Gaza's Annihilation Can Never Be Forgiven

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Today I'm going to try to do at least three things at once:

• I want to lay bare my process 0f writing about Israel/Palestine in my book, On Repentance and Repair: Making Amends in an Unapologetic World, including holding myself accountable for some of those choices.
• I will annotate the section that I wrote in On Repentance, to both clarify my words from then and re-frame the work now in light of the annihilation and genocide* in Gaza.
• During this season of, well, repentance and repair, I think we're going to be getting a lot of "Atoning for Gaza" - type words from American Jewish leaders. I want to say a bit about that.

It's a lot, but it's all connected. Here we go:

When I was writing On Repentance and Repair * – I agonized about how and how much, to write about Israel / Palestine (I/P), for a number of reasons.

They included, but were not limited to:

The fact that a proper treatment of accountability and a more whole future with regards to Israel / Palestine – harms, obligations, what each of Maimonides' stages of repentance might look like and why– could and indeed perhaps should be its own book, and likely should be written by someone(s) who is not an American Jew.

I believed that I was dealing with a unique situation vis a vis this issue. That is, as I mentioned in the book, with regards to Israel/Palestine, I was writing for readers with a range of ideas about where truth itself was situated.

More than, say, my treatments of Apartheid South Africa; #MeToo; the harms of colonialism to Native peoples; or even the harms of the prison industrial-complex and the possibilities offered by movements for its abolition–

...with Israel-Palestine, I was dealing with a case wherein various people coming to the conversation– and, most saliently, to my book– had often contradictory understandings what was actually happening, and why.

As a writer/educator, I try to be intentional about bringing readers along with me; if I lose readers by going too fast in my assumptions about with what they might agree, I'm not doing my job.*

Back then, I was trying to bring diverse readers on a journey of shared understanding so that we might ever move towards justice and accountability, without having the conversation on I/P take over the whole project. Moving slowly through specifics really is/was the work of this other theoretical book (written by not-me.)

That said, I failed living fully my obligations to justice then. Let me say that clearly. I was actively trying to do right by the larger work of the book, by Palestinians suffering under Occupation, and by the readers whom I was trying to coax along with me. Yet, even if not consciously, I'm clear now that I held back and remained excessively subtle due to the everpresent pressure of the Jewish institutional-communal professional ecosystem. If I had pushed harder, would I have lost readers who were willing to engage with me as I did pace it? Maybe. Was it a risk I should have taken (including facing how possible fallout might have impacted my work driving a network of 2500 Jewish clergy working for abortion justice in the wake of Dobbs?) Without the latter factor, absolutely. Even with it? Well, also yes. I do not seek to minimize my own accountability.

I, too, am complicit in this genocide.

However much I tried to manage my own various roles–

However much so many of us were trying to manage so many factors at once–

It's soul-splitting.

And it's hardly news that many of us fighting for justice in Jewish spaces have experienced both tacit and explicit pressure around I/P from employers, boards, donors, colleagues – that even as we have gone to the mat behind the scenes to try to push the conversation a million ways – that this game of forced choices has been an exceedingly powerful means of communal control: "Just keep silent on this one issue and there are so many other kinds of good that you can do!" My individual failures are real, and this problem is also deeply systemic. I cannot be exonerated from the ways in which I have participated in this devil's bargain at the expense of Palestinian lives– but I must name this, because many more people's jobs and budgets are still being bound by these structures. The onus to act is greatest on those with power, but they will not act if they do not feel financial or PR pressure. (Also: Every visible shift on I/P is the result of heroic amounts of invisible labor, organizing, strategizing, and effort. Those of you behind the scenes who will never be credited for your work: I see you.)

Every single choice to hold back– my own, my colleagues', every single person in our community's– has happened at the expense of Palestinian lives.

Again, then, I did not always do so consciously- but I did do so. And my figuring out how I can become a different person next time, figuring out how to pour the rest of my life into the work of amends– well, that's beyond the scope of today's missive, but it'll come up again.

I am grateful to the many Jews, especially the Jewish leaders, organizers and activists, who've been leading our collective moral conscience loudly and fiercely these decades, and especially these last years on behalf of Palestinian safety, freedom and life–

reminding us all that no one's blood is redder than anyone else's (Talmud Yoma 82b), that the answer to “Am I my sibling’s keeper?” is, has always been, yes.

