The Jewish new year has begun, and we are living in a nightmare. A year since the attack in southern Israel by Hamas, and the beginning of the genocide in Gaza , and mass death and violence continues to beam through our iPhones and televisions, now with a war on Lebanon. We have no time to mourn; we are too numb to comprehend the catastrophe that has unfolded.
At the root of this, as with most other injustices in the world in the modern day, is a politics based in supremacy, ethno-nationalism and racism. This did not start on 7 October 2023. It did not start in September 2024.
It is the consequence of historic crimes, from settler colonialism, to European antisemitism and the Holocaust, to imperialism, to colonial violence, to the Nakba. Growing up in Jewish communities in Australia and the UK, Israel was central to our identity. Israel functioned either as Jewish Disneyland, or the answer to an existential Jewish fear of annihilation – a fear experienced by my grandparents during the Second World War.
For this reason, I proudly identified as Zionist, attended Zionist summer camp, and read the prayer for the Israeli Defence Forces in my synagogue. Palestinians, on the other hand, were either absent, or an existential bogeyman, moulded in the image of a post-9/11 world in which anti-Arab racism and Islamophobia ran rampant. When I saw a Palestinian flag, I felt afraid.
There are a number of moments I associate with my starting to confront Israel’s reality. Sitting in Ofer .