Cecilie Surasky is communications director for Jewish Voice for Peace and a New Voices fellow with the Academy of Educational Development (see: http://qumsiyeh.org/ceciliesurasky/ ).
Cecilie Surasky on the obligation of decent Jews to stand up for human rights of the Palestinians (2005): Every time a Gazan father faints as he watches his family home demolished; every time a Jew, Muslim or Christian is violently attacked by armed Israelis because they are non-violently protesting the separation wall; every time a rain of Israeli army bullets flies into the body of a young child on her way to school; every time a young Palestinian man is made to play violin by Israeli soldiers, or a pregnant woman dies at a checkpoint, Jews like us must speak out.
Remaining silent is no longer an option. We can no longer let our trauma, our deep fear of anti-Jewish hatred implanted in us through generations of persecution, make us remain quiet at the expense of truth.
Our continued silence perpetuates the fiction that all Jews are of one mind when it comes to Israel - that we think it can do no wrong; that we believe the Israeli government is innocent of war crimes; that we believe US military support for Israel's illegal occupation is a sign of our special relationship, and not a cynical use of Jewish suffering to provide moral cover for strategic interests in an oil-rich region.
Our silence puts us in more danger, not less. Through it, we give our consent not only to the obliteration of the Palestinian people, but to the end of our own people. If not our bodies, then certainly our spirit…
From fear of being socially shunned, and the systematic pressure campaigns launched a few years ago against most major newspapers for being "anti-Israel", to the Jewish community council that trained others how to neutralise Jewish peace groups by meeting behind closed doors and using pro-peace buzzwords to co-opt their views, there are all too many examples of the mainstream Jewish community silencing dissent and principled Jews staying in the closet.
This phenomenon is all the more puzzling because many would say that questioning and dissent is encoded in Jewish DNA. From Emma Goldman and Saul Alinsky to Betty Freidan, Larry Kramer and refuseniks like Yoni Ben-Artzi, we find a long list of remarkable outspoken Jews whose willingness to stand up for what is right and to question the status quo made history, but also made them enemies. They stand as our heroes not only because of what they achieved, but because of what they faced in order to make all of us better as human beings and citizens of the world.
The atmosphere of intimidation in the American Jewish world has had a corrosive effect not just on our families and communities, but on the very tradition which binds us together. We are famous for speaking our minds when we perceive that an injustice is taking place. That is not true when the perpetrator is Israel. Suddenly, we allow our fears of being ostracised from our communities and families to silence us. And as a result, history will show that much of the mainstream Jewish leadership has failed us, and failed us profoundly. Perhaps we will have failed ourselves.
But courage does not mean being fearless, it means acting in the face of fear. And Jews like me have to ask: If we no longer stand up for moral courage and call injustice when we see it, regardless of who commits it, then what do we stand for?” [1].
[1]. Cecilie Surasky, “Speaking out about Israel to save the Jewish soul”, Jordan Times, 1 February 2005: http://qumsiyeh.org/ceciliesurasky/ .