Cold in Gaza
Mohammed al-Hawajri
2015
Inga Leonova has written—and Public Orthodoxy has published—a genuinely bizarre article. Darkly titled “Strike the Jew,” Leonova’s essay comprises at least three incongruous elements: (1) valid observations about rising Western antisemitism and the Orthodox Church’s abiding complicity in it; (2) unfounded assertions about the events of October 7 and Israel’s genocidal response to them; and (3) apocalyptic pronouncements about the supposedly eternal, transhistorical, and ineradicable hold that anti-Jewish bigotry enjoys across the entire world. Responding to every issue raised in Leonova’s piece would require far more space than the present article allows for. Instead, I will offer a series of observations that help to disentangle the various issues that Leonova problematically—indeed, damagingly—attempts to sandwich together.
To begin, a point of agreement: the Orthodox Church’s entanglement with both anti-Judaism and antisemitism is longstanding, deep-seated, and badly in need of addressing. Leonova rightly alludes to the figures of St.Nicholas of Zicha (also known as Nikolaj Velimirović) and St. Gabriel of Bialystok in this connection, as well as the viciously anti-Jewish liturgical texts sung annually during Holy Week. These examples, as Leonova knows, merely scratch the surface. She might also have mentioned the appalling complicity of the Romanian Church in the Shoah, among many others. The list goes on, and the Church’s reckoning with its anti-Jewish past and present—including in the form of reparations—is long overdue.
Leonova is also right to note that antisemitic incidents are on the rise, particularly in the US and Europe. But she is wrong to infer—or rather assume—that Palestine solidarity groups bear primary, or even significant, responsibility for this trend. Studies have repeatedly indicated that the overwhelming majority of antisemitic incidents and hate crimes are perpetrated not by left-leaning supporters of Palestine, but by right-wing antisemites and white supremacists who co-opt the language of anti-Zionism for their own bigoted ends. Such cooptation invariably escalates when Israel’s wars enter the news cycle, and is doubtless a problem in need of addressing, but it has little to do with the “pro-Palestinian rallies” Leonova speaks of, many of them jointly organized by Palestinian and Jewish-led groups. The solution to hate crimes, it should be obvious, is to identify and hold accountable those who perpetrate them—not to demonize “leftist youth” for voicing opposition to a genocide being perpetrated in their names, with their tax dollars, upon a defenseless and captive civilian population.
This leads directly to the second element of Leonova’s article: an array of unfounded allegations about October 7 and apologias for Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza. Leonova peppers her piece with lurid descriptions of Palestinian violence that have been either debunked (e.g., “beheaded babies”) or, as yet, never substantiated (e.g., “gang-raping women”).* The effect of these unsourced allegations, as well as Leonova’s baseless canard about Hamas deliberately maximizing Palestinian deaths, is to create an image of Gazans as irredeemable, irrational, uncivilized “savages”—the kind of people who cannot possibly be reasoned with, who possess no history or political grievances to speak of, and who therefore have brought Israel’s campaign of genocidal slaughter upon themselves.
Yes, Hamas fighters committed war crimes on October 7. While the scale and nature of those crimes remains to be investigated, it is clear that atrocities of some magnitude occurred. But no, contra Leonova, history did not begin on that day. Neither, for that matter, did the present war. Much like the Indigenous peoples of North America, Palestinians have been subjected to an ongoing colonial assault for more than 75 years, when pre-state Zionist militias first began massacring Palestinian civilians, destroying and depopulating Palestinian villages, and replacing their communities with Jewish-only settlers. By the time Israel was admitted as a UN Member State in 1949, more than one million Palestinians had been forcibly expelled to camps in Palestine and nearby Arab countries, their ethnic cleansing having paved the way for the creation of an exclusivist Jewish ethnostate atop their homeland. (More than 70% of Gaza’s present-day population, incidentally, is composed of refugees descended from this inaugural wave of Zionist violence.)
