should never have come at the expense of the Palestinian popula- tion that has deep history with the land as well. As many anti-Zionist Jews do, Rosen’s beliefs are rooted in his understanding of Judaism. In the seder supplement that he published for his congregation this year, he wrote: “If we fail to give the Palestinian people a voice at our table this evening, we will not have fulfilled the requirements of the Passover seder… If we celebrate this festival by hardening our hearts to the horrifying stories and images from Gaza that have been crying out to us for the past seven months, we will not have fulfilled the requirements of the Passover seder.” Rosen is also careful to differentiate between a right to the land and rights on the land.
negative experience as Zionists on the RRC campus. “We came to find that RRC is, de facto, a training ground for anti-Zionist rabbis,” they wrote. It was a rare situation in which the Zionists, rather than the anti-Zionists, felt alienated by their Jewish community. Rabbi Brant Rosen was the staff clergy at the Jewish Reconstruc- tionist Congregation in Evanston, Illinois from 1998 until 2014, when he resigned over a deepening divide over his outspoken criticism of Israel’s policies and actions. Recently Rosen, now the rabbi of Tzedek Chicago, an anti-Zionist congregation, told me that “the politicization of the land and the goal of creating a Jewish sovereign presence in the land—to establish, or reestablish Jewish political control of that land—was always treated with deep ambivalence by Jewish tradition.”
For Rosen, Zionism is very far from a nat- ural expression of Jewish tradition: “I would never make the argument that Zionism is alien to Judaism. But I would say that Zion- ism sought to overturn in many ways the very definition of Judaism and what it meant to be a Jew up until that point.” It isn’t just that Zionism was a modern in- vention; Rosen is candid that he views it as “a destructive form of Judaism.” What, then, does he think Judaism’s role should be with respect to the Land of Israel? He describes it as many anti-Zionists, Jewish and non-Jewish alike, do: a settler-colonial pro- ject. It’s language that many Jews find incendi- ary and abhorrent—but which is also, perhaps, deeply misunderstood. The claim is not that Jews have no ancestral or religious connec- tion to the land—no legitimate attachment— but rather than the claim is not exclusive. “I think that Palestine, like other countries that
For many anti-Zionist Jews, the claim is not that Jews have no legitimate attachment to the land, but rather than we are not the only ones who do. (Celebrating Jerusalem Day at the Western Wall, June 5, 2024.)
“The very notion of people having a right to the land flies in the face of the Torah itself… God has the right to the land, but allows people— and by the way allowed other nations before the Jewish people—to live on the land, with certain conditions of how you’re supposed to behave on the land. But the land [can] vomit you out if you’re not careful.” T’ruah: The Rabbinic Call for Human Rights is an extensive network of rabbis who use Jewish thought to support their anti-Zionist views. In one piece on their website, Rabbi Elizabeth Bolton of Ottawa Re- constructionist congregation Or Haneshama connects the fact that the Torah records separate names for a given place—one by Jacob and one by Laban—to the various place names in Israel-Palestine to- day. If the Torah values both enough to remember them, she wrote, we should honour and value the multiplicities that exist today. W henever I see a copy of the Israeli Declaration of Independ- ence, I am struck by the blue thread that runs along its left side. Ostensibly, this thread was used to sew together the three pages of script, but I can’t help but draw a comparison to the blue thread of the tzitzit on the tallit. The Bible tells us that the tzitzit act as a reminder of all the com- mandments whenever we see them. Thousands of years have passed and we have an ever-increasing multiplicity of views about Jewish thought and practice. None have a monopoly and—however you think of your Judaism—the tzitzit are a reminder of that thread that binds us together.
had been under colonial domination, should have been decolonized and power reverted to the indigenous people who live there,” he says. And that includes Jews. Rosen argues that rights should have been extended “to all people who live there, whether they were, Jewish, Christian or Muslim.” Zionists have and will continue to argue that there has been con- tinuous Jewish presence in Zion since the time of the First Temple. Anti-Zionist Jews, even when they describe Israel as a settler-coloni- al state, don’t necessarily contradict that. But they do want to de- couple the Jews that were indigenous to the land from the European Jews who began to settle the land, displacing others in the process. “Biblical tradition records certain narratives about the Jewish people creating a sovereign state after the conquest and settlement of Canaan,” Rosen tells me. These are not historical documents; these are religious documents—and they’re profoundly ahistoric- al. What we do know from history is that the Jewish people as we know them came into being centuries later, and that Judaism as we understand it today by and large was a product of the day it came to full flourishing in the diaspora.” Rosen recognizes the role the Holocaust had to play in shaping contemporary Zionism and believes the world should bear deep shame over its unwillingness to settle Jewish refugees before, dur- ing, and after the war. He understands that it is specifically that re- fusal to resettle Jewish refugees that led to Jews, refugee and other- wise, clinging to Israel as their homeland. But he believes that this
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