Israel's use of religious symbols in its genocide of Palestinians is an affront to Judaism and has robbed Jews of a faith practice divorced from nationalist barbarism
A Hanukkah menorah stands next to an Israeli flag inside central Gaza following an air strike, as seen from southern Israel, on 11 December 2023
Amanda Gelender writes in Middle East Eye 24 December 2023
Israel has stolen and appropriated Jewish symbols we hold dear, politicising them as markers for state-sponsored genocide. Palestinians continue to suffer for western empire’s spoils, under the guise of safeguarding the Jewish people.
After Palestinians, Zionism’s next victim is the Jewish faith.
Israel and Zionists around the world weaponise Jewish symbols to intimidate, humiliate and lay claim to that which they deem theirs. Israeli soldiers have branded the face of a Palestinian prisoner with the Star of David. Israeli forces notoriously make blindfolded kidnapped Palestinians wave or wear the Israeli flag – emblazoned with a blue Star of David – videotaping the humiliation to disseminate online for Zionists to join in the jeering.
Israelis taunt Palestinians with cheers for a “Happy Hanukkah” while launching air strikes on communities dying of starvation and disease. How is this honouring the Jewish faith?
How will Jewish people being inextricably tied to mass murder “protect Jewish people” globally?
‘Symbol of violence’
As Jews around the world prepared for the start of Hanukkah this year, Israel murdered a beloved powerhouse intellectual, a Palestinian professor who represented the soaring voice of Gaza. The poet and educator Dr Refaat Alareer – and six members of his family – were “surgically targeted” and assassinated by Israel in his sister’s home in Gaza City.
Zionist soldiers marked the first night of Hanukkah by erecting a gigantic menorah in the rubble of decimated homes, where bodies remain trapped
As I and many other Jews made arrangements for our annual festival of lights, Israel brutally assassinated Refaat as part of an ongoing campaign to snuff out the storytellers and journalists of Gaza. They claim to do this in our names.
Near the site where Israel assassinated Refaat, Zionist soldiers marked the first night of Hanukkah by erecting a gigantic menorah in the rubble of decimated homes, where the unrecovered bodies of loved ones remain trapped.
Instead of the menorah representing the hope and spirit of our people at this moment, it proclaims to the world a colonial military victory – a symbol of violent conquest in a place where a poet’s passionate dissent was exterminated by Israel’s death machine.
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