General Discussion

To our beloved Jewish communities:

How are we to find safety?

At this pivotal moment in human history, we come face-to-face with the question our people have confronted for thousands of years.

We have suffered scapegoating, persecution, inquisition, banishment, ghettoization, pogroms — and a shoah. In recent years, we have seen neo-Nazis march through the streets of Charlottesville chanting “Jews will not replace us” and a white nationalist open fire on a synagogue in Pittsburgh one Shabbat morning...

Of course we are afraid. We carry thousands of years of historical trauma in our bones.

But how are we to find safety?

No more empty promises.

In response to that question, political and communal leaders from Europe and the US — some Jewish, most not — have made an empty promise: Jewish safety at the expense of Palestinian safety and freedom. By depicting the Israeli government and military as the representative of all Jews, and Palestinians and those who stand up for their human rights as the great threat facing us, western leaders have evaded accountability for their own antisemitic violence, and exploited our trauma for their own benefit.

For decades, they have used “Jewish safety” as a pretext for land theft, home demolitions, military checkpoints, annexations, trade sieges, night raids, bombing campaigns, and other means of forcibly dominating the Palestinian people — all enabled by endless funding from the US. Palestinians have not known a day of safety or freedom in decades as Israeli bombs massacre elders, parents and children in their homes, blockades starve people, and walls and checkpoints tear families apart.

These actions would be wrong even if they did achieve Jewish safety, but in fact they have not: none of this protected Israelis from the devastating horrors of the Hamas-led attack on October 7, 2023. Nor will safety emerge from the Netanyahu government’s campaign of death and destruction in Gaza, which human rights organizations, international legal experts, and preeminent Jewish Israeli Holocaust scholars consider a genocide — and which has left for dead the remaining Israeli hostages held in Hamas captivity.

Meanwhile, here in the US, leaders have made their own empty promises of safety through repression. According to them, the main danger to US Jews is the movement for Palestinian human rights, which they have tried to crush by smearing advocates as antisemitic — despite the strong Jewish presence among them — passing laws against non-violent boycotts, firing professors, endorsing definitions of antisemitism that prohibit criticism of Israel, and more.

None of this has made us safe...