By Quincey Fireside
Area of the Gaza Strip: 140.9 square miles. Approximately twice the size of Washington DC, and
almost exactly the size of Las Vegas, Nevada.
Population of the Gaza Strip: 2.2 million.
Death toll in Gaza since October 7, 2023, as of November 27, 2023, at 1 pm.: 14,854. (Times of
India, 2023)
Number of children killed in Gaza since October 7, 2023, as of November 27, 2023, at 1 pm.:
5,850. (Times of India, 2023)
Average number of bombs dropped on the Gaza Strip daily since October 7, 2023, as of
November 27, 2023, at 1 pm.: 1,000. Devastation is equivalent to the detonation of two nuclear
bombs. (Duggal et al., 2023)
I have been politically active for my entire life. I grew up going to protests and graduated
to organizing my own in high school. In 2020 I, alongside friends and co-conspirators, organized
a several-hundred-person march for Black Lives Matter and the funding of an intersectional
public education curriculum for the Baltimore City Public School System. My point is that I am
no stranger to outrage, no stranger to civil disobedience as a means of expressing anger, no
stranger to protest. My grief has always been outward. It has always been oriented, calculated,
planned out. It has always been a tool.
Today and for the last month and 20 days, my grief is a loss of words. It is starting
sentences over and over and over because I do not know how to use the English language to
accurately describe how painful the simple act of listening to the Up First news podcast every
morning as I have since I was 17 has become. I am stunned. I am thrown. I am so far removed
from Palestine, so far removed from those who have died, those who have been injured, those
who are still alive, and yet my name and my identity are being used to justify their slaughter, and
I cannot function. I cannot think about anything other than the faces I have seen, caked in dust,
broken up only by tear streaks. The bodies I have seen covered in their own blood and the blood
of others. The mothers, the fathers, the sons, the daughters, the friends, the wives, the husbands,
the community members heaving up and down up and down up and down and wailing in a way
that has permanently altered my ability to sleep, to listen, to breathe. A father holding his son’s
body in two separate bags. A girl, on a gurney, asking calmly if she was being taken to a
cemetery, and a man following her, promising her that she is alive and beautiful, “like the moon.”
A woman, teeth lined with braces, lying on a sheet on the ground under a tarp, sobbing, in the
rain.
I am asked, over and over and over again to call Hamas a terrorist organization and to
categorically and in no uncertain terms condemn them, not only for the attacks they committed
on October 7, 2023, but also for merely existing. I am asked not to call Palestinian resistance a
fight for freedom or liberation. I am asked to believe that my own life, as a Jewish person, is in
jeopardy if Israel does not exist. I am asked to back “my people” in this fight. I am asked either
to ignore the murder of Palestinian people or to understand that it is necessary in preventing
another Holocaust.
I cannot do those things. I cannot condemn Hamas or call them terrorists, regardless of
their status as a recognized terrorist group on a global political scale. I cannot do anything other
than empathize with Palestinian freedom fighters, violent and non-violent alike. I cannot center
myself as a white Jewish person with no connection to Israel or the Middle East more broadly. I
cannot ignore slaughter and I cannot call it necessary. I cannot believe that the only thing
standing in the way of another Holocaust is the violent occupation and systematic cleansing of
Palestinian land and the Palestinian people. I cannot let this be done in my name and I cannot
allow the Torah and the Jewish faith as a whole to be bastardized by Zionists who will have you
believe that being Jewish is about being scared and not about love or care for the global
community.
I know the Jewish mitzvot back to front. For the uninformed gentile, mitzvot are a list of
ethical responsibilities that Jews have in order to be faithful to G*d. Over the last month and 20
days, I have re-read the mitzvot over and over and over again, trying to understand what
religious justification could possibly exist for the acts of terror being perpetrated by the Israeli
government toward the Palestinian people. I cannot find them. What I can find, are these:
- Do not murder (Exodus 20:23)
- Do not oppress the weak (Exodus 22:21)
- Do not take revenge (Leviticus 19:18)
- Do not hold a grudge (Leviticus 19:18)
- Do not move a boundary marker to steal someone’s property (Deuteronomy 19:14)
- Do not covet or scheme to acquire someone’s possessions (Exodus 20:14)
- Offer peace terms to civilians while holding siege and, if those terms are accepted, hold
their lives in alignment with the Torah (Deuteronomy 20:10) - Do not stand idly by while someone’s life is in danger (Leviticus 19:16)
- The land (Israel or occupied Palestine) cannot be sold indefinitely because it belongs not
to the Jews but to G*d (Leviticus 25:23)
Those mitzvot are clear but are often manipulated and corrupted by Zionists in order to justify
the violence being committed by the state of Israel, so let us look back in time, at Jewish history.
