Carter J. Carter, in solidarity with Palestine
I am who I am/as you are who you are: you live in me/and I live in you, to and for you.
--Mahmoud Darwish, “No More and No Less”
I am an academic, but my message today is personal. I am Jewish, among other things; I am also Afghan, and Portuguese, and a US Yankee. I have colonized and colonizer in my family tree. My wife is Israeli, and my children and I are also supposedly entitled to “birthright” citizenship if we made aliyah. I ask: What right do any of us have to citizenship, an ownership stake, in a state that would deny it to a Palestinian whose family has lived there for hundreds of years? The genocide we are watching is being justified on the basis that it is necessary to make a safe place in the world for people like me and my children. I wish to say to anyone in the Israeli government who might hear me: get my name out of your mouth. You dishonor my children by pretending that you must banish other children, or bury them in rubble, to make mine safe. You endanger my children by endangering Palestinian children. You are the pharoah with the hardened heart in the story we tell our children every year to teach them what it means to be Jewish. You bring disgrace upon the Jewish people by perpetrating the worst crimes ever committed against us against the Palestinians.
You are a shanda. I want no part of your genocide, your Nakba, your concentration camp and walled ghetto, your trail of tears, your Pharaonic vengeance. You are the very emperors and fascists who have been the villains of our history. Your imperiousness has been so traumatizing to so many, it has led to so much death, that it is hard to know how to grieve properly—for dead and damaged Palestinians, for dead and damaged Israelis, for all the people being crushed in these imperial gears.
A world in which genocide is tolerated is not a world that is safe for Jews, or for anyone. We must not stand for it. And, for all the other trade unionists listening—we must remember that the occupation is an ongoing catastrophe for the rights of Palestinian workers, who suffer massive unemployment, poverty wages, and a total deprivation of labor protections. Palestinians are leading the way for the labor movement through their formidable, kickass general strikes. And we must especially remember the Israeli and American politicians who have sought to criminalize boycotts in order to protect state-aligned corporate interests and create a pretext to threaten workers for their exercise of anti-corporate political speech. Labor fights for Palestinian rights to fight for workers around the world, just as we must fight for Xinjiang and anywhere else where states and corporations use their monopolies on violence and resources to conscript people who should, by rights, be free.
My son, Omar, was born on the first night of Passover this year. Our seder will be his birthday party, poor kid. He will learn that anyone who acts like Pharoah is the villain in the story. He will learn that never again means never again for ANYONE. He will learn that being a Jew means fighting fascists like your life depends on it, and that we fight fascists alongside our Palestinian siblings, and that we must hold ourselves to higher moral standards than our fascist opponents, because we are prefiguring a different world. He will learn that Jews can be anarchists, antifascists, anti-Zionists, atheists, and trade unionists, that these are proud ways of being Jewish that go back generations in his family’s lineage, and that generations of his relatives have been red-baited and threatened and fired for standing up for these values and come out stronger, that you ain’t done nothing if you ain’t been called a red. He will learn that we, too, are settler colonists in this country, that we were born into a colonial quagmire with which we must contend, and that we owe it to the native people who were murdered and displaced by our ancestors and forebears, and to the ones who live here today, to fight for land back, everywhere, for their sake and for ours.
To everyone here who is Palestinian, or who is dedicated to the struggle for Palestinian freedom—please take heart that there are countless Jews around the world who stand with you. We will all be safer in a world that is free of fascism, corporate control, state monopolies on violence, and genocide. I want you to be free so that I can be free with you. You will have my solidarity forever; we can bring to birth a new world from the ashes of the old.
Presented at the Red Clinic online event Speak Out/Talk Back, 23rd October 2023.
