On Israel & Gaza

Below is an abbreviated version of the message I shared with our team yesterday on the horrible situation in Israel and Gaza.

I want to start today by acknowledging the terrorist attack this weekend in Israel - which included killing hundreds of civilians, including many young people, elderly people, and children, and kidnapping countless more. Many people on our team have family members and friends that have been impacted directly or indirectly by this. I spent the weekend scrolling through the stories of murdered children, missing parents, and mass grave sites. It’s almost too much to bear.

Israel has now begun a response that has already killed many innocent Palestinian civilians, including many, many young children. There will be much more suffering ahead, and I am so scared for the Palestinian people. The loss they are now experiencing is unthinkable.

Over the past couple of days, there has been a proliferation of harmful messaging surrounding what’s happening. It’s our job — both in counseling our clients and in navigating the complexities that come with DEI work — to resist overly simplistic rhetoric, grapple with nuance, and focus on core values.

Many things about this situation are highly complex. But some things are pretty simple. Here are a few simple things I believe to be true:

• The murder and kidnapping of civilians, no matter who’s doing it, is terrorism, and it is always wrong.
• Palestinian people have the right to self-determination and freedom.
• Many Palestinian civilians - including children - have been killed over the last few decades. One child would be too many.

These things can all be true at once. Unfortunately, we’ll only see more dangerous rhetoric in the coming days. We’ll see racism and Islamophobia. We’ll see whataboutism. We’ll see the conflation of entire groups with a subset of extremists. We’ll see anti-semitism. We must resist these things.

We must resist racism and islamaphobia. We should be angry about the violence committed against Israeli civilians, but we must also push back against any efforts to cast Palestinian people as monsters.

We must resist narratives that conflate entire populations, Israeli or Palestinian, with the acts of their extremist leaders or terrorist organizations that purport to represent them. Many Israelis actively disapprove of the current government. Many Palestinians do not support Hamas - which hasn’t been elected since 2006. Most of these communities are just people who want to live.

We must resist antisemitism. Narratives that frame Jews as having innate power in any given situation, admonitions to question what we’re seeing in the news because of “who controls the media” — these are classic anti-semitic tropes. I can’t even believe I need to say this, but celebrating the murder, rape, and kidnapping of Jews is antisemitic.

Ultimately, we can and we must be open to holding many truths at once.

• You can advocate for Palestinian liberation, while simultaneously condemning the killing of Israeli civilians.
• You can critique the Israeli government, while also believing that Israeli people deserve to live free of terrorism.
• You can condemn terrorism, and be angry at any response that would violate international human rights law and lead to deaths of Palestinian civilians and children.

To quote my Rabbi, Sharon Brous, “What I am asking is for us to dare to hold the humanity, the heartache, and the need for security of the Jewish people while also holding the humanity, the dignity, the need for justice of the Palestinian people. For too long, these two have been set up as a false binary. In fact, the only liberation will be a shared liberation. The only justice is a justice for all."