Jacob's story: not in our name
One of the speakers at the recent screening of Israelism in Kilcullen Town Hall, organised by local supporters of the Palestinian people, was Jacob Woolf, a 28-year-old Dublin Jewish man with family history in Waterford and Belfast, and on his Jewish side coming from a very long line of rabbis going back many years to what is modern day Ukraine. He spoke to the Diary in advance of the screening, along with fellow speakers Gazan Mohammed Jendia and author and psychologist Felicity Heathcote.
Why are you here tonight?
I am here to represent a small but growing contingent of Jewish people in Ireland and in many other countries who see the reality of what is happening, and see our identity and our own tragic history being used to justify and whitewash the genocide currently taking place as well as the general legitimacy of what has been done in past decades. We feel morally compelled to take a stand in opposition, to show that the Jewish community is not in fact a monolith and there are dissenting voices within it.
How representative are you of Jewish feelings on this?
We are not a majority but we are significant. Not all of the Jewish community are bloodthirsty like the Netanyahu government would suggest. What we mainly want to do is show that the idea projected by Netanyahu that all Jewish people are completely a united front, completely in support of what is being done, is just completely wrong. We are in favour of a fully independent Palestinian state — we believe that this is the only peaceful solution.
How does what is going on affect Jews like you?
It hurts, in a word. It is deeply deeply upsetting to watch a genocide take place in our name, especially with our history. Many of us have been involved in civil rights and humanitarian movements across the world for a very long time. We have our own deeply upsetting history of violence and persecution, and so to see us today — Israelis, my people, Jewish people — enact a genocide, with the weight of our history on top of us, it’s horrifying.
Has Israel lost the 'never again' moral ground of what the Holocaust did to the Jewish people?
I think the real question is what does ‘never again’ mean? Does it mean such a thing must never again happen to anyone, or does it mean we must make sure that there is nobody in a position to hurt or harm us ever again? And if that means committing sectarian violence, instituting an apartheid state, if it means committing genocide, then that’s the real lesson of the Holocaust — that we must never again put ourselves in a position of weakness or vulnerability and that the only way to achieve that is a state of our own with nobody else.
Liberal Zionists will say that this doesn’t necessarily entail genocide or apartheid. But the fact is, as was said of Eichmann, once you can choose who will inhabit the Earth, or to have this place with nobody else but ourselves, there’s no way to achieve that without apartheid and without the risk of that descending at any time into outright genocide.
If you mean ‘never again’ is to accept that we must share the world with people who are different from us, we don’t really have any choice in the matter. There’s no other way you can do it.
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