"To My Fellow Jews, As They Invert Reality Each Time an Israeli Is Released from Gaza" by Michael Lesher

 

Click here for Exit the Cuckoo's Nest's posting standards and aims.

Source: OffGuardian

To My Fellow Jews, As They Invert Reality Each Time an Israeli Is Released from Gaza

Michael Lesher

Dear fellow religiously-observant Jews, I have a request to make of all of you.

Please, please – in the name of minimal decency – spare me another round of weepy propaganda over the release of some Israeli captives formerly held by inmates of the concentration camp you helped to create in Gaza.

I cannot bear your misplaced sentimentality over the freed Israelis – many of whom actually wore their IDF uniforms as they left behind the ruins of what used to be Khan Younis – any more than I can tolerate your hypocrisy about the Israeli genocide you have applauded for over a year.

And before you launch into a self-righteous tirade about “terrorism” and sputter “Hamas” into my face, let me assure you that I am not asking you to conduct yourselves like conscientious human beings. After watching your behavior over the last 15 months, I know that this would be too much to expect of all but a handful of “religious” Jews.

No, I am only asking you to begin to call things by their right names. Can you at least do that much – before making another sanctimonious speech? Before posting another self-pitying comment on Facebook about “our hostages”?

Because here’s the thing: Israeli soldiers captured during a military operation – one launched, please remember, by the victims of Israel’s brutal, decades-long occupation and the criminal blockade that has crippled Gaza since 2007 – are not “hostages.” They are captured soldiers who (in my view) are lucky not to have been put on trial for complicity in crimes against humanity.

Do you want to talk about real hostages? Then consider the thousands of Palestinian civilians (including scores of children) rounded up in the Occupied Territories and held under appalling conditions in various Israeli dungeons for their use as “bargaining chips” in negotiation with Gaza’s leadership.

Those are hostages, though never described as such in Israeli or Western media – or by you.

You’re guilty of the same sort of name-reversal every time you use the word “terrorist.” Inmates of the Gaza concentration camp who try to defend themselves against attack are not “terrorists” – not even when their desperate methods include the use of deadly force against their tormentors.

Meanwhile, real terrorists aren’t hard to find. Israeli Jews who don the uniform of a vicious apartheid militia that has confined, tortured and massacred Palestinians for decades – especially in Gaza – fully deserve that name. If anyone still questioned this before October 7, 2023, the IDF’s savagery against Gaza’s civilians since then has surely removed all doubt. Yet you never apply the word “terrorist” where it clearly belongs.

And what about the right name for the systematic destruction of Gaza?

Well, the correct word is not “war.” A war involves battles, clashes between opposed armed forces, the capture or loss of military targets. What Israel is doing to Gaza is not a “war.” It is a genocide. In little more than a year, Israeli bombs and artillery have laid waste entire cities and destroyed (according to U.N. estimates) close to two-thirds of the Strip’s civilian infrastructure, not to mention wiping out at least nearly 50,000 human beings, including more than 14,000 children. Any description of the slaughter that fails to mention such basic facts is not merely wrong; it is a sinister lie.

You, my Orthodox coreligionists, have indulged in a particularly hypocritical exercise in misnaming.

Lately you’ve been agog over a claim that newly-released Israeli soldier Agam Berger insisted on kosher food throughout her captivity. Frankly, I don’t know whether this is true (why believe a story backed only by a hearsay account from another IDF functionary?) – but I do know that the spectacle of “religious” Jews exulting over a ritual detail, while ignoring the decision of the Jew in question  to join a brutal terrorist militia in the first place, shows that you have no idea what your religion is. (Have you reread Isaiah 1:13-17 lately? Or Amos 5:21-24? Both passages are part of our liturgy, and both denounce the elevation of ritual over ethics.) As if to underscore your collective hypocrisy, Berger’s own public statement after her release from Gaza was a paean to the army that has massacred tens of thousands of Gaza’s inhabitants and is poised to resume the slaughter once Israel’s neo-Nazi government gives the signal.

You call that an example of “faith”? Call it what it is: either self-delusion or bloodthirsty fanaticism, or (perhaps) a bit of both.

And please, please do not tell me that you want “peace.” In your mouths, that word is yet another inversion of reality. Where was your interest in “peace” when Israel massacred thousands of Gaza’s civilians during its periodic “operations”: Cast Lead in 2008-2009; Pillar of Defense in 2012; Protective Edge in 2014? Or when Israel mowed down unarmed demonstrators during the Great March of Return less than six years ago, specifically targeting children, journalists and disabled protestors for assassination?

Why didn’t you complain when Israel’s army killed Israeli civilians between October 7 and 9, 2023, or when it went on to annihilate dozens of Israeli captives inside Gaza in the course of its vicious bombardment of the entire Strip in the months that followed?

Why do you condemn Hamas for holding Israeli prisoners, but never object to the torture of thousands of Palestinian detainees who haven’t been charged with a crime – not even a “crime” under Israel’s apartheid occupation law?

In short, when you speak of “peace,” what you mean is the perpetuation of Israel’s brutal apartheid regime unopposed by any Palestinian resistance. The proper name for that isn’t “peace”; it is “a crime against humanity.”

“But what harm does it do to celebrate the return of Israeli captives to their families?” someone may ask me. Plenty, in my opinion – if that “celebration” deflects attention from the basic facts of Israel’s genocidal campaign, confusing fact with fantasy and converting oppressors into victims.

As I write, “Jewish” gangsters are taking advantage of the pause in the Gaza genocide to run riot in the West Bank, and Israel’s criminal prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, is broadly hinting that the mass murder in Gaza is about to intensify.

This is not the time to be whining in hypocritical self-pity, or squealing like delighted toddlers as a bloodstained international fugitive (Netanyahu) and a predatory, half-deranged convicted felon (Trump) dangle yet another lie in front of you: the bloody ruins of Gaza as a real estate bonanza for anyone willing to drive out its survivors and obliterate whatever is left of the Genocide Convention.

No – this is the time to start calling things what they really are.

If you won’t do even that – and soon – please don’t be shocked when other people begin to call you by the names your conduct has earned. I’m sure you won’t like those names – but why should anyone care, when you’ve already proved that using the right names for things means nothing to you?

Michael Lesher is an author, poet and lawyer whose legal work is mostly dedicated to issues connected with domestic abuse and child sexual abuse. His latest nonfiction book is Sexual Abuse, Shonda and Concealment in Orthodox Jewish Communities (McFarland & Co., 2014); his first collection of poetry, Surfaces, was published by The High Window in 2019. A memoir of his discovery of Orthodox Judaism as an adult – Turning Back: The Personal Journey of a “Born-Again” Jew – was published in September 2020 by Lincoln Square Books.