OPEN LETTER TO THE PEOPLE OF WESTCHESTER, THE JEWISH COMMUNITY AND THE ADL
Dear All,
In a recent issue of its “Anti-Semitism Briefing” on WESPAC, the ADL describes WESPAC as an organization that does good in the world, serving to support equity and social justice and that stands against injustice anywhere and everywhere. In describing WESPAC, the ADL article states:
“Today, WESPAC aims to ‘give a human face to those who would otherwise be unrecognized victims of war, injustice and environmental degradation’ and links the Israeli-Palestinian conflict directly with issues of concern such as criminal justice reform and police accountability, immigrant protection, safe housing, food and climate justice and solidarity with indigenous peoples in the U.S. Board chair Howard Horowitz says the foundation “provides outreach and community to individual groups and leaders in civic and religious organizations in Greater Westchester’ that work on these issues, which he argues are ‘core to the Jewish community here in Westchester.’”
At the same time, the ADL article describes WESPAC’s position on the tragic events of October 7 as “inflammatory” and “disturbing.” According to the ADL article:
WESPAC initially condemned the October 7, 2023, Hamas-led attacks in southern Israel, though it says the terror massacre, in which some 1,200 were killed and over 250 were taken hostage, had “context.” An October 10, 2023 statement, posted to WESPAC’s website by Khader, said the assault “follows months and years and decades of constant violence, pogroms, expulsions and other manifestations of apartheid inflicted on Palestinians in the West Bank and Jerusalem.”
WESPAC said it supports “without reservation all nonviolent resistance to apartheid” and “refuse[s] to be labeled as anti-Semitic for opposing Israel’s apartheid policies of supremacy and separation.”
I, as a Jew, stand behind WESPAC, its mission and its positions, including its core principle of non-violence. WESPAC has taken a principled position against Hamas’s violent actions on October 7.
WESPAC has also taken a principled position against more than 75 years of Israeli violence and actions against Palestinians. WESPAC’s position is neither disturbing nor inflammatory as any person can readily see.
In contrast, the ADL’s rhetoric is at once disturbing and inflammatory.
According to the ADL, “Zionism (is) the foundational ideology of the Jewish state.” As a Jew, that makes me—and a growing number of Jews at this critical historical moment —profoundly uncomfortable. Is Zionism thus the foundational ideology behind apartheid and white supremacy in Palestine? Is it behind the Nakba, which led to the displacement of 750,000 Palestinians? Is Zionism the foundational ideology behind the building of walls, the confiscation of homes, the closures, the pogroms, the displacement, the destruction of bookshops in the West Bank, and the assault on a Palestinian filmmaker? Is Zionism the foundational ideology behind the genocide being committed in Gaza, and behind the ongoing displacement of two million human beings to make way for a “Zone of Interest”? If so, it is profoundly anti-Semitic—a trope and a blood libel worse than any other I can think of—to claim, as the ADL does, that Zionism is an “inherent’” part of being Jewish?
Why do we think so many Jewish students on campuses around the world—those who were raised on liberal values, on the separation of church and state, on Holocaust remembrance—have been raising their voices against the death and destruction of Palestine and Palestinians? And why also against Zionism, though many were raised on it? Perhaps they feel, as I do, the dissonance between the Jewish values we were raised on and the actions of the Israeli government in the name of Zionism. I feel enormous discomfort and dismay as the Jewish star is waved in support of Israel’s actions in Gaza and the West Bank. I am deeply disturbed observing the Star of David flying in Arab neighborhoods over homes and neighborhoods in Jerusalem forcibly confiscated from Palestinian families and given to Jewish settlers. I am flabbergasted when told it is impossible that true democracy can exist in Israel-Palestine with all people living as equals from the river to the sea. As an American Jew, I find the claim that democracy is incompatible with Judaism to be profoundly and perversely anti-Semitic.
I ask of the ADL: Given the enormous violence perpetrated on Palestinians, how is it possible to consider the practice of Zionism in Israel as consistent with the struggle for racial, economic, immigrant, LGBTQA, gender, and climate justice, causes the ADL acknowledges are “important,”?