Matters have only worsened since then. The number of Palestinian refugees has ballooned to more than six million, while those Palestinians who managed to remain in small corners of their homeland have suffered decade after decade of land theft, apartheid, and military occupation at the hands of a superpower-backed ethnostate. The situation in Gaza has grown especially horrifying. After illegally occupying the 25-by-5-mile territory in 1967, Israel set about turning it, slowly but surely, into what the late Israeli sociologist Baruch Kimmerling called “the world’s largest concentration camp ever.” This has been particularly true since 2006, when Israel imposed a deadly blockade of air, sea, and land on the tiny enclave, preventing most Palestinians from ever entering or exiting the strip even as it systematically restricted Gaza’s access to food, electricity, healthcare, and drinkable water. As if that weren’t enough, Israel subjected Gaza’s captive population to no less than five major military assaults between 2008 and 2022, each of them wreaking havoc on Gaza’s already desperate infrastructure and killing overwhelming numbers of civilians. It also used Gaza’s nonviolent protest movement of 2018-19 as an occasion to gun down some 6,000 peaceful demonstrators, making clear that no form of Palestinian resistance—peaceful or otherwise—would be met with anything other than heightened repression, slaughter, and brutalization. (“Do you know what it’s like to know that you are never safe?” Leonova asks her readers. Would she have the temerity to put the same question to the people of Gaza?)
It was against this unlivable backdrop that Palestinian fighters finally resolved to take up arms and break out of Gaza, or else die trying, on October 7. Leonova will doubtless accuse me of “victim-blaming” for contextualizing their attack in this way. But as Norman Finkelstein has pointed out, that is rather like accusing abolitionists like William Lloyd Garrison of “victim-blaming” for emphasizing the evils of slavery in the wake of Nat Turner’s revolt (a revolt, notably, in which oppressors’ babies actually were beheaded). To draw attention to the roots of violence, or even to affirm the right of oppressed peoples to armed resistance, is not to justify every tactic those peoples employ in the course of conducting that resistance. It is merely to emphasize that political violence, legitimate or not, invariably does have a history, and that it is only by reckoning with that history that we can finally hope to eliminate it [i.e., the consequent political violence].
But it is here that Leonova’s essay runs into its deepest problem. For what Leonova would have her readers believe is that murderous hatred for Jews—which appears to be her only lens for interpreting Palestinian violence—does in fact float above history and geography as some kind of immutable human curse. “The Jews are always outsiders,” she declares. “All the talk of ‘never again’ after the Holocaust was just wishful thinking. There will never be a world where Jews feel safe….” (Emphases added.) It is not clear what gives Leonova the authority to make such pronouncements on behalf of world Jewry, but that is of secondary importance. More important is the fact that these pronouncements are both historically dubious and politically dangerous.
They are dubious, first, because they elide the historical specificity of modern antisemitism as a product of the Christian West. While Jews have, like other religious minorities, faced persecution at the hands of myriad actors throughout their long diasporic history, it must be emphasized that antisemitism as a racial, political, and genocidal form of bigotry emerged squarely from the womb of modern Europe, deriving its sustenance from centuries of Christian Judeophobia and entrenched racial-colonial thinking. Nazism could conceivably have originated in France, Italy, or even the US. It could not have done so in Yemen or Ethiopia. Houria Bouteldja is therefore right to insist that we “repatriate antisemitism, identify its geopolitical territory, its original locus” in Christian Europe:
The Dreyfus affair, the impetuous development of anti-Jewish movements in the interwar period, the rise of Nazism, and the Vichy regime, all demonstrate anti-Semitism’s deep-seated roots in Europe. … It is circumscribed in space and time. No, the Inuit, the Dogon, and the Tibetans are not anti-Semitic. They aren’t Philo-Semitic either.
Why does this matter? Because to universalize or “eternalize” modern antisemitism is ultimately, by design or not, “to share the Shoah, to dilute it, to deracinate Hitler and move him to the colonized populations, and in the end, to exonerate white people.” However much Leonova may intend her pronouncements to signal a deep solicitude for Jewish suffering and a commitment to preventing more of it, their effect is otherwise. Portraying antisemitism as some kind of ineradicable and omnipresent human curse not only fails to make Jews safer; it stands in the way of Westerners taking meaningful, collective, and concrete historical accountability for it. Such accountability would inevitably take different forms in different national contexts, but in each case it would entail grappling with, and making all possible reparation for, the collective responsibility of Europe (including the US) in fomenting anti-Jewish racism, enabling anti-Jewish violence, collaborating with anti-Jewish regimes, and turning aside Jewish refugees—before, during, and after the Nazi genocide. I refuse to accept Leonova’s assertion that post-WWII talk of “Never Again” was mere wishful thinking. But she is right that it will remain hollow rhetoric for as long as Western powers and populations evade the honest historical reckoning they owe to all of Hitler’s—and their—victims.
