My Thanksgiving Dinner Is Not Complete Until I’ve Found At Least Four Ways To Invoke Israeli Apartheid

By Ken Roth, Director, Human Rights Watch

New York, November 22 – We human rights activists live a difficult life: our organizations are feted in Geneva, do as we please with no oversight, and enjoy unparalleled international credibility with the United Nations. Despite those hardships, however, as an activist I always consider even my moments of relaxation, observing certain cultural rituals, lacking, without connecting the occasion along multiple avenues to my central mission: depicting Israeli behaviors as reprehensible, regardless of truth, fairness, or the possibility of compromising other, more dangerous human rights situations. Thanksgiving dinner proves no exception.

My family loves to celebrate with the traditional roast turkey with customary side dishes and relishes, but, given my idiosyncrasy, our mealtime discourse tends less toward observations of gustatory quality and more toward overwrought metaphors decrying Palestinian suffering at the hands of Israel. I consider the event a failure if, by the time the pumpkin pie makes it to the table, no one has compared the cranberry sauce to Israeli bloodshed, or declaimed that no amount of gravy can conceal the moral rot behind Israeli Apartheid policies.

In past years I hesitated to participate in this national ritual, knowing that any number of indigenous American groups might find a commemoration of an event that heralded not coexistence as its original participants may have hoped, but genocide and continued discrimination, offensive. But then an acquaintance suggested framing the festive meal as an occasion to denounce Israel alone among all the myriad nations violating human rights, and my attitude changed. I had discovered a way to redeem Thanksgiving dinner!

Other occurrences of persecution do merit mention here and there, mostly in comparison or contrast to Israeli behaviors. Thus, I make a point of bringing up Nazi Germany, with the specific aim of drawing analogies between it and Israeli policies. Participants get extra Yorkshire pudding if they can find a conflict, a set of discriminatory laws, or some other violation of human rights elsewhere that no one else at the table has compared to Israel-Palestine such that Israel comes out looking worse than other culprits. No one could accuse me of only mentioning Israel.

Some of my favorite memories from these dinners involve creative use of the occasion to bash Israel, and I hope my children maintain this beautiful tradition when, eventually, they hold Thanksgiving dinners of their own. I will know true gratification in that respect when one of them seizes a giblet from the gravy and waxes polemic about Israel harvesting Palestinian organs.

That’s what it’s all about.

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