“I still believe words are powerful” - a speech from a Jewish activist in Aberdeen

When I was asked to contribute today, I struggled to figure out what to say. What can I say that hasn’t already been said? What can I possibly say that would make a blind bit of difference?

Last night I sat down and wrote and wrote but none of it seemed right. The words piled up like the bodies of the dead. And none of it seemed right.

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I am a Jew.

For Jews, words matter. Words are sacred. In the beginning there was the word. Words are the one thing that can never be taken away.

When they carry the Torah through the synagogue, people go to the aisle. They touch the Torah cover, then kiss their fingers – not because the object itself is holy, but because of the words inside.

I still believe words are powerful.

So we keep speaking. We keep shining a light into the darkness. And even if we can’t stop the missiles and the bullets and the bulldozers and the disease, we can send our words across the world, like kites, like doves carrying olive branches, to say to the Palestinians, “you are not alone. We see you. We stand with you. We remember you.”

In his Nobel lecture in 1986, the author and holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel said, “There may be times when we are powerless to prevent injustice, but there must never be a time when we fail to protest. […] None of us is in a position to eliminate war, but it is our obligation to denounce it and expose it in all its hideousness. War leaves no victors, only victims.”

It’s hard to think about what’s happening in Gaza as a war. War is a conflict between two armed powers, not the efforts of a heavily armed state to wipe out an entire population. That’s called genocide. And Jews should know better.

My great-grandparents fled the pogroms in eastern Europe in the 19th century. My family weren’t super religious, but we kept Kosher and went to synagogue, and my grandparents’ speech was peppered with Yiddish phrases. But more importantly, they brought me up to understand what it means to be a Jew.

My grandparents taught me that Jews are respectful and kind. We help those in need, and share what we have. We value learning and compassion and justice. We cooperate and play fair – not just with other Jews, but with everyone.

In the springtime story of Passover, we reminded ourselves that we will never keep slaves, because our people had been enslaved. We will never be the oppressor, because our people had been oppressed.

If they were still alive, my grandparents would be horrified at Israel’s actions since October. Jews are supposed to be doctors, not destroy hospitals. Jews are supposed to be teachers, not destroy schools and universities and libraries. Jews are supposed to be generous, not steal land and force thousands of people from their homes.

Whatever happened to Thou Shalt Not Kill?

Maybe we shouldn’t be surprised that it’s come to this.

As a child, I went to an orthodox Jewish school for four years, then weekend Hebrew school for a while.

Israel was literally the promised land. After the horrors of the Holocaust, after centuries of pogroms and discrimination, there was finally a place where Jews would be safe.

The stories we learned about the State of Israel followed the miraculous contours of familiar fables. Israel was a barren wasteland, we were taught. Empty, uninhabited. A land without people for a people without land. Nothing was there before 1948. But with hard work and ingenuity, the Jews made the desert bloom. They transformed a land that nobody wanted into a new Garden of Eden, the envy of the world!

It’s a version of the story told by every settler-colonial culture, from North America to Australia. The land was empty – or at least not being exploited to its full capitalist potential. White settlers come along to ‘improve’ the land and make it ‘productive.’

The twist in Israel’s story came in the second act, when the jealous Palestinians tried to steal away everything the Jews worked so hard to build. Nobody ever talked about where the Palestinians came from. They were the enemy. Their origin story didn’t matter. Nobody ever talked about the villages and olive groves that were destroyed, the hundreds of thousands of people displaced from this supposedly ‘empty’ land.  

When an entire people is written out of your history, their lives don’t matter. Their deaths don’t matter. They don’t really exist. And for the past 70 years, Israel has done its best to make that story a reality.  

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Last week, the International Court of Justice released their interim ruling, saying that Israel should “take immediate and effective measures to ensure the provision of urgently needed basic services and humanitarian assistance.”  

It’s the kind of thing you’d say after a natural disaster, an earthquake or a fire or a flood.

It’s insane to think about “ensuring humanitarian assistance” for a man-made disaster, especially from the same state that caused the disaster to begin with.

The ICJ also ordered Israel to “take all measures within its power to avoid [genocide]” – as if genocide is not the point of the whole exercise.

Words matter. We need to call things by their real names. Cutting off food and water and electricity is not ‘putting pressure on Hamas’ – it’s mass murder by disease and starvation. Bombing civilians is not ‘launching an offensive’ – it’s mass murder. Destroying hospitals is not ‘rooting out Hamas fighters’ – it’s mass murder. And when mass murder is concentrated on a single group of people, it’s called genocide.

And those of us around the world with our humanity intact will keep calling it genocide, and keep speaking out, and keep reminding the Palestinian people that they are not alone.