Thoughts on the Michigan Synagogue Attack

This week’s Zoom call will be at our regular time, Friday at 1 PM Eastern. Our guest will be Diana Buttu, a Palestinian lawyer and political analyst based in Israel. Since this war began, I’ve struggled to understand why most Israeli Jews support it. I discussed this last week with the Iranian, Jewish, and Israeli writer and translator Orly Noy. But sometimes, the people who best understand a society are those who live within it as outsiders. It’s that experience of marginality, of seeing things from below, that often animates the insights of Black writers in the US and long animated the insights of Jewish writers in Europe. That’s why I’m turning to Diana, a Palestinian citizen of Israel, to help understand Jewish Israeli society in this awful moment. She’s someone I’ve been learning from for a long time. And I’m grateful to have the chance to do so again this Friday. Please join us.

Things to Read

(Maybe this should be obvious, but I link to articles and videos I find provocative and significant, not necessarily ones I entirely agree with.)

In Jewish Currents (subscribe!), Alex Kane explains AIPAC’s attack on liberal Zionist politicians.

Greg Sargent on how the Iran War is hastening the end of the Trump coalition.

An insightful discussion with Esfandyar Batmanghelidj on the American Prestige podcast about how this war might change the long term trajectory of the Gulf countries.

Last week I spoke to Bob Wright (whose newsletter I strongly recommend) about Israel, antisemitism and this war.

On March 26, Jason Stanley will speak with Nikole Hannah-Jones in Brooklyn about his book, Erasing History.

Appearances

On March 17, I’ll be speaking at George Washington University.

On March 30, I’ll be speaking at the State University of New York at Stony Brook.

See you on Friday,

Peter

VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:

I want to say two things about this terrible attack on a synagogue in Michigan. The first is that no matter what Israel does, no matter how immoral or brutal or horrifying, it doesn’t justify attacking a synagogue or justifying attacking American Jews in any way. There’s a basic principle here. The principle is that Americans are not responsible for the actions of foreign governments or foreign organizations just because they share a religion, an ethnic, national ancestry, a race, with that state or foreign organization.

So, by that principle, it is just as wrong to target a synagogue because you’re upset at what Israel did, as it was when people attacked Chinese Americans because they were angry at the Chinese government during COVID, or when people attack Muslim Americans because they’re angry at Al-Qaeda, or ISIS, or Hamas, or Iran, or as when the United States government itself held Japanese Americans responsible and put them in internment camps because of what the Empire of Japan had done in Pearl Harbor. These things are all fundamentally wrong.

And—not but, but and—Synagogues in the United States should take down the signs that many have on their lawn that say, ‘We stand with Israel.’ They should take them down, because those signs make the congregants less safe, and because they are immoral. Because they create a climate of… they make the Congress less safe, because they encourage exactly the same conflation between Israel and American Jews that we must resist, and because in this moment, doing so is immoral.

Now, if it were morally correct for our synagogues to say in this moment, ‘We stand with Israel,’ then I think you could make an argument that even though those signs may make the congregants less safe, that it would be legitimate to do so. You could say that it’s even courageous for Jews in a synagogue to come together and say: we’re going to take a moral action that’s going to create some risk to our safety because it’s the right thing to do.

But how could one possibly argue that this is the right thing to do in this moment? That it is morally right to put yourself at risk by conflating yourself with the Israeli government when the Israeli government is doing the things that it is doing now.

Let’s do a thought experiment. Let’s imagine that after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, that the Russian Orthodox churches in the United States, that they had signs saying ‘We stand with Russia.’ By putting those signs out there, they would be putting, to some degree, the people inside those churches at risk, because there would be people who were furious about what Russia had done in Ukraine, that might take out their anger against people in those churches. But beyond that, it would be immoral to say, given what Russia has done in Ukraine, for a church to say, ‘We stand with Russia.’

And what Israel has done over the past few years, to Palestinians, and now, also, in Lebanon and Iran, is worse than what Russia has done in Ukraine. It’s worse. Let’s just look, for starters, at the numbers. The best numbers we have suggest that since the war that began in 2022 with Russia’s invasion—expanded invasion, because they first invaded in 2014—that perhaps 100,000-150,000 Ukrainians have been killed, which is horrifying.

In Gaza, the best numbers we have is that perhaps 100,000 have been killed by Israel, directly and indirectly. So, that’s a slightly smaller number. But remember, Ukraine has 40 million people. There are only about 2.2 million people in Gaza. It’s a much, much smaller area, and yet almost as many people have been killed. The percentage of people in Gaza who have been killed is 4-5% of the population. In Ukraine, it’s perhaps a quarter of a percent.

