Please note: This article was originally published in the RESISTANCE issue in August, 2024. The article has not been changed in this digital iteration.  

We write this piece together, in community, from Naarm, on the lands of the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin nation. Their sovereignty has never been ceded, this always was and always will be Aboriginal land.

And, as we have recently learned to say: From the river to the sea, always was, always will be.

At the time when you will be reading this piece, we are around 10 months into a genocide in Gaza, a new moment in a continuing Nakba – or catastrophe – that has gone on for over 76 years.

Numbers and statistics cannot do justice to the overwhelming violence that israel* has perpetrated against Palestine and Palestinians, but we need to note that over 40,000 Palestinians have been murdered (The Lancet has recently said that it is conservatively estimated to be over 186,000 people, or 8% of the population), and most of the Gazan population has been displaced.

There is almost no food, medical care, schools, places of worship, and so on. Disease and disability are being made rampant. These are the contexts in which we write, learn and come together.

We want to start by introducing ourselves, situating ourselves for you.

We are both members of the Loud Jew Collective (LJC), who each joined the group at different times during its short history. We have different experiences inside and outside Jewish communities – of family, religiosity, cultural practice, tradition, sexuality and gender – and we learn so much from those differences.

And so, we want to start by noting that for many years we – anti-zionist Jews – have been prevented from fully participating in most Jewish social and religious institutions.

This exclusion has exponentially increased in recent decades as hasbara (zionist ideological warfare) continuously broadcasts the fallacy that zionism equals Judaism.

We are told if we don’t love israel, we aren’t really Jewish, and we aren’t welcome in shuls, community halls or around Shabbat tables.

For some in the Loud Jew Collective, it was experiencing ostracism from Jewish power systems that first revealed how these systems were never designed to hold us. For others, it was growing up queer or trans in a heteronormative and transphobic society.

We’ve also been shaped by the experience of simply being Jewish in a world that sees assimilation into nondescript whiteness as the highest measure of a cultural group’s success.

Within LJC, we come from a diversity of Jewish experiences. For some of us, zionism is a central part of our families’ identities, and our experiences of unlearning and critiquing zionist indoctrination has seen some of us disowned by family and community, or made into barely tolerable pariahs.

At the moment, we experience so many different reactions to our collective.

We are welcomed as part of large and growing communities and movements who are in solidarity with Palestine.

Other people attack us; they call us “kapos” (Jews who collaborated with Nazis in the Holocaust), accuse us of being fake or self-hating, and say we’re betraying our ancestors who died so that ‘israel’ may exist.

Our diverse sexualities and gender identities are sometimes ridiculed and distorted as proof that we do not belong to Judaism.

Across our diverse experiences of exclusion, we find in each other a shared understanding that the cultural, sociopolitical and knowledge structures that surround us do not exist for us, nor do they serve to make manifest our dreams.

From our shared understanding, we draw on ancestral practices of critiquing power and learning collaboratively (chevruta) with an eye always to delinking from institutional power.

In place of traditional power structures, we work to create our own decentralised institutions in the form of networks, collectives and affinity groups.

This creation is born of both our collective imagination – that there could be more expansive, justice-oriented ways to relate to each other – and our collective resistance – we do not subscribe to institutions that are white supremacist, nationalist and capitalist in form and content.

And zionism is an iteration of all these forces, simultaneously emerging from them and strengthening the illusion of their inevitability.

Our critique of institutional power is heavily indebted to the laborious and ongoing decolonial work of First Nations (including Palestinian) writers and knowledge-sharers.

The theory and practice of decolonisation is rooted in the lived experience of First Nations and colonised peoples, who teach us that Western capitalist power structures always prefer to consolidate the powerful.

The power structures that govern us promote militarism, unlimited consumption and economic extraction, while undermining that which cannot be monetised, like mutual aid and collective solidarity.

The education system has long been identified by Indigenous activists as a mechanism for promoting and reinforcing white supremacist nationalism. This relationship has been held up to the light in the months since israel’s 2023 genocidal offensive against Gaza.

Australian pro-Palestine activist groups have recently mapped the connections between weapons companies and school science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) programs.

They found that companies including Lockheed Martin and BAE Systems sponsor STEM programs for children as young as four, creating positive brand associations. These companies manufacture the weaponry fuelling the genocide on Gaza, including white phosphorus bombs.

This year, the Teachers and School Staff for Palestine argued that, in highlighting the non-lethal aspects of their business – like robotics and coding – these weapons manufacturers partner with the education system to normalise and sanitise their trade in death, and encourage students to enter the defence industry workforce.

