The Jews of Conscience

Before the State of Israel was founded in 1948, and since its 60-year history, the Jews of Conscience have existed. They were opposed to what was to come and are opposed to what is happening now. Over time, their number across the globe, especially within the very state they hold citizenship to, has grown significantly. They are found in academia, in art, and in media. They are ex-Knesset politicians and even ex-IOF soldiers. They are moms and dads, students & activists, religious & secular. And they come with one goal in mind: the dismantlement of the Apartheid system in the State of Israel and freedom for the Palestinian people.



Hundreds of thousands of Jews across the world have held countless demonstrations denouncing the state of Israel’s historical track record in Palestine. The words “Not in our Name” define the very character of their struggle, as they recognize and condemn the injustices taking place on the Palestinians.


As early as the 1920s, the secular nature of the Zionist ideology was contrarian to the Orthodox Jewish groups living in Palestine at the time. Comprising no more than 10% of the total population, Jews living in Palestine lived peacefully with the Christian and Muslim Arabs, co-existing in the same neighborhoods, and identified themselves as part of the cultural, religious, and ethnic framework of the Holy Land. As political Zionism emerged from European Jewry, there was even a Canaanite movement led by the Jewish poet Yonatan Ratosh in the 1930s and 1940s, who argued that the potential term "Israeli" should be a “new pan-ethnic nationality” – and not one that differentiates between Jew and Gentile.


In 1982, the late Israel Shahak – former president of the Israeli League for Human and Civil Rights – translated Oded Yinon’s “A Strategy for Israel in the Nineteenth Century”; an essay strategizing Zionism’s real territorial aspirations in the Middle East (Eretz Israel or Greater Israel). In his personal forward he writes what he believes is ultimately “the accurate and detailed plan of the present Zionist regime for the Middle East which is based on the division of the whole area into small states, and the dissolution of all the existing Arab states”. As he compared Israel to Nazi Germany in his writings, Shahak was labeled an anti-Semite by the Anti-Defamation League but hailed as 'the latest, if not the last, of the great prophets' by American novelist Gore Vidal; along with the likes of Edward Said, Christopher Hitchens, and Norton Mezvinky, among many others. Vidal in fact wrote the introduction to Shahak’s most famous work entitled “Jewish History, Jewish Religion”.


Fierce opposition to Israeli policies can be found in the writings of Norman G. Finkelstein, an American Jewish political scientist and author who taught at several universities in the United States. In two of his books – entitled Beyond Chutzpah and The Holocaust Industry – he outlines how anti-Semitism and the Jewish Holocaust were both mis-used and exploited to consistently portray Israel as the “victim state”. He continues to challenge the “hoax claims” of the Zionist rhetoric popular in American academia and mainstream media [for example; that Palestine was a land without a people for a people without a land]. More recently, during the massacre in Gaza, he categorically labeled Israel a “satanic state” as it bombed the UNRWA school in Beit Lahia. Facing intense criticism from mainstream America, the established Zionist entities denounce him as a “self-hating Jew”. He was even denied tenure at DePaul University – the last institution he worked for – before being dismissed. During the Gaza Massacre, when asked in an interview on RT TV how he “felt” about being ostracized in America, Finkelstein said: “There’s a whole people that’s being decimated. I am not going to wallow in self-pity about the names that are being hurled in my direction. What about the 400 children killed, may of them incinerated by white phosphorous? They don’t feel anymore. They’re gone. Their lives were snuffed out. And for what? To ‘fit it in’ between Election Day November 4th and Coronation Day [January 20th]? Like a ‘holiday’ you fit in your calendar? Is that why 400 children were incinerated by this satanic state?”


