[ Anti-war Jewish Americans are urging U.S. leaders to call for a
ceasefire. A progressive wing of American Judaism has gained
prominence, one defined by mass mobilization against the Israeli
governments unrelenting bombing in Gaza.]
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HOW ANTI-ZIONIST AMERICAN JEWS ARE ORGANIZING FOR A CEASEFIRE IN GAZA
 
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Sophie Hurwitz
December 8, 2023
Teen Vogue
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_ Anti-war Jewish Americans are urging U.S. leaders to call for a
ceasefire. A progressive wing of American Judaism has gained
prominence, one defined by mass mobilization against the Israeli
government's unrelenting bombing in Gaza. _

Activists from Jewish Voice for Peace and IfNotNow occupy the
pedestal of the Statue of Liberty on November 6, 2023 in New York
City., Photo credit: Agence France-Presse (AFP) // Arab News

 

Over the past two months, a progressive wing of American Judaism has
gained prominence, one defined by mass mobilization against the
Israeli government's unrelenting bombing in Gaza. That
intergenerational community – nearly always youth-led, but with
those old enough to be Holocaust survivors regularly involved – has
faced police pepper spray at the DNC, sat on hunger-strike with
Palestinian organizers outside the White House, interrupted
politicians at dinner, and shut down transit centers across the
country.

In November, more than 400 New Yorkers, most of them Jewish, covertly
entered the Statue of Liberty to hold a sit-in on the pedestal of that
monument calling for a ceasefire. Dressed as tourists, they boarded
boats to the statue in small, disconnected groups among the thousands
who visit the statue each day. Once they convened, they hung
“CEASEFIRE NOW” banners from the statue’s pedestal and chanted
for just under an hour before leaving the island on a tourist ferry.

The sit-in at the Statue of Liberty was one in a series of disruptive
actions held by groups of American Jews for a ceasefire in Gaza. On
Friday, October 27th, as dusk fell over Grand Central Station,
commuters were unable to make their way through the midtown Manhattan
hub — not because of usual rush hour traffic, but because
of several hundred protesters
[[link removed]] led
by the progressive anti-Zionist American Jewish group
[[link removed]] Jewish
Voice for Peace, staging a sit-in in the main terminal. More chanted
outside, blocked from the entryways by police. Activists clambered up
the departures board to drop banners, and stood there until the police
used a boom lift to arrest them and lower them down.
 

As the American government continues to send messages of support, and
funding, to Israel’s siege on Gaza, young people across the country
[[link removed]] have
mobilized to call for an end to the violence; in particular,
Palestinian-American led groups such as the Palestinian Youth
Movement [[link removed]] have organized
teach-ins, cultural events, and mass protests drawing thousands week
after week across the country. Recent Gallup Poll numbers show
that 67% of Americans under 35
[[link removed]] oppose
Israel’s actions in Gaza, while progressive think tank Data for
Progress
[[link removed]] has
released polling that states 61% of Americans overall support a
permanent ceasefire.

 

Protest in Los Angeles
Meanwhile, within the Jewish American community, the political divide
is to some degree generational: in a Jewish Electorate Institute poll
in November, 83% of those over 36 supported Biden’s handling of the
war, while only 53% of American Jews under 36 agreed. That makes
anti-war Jewish Americans an outlier group in the Jewish community,
while their religion also makes them a minority part of the broader
American left. They have taken on two roles: as headline-grabbing
stagers of civil-disobedience and co-crafters of what a
pro-Palestinian Judaism can look like.

They urged U.S. leaders to call for an end to the Israeli military’s
ongoing assault on the people of the Gaza Strip, which has killed
over 15,000 Palestinians since Oct. 7th,
[[link removed]] an
estimated 5,000 of whom were children, according to the United Nations
Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs and the Gaza
Health Ministry. CNN calculations from November
[[link removed]] suggested
a child is killed in Gaza every 10 minutes, based on Gaza Health
Ministry figures.

