Members of Matzpen demonstrate against the Israeli occupation.
This Rosh Hashana falls during an ongoing genocide, creating a profound moral crisis for Jewish people. The holiday demands a rejection of the state committing these acts in the name of Jewish safety.
“If the Israeli Zionists believe their present occupation of Arab Palestine is the fulfillment of predictions made by their Jewish prophets, then they also religiously believe that Israel must fulfill its "divine" mission to rule all other nations with a rod of irons, which only means a different form of iron-like rule, more firmly entrenched even, than that of the former European Colonial Powers.” - El Hajj Malik El Shabazz
This week, Jewish people around the world will begin observance of the holiest week on our calendar that commences with the Jewish New Year (Rosh Hashana) and continues next week with Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement. Collectively, this ten day period is also referred to as the Ten Days of Repentance (Aseret Yemei Teshuvah) as well as The Days of Awe (Yamim Noraim). Rosh Hashana itself is also known as Yom Hadin or the Day of Judgement when it is believed that G-d opens the Books of Life and Death, which are then sealed on Yom Kippur - a day that is observed by fasting/abstaining from food (and in some cases water) until sundown. And speaking of Yom Kippur, there is something to be said about us as Jewish people choosing to fast while the so-called Jewish Homeland, the zionist ethnostate of Israel, is contemporaneously forcing Palestinian people to go hungry while using starvation as a weapon of war as part of a larger genocidal and ethnic cleansing pogrom.
This raises questions about the Day of Atonement at a time when global people of conscience navigate the idea of the zionist ethnostate’s “right to exist.” And it also raises questions about the ability of the zionist ethnostate to actually atone for 76 years of sins that are profoundly antithetical to Jewish values, Jewish law, and Jewish morality. The zionist ethnostate relies on two arguments to rationalize its existence and the way it exists, that is, through apartheid, illegal occupation, and violation of myriadinternational laws associated with human rights. The first argument is a religious one, this idea that the lands that make up the modern zionist ethnostate were promised to Jewish people by G-d.
The religious argument does not serve as vindication for the existence of the zionist ethnostate, quite the opposite actually. For instance, in Exodus (the second book of the Holy Torah) Chapter 22, verses 22 through 24, G-d admonishes the people of Israel stating, “You shall not mistreat any widow or fatherless child. If you do mistreat them, and they cry out to me, I will surely hear their cry, and my wrath will burn, and I will kill you with the sword, and your wives shall become widows and your children fatherless.” Of course there are myriad ways this can be interpreted - but there can be no doubt that the zionist ethnostate has been mistreating the Palestinian people for nearly eight decades, and there can be no doubt that the Palestinian people have prayed and cried out to G-d and the whole world prior to the genocide and certainly during it. The zionist ethnostate’s genocide has indeed rendered scores of Palestinian children parentless and rendered scores of Palestinian wives into widows. This is compounded by the fact that, according to a poll conducted by the Israeli newspaper, Haaretz, 82 percent of Jewish Israelis support expelling Palestinians from Gaza and 56 percent back the expulsion of Arab citizens of Israel — up from 45 percent and 31 percent, respectively, in a similar poll in 2003. Moreover, when the same poll asked Jewish Israelis, “Do you support the idea that the IDF [Israeli army], when conquering an enemy city, should act as the Israelites did under Joshua in Jericho — by killing all of its inhabitants,” nearly 50% concurred. The results of this poll and others eradicate the argument made by many liberals that the genocidal attitude and actions of the zionist ethnostate are solely a problem of its current ultra-right wing government led by convicted war criminal Benjamin Netanyahu, when it is, in fact, a societal problem.
The book of Exodus contains additional language that would seem to refute any religious argument for the zionist ethnostate’s right to exist. Chapter 34 verses 6 through 7 state, “And he passed in front of Moses, proclaiming, “The Lord, the Lord, the compassionate and gracious God, slow to anger, abounding in love and faithfulness, maintaining love to thousands, and forgiving wickedness, rebellion and sin. Yet he does not leave the guilty unpunished; he punishes the children and their children for the sin of the parents to the third and fourth generation.” The last portion of this text should be further articulated as many agree that a generation constitutes approximately 20 years, making this year roughly the fourth generation of the zionist ethnostate’s existence at the expense of Palestinian self-determination and freedom.
