Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel once told a reporter at a protest against the Vietnam War that he was there because he could not pray: “Whenever I open a prayer book, I see before me pictures of children burning with napalm.”
This week marks one year since the October 7 attacks, and one year since the mysterious loss. Yom Kippur, the most important holiday in the Jewish calendar, is coming up in days. When I open my prayer book, I see Palestinian children torn apart, being carried by their parents in pieces in plastic bags. Children in Lebanon are crushed under the rubble of their homes. Children of Israel lose hope for the return of their captive family members. I will witness the last year of indescribable misery, accompanied only by the nightmare of the ever-increasing war that is now unfolding.
In the face of these horrors, we have one clear responsibility: to understand the causes of this violence, and to do everything in our power to end the cooperation of our governments.
Every day, all year long, Israel has killed Palestinian children and families in Gaza, which is now the most dangerous place in the world to be a child, aid worker, civilian, or journalist. Israeli forces have killed nearly 42,000 people, including more than 16,500 children, and tens of thousands more are missing, injured, and starving, as noted by the World Health Organization (WHO). And every day, for a year, the US government has armed, funded, and protected this disaster. Since October, the US has allowed Israel to disrupt negotiations that would have ended the bloodshed and brought hostages from both sides home to their loved ones. Listening to President Biden talk about his desire to end the shootings and layoffs, it would be easy to forget that the American government also sent the bombs. Since October, the US has shipped more than 50,000 tons of weapons and billions of dollars to Israel.
Now, Israel is escalating the violence, engulfing the entire region in a war of violence. And each time Israel commits an unthinkable atrocity without consequence, it sets a new example—Israel blows up one hospital; and almost all the hospitals in the Gaza Strip. Israel bombs Palestinians waiting for bread; then begins the usual areas of aid distribution. Israel bombs more than 70% of homes in Gaza; and then the tents of the deportees’ camp. Israel continues unabated with what Israeli modern genocide scholar Raz Segal calls “the crime of genocide” against the Palestinians. And now more than a million Lebanese are fleeing Israeli bombs as they destroy Beirut.
I remember last year my son asked me why I was crying. And I told him it was because life is sacred, and each life taken that day—every parent, child, friend—was someone else’s whole world. I was crying because my dear friend’s aunt and uncle had been killed by Hamas in their kibbutz; the activist I go to the synagogue with first got lost and died; another friend’s cousin was caught.
I was also crying because of the fear of what was going to happen.
As the leader of Jewish Voice for Peace, an organization that works for a just peace for the Palestinian people and Israelis focused on the end of Israeli apartheid, we know that the clock did not start with the tragedy of October 7. For decades, the state of Israel has openly pursued the goal of forcing the Palestinian people into the land those, and taking that land as Israel, through oppression, dispossession and killing of many Palestinians. The state of Israel, which is supposed to be a guarantee of security for the Jewish people, does not provide true security for anyone.
Read more: Palestinian and Israeli Women Don’t Want to ‘Win.’ We want Peace
Before October, 2023 had already become the deadliest year ever for Palestinian children. Israeli soldiers and settlers were storming the Occupied West Bank burning villages, backed by the most right-wing government in Israel’s history. They forced entire Palestinian villages to flee, leaving their homes and land in their families for generations. Palestinian children were routinely dragged from their beds before dawn by Israeli soldiers and held without charge in Israeli military prisons. The Israeli government has been intensifying its illegal blockade of land, air and water for 16 years – costing the lives of 2.4 million Palestinians in Gaza. Ten-year-old children in Gaza have already been victimized by seven major bombing campaigns in their short lives. As the news broke on October 7th, we quickly understood that Israel would use the tragic deaths of its own Jewish citizens to justify the mass killing of Palestinians.
For decades the Israeli government, along with the US, and other western governments have blocked any attempt to hold the Israeli government accountable for these violations of Palestinian rights. I have seen Palestinian resistance to oppression brutally suppressed, from the criminalization of boycotts to Israeli snipers killing protesters in non-violent Palestinian marches in Gaza. The Israeli government has arrested Palestinian poets for posting poetry on Facebook, and has criminalized prominent human rights organizations.
In the US, Israel’s main supplier of military funding and weapons, every new atrocity has been met with impunity. This has been true for decades, as it was this year.
On January 29, for example, six-year-old Hind Rajab and his family tried to flee to safety. But there is no safe place in Gaza. Israel drops US-made bombs on safe havens, on routes into and out of safe havens, and on hospitals. Palestinians like Hind and his family have fled, and fled again. That day, Israeli soldiers shot and killed all six members of his family in front of him. Trapped in the car, surrounded by his dead family, Hind used his aunt’s cell phone to call the Red Crescent for rescue. He was shaking, bleeding from bullet wounds, afraid of the dark. “I’m afraid, please come.” For three hours he pleaded with the dispatcher, who was eagerly waiting for the Israeli army to give permission to send rescuers. When the call was about to end, he started to be silent, explaining that every time he opens his mouth, blood comes out. “Will you come to me?” His body was found two weeks later, along with the bodies of his family. Two paramedics arriving on an Israeli-sanctioned route were found dead, 50 yards from the wreckage of their ambulance, burned by Israeli tank fire.
The response of the Biden administration who once promised to put “human rights at the center of US foreign policy”? A request for Israel to investigate. Soon after, they sent Israel about 14 billion dollars in military funds.
Impunity breeds impunity, but it also depends on our desperation to continue. As a mother who watches Palestinian children starve and perish, my instinct is to feel completely despondent, feeling powerless to effect change. But the architects of genocide always count on millions of people to reject their role in history. I stand for the hundreds of thousands of American Jews who were raised with stories of the Nazi Holocaust, who understand that there is no sideline in times of great injustice.
The only way to challenge is not to punish not to give up on their bombs. We protest alongside millions—the Jews; Muslims, Christians and Atheists; students and staff; in small towns and big cities, all over the country. We pushed for a break with the war profiteers and called on our government to stop sending weapons to Israel. Together, we want accountability instead of impunity. We make it clear that in arming, financing, and defending Israel’s war crimes, the US government disregards the will of the people.
Read more: Palestinian and Israeli Women Don’t Want to ‘Win.’ We want Peace
When Rabbi Heschel explained his commitment to the protest he said: “We lose the right to pray if we remain silent about the atrocities committed in our name by our government.” In a free society, some are guilty, but all are responsible.” He marched with millions to force an end to the Vietnam War. The US government is guilty of sending its weapons of mass destruction to the Israeli army as it carries out what the International Court of Justice has called the genocide of the Palestinian people, while abandoning hostages, and plunging the region into a war that has cost millions of lives. you live in danger.
We, too, have a responsibility to do everything in our power to end the cooperation of our government. Others are guilty. But we have a responsibility.
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