As a descendant of a Holocaust victim, I stand with Palestine

This was a post that I wanted to write for a while now, but I finally feel safe and in a good place to speak my mind. Once upon a time I was pro-Israel. I was propagandised and it stuck with me even after leaving the religion at 10 years old. Even then, I was always pro-free speech even if I didn’t agree with it and I was always against war. The younger me would have been horrified by what the Pro-Israel movement has become and would have quickly defected to the Pro-Palestine side. 

I was always under the impression that my family were completely safe and we were lucky to have all gotten out just in time before WWII. It wasn’t until my mid-20s that I found out that this was not true and I indeed had an ancestor who died in the Holocaust. His name was Avraham Klopman and he was from Plonsk. My great grandmother made it to the US in the early 1910s, but she had three sisters who were stuck in Eastern Europe because of the Eastern European/Mediterranean quota introduced in the 1920s. They also died in the Holocaust. A couple of her brothers managed to escape to the US, but they had to go by way of South Africa, since that was the only country that would take them in as refugees. I’ve done some further research and there might have been a cousin of hers (I’m guessing based on him being a Klopman from the same town as my family) that escaped via Russia and Japan. I’m sure my uncle the family tree expert will correct me if I’m wrong.

My great grandmother never spoke of her family dying in the Holocaust for two reasons: she was severely sick and in those days, you just didn’t talk about trauma. When my grandfather Sol was about to be sent to Japan in WWII, he got a telegram (I think?) at the 11th hour telling him that his mother was about to die and he needs to come home now. Problem is he was in Seattle and home was NYC. She lived, but remained sick for the rest of her life and she suffered a stroke. All my dad’s memories of her is seeing her in a wheelchair staring and not saying much. The approach back then was very much “turn it off like a light switch” as they sang in the brilliant musical Book of Mormon.

It’s a big reason I think that race relations discussions benefit us all. A lot of people don’t know about this history. A lot of people forget that long before the Native Americans had their cultures stolen from them, Europeans had their indigenous religions and traditions stolen from them.

Funny story, but both sides of my grandpa’s family have some connection to David Ben-Gurion. My great grandmother knew him back when he was David Grün, as they were from the same town (Plonsk) and my grandpa’s uncle Meyer played him in the movie Exodus in exchange for a $1 million donation to the Weizmann Institute, the university he was president of (funnily enough, he didn’t really like Ben-Gurion). Not long ago I was on a podcast called The Lipstick Pickup and Emily talked about her family story about how they broke the cycle of prejudice. You can watch both episodes below. The first one focuses on my book and the second one focuses on 60s sitar music and we kinda go through my Indian influences in Classic Rock blog post.

She said something incredibly wise: the only thing you inherit from your ancestors is your appearance. Nothing else. You are your own person. You are not responsible for the actions of those who had come before you. It is disempowering, and in fact authoritarian, to say that you are your ancestors and you have to be like them. Yes, my Orthodox Jewish ancestors would be shocked at me being bisexual and obsessed with rock music and falling down research rabbit holes about “demonic” things like classic rock and true crime instead of reading Jewish scripture. And you know what, that’s okay. I’m not them. I’m me. I’m my own person. I have free will. I have a brain so I can think for myself. I have legs so I can walk away from what doesn’t make me happy. I hope my great grandfather who was off the derech would be proud. I kinda think of him as that first domino to fall in family members leaving the religion. While at yeshiva in Belarus, he got into a fight a classmate who was the son of a really important rabbi and slapped him in the face. That incident obliterated his chances of being a rabbi. He was asked by a Christian if he believed in Jesus, and he wittily replied back, “I have doubts in the father, how could I possibly believe in the son?”

After 7 October I felt tremendous guilt for ever being pro-Israel. I wanted to atone. I hated myself. As noble as some of those intentions are, most importantly it decentres the victims, and it also silences some incredibly valuable voices. It’s easy to shut down a gentile who is pro-Palestine, but it’s much harder to shut down a Jewish person or ex-Jew who is pro-Palestine. That’s how Jeremy Corbyn was ousted, a whole smear campaign. Really shows that liberals prefer fascism over socialism. Zionists spend a lot of money on buying politicians. That’s just true.

The easiest thing to do would be to stick to the status quo and be quiet and support Israel, but studying history I know how wrong that is. What’s right isn’t always popular and what’s popular isn’t always right.

