Reply to the Religious Zionist with “Tears in His Eyes”
By Michael Leshner
Dear Religious Zionist:
Your most recent email to me – in which you ask me to “take a long look in the mirror” because my truth-telling about Israeli atrocities doesn’t square with the warmongering propaganda you’ve chosen to swallow – is both perplexing and revealing.
Of course I know what prompted your message. As we’re all aware, the inmates of the concentration camp called Gaza, after years under an illegal, inhuman siege interspersed with murderous Israeli assaults (which, in previous letters to me, you actually tried to defend) finally rebelled the day before you wrote me your indignant note – attacking Israeli military positions, killing a large number of Israelis and taking many civilian hostages back to Gaza.
Although you have long taken the mass murder of Palestinians in stride, their desperate act of resistance seems to have shocked you.
And apparently you hope it will have shocked me, too.
But if I’m shocked by anything, it’s the moral blindness your letter exposes: the hypocrisy, the victim-blaming, the casual cruelty.
And because you describe yourself as a religious Jew – like me – I’m perplexed as much as I’m appalled.
I’m perplexed, first of all, because it is obvious from your email that you have never read a word of the existing scholarship on the history of Palestine under the Zionist boot. When you wrote me months ago, astonished because one of my recent articles referred to Israel’s wholesale slaughter of Gaza civilians in 2014 as a “massacre,” I was at pains to direct you to books that would have put to rest any doubts about the accuracy of my comment. You clearly haven’t even looked at those books. Yet on the strength of a typical spurt of Israeli propaganda, you feel yourself justified in condemning me.
I’m perplexed because, by your own admission, you’ve lived in Israel for fewer than ten years. All you really know of Israel’s occupation of Palestine is what its apologists tell you about it; as for Gaza, you’ve never even spoken to one of its two million imprisoned inhabitants (half of whom are children). Yet you insist that the Israeli army never targets civilians – notwithstanding mountains of evidence to the contrary – and that the belated armed resistance of the tormented Gazans represents “the epitome of all that is evil in this world.” Are you a fool or a deliberate liar?
I’m perplexed, finally, because you call yourself a religious Jew – and yet you don’t so much as mention the bloodthirsty fulminations pouring out of Israel’s Orthodox Jewish establishment at this very moment. Have you seen the video distributed last week by Hakhel, a Brooklyn-based distributor of rabbinic teaching, in which a grinning soldier in an IDF uniform proudly declares his army’s intention not only to “kill the enemy” but to “annihilate him with all force”? (If you haven’t, I have.)...
(excerpts)
...If you still can’t make out my reaction to the Palestinian resistance of October 7, allow me to articulate it even more explicitly. I have no patience for anyone who wants to use this moment to condemn the people of Gaza or to emote in favor of their oppressors. Least of all do I have any patience for Jews who take that line.
I mean Jews like you who, for years if not decades, have ignored or even celebrated every Israeli atrocity, every brutal Israeli pogrom, every Israeli crime against humanity, every Israeli massacre, who for years saw nothing wrong with imprisoning two million people, half of them children, to die slowly of toxic water, malnutrition, poverty and hopelessness – and who are now wailing with horror because the inmates of that hellish prison have finally taken a desperate revenge.
Let us not pretend that we don’t know who is responsible for this. After all, who built the prison? Who guarded it, sadistically, all these years? Who cheered every time some of the prisoners were murdered or crippled or tortured or rendered homeless by Israeli violence? Who boasted of sending money to the criminals? Or even of putting on the uniform of the terrorist militia that kept the prisoners inside? Who insisted that the U.S. pay for Israel’s weapons? Who accused anyone who told the truth about Israel’s crimes of being an anti-Semite?
Today you say you have tears in your eyes. Spare me the tears and try growing a conscience. Either you accept responsibility for the resistance you’ve provoked and begin to atone for your past sins – the first acts of which should be ending the illegal blockade and tearing down the walls of the infernal concentration camp the Israelis have made of Gaza – or shut up and take what’s coming to you. You have no right to any other reaction.
Finally, since you continue to present yourself as a religious Jew, I ask you to contemplate this familiar passage from the first chapter of Isaiah – and to read it specifically in the context of the resistance that engulfed the Israeli-Jewish oppressors on the very day after the close of Judaism’s annual judgment season:
Bring no more vain offerings; incense is an abomination to Me.
New moon and Sabbath and the calling of assemblies –
I cannot endure iniquity and solemn assembly.
Your new moon and your appointed feasts My soul hates;
they have become a burden to Me, I am weary of bearing them.
When you spread forth your hands, I hide My eyes from you;
even though you make many prayers, I no longer listen;
your hands are full of blood.
Wash yourselves, make yourselves clean; remove the evil of your doings from before My eyes; cease to do evil; learn to do good; seek justice; correct oppression.
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Thus spoke the God you claim to worship. Consider that, and ask yourself how many Jews took the opportunity of the Day of Atonement and its surrounding holidays this year to cleanse themselves of their violent sins against helpless Palestinians. Are you proud of the obvious answer?
Ask yourself how Jews who claim to believe that God sees all can profess to be shocked by the inevitable retribution for years of cruelty and callous indifference. And since so many casualties of the resistance seem to have occurred at an all-night “rave party” near the Gaza prison wall, ask yourself: What sort of Jewish society is characterized by hundreds of stoned Jewish kids boogying it up in the shadow of a concentration camp the very night after the close of the year’s Days of Awe and season of judgment? Are you proud of that too?
I am no prophet, and I can neither read God’s mind nor predict the future. But I can assess human behavior as well as the next fellow, and I can see that your childish show of indignation is really an attempt to ignore the facts that should be calling you to repentance. On October 6, the day traditionally known as Hoshanah Rabbah, you and your fellow religious Zionists were praying loudly for a good year. The events of the next day suggested what the Almighty thought of your prayers. I can assure you that I, at any rate, am the least of your worries.
But I cannot free you from responsibility for your sins. Only you (and God) can do that. And you had better do it promptly – before you accumulate even more blood on your hands.
Click for Full Text!
Poster Comment:
I left out a lot of it for brevity but read it all and the embedded links at the TBP URL!
Wow!! Religious Zionist handed his head! Wonderful! to see Jews standing up for righteousness.
Finally, since you continue to present yourself as a religious Jew, I ask you to contemplate this familiar passage from the first chapter of Isaiah – and to read it specifically in the context of the resistance that engulfed the Israeli-Jewish oppressors on the very day after the close of Judaism’s annual judgment season:
https://biblehub.com/kjv/isaiah/1.htm