Likewise, First Nations people have historically condemned the mainstream media’s role as a fundamentally racist tool for social control, as opposed to knowledge production.

In the media’s current distortion of the genocide of Palestinians, we see how this mechanism – utilised so often to dehumanise black and brown people here – is again at play. Its objective is undeniable.

What decolonisation frameworks teach us is the necessity of zooming out, so that the interplay of systems becomes visible, as do the ways they rely on and reinforce each other.

If we follow the threads of the cat’s cradle that is systemic power, we find zionism at every intersecting knot. We find nationalism intertwined with neoliberalism intertwined with racism, including Islamophobia and antisemitism.

Jewish anarchist Emma Goldman wrote in Yiddish in 1907:

We people have enough trouble from the State without establishing another one and becoming like the old bandits. You want to come up with a new Jewish state, but no, I think that the task of the Jews and their assignment in the world is to demolish and make a furnace of the nation-state.

In the Loud Jew Collective, we wholeheartedly accept this assignment and know that the destruction of the zionist project is a precondition for our collective liberation.

We see the connections between the genocide in Palestine, Western media, the prison-industrial system, climate chaos and First Nations displacement from country.

We find carceral logic not only in the prison system, but in educational institutions, where it seeks to shape how we relate and what we know.

In encouraging binaries of ‘right/good/safe’ versus ‘bad/wrong/dangerous’, carceral logic seeks to keep us controlled by fear of being designated ‘bad’ or becoming tainted by those who are designated as such. It seeks to keep us controlled through fear of punishment, and to position the State as the sole legitimate purveyor of punishment.

The media’s hyperfixation on Jewish safety concerns while Palestinians are being murdered, and the subsequent policing of “From the river to the sea”, is rooted in carceral logic, skewed as it always is against people of colour.

The tendrils of the prison-industrial complex stretch from the israeli army’s routine incarceration and degradation of Palestinian civilians to Australia’s offshore detention policies, to the unabating Aboriginal deaths in custody and removal of Aboriginal children from their families.

In working to free Palestine, we are also being freed from the dangerous notion that state-sponsored punitive ‘justice’ makes any of us safer.

But how do we work to free Palestine as a Jewish collective?

We have to undertake a careful balance in the activism we do.

We need to actively be part of creating Jewish practices and identities that are anti-zionist, and are committed to building communities which are shaped around embracing difference.

But we need to be guided by practices of solidarity, and not allow Jewishness to be the main character in the story.

That means that while we need to be constantly ensuring that we are creating an anti-zionist Jewishness, we must not always or only be doing this.

The point of this moment is not to save Jewishness or Judaism: the point is freedom, liberation and self-determination for all. All eyes on Palestine. We need less discussion about what this all means for the Jews.

We come to this as radical diasporists, in the tradition of writer and academic Melanie Kaye/Kantrowitz, among others.

We are committed not to a nation-state as the home of the Jews, but instead to Jewishness being at home in networks and interstices.

This is a queer notion of home, which avoids binaries and sharply drawn categories and instead affirms belonging as being found in community and connection that is open and diverse (genuinely diverse, that is – not ‘diversity’ as buzzword).

And we are also careful of this, because we know that Jews have other affiliations than their Jewishness. The point of our community-building and solidarity work is not to affirm that Jews are only Jews, but that Jews can belong with and alongside others.

We need to repeatedly affirm this, because zionism tries to deny that Jews might be anything other than Jewish, or that we might have other affiliations or loyalties – a notion that has the potential to erase difference.

Iraqi Jewish scholar Ella Shohat writes about this problem in her discussions of the relationship between zionism and Jews from the Iberian Peninsula, Spain, Portugal, North Africa and the Middle East.

As Shohat explains, the zionist narrative that describes how Jews must ‘return’ to one homeland invalidates any positive attachment to other places where they might live (Shohat, 2006).

It erases the fact that Jews in other countries – specifically, in her telling, “the Arab Muslim world” – may have had stronger relationships with the people with whom they have lived, rather than with other Jews.

This is a form of European nationalism, which tries to assert that people must only belong to one group.

National cohesion can only come at the expense of other loyalties. So other histories and languages have been erased and discarded, papered over, to create a homogenous national group.

Jews globally experience this constantly, being told by zionists – both Jewish and non-Jewish – that there is only one hegemonic form of Jewishness, and it involves Jews having israel as the only place where they belong.

