May the people of Israel survive Israel
& the difference between a nation and a state
It's been really hard trying to put into words a lot of what I'm feeling these days, especially because I'm wary of centering the Jewish experience while the bombs keep falling on Gaza. But it's the only experience I've got, so… I wrote about it.
As I first drafted today’s poem yesterday morning, I knew exactly what I was trying to say: the modern State of Israel, its colonial history and apartheid present, warps the minds of those who live there, changes the way they’re able to see themselves and the humans they oppress. Considering that distortion, we shouldn’t be focused on blaming individuals for their actions, but rather we should focus on addressing the head of the snake, the state itself, and the systems which uphold it.
Then I sat on the draft for a night, and woke up this morning recognizing something the poem was trying to say that I was too afraid to really sit with the day before. In the brief essay that follows, I try to talk about rising antisemitism without conflating it with antizionism, which is a hard needle to thread right now.
But it shouldn’t be. Don’t let the right monopolize the discourse around antisemitism: talking about it shouldn't mask the ongoing horrors perpetrated by Israel, it should clarify them and their stakes, and should help us remember we're always fighting against systems and states, not groups of people.
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No matter the nakedness of the crimes, please don't blame Jews or even individual Israelis for what's befallen Gaza. When we’re addressing why this happened, we need to understand that this isn’t the outcome of a uniquely evil people doing uniquely evil things (which is something I’ve seen expressed again and again and again), but the result of terrible systems colliding with tragic results.
We've seen this story before, the way nationalism or colonialism or whiteness on their own can warp a mind, let alone what happens when all three are woven together, the way regular, yes, regular people can turn into monsters when all they see are monsters on "the other side." The way sides can blind us to humanity.
It may take breaking the modern State of Israel to repair the Jewish mind, which is a tragic thing to say out loud, to suggest something is broken in all of us, but it's true and I've seen it— it's not just IDF soldiers and AIPAC donors who have bloodlust, it's my stepson's high school teachers and my bowling league friends.
These people aren't incarnations of evil, they are just beset by an evil intersection of ideology and they can't get out from under it. Though it’s uncomfortable for me to write it, and I want to damn these people with my whole chest, this is even true of those IDF soldiers who’ve videotaped themselves dancing on graves — they are just kids, wrapped up in something that’s way bigger than them. Maybe shitty kids, but not inherently evil ones.
Odds are most of you reading this have ancestors who have done or supported the same or worse from Germany or Belgium or Turkey or Britain or, of course, all over these United States. We do not let these atrocities define nations — meaning a people, not a state — forever. In fact, we fold those people right back into society once the spell is broken.
And this matters, because naming Jews as a uniquely evil people is something the world has way, way too much experience doing.
People the world over are looking at Jews in a different light, and you can't blame them! Watching a nation unleash (or support) horrors will make even the most tolerant among us look a little sideways. But don't mistake this coincidence of history, this perfect storm of a genocide suffered leading to a genocide inflicted, as something inherent to the people of Israel because yes, that is what we call ourselves, with or without the state.
There are fifteen million Jews in the world, and when the modern State of Israel falls or democratizes, we will once again be a nation, a tiny sliver of a nation, without a homeland. When this happens, please do not look at us like villains who have gotten their just desserts. The last two thousand years of Jewish history has been beset by tragedy — this is just the latest among them.
Jews don't deserve a homeland. That isn't how history works. And nothing can excuse the whole bloody sweep of Zionism. But it's genesis is not that hard to understand: a nation without a land swept up in nationalism and then colonialism and then collective trauma and then whiteness. That's an ugly combination.
I would argue it's a combination few nations could survive without tragedy, in some form, being the end result: do not blame Jews (or even individual Israelis) for what's happening in Gaza, blame systems and power and whiteness (and maybe a little bit Hitler, too).
I know a lot of you will say: "I don't need to hear this, I get it already," but I've seen it, I've heard it, and antisemitism really is on the rise. And, unlike for most other perpetrators of atrocity, there is already systemic hatred for Jews waiting in the wings. There's reason to believe things might get a lot worse.
Look, I know people hold collective grudges. It's natural. Or it's hard not to, no matter our political convictions: I still feel wary around Germans and Southerners, generations after the Nazis and Jim Crow fell. So all I'm trying to say is please, please try your best to remember we blame systems and power and isms, not people. We decry states, not nations. We demand justice, not vengeance.
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Okay, that was a pretty long intro. I really hope you check out the poem that’s below, which I’m proud of and still not sure I’ve completely finished unpacking — feel free to help me uncover what else it’s trying to say in the comments.
May the people of Israel survive Israel I can’t call them friends, though that instinct lingers, held by the trestle of a shared nation— no, not that one, not the state that refuses to cede humanity past the grip of its Green Line, not the state whose nationalisms have scoured all the texts that taught us how to be righteous, eroding holy books into marching orders, not the state that kills but a nation— that survives, only survives, fifteen million of us clinging to a common tree of life two thousand years into diaspora, yes, feel that, two thousand years, let it settle in your gut, what it means to be wanderers for millennia, to be exiled longer than you’ve been home. What does that do to a people, O Israel? I can’t call them friends, but many Jews I know who live in the state, yes, that state, tell me simply if you lived here, you would understand. I think maybe they are right: what does it do to a person to live within the marble of an ancient promise no matter how rotten the marble’s core, how the surface is pock- marked in atrocity; how can a humble mind stand up against that beautiful swirl at the center, even though it’s nothing but warped plastic, a trick of the eye. I mean to say don’t blame individuals for this malignance, all these lives defined by generational trauma finally offered a salve, a cure-all, a way out, a booming voice from behind a curtain declaring power the only path to survival: the promise has twisted our conscience, as it has for so many nations that have come before— don’t make believe like it couldn’t happen to you and pray, yes, pray for the people of Israel, pray that when, yes, when the state as it is finally falls, we will remember our god splits seas for the wanderers and casts aside the powerful, we will remember what it means to be a Jew and say if you lived here, you would understand.
Isaac, I like this very much. The “please, please,” though strikes an off key note. Begging people to see Jewish humanity is one of those drivers of hard heartedness.