Now Is Not the Time To Be Confused

In August 2014, it felt like a confusing time to be a young, progressive American with Israeli citizenship. Israel was striking Gaza from the air and on the ground and Hamas was sending rockets into the cities of Ashkelon, Be’er Sheva, and Ashdod. The challenge was to reconcile my fierce opposition to the Israeli occupation with the hope that Hamas’ rockets wouldn’t destroy more of Israel, the place where I was born and where most of my relatives live.

Today, it is no longer confusing. In March of this past year, a 20-year-old Israeli soldier named Elor Azaria was videotaped fatally shooting a 21-year-old Palestinian named Abed al-Fattah al-Sharif. Al-Sharif and another 21-year-old Palestinian, Ramzi Qasrawi Tamimi, had stabbed a different Israeli soldier in the West Bank city of Hebron. While Tamimi had been shot and killed immediately, Al-Sharif had been shot but was still alive, lying motionless on the ground. The video is easily accessible on the internet: you see Azaria taking a few paces and raising his gun to shoot before a van passes and reveals al-Sharif bleeding from the head.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu publicly disapproved of Azaria's actions, then promptly called Azaria’s family to offer sympathy. On January 3, 2017, Azaria was found guilty of manslaughter by a military tribunal, and the Israeli public was set aflame. Elor could have been any of our children, went one refrain. Protestors outside the courtroom made violent threats out loud and on social media against the judges who had delivered the verdict. Other Israelis were taken aback and pleasantly surprised that the court would convict a young Israeli soldier for gratuitously killing an already wounded Palestinian; still, they anticipated Azaria’s sentence would be relatively mild.

I arrived in Israel the next day for a short visit. With my elementary-school-level Hebrew, I slowly read through an op-ed published in the daily Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz. It was written by the mothers of two young women who refused to carry out their mandatory army service and instead served 44 days in jail. The mothers wanted the Israeli public to consider that their daughters, too, could have been everybody’s daughters. Their daughters had refused “to join the occupation’s cycle of collective victimhood.” The mothers added that, though it wasn’t often mentioned, Azaria was also a victim of the occupation.

Granting Azaria victimhood seemed to draw a false equivalence between his deliberate and inexcusable crime, with the crime of refusing to serve in an occupying army. Calling Azaria a victim also came too close to absolving him of responsibility for his actions. But while I refused to justify his actions, I did know that Azaria was one of thousands of young people who are conscripted to the Israeli army and have grown up with the understanding that military occupation and oppression of another people are acceptable and legitimate. These young people are not just bad apples, zealots of the far-right or far-left; they are products and heirs of an entrenched and monstrous system.

It is the same system that continues to build Jewish settlements on land where Palestinian Arabs are living. Israel continues to overtake the dwindling areas of land that Palestinians call home. “Israel approves settlement homes following Trump inauguration” read a headline on BBC news on Sunday. And then yesterday: “Israel approves plans for 2,500 new settlement homes in West Bank.” It is chilling but not surprising to see how quickly Trump’s presidency has facilitated the construction of even more illegal settlements.

That the settlements are illegal according to international law is not even the point. It is a fact to which effect the UN has passed multiple resolutions since 1979. Obama’s decision to abstain last month from a UN vote declaring as much was taken by many as a strong rejection of Netanyahu and of Israel, but this is only a reflection of how entangled and morally timid the United States has been regarding the condition of Palestinians throughout my life. As Americans who have been living in this hall of mirrors for so long, where the Israeli government is to be defended no matter what, we have lost track of what is right.

Several days after the Azaria verdict, the former head of the Israeli Supreme Court (2006-12), Dorit Beinisch, agreed to her first ever television appearance to speak about the threats made against the judges who convicted Azaria. A red line had been crossed, Beinisch said. When asked whether claims about the current court leaning to the left politically had any merit, Beinisch responded by stating that one of the worst disasters now afflicting Israel, is that everything relating to basic values is automatically labeled as leftist.

A sense of right and wrong, of decency and dignity, of justice and the common good, is slipping through our fingers. Now you see what we’re going through, several friends said to me in Israel. There are so many differences between Israel and the United States that comparing the two can seem misguided. But it is worth noting, right now, that the nationalism and nativism, the repression of dissent and exaltation of the military, the distortion of facts and disregard for a basic morality that treats all people as equally important—it is all very familiar.

The night after I left Tel Aviv to return to New York, several hundred people, many of them Israeli-Americans, gathered in solidarity with the march that millions around the world would join the following day. With echoes of the march that I attended on Saturday in New York still ringing in my ears, I hear my Israeli friends, those who have grown up breathing and living the occupation, more clearly. They usually speak softly because nowadays, they tell me, you have to be careful of what you say in Israel. But they will not be silenced. They are people who give and work in their daily lives, through art and education, through acts of compassion and solidarity, towards a future society that they would be able to stand by. And just because they may be a minority does not mean that they are confused. Now is not the time to be confused. Now is the time to come together and resist in every way we can—through words, through care, and through action.