Arielle Angel writes:

On Nakba Day, 15 May, amid the outbreak of war in Israel/Palestine, I attended a rally in Bay Ridge in Brooklyn, to commemorate the expulsion of more than 700,000 Palestinians from the new Israeli state in 1948, and to protest against the oppression of the Palestinian people in the land between the river and the sea. From the signs I saw as part of that crowd – “This Jew will not stand by” or “Another Jew for a Free Palestine” – and from monitoring my social media feeds, it was clear that there were thousands of Jews taking part in these protests in cities all over the country.

For me, the conspicuous presence of larger numbers of Jews – many, but not all of them young – at every major Nakba Day protest was significant. During the 2014 assault on Gaza, I ventured out to a Palestine solidarity rally in Columbus Circle in Manhattan by myself. An ardent Zionist until that point, my worldview had been profoundly shaken by the images in the papers – Palestinian children bombed to pieces on a beach; Israelis in the rattled buffer town of Sderot gathered on hilltops overlooking the Strip, cheering as the bombs fell.

I didn’t know a single person that might accompany me to such a protest. To go at all felt like a betrayal of everything I’d ever known and loved. And yet even stronger was my anguish at doing nothing. I felt alienated by the march itself, unprepared to face the righteous anger at the Israeli state from the perspective of its victims. My heart raced when chants broke out of “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” – a popular protest slogan calling for equality in a single democratic state, which Jews have long been told amounts to their expulsion. I stayed another 30 minutes, then ducked into Central Park, collapsing on a bench in sobs. I’d never felt more alone.

I don’t feel alone any more. Though the years since 2014 have seen the growth of a small but committed Jewish anti-occupation movement, the last week and a half have brought an even larger circle of the community to a place of reckoning. We’ve seen Jewish politicians, celebrities, rabbinical students and others speak up loudly for Palestine. We’ve seen a powerful display of solidarity from Jewish Google employees, asking their company to sever ties with the IDF. At Jewish Currents, the leftwing magazine where I am now editor-in-chief, we asked for questions from readers struggling to understand the recent violence. We’ve been deluged.

These questions taken in aggregate paint a striking portrait of a community at a turning point. [Continue reading…]