While there can be plenty of arguments about whether the zionist ethnostate has lost favor with G-d, there can be no argument about the fact that it has lost favor with residents of the nation primarily responsible for its existence and its main benefactor, the United States of America. A recent piece in the Economist titled, “How Israel is Losing America” indicates that, “The share of Americans who back Israel over the Palestinians is at a 25-year low. In 2022, 42% of American adults held an unfavourable view of Israel; now 53% do.” The piece continues, “A recent YouGov/Economist poll finds that 43% of Americans believe Israel is committing genocide in Gaza. In the past three years unfavourable views of Israel among Democrats over 50 rose by 23 percentage points. Among Republicans under 50, support is evenly divided, compared with 63% for Israel in 2022.” And the zionist ethnostate is even bleeding support from the religious community as according to the Economist, “Between 2018 and 2021 the share of evangelicals under the age of 30 who backed Israelis over Palestinians plunged from 69% to 34%.” While this doesn’t necessarily prove that the zionist ethnostate has lost favor with G-d per se, it can be argued that the unfettered military and financial support given to the zionist ethnostate by the U.S., support that allows it to indiscriminately decide who gets to live, and how, who gets die, as well as how people Palestinian people can even move around in their own country is damn close to the kinds of decisions made by an almighty G-d as described in the Torah. And the people of this “G-d,” the people of the United States are precipitously turning its collective backs on the zionist ethnostate in ways that seem to communicate that they do not agree with the right of it to exist in its current form.
Finally, two of the most significant events of the Jewish people, the destruction of the First and Second holy temples, enjoin a religious argument for the right of the zionist ethnostate to exist. According to chabad.org, a website dedicated to religious Jewish teachings, the first temple was destroyed due to, “three matters [that] existed in the First Temple: idol worship, forbidden sexual relations and bloodshed,” and the Second Temple was destroyed, “due to the fact that there was baseless hatred during that period. This comes to teach you that the sin of baseless hatred is equivalent to the three severe transgressions: idol worship, forbidden sexual relations and bloodshed.” The issues of bloodshed and baseless hatred are covered in the polls of Jewish Israeli society previously mentioned. And the case for forbidden sexual relations can be made based on a United Nations report, Report of the Commission of Inquiry: Israel’s systematic use of sexual, reproductive and other forms of gender-based violence since 7 October 2023, which among other things concludes, “The frequency, prevalence and severity of sexual and gender-based crimes perpetrated across the Occupied Palestinian Territory leads the Commission to conclude that sexual and gender-based violence is increasingly used as a method of war by Israel to destabilize, dominate, oppress and destroy the Palestinian people. The Commission documented a pattern of sexual violence, including cases of rape and other forms of sexual violence, torture and other inhumane acts that amount to war crimes and crimes against humanity.” All to say that from a religious standpoint, the zionist ethnostate and its society is making the case for losing its right to exist better than anyone else could.
This brings us to the geopolitical argument for the zionist ethnostate’s right to exist. The geopolitical argument is rooted in the irrefutable fact that the Jewish people have experienced persecution and subjugation in the lands/nations they populated for centuries. In turn, a secular ideology, zionism, the idea that Jewish people are in need of their own homeland as a result of the centuries of persecution and subjugation was hatched by the likes of Theodore Herzl as a solution. This ideology which was developed in the 19th century was accentuated following the atrocities of Nazi Germany during the Holocaust, which remains one of the darkest moments in the history of the Jewish people and all human kind. But the problem with relying on the tenets of zionism to make the argument for the right of the zionist ethnostate to exist is that zionism is an ideology rooted in colonialism and white “supremacy.”
That zionism is rooted in colonialism is incontrovertible. As author Ta-Nehisi Coates adroitly demonstrated in his book, The Message, the architects of zionism themselves freely admit that their ideology necessitates colonization. For instance, Herzl viewed Palestinians living on the lands that would become the zionist ethnostate as nothing more than savages writing in his manifesto, The Jewish State, that the eventual state would be, “an outpost of civilization against barbarism.” He goes on to say, “We should form a portion of a rampart of Europe against Asia.” By naming Europe, Herzl clearly admits that he saw zionists and Jews of Europe as white people who must mimic the same praxis of colonization as European nations that built their economies off of pillaging the resources of the peripheries in Africa, the so-called New World, and throughout all of the Global South.
