Dear US Law Firms
Beginning on November 1st, 2023, numerous US law firms, including my own, signed a letter. This letter rightfully rebukes the anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, and bigotry of all kinds that has spiked in recent weeks, but then goes on (to my confusion) to cite “calls for the elimination of the Israeli state” as anti-Semitism.
Anti-semitism has fittingly been called “the longest hatred.” It has been so for thousands of years and has led to the death and suffering of millions of Jewish people around the world. To conflate such bigotry with the geo-political question of Israel’s legitimacy is one of the greatest travesties in this conflict. While the letter makes no explicit threats against one’s potential employment with the signatories’ firms, the chilling effect is undeniable. The right to question not only the legitimacy of a government but also its actions is the bedrock principle of a true democracy. And despite claiming to be the one and only democracy in the Middle East, the Israeli government has weaponized anti-Semitism to defend its crimes against the Palestinian people and quell any resistance or critique against it.
Take, for example, the accusation of apartheid. Israel has been accused of committing the crime of apartheid for decades, even as early as 1961 when South African Prime Minister Hendrik Verwoerd scoffed at Israel’s vote against his own government’s apartheid, for “[t]hey took Israel away from the Arabs after the Arabs lived there for a thousand years. In that, I agree with them. Israel, like South Africa, is an apartheid state.” The United Nations, Human Rights Watch, the Human Sciences Research Council of South Africa, Yesh Din, B’Tselem, the International Federation for Human Rights, Amnesty International, the International Commission of Jurists, and Former President Jimmy Carter have all accused the state of Israel of apartheid against the Palestinian people. NGOs, activists, and politicians have leveled this allegation against the Israeli government, but to no avail. Instead, the Israeli government claims these conclusions are false, biased, and anti-Semitic.
There are deep, historical, and religious wounds that plague this conflict and cloud our ability to judge it clearly, but there are also irrefutable truths. Historic Palestine was promised by a brutalizing imperial power (for purposes motivated by their own anti-Semitism) to a minority of Jewish people who subscribed to Zionism, with no consideration given to the hundreds of thousands of Palestinians who already lived there. This was, by globally recognized definitions, colonialism. Colonialism, as we so intimately know, cannot take place without violence against its indigenous people. Instead of acknowledging their plight as a direct result of Israel’s occupation, scores of excuses attempt to discredit the indigeneity of the Palestinians and the existence of Palestine itself, as if to excuse the horrific violence they have endured at the hands of the Israeli government and its settlers since 1917 — the kind of violence that corrupts the soul, as Ta-Nehisi Coates put it.
Corruption that led to the slaughter of 15,000 Palestinians, the ethnic cleansing of 750,000 Palestinians, and the capture of 78% of Palestinian land in 1948. Corruption that led to the massacre of hundreds, if not thousands, of Palestinian and Lebanese Shias, at the hands of Christian Lebanese militias, as the Israeli Defense Force stood idly by, bearing responsibility by their own admission and the UN’s. Corruption that uses the excuse of “security concerns” to justify Israel’s apartheid, where Palestinians’ freedom of movement, right to vote, and right to dignity is severely restricted, if not completely prohibited. Corruption that results in the genocidal rhetoric of Israeli government officials, like Heritage Minister Amihai Eliyahu tweeting, “Blow up and flatten everything…we are giving out lots to all those who fought for Gaza”; or like President Isaac Herzog saying, “It is an entire nation out there that is responsible…[The civilians] could have risen up. They could have fought against that evil regime which took over Gaza in a coup d’etat”; or like Former Israeli National Security Council head Giora Eiland, who argued that “Israel needs to create a humanitarian crisis in Gaza, compelling tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands to seek refuge in Egypt or the Gulf”; or like the published paper by an Israeli government ministry that stated, “There is currently a unique and rare opportunity to evacuate the entire Gaza Strip.”
Violence corrupts the soul, and it does so by breeding more violence. There has never been, in the history of the entire human race, a people whose land was violently taken from them, whose freedoms and rights were relegated to second-class citizenship, and whose very existence was systematically threatened by its occupier, who did not resist with violence in kind. And yet, acknowledging the seemingly obvious symptom of violent resistance to violent colonialism has led to the loss of employment and freedom to numerous individuals, particularly in places that claim to value freedom of speech. I can find no words that better describe the cyclical nature of colonialist violence than that of French Philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre’s, paraphrased by Professor Nurit Peled-Elhanan, a lecturer at the David Yellen College of Education in Jerusalem, in a faculty WhatsApp group chat discussing the October 7th attacks: “‘After so many years that the neck of the occupied has been suffocating under your iron foot and suddenly was given a chance to raise his eyes, what kind of gaze did you expect you would see there?’ We saw this gaze.” Hours later, Ms. Peled-Elhanan was suspended for expressing “justification to the heinous act.”
