Occasionally, I hear Jews complain that everyone is obsessed with Israel. It’s true: this country gets way more coverage than pretty much any other. The coverage of the war on Gaza greatly eclipses anything broadcast about Yemen, Congo, or Sudan.
But can we really be surprised? More than a third of the world considers this land to be holy. Jews pray in this direction three times a day. Muslims believe their prophet ascended to Heaven here. Christians believe their god was born here. For the Bahai, their founder died here.
I do not think it is controversial to say that this land is, in some sense, sacred.
It is not that this country has any more God in it than anywhere else. Religious Jews hold that the Divine Presence departed from here with the destruction of the Temple, and that God’s place is now as dispersed as Jews are throughout the world.
But for at least the last 2,500 years, religious believers have invested their hopes and directed their prayers here. That decision to imbue the land with holiness surely has an impact.
Since the late medieval period, Jews have held that there are four holy cities in the land: Jerusalem; Tiberias; Hebron; and Tzfat. As a result, people have decided to be buried in them, retire to them, have their remains moved to them, pray to them, and study in them.
Having finished my volunteering in Jerusalem, I did what a good religious Jewish boy does. I went with my boyfriend on a pilgrimage to the sacred city of Tzfat.
We took a long bus ride through the hillsides, past the holy Mount Meron and along the Sea of Galilee into this beautiful blue city.
For centuries, this town has been considered an important religious site for Jews. Almost everything a worshipper would recognise from Friday night prayers began on these ramshackle cobbled streets. Mysticism was born here.
The Shulchan Aruch, the most important law code for observant Jews, was written here. That was what I was really excited to see: the synagogue where its author, Rabbi Yosef Karo, composed his authoritative work of religious law.
This law code holds a deeply special place in my heart (as it does for most religious Jews). My copy was gifted to me by my mentor, Rabbi Laura Janner-Klausner. She studied the codes with my grandfather, who loved halachah more than any Liberal Jew of his era (or since, probably.)
It also holds a deep connection for my partner, Laurence. He is a direct descendant of Rabbi Moses Isserles, who wrote a gloss to the Shulchan Aruch, called the ‘Mapa’, which turned it into the definitive law code for Ashkenazi Jews, especially his Lithuanian ancestors.
Laurence’s ancestry is a source of great pride to me, although he still has really no idea what the significance is.
Nevertheless, I think our backgrounds have contributed to why we connect so well. Because of our upbringings in the Liberal movement, and our ancestors who cared so much about Jewish law, we both see our Judaism in ethical terms. We regularly have moral conversations about what to eat, how to handle workplace difficulties, where to give charitable donations, and how to run our home.
When we first started dating, we had long conversations on our hikes over questions of Jewish medical ethics, like euthanasia, organ donation, and brain-death. In all of these, we refer back to our principles as religious Jews, and to the great writers on these ethical questions, like Rabbi Karo.
When we arrived at the Rabbi Yosef Karo Synagogue in Tzfat, it was shut. It hadn’t been open all day. It hadn’t been open for months. It would not be opening again any time soon.
In fact, everything was shut. Not a single art gallery, synagogue, or museum was open. We were lucky enough that one coffee shop was open in the Old City, where we got a drink, and found out what was happening. Nothing was open because there was nobody to open it for.
The northern towns have been entirely evacuated for fear of rockets from Hizbullah. No pilgrims have come for a long time, fearing for their safety. There are no tourists stopping by to look at the shops.
From the perspective of the locals, the central government has abandoned them. While the military successfully intercept nearly all the missiles from Lebanon, there has been no material support for the pious Jews who live and pray here, completely dependent on tourism.
When we first got here to the north, we felt like we could barely tell there was a war on. There were so few guns and next to no propaganda posters. It turns out we were looking for the wrong thing.
What we had not noticed were all the absences. All the missing shops, traders, youth trips, international tourist groups. There was nobody speaking English, Chinese, French, or Russian. Now the absences are the most gapingly obvious things here.
For many years, critics of Israeli nationalism have warned that arrogant militarism offered no hope for the Jewish people. For this, we have been accused of being traitors, bleeding heart liberals, communists, terrorist-enablers, and doe-eyed dreamers (usually by exactly the same people.)
I wonder if they will begin to see that it is precisely their hubris and warmongering that is destroying them.