Across recent months, we have continually returned to the words of Daniel Boyarin, a Talmudic scholar based on Turtle Island, who wrote in 2003 of his “fear” that his Judaism “may be dying at Nablus, Daheishe, Beteen (Beth El), and al-Khalil (Hebron)… If we are not for ourselves, other Jews say to me, who will be for us? And I answer, but if we are for our selves alone, what are we?”.

This, it seems to us, is crucial.

This article appears in Archer Magazine #20, the RESISTANCE issue – buy a copy here.

We must grieve what is being lost, recognise the damage to Jewishness. But we cannot under any circumstances end there. We must not be only for ourselves. And we must not foreground our losses.

For the primary injuries caused by zionism are, of course, faced by Palestinians.

And because zionism’s violence has extended further than the boundaries of Palestine, affecting Jews globally, refugees who have sought to go to israel, victimised groups around the world whose perpetrators have utilised israeli weaponry and infrastructure, and so on; because of this, our resistance and solidarities must be global.

We must also see the interconnections, as we have noted above. We return to Boyarin again, who wrote in 2023:

I categorically reject the nation-state solution to the continuity of Jewish existence and culture in favour of a diasporic nationalism that offers not the promise of security, but rather the highly contingent possibility of an ethical collective existence. Indeed, I oppose the mononational state itself – for all – as a proven dangerous and destructive mode of collective life.

That is, Boyarin – and Goldman, and us too – are anti-nationalist in general, not just anti-nationalist for the Jews. He offers this concept of ‘diasporic nationalism’ as a form of community-building which is not hegemonic or domineering, not exclusive or bordered, but is instead multiple, open and creative.

This is integral to our solidarity: based in our Jewish teachings and learnings, we are opened up to broader anti-racist and anti-nationalist commitments. The nation-state, borders, are a site of violence.

We dream, alongside others, of broader horizons of possibility.

What tools can we use to support collective liberation?

This historical moment calls for us to continually reimagine the shape of justice-doing, and we are not without Jewish maps to guide us in this effort.

The practice is in wresting our maps – ancestral knowledge, ancient liturgy and embodied ritual – from those who use it to justify the unjustifiable.

In LJC, part of our work is to recover Jewish traditions and technologies that have been lost to us. This loss has occurred due to either co-option of Jewish practice into the zionist project, where it is zealously gatekept, or through the historical assimilation of Jews as they attempted to escape antisemitic persecution.

One of the most spiritually potent practices that every Jew must undertake is teshuvah – a Hebrew word meaning to return or to repair.

This return can be understood as returning to the path of becoming our highest selves – our most humble, loving and justice-oriented version of ourselves – through relational repair and reparations.

Teshuvah is a five-stage, non-linear process of justice and accountability for harm.

It involves the person who enacted harm acknowledging that they have done so, confessing to the nature of the harm, offering restitution to the harmed party and guaranteeing that the harm won’t occur again.

If this process sounds familiar, it shares many elements of transformative justice models popularised by activist-academics Mariame Kaba and Mia Mingus.

Teshuvah is a non-carceral blueprint for interpersonal and self-reflection, guided by the priorities and needs of the person most adversely affected.

When applied to zionism, the process is clear: we acknowledge the harm zionism continues to enact on Palestinian land, lives and culture, take responsibility for our complicity in this harm, and follow Palestinian guidance as to what is required for harm cessation and repair.

Teshuvah guides us to excavate the ways that white supremacy, patriarchy and privilege live inside us and are perpetuated by us.

It asks us for a fearless inventory of not just the nature of the harm we cause, but its origin – an exploration of the darkest corners of our psyches.

This is based on the dual Jewish ethical imperatives to practice Tikkun Olam (repair of the world) and Tikkun Ha Nefesh (repair of the soul). Together, these obligations encourage us to resist dissociative and punitive approaches to justice, both for ourselves and others.

Teshuvah highlights that as we acknowledge our own fallibility, we become more able to hold others in staunch compassion and ethical fortitude. And it asks us to do this collectively, in and for our community.

Like Teshuvah, the Jewish practice of Shabbat can be used to support liberation work.

Shabbat is a biblically ordained period from Friday sunset to Saturday sunset where Jews intentionally abstain from ‘work’ and shift their focus from productivity to rest. Shabbat facilitates connection through song, prayer and ritual action.

When Jews (and our non-Jewish allies) observe Shabbat together, we resist the hegemony of capitalist time and its premise that our worth is quantified by our productivity as workers.

