Gaza and the Jewish People
Challenged to Look
Gaza. The name will come to join those of places that forever carry foreboding. Auschwitz, Babyn Yar, Hiroshima, Jonestown, Andersonville, Katyn Forest, Wounded Knee. A testament to barbarism.
That the particular barbarism in Gaza is being funded and armed and applauded by Americans, and that it is carried out by Jews, instills in it a special, baneful prestige. In this era in which both the US and Israel are succumbing to fascism, it will, I feel sure, come to represent an unheeded warning. Looking away from atrocity had become the norm even before the Israeli onslaught. Odd, given that we seem unable to stop looking in general these days: staring at our screens, playing games on them, doom scrolling, “reacting” by emoji in lieu of responding. But to look at atrocity and merely see, to look and appreciate and yet not to think, not to speak, above all not to act—that is to loll in the fascist embrace. Destruction of peoples is fascism’s highest form of gratifying the senses. Look or don’t look, but enjoy the show, fascism says. The obliteration of the people of Gaza, which is obviously the final aim of the American-supported Israeli plan, may be remembered one day as the blow that ended a world where collectivity, shared consciousness, and coordinated action were possible. The pre-fascist world, I mean.
I won’t dwell on the numbers, although they’re astonishing. The dead: sixty-thousand, a six followed by four zeroes, or perhaps it’s a seven and four zeroes by the time you read this, or even more.. The injured, the exiled, the irrevocably traumatized: beyond counting. You may look the numbers up if you wish, but be mindful that numbers offer distance. Another way of not looking. The horror of the annihilation of Gaza is better transmitted by poets—Mosab Abu Toha, notably, and Hibu Abu Nada and Refaat Alareer, both killed by Israeli airstrikes, and others. The images tend to take the form of cleaned-up photos published by the western corporate media, but some heartbreaking ones are published by Al Jazeera and the Turkish Anadolu Ajansi, and on social media by people living under threat of extinction in Gaza. Challenging us to look, and moreover, daring us to think.
America in the grip of the Trump-Musk regime is indescribable in full. I won’t try. But I will confess to my complete bafflement, and horror, that the barbarism is carried out by Jews. Bombing cities, targeting schools and hospitals for destruction, causing children to starve, shooting mothers and grandmothers, torturing men. Jews are doing this. My own people.
Is there a people that knows more intimately than Jews the pains of punishment, the yearnings of exile, the grief of loss, on and on and on? In Jewish stories, Saul Bellow wrote, “laughter and trembling are so curiously mingled that it is not easy to determine the relation of the two.” Yes: life is a joke, and the joke is on me. On us Jews.
Yet, when I speak now to fellow Jews of the plight of Gazans, it is not fear and trembling with which they respond. It is clear that they do not look. Or, in the deepest way, think. They tell me that this time they can’t care. And these are friends. They are educated. They are people whom I know to be (small-L) liberal, open minded, generous of heart, and thoughtful in both senses of the word. Yet they can’t think this time. The rationalization, always, is that they must stand with Israel.
Daring to Think
How is it that we Jews may exempt other Jews from moral scrutiny? Aren’t we the people so aware of the awful and transcendent forces of the Universe, of a God so powerful that some refer to him only as Ha-Shem, “The Name,” so awed that we scrutinize every verb uttered and every morsel of food eaten? How can we—in the name of an entity so artificial and petty as a State—overlook the most execrable moral outrages?
To look (and we must look) at the destruction of a people and not cry out, not even think—this a sign that something crooked has wormed its way into Jewishness, some kind of creature for whom laughter and trembling are not enough. A thought devourer.
I find myself wondering what my late father would have made of this worm-eaten, thoughtless Jewishness. He was descended, on his father’s side, from a family in Adrianople (now Edirne, Türkiye), of which the mystic Shlomo Alkabetz was part, and on his mother’s from the family that included the scholar and sage Aaron of Trani (Aaron ben Moshe mi Trani). Yet, he himself despised organized religion, or was allergic to it. I never understood this aversion, but it was consistent. As far as I know, he entered a synagogue only for my bar mitzvah and those of his nephews, his grandsons, and the sons of a few close friends. And then (unbeknownst to him, obviously) for his own funeral.
Still, Jewishness was essential to my father, existential and experiential. Jewishness was a matter of character. You take the side of the downtrodden. You root for the underdog. You never plead for special exemption from the Universe. He served in the US Army in the Second World War, a bombardier, flying missions over Nazi Germany. He was the least violent of men, yet he was proud of that fight. One protects the oppressed.