Compounding Herzl’s paradigm of white “supremacy” and colonization was Vladimir Jabotinsky, one of the founders of the zionist terrorist group Irgun, and author of the provocative zionist position statement, The Iron Wall. Therein he proclaims, “There can be no voluntary agreement between ourselves and the Palestine Arabs. Not now, nor in the prospective future. Except for those who were born blind, they realised long ago that it is utterly impossible to obtain the voluntary consent of the Palestine Arabs for converting "Palestine" from an Arab country into a country with a Jewish majority.” These words set up Jabotinsky’s main argument for how the zionists would need to pillage Palestine, “My readers have a general idea of the history of colonisation in other countries. I suggest that they consider all the precedents with which they are acquainted, and see whether there is one solitary instance of any colonisation being carried on with the consent of the native population. There is no such precedent.”
What is so sick about Jabotinsky’s words is that he not only sanctions the need for colonization to secure a so-called Jewish state, he also rightly forecasts that the Palestinian people would never willingly give up their lands, shut up, and die to accommodate people who suffered an atrocity that Palestinians had nothing to do with. This perhaps explains why Jabotinsky formed Irgun in the first place, which would eventually become the official Israel Occupation Force that still exists today. The idea that a state has a right to exist at the expense of denying the self determination and human rights of another is in itself disqualifying. Author Peter Beinart in his latest book, Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza: A Reckoning, vindicates this conclusion writing, “From the destruction of the Second temple to the expulsion from Spain to the Holocaust, Jews have told new stories to answer the horrors we have endured.” He continues, “We must now tell a new story to answer the horror that a Jewish country has perpetuated, with the support of many Jews around the world.”
I believe that the new stories Beinart speaks to are the idea of the zionist ethnostate’s right to exist (with impunity and above International Law), and that any criticism of the zionist ethnostate is an act of “anti semitism.” To this end, perhaps what needs to be atoned for the most is the lie that Jewish supremacy in the form of a rogue, white supremacist and genocidal zionist ethnostate is necessary for Jewish safety and security. Because as the world is showing us, the “anti semitism” card has reached its credit limit and the zionist ethnostate has become the premier pariah of the global community for its litany of transgressions.
Whether you believe in G-d and/or the tenets of International Human Rights law including, but not limited to, the Geneva Convention, it’s clear that it’s likely too late for the zionist ethnostate to atone or make any case for its right to exist. But there is still plenty of time to save Jewish faith from being further contaminated by the white “supremacy” ideology of zionism. On this Jewish New Year we Jews of conscience have a choice - will we permit these Days of Awe to allow for a new year for the zionist industrial complex to continue or will we use the new year to reclaim Jewish values that form an iron wall of interdiction for illegal occupation, apartheid, ethnic cleansing, war crimes, and genocide. It’s time for Jewish people of conscience to atone for the white “supremacy” ideology known as zionism - the most profound adulteration of Jewish values and, as such, the Jewish faith as a whole.
The only things left for us as Jews of conscience to say to the zionist ethnostate are your right to exist is rejected, just as the world rejected the right of Nazi Germany to exist in its form following atrocities and colonial expansion similar to what we are seeing from the zionist ethnostate today. In short, “not in our name,” and “not today, not during Rosh Hashanah, and damn sure, not during Yom Kippur colonizers.”
No Compromise (lele parsha)
No Retreat (in nesiga)
ללא פשרה
אין נסיגה
Anthony Karefa Rogers-Wright is an international climate and environmental liberation advocate, a racial justice practitioner, and a writer and policy expert residing in the United States with his family and their mischievous cat, “Evil” Ernie. He is a proud and active member of the Black Alliance for Peace and the Movement for Black Lives. His radio program, “Full Spectrum with Anthony Rogers-Wright,” airs on the Mighty WPFW network every Tuesday at 6:00 PM EST.
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