By Rabbi Alissa Wise, Deputy Director, Jewish Voice for Peace
Philadelphia, November 25 – Tikkun Olam isn’t meant to be easy. Difficult choices await us at every turn. The latest: follow the dictates of vaunted progressive figures such as Governor Andrew Cuomo of New York and refrain from holding or attending large Thanksgiving dinners with loved ones, or risk COVID exposure by participating in just such an event for purposes of accusing Zionist family members of complicity in genocide? The decision weighs heavily on the progressive mind.
On one hand, nothing animates the progressive mind more than justice for Palestinians. On the other hand, progressives only care about Palestinians when their suffering can be cast as Israeli malice, or more accurately Jewish malice that everyone agrees to euphemize as “Israel.” The latter point demonstrates it isn’t really about Palestinians per se, but whatever agenda we can coopt to further the goals of the progressive movement: ideally, equality and empowerment, but in practice, power over every little details of everyone else’s life. Restricting family get-togethers is just too juicy a progressive morsel to let go, even for the sake of Palestine, at least for some.
But oh, the opportunity to drive a wedge between Jews over Israel! How scarce those opportunities have become during COVID. As so many of us disregarded distancing and other restrictions to throng in protest for Black Lives Matter or in triumph at Trump’s electoral defeat, can we not similarly bend those sensibilities for the noble purpose of putting the vast majority of our Jewish relatives on the defensive over the alleged actions of other, totally different Jews thousands of miles away? The latter in fact dovetails with progressive trends of the twenty-first century, assigning people value and responsibility by virtue of their membership in a progressive-imposed identity group.
Perhaps we can eat our pumpkin pie and have it too. Here is what I propose: we adopt the same attitude as we have all along, insisting that everyone else adhere to strict distancing guidelines, and deem those who violate those guidelines, especially anyone to the right of the ACLU, grandma-killers and mass murderers, while maintaining for ourselves the prerogative to get together in whatever size assemblies and celebrations we like, because the virus only attacks right-wingers. That way, if any relatives with politics we abhor show up, we have double the reason to equate their morals with those of Nazi Germany and accuse them of failing to protect the most vulnerable – whether you understand that to mean the elderly or Palestinians.
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This is another reason to make Aliyah. The Jewish relatives that love Israel and the Jewish people will be in Israel and the BDS supporting leftest such as Jewish Voice for Peace won’t be in Israel. Given a 6 – 10 hour time zone difference Zoom calls are “inconvenient” to schedule.