My father was on the faculty at Columbia University in the spring of 1968. I, in my teens, took an avid interest in the student protests; he was put out by the protesters’ disruption of classes, even though he agreed with their aims. An echt Jewish academic, no hair too thin to be split. But he reserved his fury for the university’s president, Grayson Kirk, because Kirk invited the cops onto campus. That anger, I now see, was a different manifestation of Jewish character: an inborn antipathy to police. The cops are not a Jew’s friends. They’re always after the powerless—and if it isn’t you this time, don’t celebrate. Your turn is coming.
The crooked worm turns Jews away from this kind of Jewish essentiality. It saps the lifeblood and injects in its place an animating fear, a fear of the future which disguises itself as a fear of history. And becomes the rationale for perpetrating, or supporting the perpetration of, horror.
Fear isn’t new. God’s wrath was always worth fearing. As were the Amalekites, the Cossacks, the inquisitors, the NKVD. One must be skeptical of history, though, because it so frequently dips and swerves, fast and without warning. History is written by its victors—and the victors, we’re reminded in every Jewish retelling, are not us.
Jews were the people who lived outside of history: naming the babies after ancient prophets; reciting the same millennia-old prehistory year after year, cyclically, unerringly; performing the tripartite bow, Baruch-Ata-Adonai, being/becoming/both-at-once, the momentary immersion in the nowness of the past, the breath-defying inhalation of the full charge of an irrecoverable moment, bringing dialectics to a standstill long before Walter Benjamin coined the phrase.
Now, Jews fear history. And the holocaust perpetrated on Gaza by the history fearers is funded by the Americans who fear the future. But I promised not to try to make sense of America.
Jews, the people outside of history, no longer embrace our own Rabbi Nachman’s treasured admonition to not make ourselves fearful as we cross the narrow bridge of this world. Worse, we are adopting the fear-instilled history. And we’re not adopting it to justify a communal practice like mercy or repentance, but to endorse a mere political entity (i.e., Israel), even when it moves beyond ordinary politics into genocide. The fear of history feeds the thought-devouring worm: the crystallization of the past into a single story. People and organizations, like the ADL (the erstwhile Anti-Defamation League), and countries, like Germany, that support Israel’s demolition of Gaza tell this story: Hitler’s attempt to destroy European Jewry was both universal and foreordained. It was an inevitable resultant of Jew hatred in Germany, abetted by inactions on the part of people who didn’t hate Jews but didn’t care enough to save them, yes, but mandated by history. Jews must therefore live in fear not merely of Jew hatred but of history itself, which means, of the world. Thus, Israel and its supporters may rationalize any abomination as self-defense.
Homelands
As for the State of Israel, must there be a Jewish homeland in the Bible lands? I have no idea what a homeland is, I confess. In August 2023, I had a chance to tour Canyon de Chelly, in the Navajo Nation, with a guide whose family had lived and farmed inside the canyon for many generations. His sense of self and the family’s sense of family were inseparable, I saw, from the experience—both sensory and suprasensory—of the land and weather and the spirit world encompassed thereby. And, therefore, inseparable from the Diné language by which these things, however ineffable, could be signaled. But our guide had lived in or near the canyon for his fifty-some years, with memories of relatives implanted in the peach trees and corn and inscribed in the rock paintings on the canyon walls. The people I grew up around, in New York, were born to immigrants from Skopje, Monastir, Odesa, Vilno, Berdichev, Kishinev, or, for the gentiles, Puglia, Calabria, Molise, Galway, or Cork —and none had a desire to go back. Homeland is the place you leave so as to be better off elsewhere. So as to make a home elsewhere.
My puzzlement over “homeland” is amplified by suspicion: the term tends to be invoked when some form of fascism is on its way. The Fatherland, the Motherland, the Heartland. Homeland Security. But this suspicion of “homeland” is, perhaps, idiosyncratic. I accept the word of scholars of the ancient texts that a Jew is supposed to desire, to yearn for, a return to Zion. And I know that many of them will aver that this return need not wait for the Messiah; it may, or should, happen now.
As if to prove this, we now have the Trump-Musk fascism reinventing Homeland: America, Great Again. I do not, as I say, claim to understand everything that is happening to America now, but this I get: The new American Homeland is an abandonment of the past adherence to shared values that has always been America’s trademark. The Trump-Musk crowd, as the historian Suzanne Schneider points out, wants a nation in the European sense, based on common heritage. Not the American nation held together, as it has been, by shared allegiance to a set of ideas (speech, assembly, charity, voluntarism, overthrowing tyrants). They want a nation whose glue is principle-free: a singular set of traits and predispositions: whiteness, brutality, male superiority, unlimited acquisition. Other nations led by men with similar habits of mind—Russia, Israel, perhaps Hungary—will therefore be our friends; everyone who speaks or thinks of humankind, of clemency toward anyone not already a member of a “nation,” and of ideals that transcend pure acquisitiveness—they are our enemies. Thus, the US may abduct and hold incommunicado Mahmoud Khalil, Badan Khan Suri, and Rumeysa Ozturk, who spoke on behalf of the suffering, and who don’t carry American passports. The regime has made clear that holding a proper visa will offer no protection to its opponents. The rapid slide into authoritarianism makes clear, if it wasn’t already, that US support for Israel’s destruction of Gaza and genocide of Palestinians is a dress rehearsal, no less than Hitler’s support for Franco’s forces in the Spanish Civil War was a dress rehearsal for the conquest of Poland and the Nazis’ push into the Soviet Union. We should be having the most dire presentiments of what will likely come to pass.