This is a legitimate question being openly discussed at WESPAC. WESPAC supports those who ask such human questions. Our questions and actions about Palestine and Israel are consistent with the struggle for justice in the world, in the US, in New York and in Westchester. WESPAC wholeheartedly embraces and welcomes members of the Jewish community to find comfort with us and to re-claim their heritage from those who insist that Zionism, as we see it practiced today, is an inherent part of Jewish identity, and who attempt to discredit, intimidate, and silence those who disagree.
I call on the ADL, Hillel and any other organization that claims to speak on behalf of Jews or Jewish students to stop using Jews and stop using accusations of anti-Semitism as a shield behind which to target Palestinians and those who speak up against the crimes being perpetrated by Israel with full US support. It is a shanda that the ADL claims to represent Jews while it (the ADL) and groups like it are complicit with and active supporters of the assault on human rights, academic freedom, and free speech in the name of fighting anti-Semitism. It is a great irony that the ADL cries anti-Semitism at students and professors who speak up on behalf of Palestinians facing extermination, leaving actual anti-Semites and anti-Semitism protected, hidden from view. It is deeply painful and counter to Holocaust memory that the ADL claims to represent Jews while it stands witness to and supports a powerful regime that demonizes, deports en masse, and engages in (ICE) raids on college students and professors who speak up for Palestinians and against ethnic cleansing and genocidal violence.
Now, more than ever, the safety and continuity of the Jewish people depends on the liberation of Palestine. Any rigorous reading of Jewish history necessarily leads one to conclude that nationalism and ethnonationalism culminating in Nazism and the Holocaust have meant death and destruction for the Jewish people. Over the millennia, going back to the prophets and Rabbis of yore, nationalism was anathema to Jewishness. Nationalism has cost Jews their lives. It is now costing us our spiritual and ethical future. To step back from the dark side of ethnonationalism, let us heed the call of our young people who say, “not in our name.” They are showing us what it means to be Jewish.
Let us remember history. Let us not forget. I close with excerpts from a letter I wrote to the Israel Action Committee of Temple Israel of New Rochelle on the occasion of Israel’s massacre of Palestinians at the Gaza fence during the March of Return seven years ago in 2018:
Today is one of the most tragic days in the history of the Jewish people. It is time to “break the silence,” to invoke the Israeli soldier organization, Breaking the Silence. When will we stand up, as human beings, as a committee and as a Temple, to condemn the massacre of Palestinians on the Gaza border? The dictionary definition of massacre is “an indiscriminate and brutal slaughter of people.” That is what occurred and is occurring. We can never say we did not know. If we say we hold Jewish values, we will stand up and be counted and proclaim that we were strangers in the land of Egypt, we were slaughtered in the Holocaust, and we do unto others as we would have them do unto us.
We, as Jews who remember the Holocaust and the victimization of the Jewish people, stand in solidarity with Palestinians, the new Jews. If we do not stand up and say no to such violence, we are complicit in murder, plain and simple.
As Jews, we need to stand up as Jews and reclaim our heritage. We are Americans who acknowledge and memorialize the genocide of native Americans. We memorialize and mourn the legacy of slavery and Jim Crow—most recently with the National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, Alabama. Now we must acknowledge and atone for the expulsion, oppression, and killing of Palestinians over the past 70 years. We must, as Jews, teach the Nakba in our religious and Hebrew schools, with the understanding that Nakba denial is no different than Holocaust denial. We would not make peace with those who deny the Holocaust and makes teaching its memory illegal. We should expect no different from Palestinians whose history is denied, whose curriculum is deemed illegal, and whose story is buried under the trees planted by the Jewish National Fund for which we, as American children, put pennies in the pushka. As I observed on a recent visit to Jerusalem, “Palestine” as a place where Jews lived before the Holocaust, is willfully erased—even in Yad Vashem. In addition to the four billion dollars per year in military aid that the US provides to Israel—funds for the weapons of death and massacre in Gaza—there is also the matter of our monies given to UJA, JNF and Israel Bonds that go directly to the settlement enterprise that displaces Palestinians and defies international law.
And so WESPAC Foundation will stay true to its decades-long mission to support the struggle for justice, equal rights and human dignity for all the inhabitants of Israel/Palestine, a purpose that is interconnected with our work on criminal justice reform and police accountability, food justice work, fair housing, climate justice and safe renewable energy, immigrant protection, solidarity with Indigenous peoples, and seeing an end to militarism and drone warfare.
Our futures are intertwined.
Howard Horowitz
Board Chair, WESPAC Foundation
New Rochelle, NY
