Palestine Tet – 41 – Time for Civil Disobedience; If Not Now, When?

My sisters, Laurie center, Sarabelle to the right, at my Bar Mitzvah celebration, November 1957 at the Jamaica Jewish Center, just off Parsons’ Blvd and Hillside Ave, Jamaica, Queens, New York City.

By tomorrow noon, I will either be taking a long walk around Jim Baker Reservoir in S. Adams County, Colorado looking for wildlife to photograph, or in jail for having participated in a civil disobedience action planned and organized by the Front Range (Colorado) chapter of Jewish Voice for Peace.

I suspect it will be the latter rather than the former but with such actions no one ever knows. That said, I am mostly calm, relaxed and completely committed to the planned civil disobedience.

It would be a gross exaggeration to say I know Front Range Jewish Voice for Peace well. I don’t. But what I have seen over the past weeks since October 7 has left an indelible impression on me.

I grew up in a religious Jewish family in New York City. While I long ago lost all religious feeling and have been a secular Marxist for all my adult life, the values of Judaism are a part of my being and will be till I die. As a Jew, I am the descendant of people who survived displacement, ethnic cleansing, persecution and genocide. Racism, genocide is indefensible, whether it is Nazis killing Jews, Poles and Soviets or Zionists bombing Gaza hospitals and assassinating – murdering mostly Palestinian women and children from the air with U.S. made weaponry.

I refuse to stand by, to be silent while Zionism, in the name of Judaism, commits the kinds of crimes against humanity against the Palestinian people that it has been doing throughout its existence. The brief pause in the Israeli bombing campaign – with U.S. weapons, financing and other support – is over.A period of extreme violence lies ahead. I expect the human Palestinian toll in Gaza to be even worse now that the bombing has started up again than it was before the “pause” – which wasn’t much of a pause.

While the pretext for Israeli aerial savagery is to eliminate Hamas, that will not happen. No, the targeting of Palestinian civilians is to so terrorize the population so as to force them to flee, like after the Deir Yassin Massacre of 1948, this time from their homes in Northern Gaza to Southern Gaza. Israel will then annex Northern Gaza as it did to the Golan Heights, the West Bank and the Sinai in 1967. Except my own take is that this satanic goal will not succeed this time.

Jewish youth in Front Range, Colorado have mobilized for an immediate ceasefire, for cutting U.S. aid to Israel, for an end to the cruel Israel blockade of Gaza and of course an end to Tel Aviv’s savage bombing campaign that is not about eliminating Hamas but of forcing more than a million Palestinians who live in Gaza further south to expropriate that land for Israel.

Few times in my life have I felt more of a kinship, a sense of solidarity as I do at present with these wonderful young people and so I will join them. I’m not surprised, and am deeply moved by the fact that so many of them are teachers. And I can tell even from the little I have seen of them, what wonderful teachers they are!

All I ever wanted to do with my life is teach; nothing else every tempted me. What an honorable profession! And in the end, that’s all I’ve ever been, a teacher, not a “professor”, or “a senior lecturer”, simply a teacher! What higher goal can there be in life? If there is, I don’t know.

By the way, I had little to nothing to do with the planning of this and other events they have been a part of these past weeks; in fact try as I might, even with my new titanium knee, I can hardly keep up with them But I will continue to try. Two “elder statemen” – Arnie Carter and Mike Wilzoch – are joining in with me to stand with our young Jewish friends. They both have lifetimes of experience working for racial justice, labor rights, peace – for anything and everything that is just and humane and fair. Glad that we take this part of our journey together!

What Israel is trying to do to Palestinians in Gaza is yet again an ethnic cleansing, a genocide. It has been aptly described as “Nakba 2” and that is exactly what it is. I will be with these young Colorado anti-Zionist Jews, now and forever more. All I will say at this point that the action has been carefully planned with an option not to execute should the conditions not be right, a decisions to be made by the organizers of which I am not one.

I have “a Jewish hero”; his name is Janusz Korczak, one of ten Jews considered truly holy; Korczak was a Polish Jewish teacher, the one non-rabbi, rather secular type among Jewish holy folk. While I am not sure he can be considered an anti-Zionist, he was not at all impressed with Zionism when he visited Palestine in the 1930s. He was a teacher too, one who never abandoned his students. And I will never abandon mine. His biography, the King of Children, by Betty Jean Lifton, is worth reading; it reminds those who need reminding what a life worthy of living is actually like.

For an immediate long-lasting ceasefire!

End U.S. Aid To Israel!

Say No To The Jewish National Fund!