It seems all but inevitable that this ethos, with its suppression of thought, eradication of dissidence, and control of the culture, will advance the Trump-Musk totalizing mission. That advance will make use of the “anti-semitism” trope as one of its weapons. To declare anti-semitism to be the basis of an attack on academic institutions, notably Columbia University, located in the city most prominently Jewish in the eyes of actual anti-semites, is a clue. So is the canceling of talks that treat Palestinians as human beings, common humanity being that internationalist idea for which anti-semites have harassed Jews at least since Dreyfuss. And the closing of art exhibits that display works featuring the suffering in Gaza or just Palestinian life in general, a new form of what the Nazis’ called entartete Kunst, “degenerate art.” That battling anti-semitism is the justification for wielding these traditional weapons of anti-semites, tools for sterilizing society and “purifying” a nation of its undesired elements, are, here and now, being used against anti-semitism—this is the vilest of ironies. And it is a transparent testament to the current regime’s unbridled devotion to protecting Israel. Not Jews; only Israel. Our agent and ally in the Middle East is Israel, a state that is ever friendlier to fascism in the form of nationalism, celebratory militarism, and ruthless elimination of dissent. Israel will now provide the rationale for totalizing the suppressive and punitive tendencies of the Trump-Musk regime here.
Owning the Holocaust
Every one of my friends and acquaintances who “stands with Israel” despite its eliminationist assault on Gazans sooner or later (usually sooner) invokes the Holocaust as the core reason for this affinity with Jewish statehood. The Holocaust, in this telling, is the evidence of an irresistible force in history. Only a Jewish state, they say, can give Jews safety from this force. That nearly eighty years of Israeli statehood has not made Jews safe (especially not the ones in that very state) does not subdue their ardor for this argument. I suppose it can’t, since their rationale is based purely on the counterfactual.
The disturbing thing about this claim isn’t that it pleads for Jewish safety (after all, everyone wants to be safe). The disturbing thing is that it poses the Holocaust not as a horrifying phenomenon that exemplified how modern technological States can unleash radical evil, but as a synecdoche. The Holocaust was real, ergo an inextinguishable, immemorial, anti-Jewish genocidal current is real. The Holocaust slaughtered Jews; history slaughters Jews. This particularist narrative involving Jews belongs to Jews. History was the Shoah; the calamity. To give it a name in Hebrew, not incidentally, is to endorse the particularity: the calamity was for Jews. That the totalitarianism of Hitler was also a calamity for Russians, Ukrainians, Poles, Roma and Sinti, and a great many other peoples, as well as a terrible tragedy for Germans, gives them no claim. The Holocaust is ours.
Gershom Scholem coined the phrase “plastic hours” to describe a time “when it is possible to act. If you move then, something happens.” The term is worth contemplating as we undergo a world-historical collapse of the American republic. Yet, I disagree with Scholem in one way: in a sense, all moments are inherently plastic. Only rarely does the charge of potential energy turn into actual change. Therefore we must do more than look at the past: we must seek a world in which the potential is realized. There, too, Jewishness comes in. To Jews, Benjamin wrote, every instant is “the small gateway in time through which the Messiah might enter.” Fear and trembling: the Jew must anticipate, yet remain uncertain.
Therefore it is immensely sad, and deeply dangerous, that so many Jews prefer to suspend thought, to side with those who claim to be certain. To protect the status quo, even the status quo ante of the post-WWII era, the single pregnant moment after Naziism fell and the need for a place of refuge for the evicted Jews of Europe made it seem like a good idea to have a Jewish state. It is sad because to read history in such a way is to misuse the past; it is dangerous because it deals a knockout blow to the possibility of renewal.
The plethora of American Jews who are joining the despicable Republicans in invoking antisemitism as a ploy—a tool to suppress protest on college campuses, a rationale for continuing the genocide of Palestinians, a reason to invoke emergency powers and break into homes of dissidents—this is a tragedy. Jews who are part of Betar or Canary Mission or Documenting Hatred on Campus, who identify Palestinian-freedom protesters, including Mahmoud Khalil, and send information about them to Homeland Security for abduction and possible deportation—this is a crime against the essence of our people. And, more amply, against the fundamentals of being human.