On October 7th, Hamas militants from the Gaza Strip attacked Israel
[[link removed]],
killing at least 1,200 Israelis and foreign nationals
[[link removed]] and
abducting about 240 into Gaza. Over 100
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those hostages have since been released in a prisoner exchange, along
with hundreds of Palestinians held in Israeli jails. That doesn’t
mean the taking of prisoners has ceased: Israeli NGO
HaMoked estimates
[[link removed]] that
7,000 Palestinians are currently in Israeli prisons, nearly 2,900 of
whom are held without charge. Since Israel declared war on Hamas, its
nonstop bombing campaign of the Gaza Strip, a 140-square-mile piece
of land
[[link removed]],
ceased for a week then began again in December.

Israeli airstrikes have destroyed nearly all of Gaza’s internet
infrastructure, and the Israeli government announced it would cut off
water, fuel, food, and electricity supplies, the _New York Times_
[[link removed]] reported.
There are currently no fully open border crossings, leaving
Palestinians in Gaza with practically nowhere to run from the bombs,
though a few who are severely injured or hold foreign passports have
been able to evacuate to Egyp
[[link removed]]t.

In the U.S., meanwhile, both Islamophobic and antisemitic harassment
have increased since October 7th, as has outright violence:
A Palestinian child was killed in what was ruled a hate crime on
October 14th
[[link removed]] in
Chicago in a stabbing attack, and a Jewish man attending a pro-Israel
rally died from blunt-force head trauma
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an altercation with a counterprotestor (authorities are investigating
whether his death was a hate crime, ABC News reports). Pro-Palestinian
student groups at Columbia University and George Washington University
have been suspended and prohibited from operating as clubs on their
campuses. Over Thanksgiving, 3 Palestinian college students were shot
in Vermont while speaking Arabic and wearing keffiyehs.

A congressional committee hearing on the issue of combatting
antisemitism on campuses occurred December 5th, with the presidents of
University of Pennsylvania, Harvard, and other institutions attending.
It’s in this context that these young people choose to organize
against the war — and they say their Judaism led them to that
choice.

“Come to the capital on October 18”

About a week before protesters descended on Grand Central, five
thousand progressive Jewish people and allies arrived in Washington,
D.C. from all corners — buses out of New York, on flights in from
Los Angeles and Toronto, Priuses jam-packed from Jersey. Four days
earlier, a group of organizers with progressive Jewish groups Jewish
Voice for Peace and IfNotNow put out a call on Instagram: Come to the
capital on October 18 and show that they stand against what the U.N.
has warned could be a mass ethnic cleansing of Palestinian people.
[[link removed]]

Sumaya Awad, a Palestinian organizer with Adalah Justice Project,
spoke in D.C. on the 18th. “It was especially critical to see
thousands of American Jews come up and say, Israel is not acting in
our name,” Awad told _Teen Vogue_.

What ended up being the biggest Jewish-led mobilization for Palestine
in American history
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together in about 72 hours. A reported
[[link removed]] 5,000
to 10,000 people trickled into D.C. between Monday and Wednesday,
crashing on the couches and floors of friends and acquaintances.
Spreadsheets were hastily shared in Signal group chats and filled up
with the names of people staying behind, signing up to take care of
other people’s pets while they were away.

On Wednesday, October 18, about 300 people were arrested in the U.S.
House of Representatives Cannon Office Building,
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they occupied for several hours with one clear demand: that the U.S.
government work towards a ceasefire in Gaza. That demand has not
changed in the intervening weeks – though, as President Biden is in
support of the current “humanitarian pause” plan, the call for
“ceasefire now” has shifted to include the word “permanent.”

The U.S. helps fund the Israeli military
[[link removed]] with 3.8
billion dollars
[[link removed]] in
military aid per year. Many young Americans – as they did during
the Vietnam
[[link removed]] and Iraq
wars
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are demanding accountability from their government for their
country’s role in the violence.

Jay Saper, 32, an organizer with Jewish Voice for Peace, barely slept
in the 10 days between the Hamas attack and the D.C. action. In the
weeks since October 7, Saper has put their entire life “on hold.”
Seeing most Jewish cultural institutions standing behind Israeli
military action, Saper wanted to highlight another Jewish viewpoint,
one many young people share. So, Saper said, they needed to “pierce
through that narrative.”