Dr. Ilan Pappé, an Israeli historian who used to teach at the University of Haifa, outlined that the early Zionist, and later Israeli, narratives and subsequent policies of ethnic cleansing and massacres, then occupation and destruction have always been presented as a “morally just and […] pure act of self-defense, reluctantly perpetrated by Israel in its war against the worst kind of human beings”. He famously said that “[if one does not] understand colonialism, ethnic cleansing and the war for freedom, [then one] can't understand the cause for Palestine”. In his most revealing book entitled The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, he details the exact procedures utilized by Israel’s first Prime Minister David Ben Gurion to essentially liquidate the land of Palestine from its native inhabitants. It was planned ethnic cleansing through a process of terror executed mainly by the Jewish Haganah and Irgun death squads (both of which later formed the present Israeli Occupation Forces). In fact he quotes another Israeli author Gabi Piterberg who, in his volume entitled The Returns of Zionism, demonstrates that this narrative is found across the Israeli political spectrum. From Likud to Kadima, one can hear this “’righteous’ fury of a state that is busier than any other state in the world in destroying and dispossessing an indigenous population”. Their conclusions therefore underline that Zionism can only be defined as a European, colonialist, and racist political ideology that is causing millions of Palestinians to live under a state of either occupation or diaspora. Due to his courage and resilience for speaking the truth, Pappé and his family received several death threats in Haifa; he now teaches at the British University of Exter.


On the ground, dissent has emerged within the Israeli military itself. The number of Israel’s “Refuseniks” – Israelis that refuse to serve in the IOF – is growing. According to The Guardian dated January 17th 2009, Courage to Refuse, a refusenik organization in Israel, published a newspaper advert condemning the killing of hundreds of Palestinian civilians and calling on soldiers to refuse to fight in Gaza. It said "The brutal, unprecedented violence in Gaza is shocking. The false hope that this kind of violence will bring security to Israelis is all the more dangerous. We cannot stand aside while hundreds of civilians are being butchered by the IDF [Israel Defense Force]". One such refusenik is 19-year-old Omer Goldman; daughter of Natalin Granot, Deputy Head of the Mossad. In an interview published in The Times Online, she spoke candidly with Igal Sarna on how the crucial moment of her metamorphosis occurred. She had gone to a Palestinian village where the army had set up a roadblock. As the soldiers suddenly opened fire, she realized that she was on the same receiving end as the Palestinians, whom she considered her enemy all her life. Afterwards, she declared to her father her refusal to join the army. And on September 23rd 2008 she was tried and sentenced to prison for 21 days with two other Israeli women maintaining the same stance.


Religious Jews are also vocally opposed to the state of Israel and it’s willingness to destroy the Palestinian nation. Neturei Karta is a Jewish group that aims to place the emphasis back on spiritual Judaism. It is vehemently opposed to the creation of the state of Israel and calls for the boycott, divestment, and unilateral sanction of the Jewish State. To them, Zionism is a contamination of the Jewish belief system for it causes Jews to dominate, kill, harm, and demean others. “The true Jews are against dispossessing the Arabs of their land and homes. According to the Torah, the land should be returned to them”, their website states. It adds that “the world must know that the Zionists have illegitimately seized the name Israel and have no right to speak in the name of the Jewish people”. Neturei Karta holds regular demonstrations across North America and Europe in solidarity with the Palestinian people. In addition, the International Jewish Anti-Zionist Network (IJAN) encompasses more Jews whose identities are not based on Zionism but on a plurality of histories and experiences. According to their own declaration, they share a commitment to participation in the legacy of struggles against colonization and imperialism. As such, their struggle is against Zionism and its manifestation in Israel’s historic treatment of the Palestinian people and the confiscation of their lands.

The above names and organizations are joined by the excellent scholar Noam Chomsky of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the resilient Haaretz journalist Amira Hass, the brilliant author Gilad Atzmon (a world renowned saxophonist and novelist), Avi Shlaim (an Iraqi-born Jewish historian teaching at Oxford), Rabbis Yisroel Weiss and Arik Ascherman , and Phyllis Bennis (who helped produce the award-winning documentary Occupation 101), amongst thousands of other Jews. Their efforts for the Palestinian cause are aided by grass-roots Jewish activists around the world, who -- like in Los Angeles, Toronto, and London -- stormed the Israeli Consulates in protest of the ongoing massacre in Gaza.


The Arab world, and the Arab communities across the globe, must not only recognize and applaud their relentless spirit for resistance; they must extend their hands in solidarity to achieve real justice and peace in the region. For in times of Apartheid, one of the most vital resistance groups is the one that shares the very same ethno-religious background as the ruling regime. And it is the Jews of Conscience, who have joined the masses in a united stance of dissent against Israel’s occupation of Palestine, that have become most admirable for their unyielding belief in justice and humanity.