This war is bankrupting them; their economy is in tatters; they are isolated and facing criminal charges in the Hague. Many Jews now look to this land with horror and fear.
Before the founding of the state, the mainstream religious position was one of opposition to Zionism. At that time, Orthodox leaders warned that building a military state would strip the land of its holiness. For them, this was an existential and mythical claim, borne partly out of their objections to secular modernity.
Today, however, it takes on a new meaning. The land is imbued with holiness because people have decided it is so.
Without pilgrims, even the shrines of great rabbis lose their significance. In the shadow of constant war, the place is stripped of its sanctity.
I am left wondering: what happens to the Holy Land if people can’t see anything holy here?
Noah knew that the Garden of Eden was the Holy of Holies, and the dwelling-place of God; and Mount Sinai was the centre of the desert; and Mount Zion was the centre of the navel of the earth. These three were created as holy places facing each other. – Jubilees 8:30
Month: July 2024
The dawn will come
My soul looks to God as a nightguard watches for the morning. – Psalm 130:6
I used to think the night guard was watching for the dawn with eagerness, excitement, and trepidation.
I just did a night shift watching out for army vans and settlers in the village of Umm al-Khair.
Now I know that the night guard simply greets the dawn with a weary sigh.
The last time I was here, we came to see the ruins of their destroyed homes. After we left, settlers and military shot at them.
In the short time since, the settlers have ramped up their aggression. They come in large, fanatical groups to terrorise the neighbourhood.
Night is a time when they feel most at risk. They also now have the added fear that the army, which is now entirely comprised of military reservists from the Hebron settlements, will come and carry out late night arrests.
So the locals stay awake, watching. They say they cannot sleep anyway. If they shut their eyes, fear is waiting in the dark.
The Talmud teaches that there is a state that is neither asleep nor awake. A rabbinic colleague once compared this to breastfeeding a newborn in the night. Now I know another version of this non-sleep. Fear.
I could not sleep either. We were supposed to sleep in shifts of a few hours. I lay down for about four hours.
A local boy stayed up with us to practise his English through the night. He wants to go to university. He hopes he will have passed his exams, but he’s worried, because he was distracted during the maths test, as his house had just been bulldozed.
We watched for every vehicle, every sign of activity, praying that the night would be “boring.”
When dawn broke, the children flooded into the playground where we had been camping out. I spun them round on the merry-go-round and pushed them on the swings.
A five-year-old came up with a cheeky grin and wanted to tell one of the international activists something. She took out an app on her phone that translated for hi.: “Gaza is my family, they are being bombed by Israel.”
In the light of day, I could see the human impact of the occupation. Kids – normal, sweet kids – who already know they are under siege.
Destroyed homes. Murals on walls professing the village’s resilience. Women cooking breakfast and men pouring cups of tea for activists who stayed the night.
Dawn will come to this sacred scrubland.
I know that morning will one day come, after decades upon decades of occupation and war.
But daybreak will not be the moment when all is set right. It will simply be when we take stock of what happened in the night.
In the daylight, we will see all the bodies of repeated catastrophes and finally be able to mourn them.
When dawn comes, we will see all that has been destroyed, and we will realise how much work has to be done to heal and repair.
I will wait for morning to come to Palestine-Israel just like the night guard waits for the first rays of daylight: restlessly, anxiously, hoping there will be enough remaining to begin the processes of reconciliation and rebuilding.
Dawn will surely come, but that will only be the beginning.
Wait, O Israel, for God, for God holds love and redemption. It is God who will redeem Israel from all their sins. – Psalm 130:7-8
Water is a more precious resource than I realised
Needing to use the toilet when you’re out and about is always embarrassing. After days going between different spots without returning to the hostel, it is inevitable.
But that embarrassment is multiplied tenfold in the home of a West Bank Palestinian. There, water is too scarce a resource to be wasted. The cistern is never full and needs to be filled up only in extremis. You can imagine my horror at being the cause for such a use of water when visiting people in Nablus.
You can recognise which homes are Palestinian in the West Bank because they have enormous water tankards above their rooves, which they fill up whenever possible. Unlike the settlers, they are cut off from the grid and cannot access basic running water.
Consider what this means for people. Clean drinking water is hard to come by in a valley thar, yesterday, reached highs of 44°C. You have to severely ration showers in the dustiest place I’ve ever been.