Which brings me back, finally, to the question of Palestine. While most Western powers remained ambivalent about the Zionist colonial project in its formative decades, they seized eagerly upon it as the anti-Jewish horrors of WWII came into public view. Before long, supporting Israel’s colonization and ethnic cleansing of Palestine became the quickest, most strategic, and most costless way for Western states to signal repudiation of Hitler’s crimes without actually taking responsibility for their role in enabling and/or executing them. Meanwhile, as Palestinians continued resisting their dispossession at the hands of a violently imposed and Western-backed settler state, it became increasingly easy for US and European governments to project onto Palestinians precisely that form of racist Jew-hatred that they had themselves refused to reckon with. In one fell swoop, Jew-hating Europe regained its self-image as the world’s moral conscience, acquired an imperial “outpost” in the Middle East, offloaded the burden of Holocaust reparation to newly colonized Palestinians, and branded them (and their supporters) antisemites for resisting this state of affairs.
Such, in broad strokes, has been the story ever since. Geopolitical alignments have shifted, and Palestine solidarity movements have blossomed internationally, but Western powers have remained uniformly supportive as Israel has endeavored, decade by decade, to bring the Zionist dream to completion: as much Palestinian land as possible, as few Palestinian people as possible.** The events of October 7—coupled with ignorant commentary like Leonova’s—have provided Netanyahu’s government with an opportunity to accelerate this process dramatically. Having first cut off all food, water, electricity, and fuel to Gaza’s captive population on October 9, Israel commenced an openly genocidal campaign of vengeance and destruction against the besieged enclave. The campaign’s effects have been nothing short of devastating. Already by November 10, Israel had killed well over 11,000 Palestinians (including at least 4,500 children), internally displaced 1.5 million civilians, attacked at least 135 health facilities, rendered 68 hospitals and healthcare centers inoperative, damaged or destroyed at least 70 mosques and churches, and fully flattened more than 40,000 Palestinian homes. In the space of just one month, Israel killed more civilians than Russia has killed in its nearly two-year-long war against Ukraine, while slaughtering more children than have died in all the world’s war zones combined for each of the last 3 years. Meanwhile, Israeli officials are making daily media rounds to assure us that this is only the beginning and that, in the end, the whole of Gaza will be destroyed, its population having been either expelled or exterminated.
“Never Again” may no longer mean much to Leonova, but it does to me. Speaking personally, it means never forgetting the overlapping histories of violence and bigotry in which I am implicated—the histories of antisemitism, of colonialism, of antiblackness, and so forth—and doing everything humanly possible to prevent those histories from reaching the genocidal heights that they did in WWII. As I write these words, those heights are closer to being reached than they have been at any point in my 28-year lifetime. A people is being annihilated, a country destroyed, a history erased. So yes, with due respect to Leonova, Never Again for anyone—not for Jews, not for Roma, not for Tutsi, not for Rohingya, and not for Palestinians.