What helped me heal was finding other Jewish voices against apartheid like Katie Halper, Norman Finkelstein, Keaton Weiss and Russell Dobular of Due Dissidence, Gabor Maté, and Adam Friedland. The latter’s story was one that resonated with me. Adam Friedland said the pivotal moment that made him support Palestine was spending time in Israel and seeing Arabs being discriminated against.

The same thing happened to me but I didn’t spend an extended period of time there, thank goodness! Much like America, there are lovely people there, but there is so much propaganda and prejudice. I think some people don’t realise it and they take it for granted.

After getting kicked off the birthright trip for having a mental breakdown, I spent time with some leftist and left leaning family members who countered narratives from the birthright trip. One story that stuck out was a distant cousin who had refused to serve in the IDF in the late 70s and was jailed for it. There’s a huge cost to this: you’ll lose friends, family, and opportunities. For a while there, that’s why I would give some benefit of the doubt when people served in the IDF. At every job interview you are asked about your military service and when you’re living in a society that is pro-occupation, there’s going to be a bias against refuseniks. There’s a great interview here with a trans woman named Yona Roseman who is refusing to serve in the IDF:

The real moment where it hit how racist Israeli society is was when I got to the airport and went through security. Just ahead of me were two American hijabis. Every square centimetre of their bag was searched. The security guys must have been searching their bags for 15 minutes. My mouth was agape the entire time. I was appalled at how they were being singled out and discriminated against. They found nothing. They get to me and they waved me through, even missing a full water bottle in my backpack. While I’m not fully Jewish, I blended in since I looked Russian. My brother on the other hand looks Egyptian or Moroccan and said he was questioned more than the other Jewish travellers (doesn’t help that he had less of a Jewish upbringing than I did).

I couldn’t get that moment out of my head and it completely shattered any belief I had in Israel as it is. I still believe Jews should have the right to make aliyah, but I think Palestinians should have the same right too. Realistically, you’re not going to kick out every Jewish person from the region and I believe that if you’re born and raised in a place that’s where you’re from. Simply put, I want equality, peace, and secularism. That is all. I have no problems with a state being culturally Jewish, but Judaism should play no role in government. I don’t like it when Christianity or Islam plays a role in government, and the same applies to Judaism and every other religion. It was also during that trip that I learnt that my parents wouldn’t have been allowed to get married there since my mother is a gentile. My marriage would have been allowed because I’m classified as a gentile on a technicality from 2000+ year old texts that pre-dated the discovery of DNA. As well, you cannot have a secular wedding. Some may victim blame me for my parents falling in love and causing me to not belong anywhere, but I think the problem is society not accepting those who come from mixed marriages. 

In the UK there have been many attacks on free speech and it really ramped up this year with the online safety bill and the proscribing of Palestine Action (if you say you support Palestine Action you will be arrested because it supposedly “supports terrorism”. Information about the genocide in Palestine is being censored thanks to this law and it’s hurting activism.

I’m finding parallels between this legislation and my current project. Moral panics, censorship, and it’s all about controlling the population. Just like the prosecutions of Mae West and Lenny Bruce weren’t about “protecting children” or the “corruption of youth”, the censorship of the internet isn’t about keeping children safe, it’s all about mind control and taking away freedom. It’s why authoritarian governments are compared frequently to cults.

Is being against genocide terrorism? I don’t know about you guys, but I know for a fact that there are cults out there in the UK and there’s rampant abuse of children, women, and LGBT people in these cults. LGBT “conversion therapy” (which really is just torture) is still legal in the UK. That’s real terrorism. What about class warfare? The fact that there are vast numbers of homeless and poor people when there are people who have so much. That’s real terrorism! The NHS is at risk of privatisation. Denying healthcare to people because they can’t afford it (or putting them in debt because of it) is real terrorism.

I know I’ll get called an antisemite by some people, but that is just ridiculous. You know my family history. You know what I believe. I am against Hamas and I think that groups like Kneecap were wrong to say “Up Hamas” and “Up Hezbollah” and stupid acts like this set back the pro-Palestine movement. Anyone who supports Hamas is not an ally of mine and is not anyone that I would stand with.

Why do Zionists spend more energy calling out people critical of Palestine when there’s literal neo-Nazis in the US government? Why do a lot of Jewish Zionists side with the very people who are probably calling them antisemitic slurs behind their backs? The only reason these right wingers support Israel is because there’s one thing they hate more than Jews, and that’s Muslims. Calling everything antisemitic only makes people take real instances of antisemitism less seriously, which ends up hurting Jewish people even more. I don’t like identity politics and I especially hate it when people use identity in bad faith as a cudgel. Stop equating Jews and Israel, and that goes for all sides of the political spectrum.

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