Yesterday, all the Bedouin men were called up to fix a problem. There was a leak in one of the water tankards by the grazing pastures. It was a hole at the bottom of the barrel that was spilling out the region’s most precious resource. Just a small gap, but enough to risk livelihoods.
They got all their resources together over a few hours in the hottest part of the day and patched it as best they could. It will do for now, but it will not last.
It is so unjust. The authorities could simply hook them up to the water supplies. Only meters away, Israelis are having baths and watering lawns.
Yet the Palestinians cannot even access water on their own ancestral lands, as an entire machinery seeks to destroy them.
Isaac returned and dug water-wells that were dug in the days of Abraham his father, which the Philistines had stopped up after the death of Abraham. He gave the wells the names that his father had given them. But when Isaac’s servants were digging the wells in the valley, they found there a spring of fresh water. The shepherds of Gerar argued with the shepherds of Isaac saying: “this water is ours!” Genesis 26
We are contesting what being Jewish means
“Nothing that happens here is transcendental. It is just about who gets to live in and farm these hills.”
In the Jordan Valley, there is a vague tedium for we who do protective presence. We are not farmers, and I suspect I would be fairly useless at the tough manual labour these men and women do from dawn until dusk.
Once we have entertained the children, read our books, and drank enough caffeine to feel slightly buzzed, all that is left to do is talk.
My Hebrew is weak, and Arabic limited to basic conversation words, so I can only really talk properly with the one English speaker, an Israeli activist who comes here every week to support these Bedouin families.
He does not understand why international Jews care at all. “If I could forget this place, I would.”
True, it is a humanitarian catastrophe and a deep invasion of people’s basic right to life, but it is deeper than that.
We are contesting what being Jewish means. Is it these settlers, deploying the power of a large military to attack and displace the Palestinians? Is it the police officers who randomly arrest shepherds as an intimidation tactic? Or is it the ethical practices and God-fearing mentality we have developed over three thousand years?
“You (Diaspora Jews) think about us so much, but we don’t think about you at all. If anything, we have contempt for you, with all your bagels and tefillin.” (I have, indeed, brought my tefillin, and the gefilte fish I am eating look to him like weird hangovers from a shtetl past.) The whole business of our exilic life looks bizarre.
“You have to understand,” he says, “Israel is a modern European country, and like any modern European country, it hates Jews.”
I know what he means. Not, of course, the modern Israeli Jews. Not the army officers in my hostel who are sharing misogynistic stories of their sexploits. Jews like me, with our effeminate affinity for books and ideas.
Before starting work for Rabbis for Human Rights, my interlocutor had only heard of Reform Judaism as a punchline. In fact, in the context of Israeli society, where rabbis are normally seen giving blessing to bombing campaigns, even the concept of rabbis who stood up for human rights sounded like a joke.
In my own context in Britain, Judaism is so obviously a contested site. The debates about what antisemitism is are just as much debates about who is Jewish, who has the power to make pronouncements about it, and what being Jewish means in the context of the divisions at the heart of an imperial core.
In a way, holding onto Diasporic Judaism is a fundamentally conservative project. We are seeking to protect old institutions, like synagogues and Talmud study, from the unbearable weight of a modernity that sees no role for them.
Yet, even there, we are contesting what being Jewish means. Will it be complicit, for example, in the subjugation of women and silencing of queers, or will it be instrumental in their liberation? Will we be Britain’s best model minority who acquiesce to every part of nationalist capitalism, or will we be key to resisting it?
On Shabbat I hung out with an Israeli rabbinic student with whom I have quickly become friends. She is very active in the resistance and proudly part of the radical left. “Being Reform here is very edgy,” she tells me.
The idea of a feminist religion seems a contradiction in terms. Here, religion, state power, and patriarchy are synonymous. It is hard for most Israelis to imagine how faith could be counter-cultural.
Yet the Reform Jews exist in Jerusalem, where they demand a different definition of Judaism. On Saturday, they made havdallah outside the President’s residency before joining the protests against war. I have seen how their spiritual practices maximise Judaism’s emancipatory potential.
So there is a fundamental question, when we come to do Palestinian solidarity, about what being Jewish means.
And I worry that we are losing.
I do not feel any certainty that my Judaism – this collection of Diasporic religious practices rooted in struggles of oppressed people – will win against the forces of chauvinism.
