Jewish Voice for Peace embraces the Palestinian-led call for Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions
Poster by Sarah Sills
SAGIV GALAI
In September 2016, I found myself testifying before the New York City Council’s Contracts Committee. The Council was holding a public hearing on a resolution (1058A) condemning the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions movement and proclaiming “all efforts to delegitimize the State of Israel” antisemitic. As a member of the organization Jewish Voice for Peace, which is part of the international BDS movement, and an Israeli Jew living in New York City, I was there to disagree that condemning Israel’s human rights violations was antisemitic.
The session was intense. Over the course of the hearing, anti-Zionist protestors were escorted out, and plenty of Council members showed their talents by excoriating any testimony that was critical of the resolution. It was my first time in front of the NY City Council, and the subject up for discussion was the most intimate and difficult of my life. I explained to the legislators how militant Zionism had impacted every aspect of my childhood, and why I believed Israeli nationalism to be inseparable from the “othering” of Palestinians. The testimony I had worked tirelessly to craft didn’t sway the mostly liberal Council, but I was glad to join a group of activists who told them that, as Jews, we disagreed with Israel’s oppressive policies. I felt an obligation as a New Yorker to protest in a way that I thought could be constructive, confident that the story I told the Council members would change their minds.
I was wrong; the resolution passed. But, while Jewish people have a responsibility to show up for Palestine, Israelis have a responsibility that surpasses religious identity, and I thought that, as an Israeli from a settlement, I knew a bit more about Zionism and its manifestations than most of the members of the Council, especially the members of the Jewish Caucus who sponsored this misguided resolution. What follows is an abridged version of my 2016 testimony.
Today I’ll share a bit about myself with this committee. As for the biographical facts: I was born and raised in Israel. When I was young, we moved to an exclusively Jewish settlement in the West Bank. Military life and its doctrines were prevalent features in my childhood. My dad demolished Palestinian homes in the military with the engineering unit. My grandfathers fought in Israel’s wars. My mother, as a young woman, was in the Intelligence Corps. All in all, I had a very Israeli upbringing, which meant an unquestioning loyalty to Zionism.
Despite moments of grace or even bliss—the moments of sunshine that can be plucked away from the more troubling memories of our childhoods—I remember living with a deep sense of disdain for the Palestinian or Arab Other; I remember the concept of the Other being developed and instilled to shape my malleable sense of morality as a young Israeli boy. I was raised to learn and repeat a morbid aphorism, which, to this day, I believe encapsulates the dehumanizing policies used to sustain the occupation: “a good Arab is a dead Arab.”
This disturbing social cliché was proclaimed with indifference; it was an emblem of dinner conversations that turned on the topic of “politics,” the idea that the death of the Other is a logical path toward peace. It was recited again and again as a way to remind me, the child, that our state-sponsored violence was but a logical and legitimate reaction to the Other’s implacable proclivity to violence. And this fundamental us–them hatred lay at the heart of my Zionist loyalty.
As I grew up, military life enthralled me. I aspired to be an elite infantry commander and rack up as many dead bodies under my name as the next best soldier. I remember sitting with my friends, trying to compare which of our dads inflicted more pain upon the Other; which was more elite; which was part of the more violent operations; which father killed more of “them.” I was blind to the crimes and violence perpetrated in my name.
Today, I see the impact such inculcation has on those I grew up with. I see the tantalizing racism that binds the political imagination and hearts of the young and the old. I see a nation built for sustaining its powerful position, to remain on top of the Palestinian people with our studded boots pressing hard on their dignity. I wish I could point to a moment of clarity, to an abrupt apotheosis that liberated my tainted young morality, but my transition from Zionism to Humanism was a gradual one; one that, in this long process of maturation, entailed the upending of my world. And as it was upended, I gained a bit of clarity.
The irony of this transition lies in the tragedy of the liberal paradigm of equality and democracy that we are encouraged to use as a lens for seeing the world. Such a prism is blurred by the hypocrisy it depends on and sustains. Eventually, as my emotional growth was cultivated through life and education, I could no longer reconcile my politics with the blindness through which I once used to assess the occupation.
At first, I don’t even think I knew there was an occupation. It took me awhile to recognize the significance of settlements as outposts of population transfers into occupied territory (a violation of the Fourth Geneva Convention). But once I realized that, I addressed nearly all historic and current emblems of injustice inflicted by and upon humanity with a level of scrutiny I had never applied to Israel. And then, I realized that I, too, was an agent of hypocrisy. Suddenly, I saw my childhood—the racism that surrounded me: the hatred and the settlements and the checkpoints and the violent stories told by soldiers who returned from the “field”—through a new prism, one that is not solely dedicated to maintaining and justifying my own privilege.
Committee members, I ask you to reject the false claim that the activism of members of the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement—and in fact by association, the whole Palestine Solidarity Movement—is tainted by antisemitism. This vitiated argument denies the reality that Jews can, and do in the thousands, proudly and wholeheartedly oppose Israeli policies, without diminishing their love for their community and heritage. I ask you to vote against this resolution because we have the right to boycott; because we have the right and moral duty to fight for Palestinian human rights and self-determination; and because opposing Israel and its policies is not antisemitic, regardless of how much right-wing and powerful Zionist groups may want us to believe the opposite.
Today, we need a politics that stretches our modern political imagination, surpasses Zionism, and galvanizes those of us whom Zionism claims to speak for to move beyond the nationalist, colonial, and racist ideology that justifies occupation and apartheid. This necessitates courage to concern ourselves with the dignity of those we were separated from, those we were taught to hate. In the words of the Jewish thinker Hannah Arendt, herself an ardent critic of ethno-nationalist forms of Zionism in the twentieth century: “Courage liberates men [sic] from their worry about life for the freedom of the world. Courage is indispensable because, in politics, not life but the world is at stake.”
Arendt wrote these words as a Jew, a Holocaust survivor, and a refugee. In no way antisemitic, she was a political theorist who studied political violence with unprecedented rigor, teaching us that racism is often inextricable from colonialism, nationalism, dehumanization, and the making of stateless people. She urged people to find the courage to dignify the plight of the dispossessed with whom we share this world. Palestinians are a part of this world. Palestine exists. It is not an eradicated memory. I urge you, in your work as representatives and politicians, to have the courage to follow Arendt’s example and vote against this resolution.