Why I’m renouncing my Israeli citizenship
As the death toll among Palestinians in Gaza continues to climb, the Israeli government claims it is carrying out a war against an enemy that supposedly threatens not only the existence of the Israeli state, but Jews in general. Such logic has been used for decades to drum up support for Israel's war against Palestinians. But with this latest onslaught, more and more people are saying "no more."
In this letter to the editor published at MassLive.com, , an activist and retired school teacher living in Springfield, Mass, describes why he is giving up his Israeli citizenship.
ON OCTOBER 19, 2010, my plane landed in Israel, and instantaneously, I was awarded Israeli citizenship with identification card number 012706735 solely because I am Jewish. Through reflection and study, I have come to realize that this act was a travesty of justice. There are several million Palestinians and their descendants who cannot enter and/or live and move freely in their native historical homeland.
For several decades, I believed, as most Jews do, that the establishment of the Jewish State of Israel was an answer to the Nazi Holocaust and other persecutions of Jews through the centuries, such as the Russian pogroms, the Spanish Inquisition and the Crusades. However, none of these atrocities were carried out by Palestinians, and none of them justify the atrocities and other injustices perpetrated upon the Palestinian people by the Zionist movement and the state of Israel for over a century.
I am referring to the racist colonization of Palestine, the Nakba/Catastrophe of 1948 whereby the establishment of Israel as a state was accompanied by the destruction of hundreds of Palestinian Arab villages, massacres of thousands of men, women and children and the forced exile of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians from their homeland. Subsequently Israel has embarked upon an aggressive, Nazi-like expansion and a brutal, inhuman, military occupation of nearly half a century.
As a serious student of the Nazi Holocaust, I can only be horrified at the disgrace that the State of Israel and its Jewish supporters continue to bring upon the memory of Jewish Holocaust victims. It's a moral abomination to emulate Nazi tactics in the name of the Jewish people and their alleged security: cowardly massive bombings and slaughter of civilian populations who have no air force to protect them, collective punishment and torture, mass incarcerations, destruction of thousands of homes, and the vicious blockade and ghettoization of Gaza.
Israel is not becoming an apartheid state--it already is one with separate and unequal laws and policing for its Jewish citizens on one hand and for its non-Jewish, mostly Arab citizens and victims of the occupation on the other hand.
It is with a newfound clarity of thinking and analyzing a very emotional tragedy that I have thrown off the shackles of Zionist propaganda and am proudly and publicly renouncing my Israeli citizenship effective immediately. At the same time, I denounce the ongoing colonial oppression of the Palestinian people, a terrible injustice that is greatly facilitated by U.S. tax dollars supporting the vast Israeli military machine. I also encourage other Jews to educate themselves and to stand on the side of the oppressed.
First published at MassLive.com.