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Regular readers have seen Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz' annotations of the Talmud often shared here, wherein BOLD is the original text, and ROMAN [regular, not-bold] is commentary added for clarity to help later generations make sense of the thing.

I thought I'd try this with the original On Repentance section on Israel/Palestine – I've never done anything like this before, but it could be a way to transparently bridge some of the gap between then and now.

I don't have the bandwidth now to craft the kind of research-intensive case summaries found in On Repentance. (I spent five years on the book.) So if you want more robust historical context for everything, please look to the reading list at the bottom of the post.

Maimonides' wisdom proved itself again and again in my research; when steps were skipped or missing, the impact was all too visible.

The larger the scale of harm, the more important it is (I believe, and argued) to engage thoroughly with the first step, owning the harm caused.

Archbishop Desomond Tutu described the importance of televising of the TRC hearings this way:

"This is the horror that was apartheid. And those who supported the system must know what they supported. Those who claimed they did not know cannot very well say so now. They know.”

With this, here's the On Repentance section on Israel/Palestine, newly annotated (again bold was in the book, everything is new today):

Needless to say, this truth-telling is needed in many contexts, in all places where great harm and suffering has been caused.  And it can open up space to consider what appropriate next steps might be needed—like the TRC in South Africa had a committee dedicated to formulating concrete, reparative steps. 

Sometimes the harmed party knows what accountability they want, but the process cannot advance until the harmdoer is pulled from their privileged hermitage through a brutal accounting of the victim-survivors' experience: "Those who claimed they did not know cannot very well say so now." And as I wrote in the TRC section and elsewhere in the book, there are many other important things that this airing of truth does, can do, for victim-survivors. I won't rehash them here.

But I wonder if the process of truth-telling isn't sometimes necessary for all involved to even be able to get clarity what the next step in the process could or should be. When I was writing this– and perhaps even now, but certainly then– this idea felt like a core component of my thinking around Israel/Palestine. But (as mentioned above) it didn't feel like my place to be saying this too explicitly.

One imagines such a process of truth-telling being useful in the United States around the horrors of its immigration policies and practices, including the atrocities of Trump 2.0, in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and Israeli occupation of Palestinian territory; I failed here. I struggled to find a better word than "conflict," which too many people use to imply that power is equal, and was stumped, then; I was trying to plow through an eight-word sentence fragment while holding everyone's traumas plus naming Occupation. If I were advising 2020 me now I'd reword to something like "The Israeli Occupation and other harms, traumas and atrocities related to Israel/Palestine," – though of course now it would have to be "The Israeli genocide in Gaza, as well as the Occupation and apartheid systems, and other dimensions of harm in Israel/Palestine"–

the genocide of the Rohingya people in Myanmar; the persecution of the Uyghur people in China; in Cyprus, in Kashmir, in Chechnya, and elsewhere around the world. And, of course, there are many more peoples I could and should list whose harms have occurred since this was written, but I'm trying to stay focused.

Particularly in places where groups perceive competing truth claims about the basic facts of historical events—as is the case with Israel/Palestine—a truth commission that began with a specific scope could be a first attempt to gain communal consensus. 

This, above, is the big sentence around which I should have put blinking lights, and I think many people missed it.

It is a fact that around I/P, more than many other places/events, there are groups who perceive competing truth claims about the basic facts of historical events.

Is it Memorial Day "or" Nakba Day? Whose "true" ancestral homeland is it? Whose accounts of what happened or even whose death tolls are trustworthy?

In 2021, this perceived-truth gap was even greater, I think.

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Now, with more recognition of the genocide (what language which Jews use is variable, but even so), there is more Jewish openness to more aspects of this conversation. Yet, of course, many significant gaps exist: Some of it's about fear and priorities; some about sources of news; some, due to what histories are taught and what are buried; some about where of it is due to differing family histories and family traumas.

As I said in the days immediately following October 7th, a lot of things are true, and/though the truths which acknowledge everyone's humanity do not at all need to be contradictory (even as we must name power imbalances.)

Where were we?

