Why as a Jew I Stand with Palestinian Liberation

BY MARC ROSENTHAL, THE PROGRESSIVE, DECEMBER 18, 2024

grew up post-World War II in Madison, Wisconsin, in the shadow of the Holocaust. Our rabbi was a survivor of Auschwitz. As one of my most influential teachers, he instilled in me the understanding that silence in the face of injustice is not only unacceptable, it makes you complicit.

I took very seriously his philosophy that we have no choice but to engage in the work of healing a broken world.

At fourteen years old, I joined a socialist Zionist youth movement, seeking to heal the pervasive racism and madness of war that dominated American life. At seventeen, I left for Israel, which I had always been told was “a land without a people for a people without land” that embodied the values of social justice I was raised with.

But the reality on the ground was different. The land was not empty, and the majority of its native people—the Palestinians—were dispossessed and expelled so that Jews from other lands could take their places. Palestinians who remained lived as third-class citizens within the “Jewish State.” I found it impossible to reconcile the Zionist project that I had once believed in with the universal values that I had been raised with: social justice, democracy, and equality for all.

When I returned to the United States, I was drawn to the work of international solidarity, supporting national liberation struggles throughout the world. I also started to look for progressive spaces where Jews, Arabs, and Palestinians came together. I searched for a way to support the Palestinian struggle as a Jew. This was not easy given the hegemony Zionism has had over Jewish life and institutions here in the United States.

Fortunately, today, that stranglehold has been broken. I now work with Jewish Voice for Peace, the largest Jewish anti-Zionist organization in the world. I understand that Zionism is a modern colonial ideology that arose in response to European antisemitism. It is different from Judaism, a culture and religion that is thousands of years old.

Opposing Zionism is not antisemitism. Building a truly democratic state for all—Jews, Palestinians, and Arabs—is not antisemitic. Rather, it is carried out in the spirit of the Talmudic instruction to meet “the enormity of the world’s grief” with justice, mercy, and humility.

There is a story in the Talmud where a Roman challenged Rabbi Hillel to teach him the essence of Judaism while standing on one foot. Hillel responded: “That which is hateful to you, do not do to others. The rest is commentary.”

I worked as an emergency room nurse for many years. I have worked globally with disaster response and in war zones. I’ve held children as they died—some from violence, some from lack of access to basic medicine. I’ve witnessed more death than I care to remember. But nothing prepared me for the hell being inflicted on Gaza. I am haunted by images of sudden mechanized death from the sky and tens of thousands of crushed, burned, and broken children.

For decades, I have opposed my own government’s long, bloody record of racism, violence, and war. Now I must call out the deep complicity of the United States in Israel’s genocide, ethnic cleansing, and apartheid. Every bomb dropped, every home demolished, every child crushed by rubble is paid for by billions of our taxpayer dollars. Our weapons are killing them. The teachings of Hillel call upon me to understand this as the murder of our own children, our own families, and our own communities.

As Jews, as Americans, and as human beings, we all have an obligation to demand an end to U.S. complicity in Israel’s apartheid government and its genocidal war in Gaza, and now Lebanon and beyond. We need a complete worldwide arms embargo on Israel if we are to stop this madness—beginning right here at home.

Not another bomb. The rest is just commentary. 

MAGAZINEDECEMBER2024/JANUARY2025FIRST PERSON SINGULARWAR AND PEACEJEWISH VOICE FOR PEACE