As a collective of progressive Jews in the diaspora, living as uninvited settlers in the colony of so-called Australia, we watch the news unfold in Palestine and Israel with grief and rage.
We are enraged at how decades of oppressive governments created the conditions for this violence by enforcing the world’s largest open air prison in Gaza and by a continuous and violent occupation in the West Bank and Occupied Palestine. The bloodshed did not start now. It is rooted in dispossession, oppression, and dehumanisation.
We are horrified at the rising toll of casualties. At the rate of civilians, including children, who have been kidnapped, targeted, and murdered.
From the Frontier wars in so-called ‘Australia’, to the Warsaw ghetto uprisings, to Gaza today, resistance has always played a key role in calling out the greater, and more sustained violences that are inflicted upon oppressed peoples. As Jews, we recognise Palestinians resisting violent occupation in spite of the very clear consequences it will bring. We condemn the reactionary and indiscriminate attacks on Gaza whose people have nowhere to flee to, and believe that there is no Israeli-militarised solution to what’s happening. We call for urgent de-escalation, demilitarisation, and for ensuring that humanitarian law is enforced and those responsible brought to justice in Hague.
We stand united in our calls for peace and solidarity with Palestinians who deserve liberation from the Israeli settler-colonial occupation and the violence it inflicts. In the coming weeks, we hope that the international community which claims to want peace turns away from the Zionist voices that will seek a return to the ‘normal’ — a normalised settler-colonial pseudo-peace that is inherently violent and seeks to eliminate Palestinians — and towards Palestinian voices and their demands of liberation.
There is another way. Now is the time for righteousness. For Tzedek.