“We cannot stand idly by as President Biden pledges more monetary
support to the State of Israel,” Saper said. With their
co-organizers, they feel a specifically Jewish impulse to dissent.
“We have to make so clear, as Jews, that we do not believe our
safety can ever come at the expense of another community.”

Not every Jewish group labeling itself progressive has stood behind
the call for a ceasefire: notably, J Street, a liberal Jewish lobby
group that supports a two-state solution as well as Israel’s
“right to defend itself…within the bounds of international law,”
has in this case called on its members to support a temporary
“humanitarian pause”
[[link removed]] rather
than a complete ceasefire. J Street is also asking the White House and
Congress to pressure Israel to “acknowledge that post-conflict
arrangements will ultimately result in the creation of an independent
Palestinian state.” While some goals are shared across the groups,
the difference in positions among J Street, JVP, and IfNotNow
illustrate splits in the progressive and liberal Jewish communities.
A coalition of former J Street staffers
[[link removed]] called
on the org to bring their position more in line with that of the other
two groups.

Jewish Voice for Peace has for years explicitly described itself as
anti-Zionist. On their website, they state that “While it had many
strains historically, the Zionism that took hold and stands today is a
settler-colonial movement, establishing an apartheid state where Jews
have more rights than others.” While IfNotNow states that its goal
is to “end American support for Israel’s apartheid system,” they
do not position themselves as explicitly anti-Zionist. The two groups
have found some common ground for years in criticism of Israeli policy
– now more so than ever.

Per recent polling, the call for a ceasefire is not a fringe position.
An earlier November poll from Reuters and Ipsos
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that 68% of Americans backed a ceasefire, including ¾ of Democrats
and half of Republicans. Saper wanted to represent that American
majority, as well as the sizeable portion of American Jews who say the
U.S. should not veto a U.N. ceasefire resolution – 45% of those
under age 36
[[link removed]],
according to another recent poll.

Inside the Hill

Saper helped organize a protest outside Sen. Chuck Schumer’s (D)
house the night of October 7th. Schumer, a stalwart Jewish-American
ally to Israel, has spoken at pro-Israel rallies, pushed for an
expanded aid package
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Israel, and has not supported any kind of ceasefire. A week after
their initial protest, Saper co-organized another protest outside
Schumer’s Park Slope home, while Schumer was en route to Israel to
meet with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. It was then that they
knew they needed to change strategies. They texted everyone in their
networks to come to DC on the 18th.

In order to enter the Cannon Building in such numbers, Saper said, the
group dressed up in “lobbyist drag”: Business-casual cosplay.
Then, all at once, they removed their dressed-up outer layer to reveal
black t-shirts that read “NOT IN OUR NAMES.” That was one of the
organizers’ goals: to disrupt what they see as a prevailing
American narrative
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for decades, has cast support for the state of Israel as the one
monolithic Jewish-American opinion–and statehood as the one possible
path towards Jewish safety in a post-Holocaust world.

The Jewish protesters and allies echoed a primary demand
of Palestinian civil society groups
[[link removed]]: that nations which fund
Israel’s military call for an immediate ceasefire and demand that
Israel comply with international law, so that those in Gaza have a
chance to bury their dead, evacuate their wounded, and dig people out
from under the rubble, where thousands are still estimated to be
trapped. In Gaza, conditions are bleak: people are rationing water
[[link removed].], houses
of worship
[[link removed]] and U.N.
schools
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been bombed by the IDF, most hospitals are shut down, and the Rafah
border crossing, where thousands hope to flee into Egypt, is still
closed
[[link removed]].
Information can hardly get to the outside world from many parts of
Gaza: internet service is rapidly declining as Israeli airstrikes
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telecommunications infrastructure. The unrelenting violence has led
many, including Israeli Holocaust scholars like Raz Segal and Omer
Bartov,
[[link removed]] to
call what we’re seeing unfold in Gaza an attempted genocide
[[link removed]], though
others dispute this assertion.