So I think my Israeli friend is wrong. There is something transcendental happening here. Across borders, we Diaspora Jews and they Palestinians have been joined to each other. Neither intended it but we are connected.
And if they cannot survive colonisation, I do not know if we will either.
This is what Hashem of Hosts, the God of Israel, says to those in Diaspora who have been exiled from Jerusalem to Babylon: Build houses and live in them. Plant gardens and eat from their fruit. Take wives: have sons and daughters; multiply and do not decrease. Seek the peace of the city where I have scattered you. Pray to God on its behalf. In its peace, may you find peace. – Jeremiah 29
We need you here
Last night, Eid Alhad’lin spoke on Zoom to Rabbis for Human Rights from Masafer Yatta, and explained what was happening to his village.
The settlers have cut off water and electricity, demolished homes, and shot people.
I met them last week. Their leader gave a talk to European diplomats in Arabic, then a younger man explained the situation in English. An elderly woman clutched her cane and talked to the women about the sexual harassment she has experienced from settlers.
Not long after we left, the settlers shot them, apparently as reprisal for talking to internationals. The problem, however, was not that we had been there.
It was that we had left.
There was a time when the villagers in Umm al-Khair could call the police for support or rely on the army to stand in their way. Now, if the police come, they will fit the residents for crimes and arrest them. If the army come, it is more likely that they will shoot the villagers. The settlers, too, now have guns and military uniforms.
After the settlers had shot the Palestinians, it seems the army came back to shoot them some more. When ambulances came, settlers prevented them reaching the wounded. It was a wonder the ambulance came at all. Everything in the south Hebron Hills is now geared towards expanding Jewish territory and displacing Palestinians.
The only thing that is preventing greater violence and deeper ethnic cleansing is the presence of internationals and Israelis. While they are being watched, the settlers and the army hold back.
It is, by no means, a solution, but it is the only thing in the power of ordinary individuals.
In order for it to work, however, it needs 24/7 presence from human rights activists in every village. My time here has been quiet, mostly because the village we are supporting has that constant support, predominantly from retired Israelis.
Masafer Yatta has retained a strong international presence, but in the moments where they have been left unsupported, they have experienced dire crisis.
So where are all the internationals? When I talked to Saleh in Sheikh Jarrah, he shared what an outpouring of support they had received around 2008-2009 (when I first became politicised on the issue). But where are they now?
In theory, the entire area should be swamped by radicals and peaceniks. There are millions of tweets about the issue every day, and thousands of demonstrations worldwide. If even a fraction of the people who shared links on the Internet or marched in the big cities would come and do protective presence work, the situation here would look very different.
Come with Rabbis for Human Rights. You don’t have to be a rabbi. You just have to believe in human rights.
There are so many organisations doing this too, and all are struggling to recruit. Join women’s groups supporting the olive harvest. Come with the ISM. Come with the Jewish Centre for Non-Violence. Or Tzedek Torah. I don’t care. Find the group that works for you and get out here.
You can be any age. Plenty of the activists are either university students or retired people.
You don’t have to speak Hebrew or Arabic (though I recommend learning a little).
And, yes, it is dangerous, obviously. Not long before I came out, two Israeli activists were shot. You need to be realistic with yourself about what risks you can take and what it means to you.
But we really do need people.
The settlers have realised that, with fascists in the coalition government and the window of the war in Gaza, they have an unprecedented opportunity to destroy villages and get away with it.
You have the power to reverse that tide.
Get out here.
The Eternal One is with me; I will not be afraid. What can mere mortals do to me?
God is with me as my helper. I will see the downfall of those who hate. – Psalm 118
What can be remembered from rubble?
Until this morning, I had avoided the Old City. I am not sure why. I think there was some feeling of indignation in me; a certainty that there is nothing sacred about the Western Wall.
I come from a Liberal Jewish tradition that runs directly counter to such national religious architecture. The Diaspora is our permanent home; the synagogue is our replacement Temple; the Shabbat table is our everlasting altar to God.
I have prayed twice (I think) at the Kotel. It means going through body scanners and security checks through the army to stand underneath nationalist symbols surrounded by men. Nothing about it feels sacred.
This morning, however, I joined the other yeshiva bochers from CY and went down to the egalitarian section of the Kotel: Azarat Yisrael. There, there are no army checkpoints or flags. It looks more like the site of an archaeological dig. Propped up by scaffolding that snakes round towards the ancient site, it is a little oasis among ruins.
