Never Again

Editor’s note: This article shares the widely reported claim that ‘there were people shouting “Gas the Jews” at the Opera House protest of 9 October’. Forensic evidence suggests this video was edited. 

I’ve thought more about being Jewish this past month than ever before in my life. Never have I felt more connected to my Judaism or more ashamed of the government of the country that claims to represent me.

Each day I’m confronted by the rising number of deaths of Palestinian civilians in Gaza and the relentless bombing by the Israeli military in response to Hamas’s massacre on 7 October. As I write this, some 11,000 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli forces in Gaza, almost half of those children. Israeli forces have killed over 100 United Nations aid workers and more than 40 journalists. Children in Gaza are dying at the rate of 1 every 10 minutes. Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, and those around him are using the language of genocide to call for the destruction of Gaza.

My own Jewish identity is complex. I married a non-Jew and so did my mother. But when my parents married, in the late 1960s in Omaha, Nebraska, my father agreed that my mother could raise their children in the Jewish faith.

Judaism, as my mother frequently reminds me, is a matrilineal religion. Growing up, I went to a Reform synagogue and my family had Friday night Shabbat dinners. My sister and I were raised on matzo ball soup and bagels with lox. We were raised on The Diary of Anne Frank and the searingly graphic Holocaust documentary series Memory of the Camps. It was drummed into us from a young age: the rest of the world might turn on you at any moment. You could be exterminated for being Jewish.

Each day I’m confronted by the rising number of deaths of Palestinian civilians in Gaza.

This was the takeaway of my religious education as a child: you will never be safe. And the counterpoint, the message on the handmade signs held by the prisoners liberated from Buchenwald concentration camp at the end of World War II: never again. Never again could any country try to eradicate us. Afterwards, the ratification of the UN Genocide Convention of 1948 ‘signified the international community’s commitment to “never again” after the atrocities committed during the Second World War’.

The horrific 7 October massacre of 1200 Israelis in their homes, at a music festival, in streets and kibbutzim was the apotheosis of these warnings. I felt the recoil of fear and the blind fury that followed. I understood the need to do whatever it takes to stay safe. The celebratory posts on social media from some who seemed to admire Hamas’s brutality frightened me. Those who said: How do you expect people to react to colonisation? Surely not by the taking of 240 hostages, including children. I read the open letter in Overland from Artists Against Apartheid and the sentence which began, ‘If crimes were committed during the attacks…’ in regards to the massacre. How could you question what unfolded in front of us? How could you intimate these people had it coming because of the country they lived in? (This letter has since been edited, and a retraction issued about this wording.)

In response to the Overland letter, I was invited to sign a letter from Jewish creatives, academics and allies, which expressed ‘dismay and shock’ at the lack of ‘empathy and understanding’ shown to Jews in Australia after the 7 October attacks. But by this time, Israel had begun its own attacks on Gaza and civilian deaths had already eclipsed those from 7 October. Netanyahu said that the Israeli Defence Forces would turn parts of Gaza ‘into rubble’. Major General Ghassan Alian from the IDF said, ‘Human animals must be treated as such.’ He said, ‘There will be no electricity and no water. There will be only destruction. You wanted hell, you will get hell.’

One party’s war crimes do not justify another’s. Netanyahu’s government, after propping up Hamas for years, is using Hamas’s radical terror to excuse Israel’s radical response. There is no justification—not the claim of Hamas hiding in tunnels, hospitals or schools, nor the claim that Hamas decapitated babies—which allows for the indiscriminate killing of Palestinian civilians. I know because for a day or two I tried to find it. It is a feeling like fire in your brain. You become obsessed with ways of accounting for your rage.

This was the takeaway of my religious education as a child: you will never be safe.

When I moved to Australia twenty-two years ago, I looked for the culture I had been raised in and I discovered that the Reform Judaism I knew is rare here. The majority of Jews in Australia are either Conservative, Orthodox or secular. Australia has a greater number of Jews who migrated here as a result of the Holocaust, while the majority of the Jews in the United States came after pogroms in parts of Eastern Europe and the Russian Empire in the late 1800s.

My ancestors are Ashkenazi Jews from Lithuania, who had greater distance from trauma than those who migrated immediately before, during or after the Holocaust. I’ve since begun to wonder if this is why there is not more of a cohesive Jewish Left in Australia. I don’t know the answer to this. When I had children, my mother wanted to know whether I would raise them Jewish. ‘Culturally, yes. Religiously, no,’ I replied. But when there were Jewish scripture classes available at my daughter’s public primary school, I enrolled her, thinking she might as well receive some of the religious education I got. Several weeks later, she brought home a small Israeli flag.

My grandmother was a staunch Zionist and my father worked for several years at the Arab-Israeli desk at the US State Department. Raised in a Methodist family, he was agnostic most of his life. At home, the dinner table arguments about Israel and Palestine were heated, and often ended with my grandmother in tears, particularly if she’d had a second martini. My father often took the anti-Zionist side, despite the US Government being the major backers of the Israeli military. I don’t know what he believed, except in riling my grandmother.

