Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel once told a reporter at a protest against the Vietnam War that he was there because he couldn’t pray: “Whenever I open the prayer book, I see before me images of children burning from napalm.”
This week marks one year since the October 7 attacks, and a year of unfathomable loss since. Yom Kippur, the most important holiday in the Jewish calendar, will arrive in days. When I open my prayer book, I will see Palestinian children torn apart, carried home by their parents in pieces in plastic bags. Lebanese children crushed beneath the rubble of their homes. Israeli children losing hope in the return of their family members who are hostages. I will see the past year of unspeakable grief, matched only by the nightmare of ever-escalating war now unfolding.
In the face of these horrors, we have one clear obligation: to understand the causes of this violence, and to act with everything we have to end the complicity of our own governments.
Every day, for an entire year, Israel has massacred Palestinian children and families in Gaza, where it is now the most dangerous place on earth to be a child, aid worker, civilian, or journalist. The Israeli military has killed almost 42,000 people including more than 16,500 children, with tens of thousands more missing, injured, and starving, as noted by the World Health Organization (WHO). And every day, for a year, the U.S. government has armed, funded, and defended this catastrophe. Since October, the U.S. has allowed Israel to derail negotiations that would have ended the bloodshed and brought the hostages on both sides home to their loved ones. Listening to President Biden talk about his desire for a ceasefire and deescalation, it would be easy to forget that the American government has also sent the bombs. Since October, the U.S. has sent more than 50,000 tons of weaponry and billions of dollars to Israel.
Now, Israel is escalating the violence, engulfing the entire region in a war of aggression. And each time Israel commits an unthinkable atrocity without consequence, it sets a new precedent—Israel bombs a single hospital; then nearly every single hospital in the Gaza Strip. Israel bombs Palestinians waiting for bread; then begins routinely striking aid distribution sites. Israel bombs more than 70% of homes in Gaza; then the tents of displaced persons’ camps. Israel continues unabated with what Israeli scholar of modern genocide Raz Segal calls a “textbook case of genocide” against Palestinians. And now more than a million Lebanese people are fleeing Israeli bombs as they decimate Beirut.
I remember a year ago my son asked me why I was crying. And I told him it was because life is sacred, and each life taken that day—every parent, child, friend—was someone else’s entire world. I was crying because my dear friend’s aunt and uncle had been killed by Hamas on their kibbutz; an activist I go to synagogue with was first missing, then dead; a cousin of another friend was taken hostage.
I was also crying because I was terrified of what was about to happen.
As a leader of Jewish Voice for Peace, an organization working toward a just peace for Palestinians and Israelis rooted in an end to Israeli apartheid, we know that the clock did not start with the tragedy of October 7. For decades, the Israeli state has openly pursued the goal of forcing Palestinians from their land, and annexing that land as Israel, through the oppression, dispossession, and mass killing of Palestinians. The Israeli state, supposedly a guarantee of safety for Jewish people, provides no true safety for anyone.
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Before October, 2023 was already the deadliest year ever for Palestinian children. Israeli soldiers and settlers were rampaging through the Occupied West Bank setting fire to villages, supported by the most far-right government in Israeli history. They forced entire Palestinian villages to flee, to abandon the homes and land in their family for generations. Palestinian children were regularly dragged from their beds in pre-dawn raids by Israeli soldiers and held without charge in Israeli military prisons. The Israeli government was tightening its 16 year illegal blockade of land, air and water – suffocating the lives of the 2.4 million Palestinians in Gaza. Ten-year-olds in Gaza had already been traumatized by seven major bombing campaigns in their short lives. As news broke on October 7th, we immediately understood that Israel would exploit the tragic deaths of its Jewish citizens to justify the mass slaughter of Palestinians.
For decades, the Israeli government, and the U.S., and other western governments have shut down any attempts to hold the Israeli government accountable for these violations of Palestinian rights. I have seen Palestinian resistance to oppression ruthlessly repressed, from the criminalization of boycotts to Israeli snipers murdering protestors at nonviolent Palestinian marches in Gaza. The Israeli government has jailed Palestinian poets for posting poems to Facebook, and criminalized prominent human rights organizations.
In the U.S., Israel’s largest supplier of military funding and weapons, every new atrocity has been met with impunity. This has been true for decades, as it was this year.
On January 29th, for instance, six-year-old Hind Rajab and her family tried to flee to safety. But there is no safe place in Gaza. Israel drops U.S.-made bombs on safe zones, on the routes in and out of safe zones, and on hospitals. Palestinians like Hind and her family have fled, and fled again. That day, Israeli troops shot and killed all six of her family members in front of her. Trapped in a car, surrounded by her dead family, Hind used her aunt’s cell phone to call the Red Crescent and beg to be rescued. She was shaking, bleeding out from her bullet wounds, scared of the dark. “I’m so scared, please come.” For three hours she pleaded with the dispatcher, who was waiting desperately on Israeli forces to give approval to send rescuers. Toward the end of the call she began to quiet, explaining that everytime she opened her mouth, blood was falling out. “You’ll come for me?” Her body was found two weeks later, alongside the bodies of her family. The two paramedics who came on the Israeli approved route for her were dead, 50 yards away in the ruins of their ambulance, burned out from apparent Israeli tank fire.
The response of the Biden administration that once promised to put “human rights at the center of U.S. foreign policy”? A request for Israel to investigate itself. Shortly after, they sent Israel about $14 billion more in military funding.
Impunity breeds impunity, but it also relies on our despair to continue. As a mother watching Palestinian children starved and obliterated, my instinct is to feel utterly despondent, to feel powerless to make change. But the architects of genocide always rely on millions of people to refuse their role in history. I represent hundreds of thousands of Jewish Americans who were raised on stories of the Nazi Holocaust, who understand there are no sidelines in moments of grave injustice.
The only way to challenge impunity is to be more relentless than their bombs. We protest alongside millions—Jews; Muslims, Christians and atheists; students and workers; in small towns and big cities, across the country. We have pushed for divestment from war profiteers and called on our government to stop sending weapons to Israel. Together, we are demanding accountability in place of impunity. We are making clear that in arming, funding, and defending Israel’s war crimes, the U.S. government defies the will of the people.
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When Rabbi Heschel explained his commitment to protest he said: “We forfeit the right to pray if we are silent about the cruelties committed in our name by our government. In a free society, some are guilty, but all are responsible.” He marched alongside the millions who forced an end to the Vietnam War. The U.S. government is guilty of sending the Israeli military its murder weapons as it carries out what the International Court of Justice has called a plausible genocide of the Palestinian people, while also abandoning the hostages, and catapulting the region into a war that puts millions of lives in danger.
We, in turn, are responsible for doing absolutely everything in our power to end the complicity of our government. Some are guilty. But we are responsible.