Ruins is exactly what they are. There is nothing polished about this section of wall. Broken rocks everywhere. Weeds growing in the nooks. Smashed up slabs. It looks like the site of a disaster, as it should.
On these liminal stones two thousand years ago, an ancient cult was destroyed because its adherents rebelled against a mighty empire. From then on, there was no more priesthood or ancient Israelite religion. The ruins are testament to all that was lost.
And out of that disaster came something new. Prayers replaced sacrifices; rabbis replaced priests; and the grand courtyards were replaced by storytelling.
Now the stones are a testament to the power of memory – how, by holding onto meaning, civilisations can endure beyond their physical structures.
Yesterday and Monday, I was back in the Jordan Valley doing protective presence with Bedouin families.
Their rubble is more recent than this.
Their rubble is the dirt tracks they take their goats down while settlers ride big cars down paved roads. Theirs is the ruins of their tents from settler invasions; the lack of running water while Israelis draw baths in villages above them. Theirs is the accumulating rubbish that nobody will come to collect.
I was slated in the Jewish Chronicle for signing a letter with the other rabbis that called this apartheid. What other word is there for it? What else can you call it? The only thing they have in common is the army, and their guns are aimed from the settlers towards the Palestinians.
The Bedouin have already had much of their culture reduced to rubble. Before the British imperialists arrived, they traversed the entire trans-Jordan, shifting their herds with the seasons. Then the people were walled in; confined to borders they’d not before known; deprived of the culture they had built.
What remains for them now is a rubble of their civilisation. A small enclave where their families can keep chickens. And even that is being taken away from them.
Across their land, settlers have planted Israeli flags. They are signs to remind them of their humiliation. They are only there as symbols that the Palestinians have been conquered, and will be conquered further.
Out of this destruction, they build their own semiotics, so that something of them cannot be destroyed. Kheffiyes wrapped around their heads. Necklaces with the historic lands bearing the Palestinian flag. Songs they teach their children: “I am a Palestinian; my blood is Palestinian.”
I realise now that we are not really here to prevent the destruction. That does not seem within the power of a few non-violent humanitarians. We are here to be witnesses.
We are here to see how a culture is being destroyed. We are here with a memory, which we have held since a Temple was broken two thousand years ago, that they cannot destroy a people entirely. They cannot destroy your spirit.
We are here to say: your lives are worth living and your culture worth defending.
We are here to assist in the building of memory, so that not everything can be destroyed.
May they remember, even in the rubble.
One who cries out over the past prays in vain. And if you are walking on the way and you hear a scream from the city and you say “may it be God’s will that such a scream does not come from my house” – that prayer was delivered in vain. – Berachot 54a
How many machine guns do you need in a synagogue?
A person shall not go out with a sword, nor a bow, nor a shield, nor a dagger, nor a spear. If one does, they are liable for sin. Rabbi Eliezer says: they are decorations for him. And the sages say: they are simply disgraceful, as the Torah says: “they shall beat their swords into ploughshares and their spears into pruning hooks; nation will not raise up sword against nation, nor will they learn war any more.” – Shabbat 63a
I wish the sages had the foresight to extend their prohibition to machine guns.
On Friday morning, I sat in a session learning how to lay tefillin with other queers at Kol HaNeshama synagogue in Jerusalem. It was a wonderful expression of LGBT leadership, with meaningful intention-setting and prayer. It felt truly special.
I found it hard to concentrate, and not just because my Hebrew is too poor to keep up. Just a few chairs away from me, a man was holding a gun larger than his torso, pointed towards the floor in front of him. I don’t know what type of gun this was, or what it can do, nor do I want to.
I asked a friend why so many men now carried guns. I had assumed it was a result of Ben Gvir handing out over 100,000 gun licenses since October 7th. In this case, however, the man was a military reservist, and had no choice but to keep his weapon on him at all times.
“We used to have a policy of no weapons at LGBT events, but it’s getting increasingly hard to enforce. There is a place in the city centre where you can leave your gun with the police for an hour, but people don’t do it any more. Once they feel the safety of holding it, they don’t want to let it go.”
When I came here for the first time, 15 years ago, the thing that struck me most was how many people had enormous weapons. Now, there are far more guns, and the people holding them look so much younger.