Particularly in places where groups perceive competing truth claims about the basic facts of historical events—as is the case with Israel/Palestine—a truth commission that began with a specific scope could be a first attempt to gain communal consensus. 

Following this, I should have written something like,

"Palestinians have been subjected to Nakba, subjugated under Occupation for decades, including many of the horrors that characterized apartheid-era South Africa, such as the gutting and seizure of homes, restrictions on day-to-day movement, removals into refugee camps and land dispossession, the banning of political protest and organizations, detention without trial, torture, assassinations, the brutal murders of activists, and, of course, creating conditions of terror, poverty, and desperation.* When it comes to the scale of harm and power differential, there is no comparison.

And it is both true on a level of honoring all trauma, all human life, and a level of creating a new future for all fourteen million people in the region: Every truth about every atrocity must be told."

I was overly subtle about the power differential, hoping that my using the word Occupation and my careful wording of the examples below would do my work for me (since I didn't have the word count to accompany readers through a process that I perceived that they needed) (and also, again, none of these reasons doesn't also mean that it wasn't a coward's choice, conscious or not).

There's a chapter in this theoretical not-by-me book called, maybe, "Jewish Trauma, Jewish Feelings." Because – the Jewish experience of trauma is real, and much of what Jews carry is real.* And it's also true, my wonderful kin, we all too often wear our trauma as both shield and sword, using both our history and anything that might take place now as proof that we cannot possibly be expected to do thoughtful power analysis or engage empathetically with others' experience.

Let me say this with love: We are better than this, we are smarter than this, and our false equivalences– and the fact that tiptoeing around these sensitivities has been a condition for engaging with the Jewish community on any terms for so long – has contributed to genocide.

Again, I'm complicit. I wanted to try to bring my people along, wanted them to keep listening so that I could teach them– but I stepped wrong. I know that now.

But. And. To bring a new future into being, in a new truth-telling, we would need to name every harm– and this includes acknowledging Jewish traumas. What justifies genocide (nothing) and what will make tomorrow possible (all truths) are not, to my mind, the same thing.

For those of you who resist naming every harm (say, talking about kidnappings, terror attacks) because of power asymmetry, let the pragmatist in me speak: the Israelis who most need to hear Palestinian voices would be most reticent to listen if there was not space for Israeli voices in the conversation as well. And truly, it's the only fully cathartic, fully healing way forward.

Again: I'm never the person anybody needs to hear on any of this. But I am applying my research on other mass atrocities to this moment in one small essay and, please God, someday, may reconciliation work may yet come to pass.

And for this to succeed this must, I believe, include women at the table.

One wonders if beginning with a public detailing of everything that happened in Israel/Palestine in 1948, for example, could open the door for additional space to unpack other events,

I should have said Nakba, explicitly, even if I didn't get into specifics like Saliha, Deir Yassin, Lydda, Tantura and Abu Shusha, or the vicissitudes of the expulsions of 750,000 Palestinians from their homes and how these things are glossed over in Israeli society. At the same time, a full truth-telling would include things like the Hadassah medical convoy massacre, the Haifa Oil Refinery massacre and Kfar Etzion massacre by Palestinians, the latter in retaliation for Deir Yassin, as well as the fact that Jews committed the al-Dawayima massacre and (for Haifa Oil) the Balad al-Shaykh massacres in retaliation.

No facts left unchecked. No loss, unspeakable. And, like the broadcasting of the TRC hearings, everyone with a stake in the outcomes– all of the 14 million people in the region– would hear it all. The truths of what had happened. All of it, named in one place, all the pain. That was the idea.

The stories themselves would pave the way to the next step.

 "Those who claimed they did not know cannot very well say so now. They know.”

Needless to say, all this is supplanted by the genocide now. What needs to be spoken is not only what's happened, but what was known and planned when, by whom. Who gave what orders. There's already ample documentation. But there's so much more that must be unearthed. Stories to be told. Those who do not want to listen must hear.

After the Holocaust, Germans hid their heads in the sand for a couple of generations, left a lot of Nazis in power and did much of their reckoning process backwards, which might explain their descent back into far-right fascism now (though, granted, that's a bit on trend these days.)

If Israel is willing to face what is has done– is doing now– to Palestinians, both in Gaza and the West Bank, to engage with its moral gravity– there might be hope for a different kind of future.