You will sometimes see other anti-Zionist Jews refer to Gaza as a quasi-concentration camp, but
I have rhetoric-based issues with that particular comparison. I think it is more appropriate to call
Gaza a ghetto. Gaza bears an unsettling similarity to Nazi-era ghettos, especially but not
exclusively the most well-known Warsaw ghetto. (Holocaust Center for Humanity)
- Both were incredibly overcrowded. The Warsaw ghetto had 400,000 Jews living in 1.3
square miles of space (Holocaust Centre for Humanity, n.d.). Gaza has 2.2 million living
on 140.9 square miles. (Moriarty, Berkowitz, 2023)
- Both had the flow of resources like food, water, and fuel controlled by their oppressor or
the occupying force. Israel, until the recent closure of Gaza’s borders, restricts the flow of
food into Gaza based on their calculation of the necessary caloric intake of every Gazan
civilian. (Associated Press, 2012) - Both experience(d) incredibly high rates of death compared to surrounding areas.
(Mousa, 2023) - Both have/had their population forcibly segregated from the outside world and were, as
such, subjected to extreme violence with little if any means of escape. (Al Jazeera, 2023) - Both are/were heavily guarded by the oppressing or occupying forces. Al Jazeera, 2023)
How can I, or any person (Jewish or not), insist that this pain, this suffering, this death,
this destruction, this trauma has to exist? How can I or any Jewish person allow it to happen in
the name of our faith and our safety? I am not safer or at lower risk of being the victim of an
antisemitic hate crime because Israel exists. I am not safer or at lower risk of experiencing an
antisemitic hate crime because Gazan men women and children are dead and dying.
How can I, or any person (Jewish or not), condemn violent resistance against genocidal
occupying forces? How can I or any other Jewish person fight to continue oppressing the weak,
to continue allowing the rape, murder, torture, starvation, imprisonment, humiliation,
kidnapping, and ethnic cleansing of Palestinian people to be committed in my name?
The answer is simple: I cannot. I am not a fierce advocate for a free and liberated
Palestine in spite of my faith, I am a fierce advocate for a free and liberated Palestine because of
my faith. I am fighting for Palestinian liberation with every breath in my body because I cannot
sit idly by and allow the decimation of an entire people to happen, especially not in my name.
References
Al Jazeera. (2023, November 27). Israel-Hamas war live. Al Jazeera.
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/liveblog/2023/12/4/israel-gaza-war-live-israel-expandsground-attack-in-southern-gaza
Associated Press. (2012, October 17). Israel used ‘calorie count’ to limit Gaza food during
blockade, critics claim. The Guardian.
https://theguardian.com/world/2012/oct/17/israeli-military-calorie-limit-gaza
Duggal, Hanna. Hussein, Mohammed. Asrar, Shakeeb. (2023, November 9). Israel’s attacks on
Gaza: The weapons and scale of destruction. Al Jazeera.
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/longform/2023/11/9/israel-attacks-on-gaza-weapons-and
-scale-of-destruction
Holocaust Center for Humanity. 4.0 OVERVIEW: GHETTOS & CAMPS.
https://www.holocaustcenterseattle.org/ghettos-camps-overview
Moriarty, Dylan. Berkowitz, Bonnie. (2023, October 17). Visualizing the size of Gaza City
compared with U.S. cities. Washington Post.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2023/10/17/gaza-size-population-comparison/
Mousa, Aseel. (2023, October 27). Displaced Palestinians in overcrowded UN schools face
outbreak of disease. Al Jazeera.
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/10/27/displaced-palestinians-in-overcrowded-un-s
chools-face-outbreak-of-disease
Times of India. (2023, November 24). Over 14,800, including 5,850 children, killed in Gaza:
Hamas health authorities. India Times.
https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/world/middle-east/over-14800-including-5850-childr
en-killed-in-gaza-hamas-health-authorities/articleshow/105462994.cms?from=mdr
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