence, malapropriating and utilizing the term ‘resistance’ as a misnomer standing in for terrorism, falsely attempting to normalize brutal aggression against innocents, while cleansing the word *resistance* with freshly spilled Jewish blood. Not a problem, right?

And while I’m quite sure I don’t speak for all of them, it’s correct to note that quite a significant proportion of staff in progressive organizations in North America today have Jewish ancestry or Jewish family members. its that Tzedek DNA. Some of us were born just a decade or so after the Holocaust ended. Some of us were even born into homes that experienced first-hand the kind of genocide in which entire families, villages, and generations of existense was wiped out.

A number of us have family scattered throughout Israel today. And a number more who don’t necessarily have ties to Israel, still feel pain when their People experience wanton violence committed against them.

People just like those you have seen being kidnapped or killed in the past few days.

Shocking human rights violations have been witnessed and acknowledged by the world community. Yet despite these atrocities so far we haven’t heard barely a peep from our comrades on the left. Not concern, compassion or empathy has been expressed by most progressive colleagues for our frayed nerves, for our families huddling in bomb shelters or safe rooms. Not a moment of horror or revulsion has been mouthed at the brutal misogyny and rape committed by the terrorists who don’t even represent the views or wishes of the vast majority of the People living in Gaza.

Jew or non-Jew, ambivalent Israeli or anti-Zionist, no matter your feelings about the current Israeli government, this is a moment when sordid human rights violations, grave injustice, terrorism and extreme violence against civilian targets are being committed under a false banner in the name of resistance. Terrorism is not resistance. Barbarically capturing infants and carting them off as the Romans did during the sacking of Jerusalem 2000 years ago is not resistance. Violating and killing 260 peace-loving hippies at a music festival and piling up the dead bodies to photograph them the way the Nazis did at concentration camps is not resistance.

Academics everywhere decry the uptick in anti-Semitism, the one socially acceptable form of intolerance, bigotry and ideological disgust towards a group of people that somehow still seems to be politically and socially tolerable in 2023. Indeed our sages have foretold it is the one kind of intolerance that *has always been, and always will be* accepted by the rest of the nations.

We Jews seem to be convenient, perhaps even useful, to have around in any given country as long as we don’t make too much noise about who we are. As long as we refrain from waving blue and white flags, assimilate into the dominant culture, and try to pass. Or until having a handy scapegoat is more convenient, and then we can be singled out for hatred and ultimately extermination time and again.

Whether emanating from the extreme far-right or the woke left-wing, hate is hate.

And love is love, as our progressive lawn signs and t-shirts are fond of proclaiming.

True justice doesn’t cherry pick some people out and say, Hey, it’s ok to excuse violence and hate, as long as it’s committed against THESE people.

You may feel uncomfortable that a progressive movement colleague sent this out. You may find the current state of Israel puzzling or inconvenient. Or, like Hamas, you may wish Israel and Zionism didn’t exist altogether. You may agree with Hamas that Israel should become Palestine from Jordan to the sea and all the Jews within its borders should be eradicated. You may wish to tip a glass to the ‘resistance’ while closing your eyes to the fact you have progressive Jewish colleagues with strong ties to Israel working shoulder to shoulder with you in the progressive movement. You may simply have questions, for which there may be no answers. But compassion is never wrong.

It is true we have become settlers outside of Israel and our history is intertwined with colonialism throughout the diaspora. But during a week in which we observe Indigenous Peoples day, let’s not forget that Israel is also the Jewish Peoples’ ancestral homeland — the place Jews are also indigenous to.

The history of the modern state of Israel may be complicated and fraught with injustices and violence from every side. But the land of Israel is the one place on the planet Earth where the Jewish People actually have as much right to co-exist in, as much right as any indigenous People do, having petitioned after the Holocaust for a sliver of their land back to be left alone and to try to live in peace.

Some Jews just finished three and half weeks of fasting and prayer.

Every time we open a prayer book of text that is thousands of years old, every page mentions Israel, Zion and Jerusalem; Israel being the one place where the Jewish People truly belong.

But until we get there, we are here. And we are in pain right now.

See us.

First They Came
by Pastor Martin Niemöller

First they came for the Communists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Communist

Then they came for the Socialists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Socialist

Then they came for the trade unionists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a trade unionist

Then they came for the Jews
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Jew

Then they came for me
And there was no one left
To speak out for me