*To be clear, “as yet, never substantiated” means exactly what it says—nothing more, nothing less. It is not a synonym for “false” or “fabricated.” There is much that remains unknown about the events of October 7, and it is my hope that that day’s events will in time be subject to a thorough and impartial investigation. While the sensationalized story about 40 beheaded babies appears, by this point, to have been a pure fabrication, it is too soon to judge whether or not the incidents of “gang-raping” alleged by Leonova in fact occurred. If they did occur, needless to say, they would be abhorrent and evil crimes, and their perpetrators would deserve the same condemnation and accountability as all other perpetrators of sexual violence. But there are multiple reasons to be cautious about unreservedly disseminating such allegations at the present time, particularly without citing one’s sources. The first is that we have, to this point, neither forensic evidence nor firsthand testimony from Israeli victims indicating gang-rape. (What little forensic testing has been conducted has not yielded any evidence of sexual activity, still less sexual assault by a group.) Leonova will here point out that Israel has, nevertheless, cited the deeply worrying testimonies of a handful of individuals who saw corpses they believed had previously been raped or, in one case, who profess to have witnessed an incident of rape. (Only one secondhand piece of testimony, to my knowledge, alleges anything about gang-rape in particular.) This is true, and it is one among several reasons to refrain from declaring that gang-rapes didn’t occur on October 7. But neither do these unverified secondhand testimonies constitute sufficient grounds, at present, for declaring categorically that gang-rapes did occur. For one thing, both before October 7 and in recent weeks, Israel has shown itself repeatedly willing to fabricate evidence and draw on faulty testimony in order to lend weight to its most extreme allegations against Palestinians. In some cases, the problems with Israel’s evidence are exposed by investigative journalists; in others, they are eventually admitted by Israel itself, but only quietly, unrepentantly, and after they have slipped into mainstream media discourse as common knowledge. This pattern has played out at least once since October 7 with regard to rape allegations, and should give us pause before loading our speech with Israeli accusations that have not, as yet, been duly investigated, verified, or even attested to by survivors themselves. It also bears emphasizing that these and other graphic allegations are being weaponized by the Israeli state in order to dehumanize Palestinians as “savages” and justify its unfolding genocide against them—much as real and fictitious allegations of sexual assault were sensationalized in the US to justify violence against Black and Indigenous communities. This emphatically doesn’t mean such allegations should be dismissed, brushed under the rug, or left uninvestigated. But it does mean that, when we talk about gang-rape allegations in the present context, there are two colliding histories to which we must be accountable: on the one hand, the very real history of women and other victims of sexual assault having their suffering denied, excused, or glossed over; and on the other, the equally real history of oppressed and dehumanized populations being pronounced guilty of still-unverified sexual crimes and suffering horrific violence as a result. I tried in this piece to be accountable to both histories, just as I tried to be accountable to the histories of Christian antisemitism and Western colonialism. Whether I succeeded or failed is for readers to judge, but none of this should distract from the larger point at hand: whatever atrocities Hamas fighters did commit on October 7—and it is clear, as I stated, that atrocities of some magnitude did occur—there can be no possible justification for systematically starving, slaughtering, or expelling a civilian population by way of reprisal. That’s precisely what Israel is doing, with the full-throated assistance of our governments and mainstream media outlets. Under these circumstances, we owe it to our Palestinian victims to refrain from treating grotesque, easily-weaponized Israeli allegations about them as established facts until investigations have been concluded or reliable evidence provided.
**Leonova will of course object that Israel’s fundamental commitment is not to colonial expansionism, but to Jewish security. This claim is belied, however, by a sober reading of the history. As Joseph Massad notes:
The Zionist movement, in fact, has a clear record of compromising the welfare of Jews in favor of achieving Zionist goals. In the Nazi period, Zionist leaders, for example, protested strongly against granting European Jews refuge in any country other than Palestine. David Ben-Gurion responded to a British offer, in the aftermath of Kristallnacht, to take thousands of children directly to Britain by saying: “If I knew it would be possible to save all the children in Germany by bringing them to England, and only half of them by transporting them to Eretz Yisrael (the land of Israel), then I would opt for the second alternative, for we must weigh not only the life of these children but also the history of the people of Israel.” Such actions were certainly the norm, not the exception. The Zionist sell-out of Hungarian Jewry (numbering 450,000) was perhaps the worst of all. Rezco Kastner, the head of the World Zionist Organization’s Rescue Committee in Budapest, knew that Adolf Eichmann planned to ship Hungary’s Jews to Auschwitz but did not warn them in return for a special exemption for a trainload of Jews whom he could select for escape to Switzerland and later to Palestine. When Kastner was brought to trial in Israel in 1953, he was found innocent of collaboration with the Nazis by the Israeli Supreme Court.
This prioritization of Zionist colonial interests over Jewish safety has continued under successive Israeli governments, and is reflected in Netanyahu’s recent refusal to heed calls for hostage exchange even as they are made by growing numbers of Israeli families.
Christopher Iacovetti is a PhD student in religion and literature at the University of Chicago, with research interests in Palestinian memoir and autobiography. He was received into the Orthodox Church in 2014.
ORTHODOXY IN DIALOGUE 