The most shameful chapters in our global history have always resulted from one group’s inability to separate another group’s identities and experiences from our shared humanity. There is no justification for the attacks on Israel on October 7th, just as there is no justification for the disproportionate and collective punishment being waged on the Palestinian people by the Israeli government in retaliation, but it cannot be forgotten that violence does not occur in a vacuum. When we fail to ask what could drive people to such horrific violence, we fail in our duty to one another to prevent the conditions that allowed it from ever happening again. When we fail to condemn acts of violence equally, regardless of the perpetrator, we doom any opportunities for meaningful, equitable change. In this, we are constantly failing.
A study in 2010 found that the New York Times covered Israeli deaths and Palestinian deaths at a ratio of 25:1. Today, coverage of the conflict continues this pattern. Palestinians “die” while Israelis are “killed.” Acts of Palestinian resistance are labeled “terrorism,” while acts of Israeli settler violence are called “vigilantism,” the very same settler violence responsible for the over 133 Palestinians murdered and 1800 arbitrarily arrested in the West Bank since the October 7th attacks near Gaza. Hamas operates exclusively in Gaza, so what justification could there possibly be for such violence? There are none — not now, not ever — and yet, the government of Israel attempts to by claiming “self-defense” and “security concerns” — terms that are meant to disguise the innocence of the Palestinians being victimized by their violence.
The history of this conflict is complex, a solution to this violence has evaded the world for decades, and there is still no end in sight, but we cannot let the painful nature of this moment stop us from remembering in one another our shared humanity and our responsibility to condemn any government’s systemic oppression and murder against innocent people. We cannot fulfill these duties when any critique leveled at the Israeli government, and the Zionism that inspires it, is callously characterized as anti-Semitism. Centuries of persecution across the globe and one of the most calculated and horrendous genocides in history do not preclude the government of Israel and its settlers from committing their own discriminatory violence. In his book, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, dedicated “to the oppressed, and to those who suffer with them and fight at their side,” Paulo Freire writes this: “It is easy for the oppressed to fight their oppressors only to become the polar opposites of what they currently are. In other words, this just makes them the oppressors and starts the cycle all over again.”
Just as we all have a great capacity for tolerance and kindness, so too is our capacity for oppression and cruelty. Our only hope of creating a world where this kind of violence and oppression no longer exists requires us to acknowledge any and all injustice wherever it festers and reject it in the fiercest terms.
On October 7th, 2023, Hamas perpetrated an attack where 1,400 innocent Israelis were killed, 4,500 were injured, and 203 were taken hostage. Today is November 7th, 2023, and as a result of Israel’s retaliatory bombing of Gaza, at least 10,022 Palestinians have been killed, 70% of which are women and children, 32,000 have been wounded, thousands of Gazans working in Israel at the time of the October 7th attack have been expelled back to the war zone where at least 45% of their homes have been destroyed by 10,000 plus Israeli bombs, and an estimated 1.4 million have been displaced. UN special rapporteurs are “convinced that the Palestinian people are at grave risk of genocide.” The heads of 18 UN agencies have made an incredibly rare joint-statement calling for “an immediate humanitarian ceasefire.”
Hateful attacks and acts of intimidation have sharply risen against American Jews, regardless of their political ideology and whether they subscribe to Zionism. Hateful attacks and acts of intimidation have also sharply risen against American Muslims, regardless of their national origin. Hateful attacks and acts of intimidation have also sharply risen against American Sikhs, a community far removed from this conflict. All of these hate crimes stem from the same deeply misguided belief that we must answer for the actions of those who share our race, religion, nationality, ethnicity, and so on, and so on…
While the letter that over 100 US law firms (and counting) have signed condemns bigotry of all kinds, it only calls out specific examples of anti-Semitism, begging the question, do you consider some acts of hate against one group to be worse than another? By chilling future lawyers’ employment prospects for criticism of the Israeli government’s actions and its legitimacy, you are complicit in Israel’s weaponization of anti-Semitism against legitimate concerns for the right of self-determination and the livelihood of the Palestinian people. By conflating “calls for the elimination of the Israeli state” with anti-Semitism, you delegitimize any solution that forces Israel to reckon with its colonial role in Palestine, including one-state solutions called for by Palestinians and Israelis alike — one state, under the historic Palestine, where all citizens are equal under the rule of law, regardless of religion or ethnicity. As stated by Palestinian lawyer Michael Tarazi:
“Support for one state is hardly a radical idea; it is simply the recognition of the uncomfortable reality that Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories already function as a single state. They share the same aquifers, the same highway network, the same electricity grid and the same international borders…[The one-state solution] neither destroys the Jewish character of the Holy Land nor negates the Jewish historical and religious attachment (although it would destroy the superior status of Jews in that state). Rather, it affirms that the Holy Land has an equal Christian and Muslim character. For those who believe in equality, this is a good thing.”
Perhaps it is naive to believe that the people in Palestine and Israel might one day live together as neighbors, in peace, without fear of persecution, under a new government, but it is not hopeless, and, most importantly, it is not anti-Semitic. I sincerely hope you take my words in the earnest spirit I am giving them and reconsider your signatures on this letter by recognizing that there is no path toward peace if we do not allow the legitimacy of governments and institutions around the globe to be questioned and criticized, regardless of where they are or who they serve.