But as I noted in the book, it may have been easier (uh, 25-35 years after the end of the war) for Germans to grapple with their past actions to those who were no longer present (as they had been either murdered or expatriated) than what went down in South Africa. There, significant systemic restructuring is (still) required to undo centuries of oppression of 90% of its population by the other 10%—and that inequality is still ongoing. .

The occupation of Palestinian lives and land is also far from theoretical, and very much related to Israeli privilege and comfort today.

... whether in 1929, 1967, 1987, 2000, 2014, 2021, and all the years in-between and beyond.  

These years were not selected capriciously. They're each significant in terms of the stories of the people of the land, many of which have a lot of "competing truth claims" baggage.

It could begin with the work of personal testimony of Israelis and Palestinians, archival documentation and more.  Or, perhaps if it could begin, and expand, upon the much more recent work of Breaking the Silence (an organization of Israeli veterans who tell the truth about the Israeli army's activities under Occupation), Al-Haq (an independent organization that details human rights violations of Palestinians by both Israeli and Palestinian institutions), international NGOs and monitors, and the work of Israeli and Palestinian historians, sociologists and many others who have been working for decades to document the many truths of what has happened and what is happening now.  So much is known, even if it is not all spoken, not all in the same place. 

I didn't think that I was being subtle. Breaking the Silence has been heavily targeted by Netanyahu because because they tell inconvenient truths about the IDF's human rights violations and atrocities. And Al-Haq is an important Palestinian voice, and one willing to call both Israeli and Palestinian harms to account. (Again, any large-scale truth-telling process could and should include stories of what Hamas has done, yes.)

But there are so many forces both within and beyond my community trying to pretend that the balance of power–and the scale of harm–has been equal. When it never has been, and it certainly is not, now. And in my attempt to try to nod at the Occupation without wanting to unpack it, wanting to acknowledge it without peeling out the many layers present because I was trying to do *waves hands* all this in 300 words– I believe that I contributed to this equivocation. That's on me.

A truth and reconciliation commission could also be a crucial first step in addressing harms with hundreds of years of accumulated injustice, such as slavery and institutional anti-Black racism in the United States.  But of course, as the lessons of South Africa and Canada—the latter mentioned in Chapter One—show us, making space to tell the truth isn’t enough.  Recommendations must be followed.  Structural changes must be implemented.  Restitution must be provided.

And in the wake of this genocide– please God may we end it soon – that accountability is greater, the changes even more significant, the restitution beyond conception. Perhaps the only way to feel our way to Step Two is through Step One. In any case, this white American Jew isn't the right person to dictate any of it; Palestinian voices, Gazan voices, survivor voices are where to look.

But, to my dear colleagues working on their "Atonement for Gaza" sermons, I might remind you that in our tradition, the obligation of repentance and repair for serious harm can be deep, ongoing and consume the rest of one's life. And this must, ours, This is an obligation from which we can never be free. Never.

However.

Only harmed parties can forgive those who committed harm against them.*

Over 64,000 human beings have been murdered. Including 17,000 children.**

The dead can never, and will never, forgive.

The work of repentance and the gift of receiving forgiveness are not the same. 

It is upon every single one us to work on repentance and repair for everything from the small harms we have caused to the great evils in which we have participated, been complicit–

Even if we meant well,

Even if we were "still learning,"

Even if it was "a process,"

Even if we were breathing in toxic communal fumes.

Even if some accounts can never be closed.

Having to live with the knowledge that our hesitation meant that we participated in genocide –

may, sometimes, just be one of the consequences of our actions.

There is no atonement for Gaza, ever.

There is only–

ever–

the unsparing, lifelong, work of repentance and repair.

Gaza Soup Kitchen – This isn’t just a soup — it’s a recipe for resilience, simmering on the stoves of Gaza, feeding bodies and souls alike. Each bowl serves not just sustenance

On Repentance and Repair by Danya Ruttenberg: 9780807013311 | PenguinRandomHouse.com: Books

Winner NATIONAL JEWISH BOOK AWARDS in Contemporary Jewish Life & Practice Myra H. Kraft Memorial Award A crucial new lens on repentance, atonement, forgiveness, and repair from harm—from personal…

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