When I was fifteen, my grandmother took our family to Israel. We visited the Holocaust memorial at Yad Vashem. We floated in the Dead Sea and climbed Masada, where, according to legend, 960 Jews committed mass suicide to avoid dying at the hands of the Romans in 73 CE. We visited the Western Wall in Jerusalem, where you fold a prayer or wish written on a small piece of paper and tuck it between the ancient stones.

I wish I could say my prayer was for peace, but it was more likely a wish for a boyfriend or for my older sister to shut up about hers. At the end of the trip, the guide told us this was our homeland—under the Law of Return, we had rights to be citizens not only of the United States but of Israel. As a teenager, the possibility of this thrilled me. Now it upsets me. Why give a second homeland to a privileged Jewish child from the US when a Palestinian child has none?

One party’s war crimes do not justify another’s.

I never did go live in Israel, in part because I could not identify with Israel’s successive right-wing governments. Their protectionist measures. The settlers they allowed to terrorise and kill Palestinians in the West Bank (at least 183 Palestinians have been killed in the West Bank since 7 October). They did not represent the Judaism I had grown up with, the spirit of Tikkun Olam, repair the world. I withdrew my daughter from Jewish scripture and enrolled her in ethics.

Prior to the 7 October massacre, Netanyahu had been facing widespread criticism and massive protests within Israel for his hard-line judicial reforms which would give Knesset more power and kneecap the authority of the judiciary. Netanyahu has been responsible for expanding the illegal Israeli settlements on the occupied West Bank and encouraging settler violence. He’s been charged with bribery, fraud and breach of trust in Israel, and his criminal trial is ongoing.

In an effort to understand more about this conflict, I began to read Palestinian voices like lawyer and human rights activist Raja Shehadeh. I read about the Palestinian author, Adania Shibli, whose award ceremony was cancelled at the Frankfurt Book Fair. I found the Jewish Voice for Peace, the work of Antony Loewenstein, the podcasts of Ezra Klein. I listened to Israeli leaders use the history of Jewish trauma and the narrative of antisemitism to dehumanise Palestinians. The reality of the occupied territories and violence against Palestinians has been going on for a long time, as have militant Palestinian suicide bombers and Hamas and Hezbollah rockets into Israel.

I did not sign the letter from Jewish artists, academics and allies in response to the letter in Overland. I felt the more pressing responsibility to call for a ceasefire in the face of civilian deaths, which was not the imperative of that statement. It isn’t easy to see beyond our own fear borne out of past traumas. When we become consumed by this intergenerational pain—the scars of our people—we can become blind to the suffering of others.

When a friend suggested I go to a Free Palestine rally in Sydney, I told her that I was scared. There were people shouting ‘Gas the Jews’ at the Opera House protest of 9 October, and that afternoon Jewish people were told to avoid the CBD. [This widely reported claim has now been debunked by NSW Police.] She replied that they’d been denounced by the rally organisers. They were a fringe element of neo-Nazis who the media focused on.

In an effort to understand more about this conflict, I began to read Palestinian voices.

I made a sign that said Ceasefire Now on one side and Not In My Name on the other, and took public transport into the city with another friend. Several people stopped to tell me they liked my sign. As we walked over to Hyde Park, there were more and more signs, headscarves, keffiyehs and everywhere Palestinian flags and watermelons (a symbol of Palestinian resistance). It was a beautiful day, the fountain brought tiny droplets of water on the breeze, and volunteers with Sharpies offered to write peace or freedom on our arms in Arabic. Anyone who read my sign could guess that I’m Jewish, but all I received in response were nods and smiles. There was a call to prayer after we arrived and a group of women and girls in headscarves turned to face the qibla.

We were surrounded by families: a father cradled his infant close to his chest, and I couldn’t help but think of the premature babies that died that day at al-Shifa Hospital because Israel cut their power and they ran out of fuel for the generators. One woman spoke of how her family’s WhatsApp group used to be just catching up; now it was desperation. She hadn’t heard from those living in Gaza for two days, and she didn’t know whether it was a blackout or whether they were no longer alive. One of the speakers thanked the various communities that had come together to support the Palestinian cause: the other Muslim communities, First Nations allies and those from the Jewish community in attendance.

My friend put a photograph from the rally on her Instagram and received a reply from a Jewish colleague calling her antisemitic. ‘Never contact me again you uneducated leftie,’ this woman messaged. I assured my friend that critique of Israel is not antisemitic, this is a reductive argument which is used to shut down conversation and silence debate.

Right now, Israel’s military offensive in Gaza is inspiring the next generation of Hamas fighters. It is inspiring more desperation and violence. How can these two groups live side-by-side peacefully? Not by seeking to retaliate against one another in an endless cycle of horror.

And how do we confront this in our daily lives? We need to engage in a deeper, more empathetic debate. Acknowledge the trauma of others as well as our own. Recognise that two things can be true at once: we can denounce the actions of Hamas and the retaliation of the IDF. We can grieve the deaths of Israelis and Palestinians. But we also must ask the difficult questions. Is it self-defence if innocent civilians are the ones paying the price? Is it self-defence if Gaza is a territory occupied by Israeli forces?

All people deserve the right to self-determination, not just our own people. Israel’s government is relying on a narrative of trauma to inflict trauma on others, and I refuse to stand quietly by.

Never again.