Since that violence is being funded in part with U.S. dollars, some
American Jews, like Mateo Rojas, 28, feel a moral imperative to speak
out. Rojas, who participated in October’s protests, is a teacher at
the Workers Circle [[link removed]] (a progressive Jewish
center) in Boston. He has spent the past weeks figuring out how, as a
Jewish educator, he can speak to his students about the violence in
Gaza. The theme of his fifth grade class is social justice movements.
“I know everyone says it’s a touchy issue,” Rojas said. “But
genocide isn’t a touchy issue.”

Elana Goldman, a 25-year-old social work student from Los Angeles, was
arrested on October 18th. Beyond direct action, she, like Rojas,
focuses on speaking to members of her own community about her views on
Zionism and the state of Israel.

“On a systemic level, I do think it’s important for Jews to openly
say that they’re not Zionists
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that Jews are not a monolith,” Goldman said. “It’s important for
people to hear that. As people who have survived a genocide, it’s
deeply disturbing to see that being done under the guise of
Judaism.”

“It’s a lot of work, but that is what love and solidarity looks
like,” Goldman said. “Doing that work to talk to people, to sit
with them, to unlearn the propaganda. To sit with each other, and hold
Jewish institutions accountable–which does have impact.”

Like many other protesters – including IfNotNow’s national
spokesperson Eva Borgwardt
[[link removed]],
who told the rally crowd it could be “the biggest revival of the
U.S. antiwar movement since the war in Iraq” – Rojas saw previous
U.S. peace movements as instructive in this moment. This time, the
violence is being broadcast live on our cellphones, unmediated even by
cable news networks.

Inside the Cannon Building, the group formed a loose circle, and sat
down. At the center were 22 rabbis and rabbinical students. Among them
was May Ye, 29, a recent rabbinical school graduate who serves a
congregation in Connecticut.

“I am the direct descendant of Holocaust survivors,” Ye said.
“My grandfather was incarcerated in the concentration camp at
Dachau.” Upon his release, Ye said, her grandfather warned against
the creation of the state of Israel, believing that a Jewish state
would not be what made Jews safe. That family legacy continued
throughout the generations: Ye recalled her father sending letters to
the editor about Palestinian human rights when she was a child. With
that personal history in mind, Ye traveled down to D.C. on the 18th to
stand with the 21 other rabbis.

“I want to say that rabbis must be calling for a ceasefire right
now, no matter what their politics are,” Ye insisted. “And all
rabbis must be condemning war, no matter what our politics are. I have
seen rabbis call for a war and we cannot do that. We cannot be silent
when genocide happens to another people, we have to say, not in our
name.” The rabbis led the crowd singing “lo yisa goy el goy
cherev” — _nation shall not lift up sword against nation
[[link removed]]._ And then, Ye
said, the protesters began to intersperse the song with chanting,
“CEASEFIRE NOW” echoed around the rotunda.

The rabbis sang in keffiyehs (traditional Palestinian scarves),
yarmulkes and tallitot (Jewish ritual garments), dressed in white,
surrounded by protesters in all black. From the balcony above, they
looked like a photo-inverse drawing of a human eye. “We were not
just Jews singing. We were singing and chanting. We were praying,”
Rabbi Ye said. As part of that prayer, the rabbis read testimony from
Gazans, in a call-and-response fashion, so that everyone in the
building could hear. And while the arrests began, they recited the
Mourner’s Kaddish, the prayer for the dead.

As Ye and the other rabbis were arrested, they made history: they
became one of the largest known groups of Jewish clergy arrested in
civil disobedience in American history, surpassing the St. Augustine
16 [[link removed]], a group of
rabbis arrested at the Monson Motor Lodge in St. Augustine, Florida,
at a civil rights protest in 1964. “It's going to be hard for the US
government to look away,” Rabbi Ye said.

“How long will it take for them to listen?”

