Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza  ## Document Notes ## Highlights - Shavuot no longer fits the story we tell about ourselves. In modernity, Jews have grown more secular. Except for a religiously observant minority, we no longer describe ourselves as a people chosen by God to follow laws engraved at Sinai. We instead describe ourselves as a people fated by history to perpetually face annihilation but, miraculously, to survive. ([Location 171](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0D77H2TR5&location=171)) - “They tried to kill us, we survived, let’s eat” isn’t the story of our festivals. It’s a choice about what to see, and what not to see, in Judaism, and in ourselves. ([Location 190](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0D77H2TR5&location=190)) - It’s not surprising, then, that victim often feels like our natural role. But it’s also a costume that our community urges upon us and re-tailors for the specifications of the moment. It evokes something familiar while concealing something unnerving, something our tradition knows: that Jews can be Pharaohs too. ([Location 203](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0D77H2TR5&location=203)) - When a Jewish state denies most of its Palestinian residents citizenship and denies all of them legal equality, it is not merely offering Jews the right to determine their own lives. It is offering them dominance over another people. And under international law, there is a word for legal dominance based on ethnicity, religion, or race—a word that Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, and even Israel’s own leading human rights group, B’Tselem, say applies to Israel. It is not “self-determination.” It is “apartheid.” ([Location 348](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0D77H2TR5&location=348)) - One reason people confuse Israel as a state and Jewish supremacy as a political system is that Israel’s name itself connotes Jewish supremacy. “Israel” isn’t only the name of a country. It’s also the name of the Jewish people, and thus suggests a political system built for Jews, not for everyone living in the land. That’s certainly how most Israeli Jews see it. ([Location 386](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0D77H2TR5&location=386)) - The problem with our communal story is not that it acknowledges the crimes we have suffered. The problem is that it ignores the crimes we commit. ([Location 403](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0D77H2TR5&location=403)) - pogroms ([Location 482](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0D77H2TR5&location=482)) - To preserve Israel’s innocence, it transforms Palestinians from a subjugated people into the reincarnation of the monsters of the Jewish past, the latest manifestation of the eternal, pathological, genocidal hatred that, according to the Passover Haggadah, “in every generation rises up to destroy us.” ([Location 486](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0D77H2TR5&location=486)) - violent dispossession and violent resistance are intertwined. ([Location 508](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0D77H2TR5&location=508)) - “It was only when all else had failed, when all channels of peaceful protest had been barred to us that the decision was made to embark on violent forms of political struggle,” declared Nelson Mandela in 1964. He could no longer “continue preaching peace and non-violence at a time when the government met our peaceful demands with force.” ([Location 668](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0D77H2TR5&location=668)) - When those people live under foreign occupation, it requires convincing them there’s a better way of achieving their freedom. ([Location 834](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0D77H2TR5&location=834)) - These groups recognize that progressives are capable of bigotry, of course. But they also recognize that conservatives are far more likely to romanticize earlier periods in American history, when white straight Christian men were more comfortably in charge. That’s why Donald Trump vows to Make America Great Again. ([Location 975](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0D77H2TR5&location=975)) - Jews are never responsible for antisemitism. We are, however, responsible for fighting it wisely. And conflating Israel and Judaism does exactly the opposite. ([Location 1081](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0D77H2TR5&location=1081)) - To avoid an open debate about Israel, some of America’s most venerable Jewish institutions are abandoning the intellectual openness in which we once took pride. ([Location 1323](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0D77H2TR5&location=1323)) - Political inclusion doesn’t only foster peace within countries. It fosters peace between them. ([Location 1437](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0D77H2TR5&location=1437)) - abandoning supremacy offers a chance at liberation. ([Location 1463](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0D77H2TR5&location=1463)) - Speaking of Abraham’s descendants in the book of Genesis, God says, “All the families of the earth shall bless themselves by you.” Perhaps this is what it means for the Jewish people to bless humanity in our time. It means liberating ourselves from supremacy so, as partners with Palestinians, we can help liberate the world. ([Location 1526](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0D77H2TR5&location=1526)) ## Book Review - [[4. Archives/Book reviews/Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza|Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza - Book Review]]