a report on the second Jewish Anti-Zionist Congress in Dublin…

On Friday the 26th of June, the second Jewish Anti-Zionist Congress convened for three days in the Maldron Hotel, Tallaght, Dublin. The Maldron thankfully resisted pressure from a variety of actors to refuse hosting of this event. Around 450 attended on each of the two days I was there.

The list of speakers included the prominent historian Ilan Pappe, UN special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese, Peace Activists Ronnie Barkan, Jude Farrell, Andrew Feinstein, Lara Elborno and many others.

Ilan Pappe’s introductory keynote session stressed the need to ‘explain how Zionism emerged and developed historically.’

Perhaps it might be framed in the context of the near two millennia history of Christian Anti-Semitism coalescing from the 1880’s onwards into a near thirty-year period of intense Eastern European pogromist activity. This ‘Tilt in History’ saw the migration of over two million Jews, seeking safety.

The formation of myriad Nation States within Europe encouraged an attempt by a minority of (now mostly secular) Jews to seek to remould a Torah-centred transnational Jewish identity into a Nationalist one modelled by adjacent European nations. This was to be realised by a relocation of Jews to Palestine where political and economic control would be established. Simple? Not.

A colonial sponsor was required, sought and found in Britain’s willingness to support such a Jewish ‘National Home’, despite the presence of an existing indigenous population.

In short, Zionist migrants brought trauma with them, ‘projecting,’ as one biographer put it, ‘onto the Palestinian Arab population the familiar cliche’s of old Russia: the murderous shadow of the Pogroms… morphing into the ‘Arab threat.’ This insecurity, arguably, was brought to the worst possible place, where, without a peace arrangement with Palestinians, it would be constantly heightened.

The cost of Zionist statehood was the visitation of deep intergenerational trauma on others. In 1948 Israel declared itself a state, but, uniquely, one representing all Jewish people – wherever their location.

With this, the Jewish Anti-Zionist Congress and many historic Jewish communities choose to demur – regarding the conflation of Judaism with Zionism as essentially an ‘Imperialist’ claim, by a de facto Apartheid state, colonising both place and identity – its engine room the doctrine of ‘Hafrada’ – the ‘separation of things (or people) from each other.’

A Separate Development. Enforced by a new, ‘muscular’ and martial Jew, unconstrained by the ethical requirements of traditional, pacifistic, non-violent Judaism.

This conflation is opposed today by organisations such as the Jewish Anti-Zionist Congress.

Convened last year, in Vienna, this broad alliance stated some core concerns:

“Given Israel and its allies relentless efforts to conflate criticism of Zionism with anti-semitism, the Congress affirmed: “Israel and Zionism act illegally and immorally while claiming to represent all Jews – thus endangering Jewish communities everywhere. The false assertion that Jews inherently support Zionism and its abhorrent state is the real antisemitism.”

Given the high degree of Irish public mobilisation over a near-three-year period regarding the fate of Palestinian people, Dublin seemed a logical venue for the second Congress. With one contributor noting that even the choice of Tallaght seemed to somehow rhyme. Its etymology of ‘a burial place – of plague, (and perhaps even Famine victims), evokes a resonance with An Gorta Mor, Ireland’s Great Hunger, which along with its experience of Colonialism, remains deeply etched in the collective memory of most Irish people.

This context helps explain its extraordinary outpouring of empathy with an ongoing Palestinian catastrophe.

Every session pulsed with the urgency of energised emotion.

One snapshot: A flickering image via live video link of Francesca Albanese, the UN Special Rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territories. She’s greeted with love. Like a long-lost friend. A standing ovation and sustained applause. Minutes long.

Despite her exclusion from the global financial system, she argued that a shift in opinion was indeed occurring. Her travails recast as evidence that the elites are indeed discomfited by the mass actions on the streets. Still, she stressed, the need remains to reach out to those ‘in the middle,’ yet undecided on how events in the Israel/Palestine region should be framed.

Later, another testimony, another live feed. This time directly from Gaza. A man greeting us, from a place of 64,000 orphans; of children, hungering still, sweltering under thin canvas, besieged by rats and disease; of a generation lost to schooling. To not forget them or their trauma. Nor the amputees, nor the widowed. To not give up on them.

The energy pulsed again, a stop you in your track’s moment, as hands raised high in imprecation and humane longing, reaching out through a screen.

It’s what love looked like that Friday: as waves of applause broke again on the rocks of Palestinian Sumud (steadfastness, resilience, a refusal to just leave their land). Then the unnamed everyman’s hands raised also. Two realities interacting, each affirming in empathy that one day, Palestine will indeed be free.

Empathy. Something despised by the new wave of regurgitated far-right ethno-nationalist ideologues. On their Demodernising quest. Feverishly working to eradicate Multicultural Liberal Democratic values, and a reversion in time when Citizenship Rights were allocated according to ethnicity or skin tone, longing for a 1984 boot stamp on human faces.

Strangely now, for this constituency, Israel has become a behavioural blueprint. As Crusader flags dot parts of Belfast. Deus Vult: God wills it.

On Saturday:

‘Why would you eradicate cemeteries?’ Lara Elborno, a Palestinian – American International lawyer asked.

‘Bulldoze, churn up family histories, where my grandparents are buried?’

It’s an eradication end game.

‘To erase the record of a people’s existence.’

Carefully, thoroughly. The pattern plays out: attack, for example, a hospital.

‘Then deny. You would never do that. Then repeat, scaling up attacks, each time exponentially greater. Until all are gone. And with zero accountability, that’s how you normalise the unthinkable.

‘How a much more dangerous world emerges. Where ICC lawyers, families are threatened. Where Zionism becomes the status quo for a new world of disorder.’

Modelling out the future  – clearing the ground of the already creaking, fragile but necessary fiction of the Architecture of International Law. Then press cut, paste and repeat elsewhere.

Andrew Feinstein and Jude Farrell then talk of mass surveillance, AI targeting models, terrifying technologies. Heralds of dystopia. A Trillion dollars in defence spending this year alone. Most paid for by general taxation. With 40% of world corruption occurring in the Arms trade. A new world order incubated in a laboratory under control conditions: a Palestine laboratory.

Its ripples affecting us also. Tugging the ever-tightening noose of coercive control around our civil liberties. Provoked by the need to reign in the rampaging mobs of retired Vicars wielding their placards; deploying their ethics in the public space, rather than in dank, deserted churches where they would do no harm.

And there was more. On Shabbat sessions in Tallaght of insight and exposure. Too many to repeat here.

So, in trying to conclude, surely the only critique worth a damn is one regarding the behaviour of your own people-group or co-religionists? Something we’re not very good at, especially in our own northern patch of earth.

The irony still holds that only admissions of failure enable genuine reconciliation.

In this, the Jewish Anti-Zionism Congress exhibit a moral posture we would do well to emulate. Their words and actions mirroring the ethical principles of 3000 years of Judaic practice, unwilling still to exchange such wisdom for allegiance to a plot of earth, a rag (a flag), and a national anthem. For no nationalism is ever truly on the side of the better angels of our nature.

Wherever in the Jewish Diaspora they may be twelve months hence, they’ll echo still the humane longings that observant Jews at Passover pray for from afar: ‘Next Year in Jerusalem.’ A prayer repeated by many also located within Jerusalem – to be in Jeru-Salem, the city of a Peace not yet achieved.

Note: See jazic.org for more information

The author is a member of the ‘Belfast Peace Movement’ which has been hosting seminars over the last two months on ‘Christian Zionism,’ ‘The History of Palestine,’ and ‘Zionist Ideology and Jewish Critiques of Zionism.’