Shabbat is an offer to slow down and arrive in presence while opening towards understanding ourselves and each other as more than simply matter: as spirit.

Olam Haba – the world to come – is a Jewish concept that can be understood as a collective dream of a world where justice, beauty and liberation is fully realised, no longer undermined by the estrangement and violence that characterises much of what surrounds us.

In Jewish religious text the Talmud, Berakhot 57 teaches us that Shabbat is one-sixtieth of the world to come, and as such, Shabbat allows us to experience this collective longing for liberation as a reality.

Shabbat reorients our understanding of the world to come away from an impossible future, reminding us that the world to come is here.

We actually experience it; as the sun sets, we turn towards the revolutionary love in each other and ourselves and know more deeply than ever that none of us are free until all of us are free.

We can sing and tell Jewish stories about freedom, resistance and tzedek – justice. This somatic experience bolsters our anti-zionist organising, imbuing it with sacred potentiality, and rendering the offers of capitalism superficial and unfulfilling in comparison.

And, how will we carry ourselves through this anti-zionist work?

Throughout all our work is a commitment to humility. We try our hardest, and we know we make mistakes. We know we stuff up. We try to be open to criticism and collaboration.

We want to avoid replicating the problems of the broader society. We strive to do our best, but we recognise the pitfalls that come with imagining that perfection is possible.

We want critique – and we want to critique each other – but we want to do this through a spirit of building love and connection. We grow together. We are nothing without each other.

We all have much to learn.

In this way, we ensure that we are not missionaries, bestowing our ‘solidarity’ on people below us. Never. We are constantly in a position of learning, from everyone around us.

We are curious. But we are not extractive in our curiosity: we learn through deep listening and engagement.

Silence can be our friend. We show up when asked – preempting at times, but trying never to overstep or force ourselves on others.

And when we make mistakes, when we stuff up, we try to repair. We try to do better next time. Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang, in their foundational article ‘Decolonisation is not a metaphor’, teach us that we need to be attentive to what they term “settler moves to innocence”.

They offer a series of examples of how this occurs, all of which function to alibi the settler, or to provide excuses for why the settler is not to blame for ongoing colonial violence. As colonisers, we take this lesson seriously.

Our humility must not be a claim for innocence. Our humility instead must centre on a recognition of what it means to be a coloniser deeply committed to working in partnership towards decolonisation, against settler-colonialism.

We must always be learning from First Nations and Indigenous peoples.

Late last year, we attended a panel to learn from Dr Micaela Sahhar [interviewed in Archer Magazine here], Associate Professor Crystal McKinnon, Professor Gary Foley and Tarneen Onus Browne.

Crystal told us that solidarity is relational: it is care, it is community. None of us can do it without each other. We learn from each other how to do it.

Both Crystal and Micaela shared stories of how they came to learn what solidarity is as a tangible practice, telling of their influences from family, friends and community.

They made clear, that we learn from each other, from family, from being invited into spaces. And, Micaela explained that we need to not equivocate about what is going on: everyone needs to learn how to apprehend the truth of the violence and the truth of what continual resistance entails.

We have learned so much from all these speakers, and many others, over the years. Learning is a lifelong project. It involves conversations that take decades.

These deep relationships are how we ensure that solidarity is constantly being undertaken: that solidarity is truly approached as a verb.

A key leader we, in the Loud Jew Collective, have learned from over many years is Joan Nestle.

At her kitchen table, at the Jewish rituals that we organise and she attends, and through her decades-long written and spoken words, we learn what it looks like to spend a lifetime building community and constantly seeking to grow.

We turn to her work now, as ever, reading how she wrote to her community in 1993 words that still resonate:

Think of what they fear from us – love and desire, rebellion and difference, play, tenderness, touch, freer children who do not call each other faggot, girls who strive for their own glory, men who do not have to hate softness. All their words and reasons for exclusions, all the tumult of their No, will fall into the shadows of history. You – my queer comrades – have given me a world where my words could live, where my love was kissed by the sun, where my anger turned to visions of possibilities. These are hard times, but necessary ones. These are times when we BE, a sturdy Yes of a people.

This is a moment that calls for a community who come together in the service of resistance, truth and liberation.

And each minute of each day, we raise our voices in a chorus led by Palestinians, to affirm: From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.

* Some words have been de-capitalised as a form of resistance by the writers.

This article first appeared in Archer Magazine #20, the RESISTANCE issue in August, 2024. The article has not been changed in this digital iteration.  

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