The oppression and the violence that Israel has committed against the people in Gaza also is much older, long predates what Russia has done in Ukraine under Vladimir Putin. The people in Gaza are there because their families were expelled from what’s now Israel in 1948. Gaza has been under Israeli occupation since 1967, and that occupation never ended, contrary to what you often hear in American Jewish spaces. Because even when Israel withdrew its soldiers and settlers in 2005, it maintained virtually all control over people and goods coming in and out of Gaza by air, land, and sea. Yes, with some assistance at the Rafah crossing with Egypt, but even there, Israel had a lot of control of what goes in and out.

So, Israel has killed many, many more people in Gaza than Russia has done in Ukraine. And the oppression of Palestinians in Gaza and beyond long predates Russia’s invasion in 2014, and then expanded invasion in 2022. And that doesn’t even include now what Israel has been doing over the last couple of weeks. Estimates suggest that Israel has killed 850 people in Lebanon, including perhaps 100 children. The U.S. and Israel have killed, estimates are, about 1,300 civilians in Iran. These attacks on the oil facilities have created this toxic black rain that will have health and environmental consequences for years, maybe even decades.

Now, I am very, very familiar that the Israeli government and its supporters have all kinds of justifications for all of these actions. And frankly, Vladimir Putin has his own justifications, and I think they’re all fundamentally wrong. They’re all fundamentally wrong. Because no justification, nothing justifies the targeting of, the mass killing of civilians, especially when you are targeting them, as Israel has targeted them in Gaza, for instance, when it shut off food, fuel, and water at various intervals after October 7th, or when you attacked oil refineries that you know are going to have these toxic environmental effects.

So, if it’s wrong to put out a sign, for a church to put out a sign that says ‘We stand with Russia,’ surely it’s also wrong. For a synagogue to say in this moment, ‘We stand with Israel.’ And it’s surely wrong to put yourself, your congregants, at risk for something that is also immoral. So, what could the synagogues say on these signs, on their lawns instead? They could say, ‘We stand with Israelis and Palestinians.’

Or they could do something more radical than that. They could say: ‘This is a house of Torah.’ This is a house of Torah. The reason I say this would be a more radical act is it would be a response, it would be a re-centering of Torah in American Judaism. What has happened in so many of the synagogues, as exemplified by the ‘We Stand with Israel’ side outside, is that Israel has eclipsed Torah as the object of veneration, the object of worship inside these religious holy spaces.

I say worship and veneration because when the synagogues put the sign out that says, ‘We stand with Israel,’ it’s not like they then reconsider that sign every year or a couple years based on what Israel’s doing. Oh, we stand with Israel, we don’t stand with Israel because we think Israel is acting in some moral or immoral way. You know, Israel’s human rights organizations have now just said that it’s committing apartheid and genocide. Maybe we should reconsider that sign. No, that’s not the way this operates. Because it’s not actually a statement of political support. It’s more like a statement of worship, that fundamental to our Judaism is our belief in this state, no matter what the state does. That’s what I mean by worship rather than mere support.

And replacing that with a sign that says ‘This is a home for Torah’ would be a moving away from this idolatrous centering of the state as an object of unconditional good, right? Unconditional value, irrespective of how it treats the people inside of that state, and a reassertion that what is at the center of this synagogue, what’s at the center of Judaism is Torah, is our religious texts that are far, far older and deeper than the creation of the state of Israel in 1948. And what this synagogue stands for is the study of those texts as a way to try to understand how we as individuals and how the Jewish people should live, right? And that would be a radical act in this moment because, in so many American Jewish spaces, Torah has been eclipsed by the idolatry of the worship of the state.

And now, now we see not only that that form of idolatry is making American Jews less safe, but it’s sapping the fundamental, moral core of what these synagogues are supposed to be about. Torah speaks in many, many voices. I don’t want to sanitize it. I don’t want to suggest that there are not horrifying things in Jewish religious tradition. But the best of our religious tradition suggests that by studying these texts, we can become more sensitive to the value of all human life, that we can become more ethically refined, and we can have a deeper understanding of the preciousness of the people with whom we share the world.

When you put out a sign that says, and keep it there, ‘We stand with Israel,’ even after something that has been called a genocide by Israel’s own leading human rights organization, B’Tselem, and the International Association of Genocide Scholars, it seems to me you are contributing to a diminution, a denigration of our moral, ethical refinement.

If a synagogue wants to have a conversation about whether it’s moral to have this sign, ‘We stand with Israel,’ on its lawn right now, I would suggest do so after you have invited someone from Gaza to speak to you. Do so after you’ve invited someone whose family is now in Lebanon or in Iran under these bombs falling on them. Listen to what they’ve gone through, and then ask yourself, is this the best message that we can advertise to the world? ‘We stand with Israel’ in this moment? Or might a statement like ‘This is a home for Torah’ be a better way of understanding what it means to be a Jew in this moment.

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