On the train from Tel Aviv last week, all the boys sitting around me had different types of guns. In the hostel where I am staying, a large family has come for a reunion. In this family, the women wear enormous beautiful headwraps and the men wear rifles like necklaces.
I prayed with Chabad this weekend. In every service and meal, I looked around: guns everywhere. Even these Orthodox, Shabbat-observant Jews were fully-armed.
The civilians have guns. The settlers have guns. The army have guns. It seems only the peace movement does not. There is, however, something powerful about standing with the believers holding nothing but faith.
When the sun went down, I once again joined the protests for a ceasefire and a hostage deal. The police were heavily armed and facing us. I was warned they might get violent. That threat has a very different resonance to in London, where police very rarely carry guns.
I long for the day when this entire region is disarmed and demilitarised. What will it be like when Jews can pray at the Kotel, Christians at the Holy Sepulchre, and Muslims on Al-Aqsa, when nobody has a single gun? How different will the prayers from this city sound when nobody has reason to fear being shot?
Some trust in chariots and some in horses, but we trust in the name of the Eternal One our God. – Psalm 20:7
Who are my people?
At a time when the community is suffering, one may not say: “I will go home, and eat, and drink, and be at peace in my soul.” – Talmud Taanit 11a
I began studying this sugya in the immediate aftermath of October 7th and the subsequent war on Gaza. It was evident that people were seriously suffering, and I felt that I could not just sit at home and be at peace in my soul.
No matter where I went, the war was on my mind. I thought that, if I came here, at least my mind and body would be more aligned.
But the sugya prompted a question I did not expect: who is my community? The question of suffering and how to respond seemed already self-answered, but whose suffering ought to concern me? Who were ‘my people’?
Perhaps there was a time when ‘the community’ was just the neighbourhood. Those who lived in close proximity shared in times of trouble. The people on my street might well share with me in some suffering – missed bin collections and sewage in the river – but this suffering was specific.
I found, sometimes, I would talk to my neighbours and realise they were not obsessing about Gaza. They maybe had not thought about it for weeks. They were my community, but they also were far away from it.
In that sense, the Jews were my community. No matter their politics, every Jew was stuck in the same place of fear. Over different things, with different prescriptions, but certainly with the same neurosis.
Yet, in the weeks following October 7th, I heard people in “my” community call to flatten Gaza, and watched Netanyahu’s government heed them. I was sent the most bellicose memes, hungry for war. Most chillingly, a one sentence text from a person I previously respected: “you can’t give human rights to people who aren’t human.” How could I say these were my people? How could I claim them as my community when our values were so misaligned?
At a Friday night dinner, a friend suggested thet our community should be all oppressed people of the world. Jews, he said, were not an ethnic category, but a political one, and anyone who suffered under the burden of injustice was one of us.
Another gently chided him: “it’s too easy to only associate ourselves with victims. It stops us thinking about all the complex ways we are complicit in oppression too,” she said. “We can be both, and we need to face the problems in our own community.”
I wondered if I would find my people here among the international left, with those striving against occupation and war. There are people whom I love greatly here. I see them, beaten down in body and spirit, weary from fighting against a world that may destroy them, and destroy all they care about.
I am here to join them in struggle, but when this month ends, I know that I will go back to my own home in England, and tend to my own garden, and eat the foods I am used to, and drink that diluted squash you can only get in British supermarkets.
But my soul will not be at peace.
Perhaps all of these people are my people. Perhaps none of them are. But I will suffer on with them anyway.
Whoever they are, I know my soul will not be at peace while any of them are hurting.
And anyone who suffers with the community has achieved merit and will live to see the consolation of the community.
Because of my Jewish friends
“And who occupied us first, before Israel?”
I am getting grilled on my understanding of Jerusalem’s history.
“Wait, how far back are we going?”
“Just before Israel, who was here?”
“The British.”
“Exactly. The British.”
The fact that I am a rabbi in kippah and tzitzit in this Palestinian man’s home is largely unremarkable. But the fact that I am British makes me circumspect.
Saleh, an activist in Sheikh Jarrah, wants to see if I actually know Britain’s colonial history and the role it played in shaping problems today.
Blessed is God, Creator of the Universe, who has not made me a stranger.
There is no way he could know this, but I come from a socialist family, and listing the crimes of every empire is a longstanding tradition of the dinner table. As he curses the indifference of Arab leaders and the ineffectiveness of diplomats, I am fondly reminded of my dad.