Pressure for a ceasefire is building inside the U.S. government, too:
one Congressional staffer, Philip Bennett of Summer Lee’s office,
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what was going on, and sat down with the protesters–eventually
joining them in being arrested by the Capitol Police. The next day, a
letter signed by more than 400 congressional staffers
[[link removed]] came
out demanding that their bosses sign onto the Ceasefire Now
Resolution introduced by Congresswoman Cori Bush (D-MO)
[[link removed].]. Greg
Casar, D-TX,
[[link removed]] signed
as the protest occurred, prompting a wave of cheers in the Cannon
Building. As of this writing, 41 U.S. legislators are calling for a
ceasefire. On Nov. 8, over 100 Congressional staffers held a vigil for
a ceasefire, saying “our bosses on Capitol Hill are not listening
to the people they represent.”
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A historic wave of protests swept the world over the last two months:
thousands gathered in nearly every major city on this continent.
A massive protest moved through Paris
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France banned all pro-Palestinian protest
[[link removed]].
Protests were also seen in Amman, Jordan,
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Lebanon,
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elsewhere around the world. On October 25, students on over 100 U.S.
college campuses
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out of class to call for a ceasefire. And on October 28th, the
Palestinian-led community group Within Our Lifetime
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York, temporarily shutting down the Brooklyn Bridge
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while simultaneous massive pro-Palestinian protests continued across
the country and the world. At the largest mobilization yet, on
November 4th, some estimates put the crowd at 300,000 attendees.

In New York, “there have been protests every single day for the last
10 days,” said Sumaya Awad, an organizer with the Palestine-advocacy
group Adalah Justice Project, in mid-October. At a rate of several
protests per week in New York, often multiple on the same day, the
mobilization has continued since then. “There's no sign of them
slowing down,” Awad said. “And I think that's because people are
committed to a ceasefire.”

Beyond a ceasefire, all the activists who spoke to _Teen Vogue_ said
the conditions that produced this wave of violence must end. “We
need all the masses out to get the bombing stopped,” Saper of JVP
said. “And while the ceasefire language is front and center, we know
that we actually have to address 75 years of occupation and
apartheid.”

Palestinian organizers tend to be targets of online harassment
campaigns,
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face threats of real-life violence, for their views. Collaboration
between Palestinian and Jewish organizers, Awad said, can have a role
to play in counteracting that narrative.

“There is so much smearing happening against Palestinians who are
trying to organize around this – I think there's a lot of power in
messaging and an influence that American Jews have in overcoming
that,” Awad said. “And there's an urgency to it. It's not
something that we can wait a week, or two weeks, or a month, for.”

Awad spoke at the Jewish-led rally on Oct. 18, and then coordinated
both a sit-in at Ro Khanna’s office two days later,
[[link removed]] on
Friday the 20th, and a Palestinian-led protest in New York that same
day that she said drew 3,000 attendees. Khanna later became one of the
politicians who was swayed by this activism–as of last week, he is
publicly supporting a ceasefire.

As the protests have continued, some online commentators have sparred
over whether or not Jewish Americans are centering their own
identities and feelings too much
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this moment. For activists like Goldman, working for Palestinian
liberation from a specifically diaspora-Jewish perspective requires a
bit of a balancing act.

“American Jews specifically need to find a balance between not
centering themselves, and also knowing when to let their voices be
heard,” Goldman said. “I think that when you build solidarity with
Palestinians, it becomes personal, and it becomes rooted in actual
love, and care, and accountability. When it gets to that level, it
kind of gets easier to find out where and when your voice is
needed.”

Awad, for her part, reiterated that she believes time is running out.

“How long will it take for them to listen?” she asked. “How many
Palestinians will be killed by Israel's bombs, or from dehydration or
lack of food because of this blockade, before our government actually
listens and applies pressure on Israel for a ceasefire?”

Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib, the only Palestinian-American member of
the U.S. legislature, spoke at the Oct. 18 rally. “I wish the
Palestinian people could see this,” Tlaib said. “I wish they could
see that not all of America wants them to die–that they are not
disposable.”

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_[SOPHIE HURWITZ is a freelance journalist and researcher based in
Brooklyn. They were previously the education and criminal-legal system
reporter for the St. Louis American.]_

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