Diasporist visions of Jewish safety
Like many other Jewish people, I’ve spent much of my time in the past days scrolling through image after image of horrific violence emerging from Palestine with tears in my eyes. I’ve seen endless descriptions of deaths, violence and destruction, I’ve reached out to friends and family members and have sat with our pain, confusion and fears. I’ve seen some members of my community rushing to defend one side, to ensure that everyone knows who the ‘real’ victims are and demarcate the lines of ‘acceptable’ violence.
All of it is unmeasurably painful. I’m dealing not only with the grief for the many lives lost and crushed in vain, but the knowledge that this ongoing cycle of violence emerges from a false narrative that has taken root in some Jewish communities. This perception falsely tells us that the only way to finally achieve safety for Jews is through separation, supremacy and exclusion of others.
Apart from grief and horror at these deaths and this violence, I’m dealing with the despair at knowing that parts of my community justify violence and the dehumanisation of others in the name of our safety. My grief understands that there exist alternative stories that are often sidelined or marginalised. I feel anger at the erasure of Jewish stories that are so much more hopeful, stories that centre solidarity and an understanding that our safety is intimately intertwined with that of others. Those stories tell us, in line with Jewish tradition, that as Jews we have a duty to sow justice and peace into the world in whatever small and big ways we are able to.
My grief is ignited by the realisation that instead of this, so many of us have absorbed a story of scarcity. This story of fear, that we can only be safe in isolation, among ourselves, has led many in our communities to identify with a Jewish state that is based on colonial violence, dispossession and oppression of others. But is this really the only path available to us as Jews?
Within the Jewish world, there have always existed a variety of opinions and perspectives on how to respond to antisemitic violence that has plagued Jews in many different contexts at various times. I am inspired by ancestors who, before the Holocaust, organised with the Jewish Labour Bund in Lithuania, Poland and Russia and believed in the principle of ‘doykheit’ or ‘hereness’. They argued that we should build communities of solidarity in the places we worked and lived right now, not in some faraway future place. Melanie Kaye Kantrowitz, another Jewish ancestor, coined the term ‘diasporism’, which builds on this concept. She writes beautifully about the idea of home beyond the nation state; she tells us to find common ground and bonds of mutual care with other communities where we live. To fight for justice wherever we are — for ourselves and for all those around us. Because we intimately understand that justice for us is contingent on justice for all.
In 2007 she wrote powerfully in her seminal work ‘The Colors of Jews: Racial Politics and Radical Diasporism’:
What do I mean by home? Not the nation state; not religious worship; not the deepest grief of a people marked by hatred. I mean a commitment to what is and is not mine; to the strangeness of others, to my strangeness to others; to common threads twisted with surprise. Diasporism takes root in the Jewish Socialist Labor Bund’s principle of doikayt — hereness — the right to be, and to fight for justice, wherever we are…Doikayt is about wanting to be citizens, to have rights, to not worry about being shipped off at any moment where someone else thinks you do or don’t belong…I name this commitment Diasporism.
I know that a commitment to diasporism could offer us an alternative vision of Jewish safety — one that recognizes our shared humanity wherever we live, upholds the dignity of all those we live alongside, and insists that we cannot be safe if driven into isolation by fear. Our safety is a mere illusion if it relies on walls and weapons to keep those we dehumanise out. There is only so long a state can oppress and inflict cruelty on a people without a reaction being unleashed. Ultimately these cycles of violence will never end unless we change the story — and the reality — to one of justice and equality for all.
More than anything, I want to see Jewish people and other communities flourishing, living in safety side by side with others in mutual solidarity and support. I have no wish to live in a state where my life and wellbeing is deemed to be more important than that of others, because of our ethnicity, race, nationality or any other background. As a member of Een Andere Joodse Stem (Another Jewish Voice), a diverse group of Jews living in Belgium united in our commitment to promote justice and equality in Belgium and Palestine, I organise with other Jews in Belgium to put forward our visions of safety, showing solidarity with other racialised communities, refusing to be pitted against each other and resisting all forms of racism and state violence. As a Jew, it feels natural to stand in solidarity with Palestinians who have endured years of dispossession, military violence and Apartheid policies. At the same time, I grieve with all those who have lost loved ones due to the escalation of violence that decades of oppression, deprivation and dehumanisation have made inevitable.
In the famous words of Marek Edelman, a Jewish partisan leader who survived the Warsaw ghetto, “to be a Jew means always being with the oppressed and never the oppressors.” As Jews, I want us to stand beside other marginalised communities wherever we can. We can only overcome these violent cycles of oppression by coming together.