“I tell the diplomats: the shoes of one street activist are worth more than all of you put together.”
Blessed is God, Sovereign of the Universe, who supports every step a human being takes.
Saleh tells me his family’s story, getting out grainy photos going back decades of settler violence, police brutality, threats, and harm.
As he pulls out the photos, he occasionally stops on one and says “this is my Jewish friend.” He is talking about the Israeli activists from Free Jerusalem who turn up to protest against the settlers.
There are some in Sheikh Jarrah, like the al-Qurd family, who will not work with Israeli activists because they want to maintain their autonomy. But Saleh doesn’t see it this way. At every stage, he is eager to tell me that he hates nobody and respects the Jews.
“This is my Jewish friend. He was arrested trying to stop demolitions here.”
Blessed is God, Sovereign of the Universe, who frees all those who are imprisoned.
“This is my Jewish friend. She was shot and lost an eye defending Sheikh Jarrah. I was the first to visit her in the hospital. Her father came too. He used to be a settler and hated Arabs. After weeks of seeing me support his daughter and seeing what the occupiers did, he apologised and changed his mind completely. He told me he could now understand all the lies he had been told.”
Blessed is God, Sovereign of the Universe, who opens the eyes of those who cannot see.
It is remarkable that a racist could turn away from hate. It is more remarkable that such a man as Saleh would not feel it.
On either side of his home, there are settlers. At the back, from behind barbed wire, settlers throw rocks at his family. At the front is another house, filled up with Israeli flags and security infrastructure, where settlers live who have told him they want to burn him alive, just like they did to the Dawabsheh family in Duma.
Blessed is God, Creator of the Universe, who lifts up those bent low.
“After October 7th, I had to stop doing the protests. Not for me, but because of my Jewish friends. Since Smotrich, everyone has machine guns. I cannot stand to see someone die because of me. I am ready to die. I have been to jail 25 times. I can endure anything. But I cannot put my Jewish friends in danger any more.”
Blessed is God, Creator of the Universe, who gives strength to the weary.
“I do not hate any Jew, or anyone for being British. I hate the people who are trying to steal my house. Whoever it was, I would try to stop them. I have to have faith in God. I know I have not committed sins, and God knows my heart, and I know God will be with me in the end. We just have to keep our eyes on the future, always looking towards the future.”
He reminds me so much of my dad. And if someone was trying to steal my family’s homes, I would hate them too. I do not know if I would be as compassionate as Saleh. I do not know if I could do that.
Blessed is God, Creator of the Universe, who wipes away sleep from my eyes and slumber from my eyelids.
A commitment to myself
In my early 20s, when university friends first came back from the West Bank with stories of what they had seen, I did not listen as I should have done.
One friend described the death of a child and sitting consoling her mother and said, “There’s just not enough sad in the world for how sad it is.”
I thought, “yes, yes, I know, let’s get onto talking about action we will take and what our solutions are and how we theorise all this.”
I feel thoroughly embarrassed at how callous I was. I feel deep shame and a need to make amends.
I understand better now why I was wrong.
Yesterday, we went to the ruins of Umm al-Khair to show solidarity. There were not enough activists there to keep a permanent protective presence.
So, as we were in the car on the way to a peace conference, we received news that the villagers had been shot by settlers. Apparently, it was a “revenge” attack on them for daring to show their devastation to internationals.
I listened to speeches with grand promises of peace, equality, and coexistence.
Then, in the car on the way back, we heard that the army had also gone in to shoot at the Bedouin too, and destroyed one of their temporary structures.
The people in Umm al-Khair now have had their homes, water, and electricity destroyed. And they have at least two elderly women in hospital. And these were people I met and looked in the eye and wished for God to give them strength. These were friends of friends with full lives.
After the conference, we had no discussions about the speeches or the ideas. There was nothing to talk about. Only Umm al-Khair. Only getting as many internationals and Israelis there as possible. Only doing everything possible to stop them dying.
It is a small piece of everything that is happening here. How can we talk ideologies when people are dying imminently? We may waste our entire time coming up with solutions while entire families, cultures, and livelihoods are destroyed.
This is my promise to myself. I will not be part of that.
I will never, for a moment, let myself think that ideologies matter more than human lives.
I will always prioritise people first.
Because there is not enough sad in the world, and I wish I had seen that sooner.
Sim Lev 