As if it weren’t bad enough that over two thousand young people have been arrested for peacefully protesting investment in the Israeli state that is heinously killing Gazans and destroying their homes; that Khalil and Khan Suri and Ozturk have been abducted and nearly disappeared, that other campus protestors have been deported or have had to flee the country, that in 2024 police in riot gear invaded encampments of college students (in the case of Ohio State, accompanied by rooftop snipers); that the campus security force at UCLA stood by for hours as pro-Israel “protestors” attacked a student encampment with sticks, fists, pepper spray, bear spray, and (according to Rep. Ilhan Omar) rats, before the campus cops moved to disperse the actual protestors, the ones opposed to Israel’s actions; that this is happening after the incomprehensible murders of protesting students by national guardsmen on the campus of Kent State University and by police on the campus of Jackson State College in 1970, now we have what journalist/historian Rick Perlstein refers to as the “allegedly noble ‘bipartisan’ convergence,” wherein supposedly liberal Democratic officials join Republicans in decrying protest. Witness, for instance, my local NY State Senator, the Democrat Jeffrey Dinowitz, who says that Khalil ought to be deported but, really, he should have due process first. And, of course, my US Senator, also Minority Leader, Chuck Schumer, who, after taking pains to note that he “abhors” what Khalil stands for and implying that Khalil is antisemitic, says not that he should be released but only that “the Trump administration’s DHS must articulate any criminal charges or facts that would justify his detention or the initiation of deportation proceedings against him.” The quality of courage is not strained.
Now, at the behest of the nobles of this convergence, college presidents are forced to resign—an interim tactic of the neo fascist assault on higher education—because they are said to have failed to protect (whom?) against antisemitism. It is as if challenges to the status quo are part of the putative historical current of eliminationist antisemitism, and Jews must suppress them. Here, too, we see that support of Israel’s atrocity in Gaza is a dress rehearsal for totalitarianism here in the US.
The fearworm that effects such a transformation, aligning Jews with the fascists, turns Jewishness into something new. It’s okay to cause suffering, even to kill en masse, if the victims can be said to question “Israel’s right to exist.” The phrase is a shibboleth of our times, meaningless in itself but crucial to defining who may be attacked.
In other words, a fear of history is replacing the love of memory as the fundamental Jewish approach to the past—and therefore the future, in which new approaches to the past will appear. The past, Benjamin writes in The Arcades Project, will “become the dialectical reversal—the flash of awakened consciousness.” But if the future is to thus awaken us from the dreaming of the past, if there is to be the renewal of the world that Jewishness has long insisted on, then memory must guide. For one, the memory of oppression (“we were slaves in the Narrow Place”). And the memory of moral development. We recognize that what is called for is a true memory of moral action. Memory of our own plight (we were children in our parents’ control) spurs us to retain our anticipatory uncertainty. We must remain unsure of what is right. We live, Philip Roth writes, “with a God who does not ever stop, not once, to think and reason and use His head with His loving children”—but sure of whom to help.
The ones who have wiped out so much of Gaza and killed so many Gazans, who have bombed hospitals and assassinated journalists, they think they know what God wants. They’ve left Jewishness behind (although they continue to call themselves Jews). They’ve given up on the fear and trembling. They’ve adopted certainty. Of course the fascists love them.
Renewal
Yet, I have hope. Because as more and more nation-states turn rightward (including our own), revealing the natural affinity of any state for authoritarianism, more and more of the world’s oppressed find commonalities in their suffering. Black Americans, sexual minorities, indigenous peoples in many parts of the world, the colonized, the victims of corporate water theft and wage theft, women, the poor, and those Jews whose memories have not been distorted by the factitious historicization of the Holocaust and the idolization of the state of Israel—they are speaking in harmony, if not often in unison. It is what the campus protests were for, and why, I’m sure, they are being so viciously suppressed by the powers that be. In Jewish Currents, Arielle Angel wrote, “what Exodus reminds us is that the dehumanization that is required to oppress and occupy another people always dehumanizes the oppressor in turn.” And from this moment—the oppressors abased, the oppressed joining hands—radiates a hope, however slight, for renewal. Hope, but do not forget the terrible cost.
Philip G. Alcabes wrote on Susan Sontag for Arrowsmith Journal Volume VI in 2020. He is the author of a book on epidemics and culture, Dread: How Fear and Fantasy Have Fueled Epidemics, and essays that have appeared in The American Scholar, The Chronicle Review, LARB, Wrath-Bearing Tree, and other publications. Alcabes lives in the Bronx, New York.