Not in My Name: Netanyahu, Make a Deal and Stop the Genocide

A recent Jewish Heritage Fund survey found that 7% of respondents identified as LGBTQ+. Queer Kentucky has partnered with the Jewish Heritage Fund to uplift queer Jewish people. With anti-Semitism spreading in the United States and abroad, it is important to uplift our Jewish community members. Queer is an identity that crosses racial, geographic, ethnic, class, and cultural boundaries, so the communities we work with are as diverse as the communities in that queer Kentuckians live.

This week, the Republican members of Kentucky’s Congressional delegation embraced a war criminal, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, at the Capitol. This is a man who ignored warnings of Hamas’ attack plans, leading to the deaths of over 1,200 Israelis, and coordinated a retaliatory genocide that has so far killed over 38,000 Palestinians. The Commonwealth’s lone Democratic representative, Morgan McGarvey, didn’t go. One of the country’s first Muslim-American members of Congress, Ilhan Omar, also didn’t attend. She instead gave her seats to relatives of Israeli hostages, many of whom have been relentlessly condemning Netanyahu’s failure to negotiate a return for their loved ones.

I’m a Kentucky Jew, I’m queer, and I believe Israel needs to negotiate a deal and stop its genocide on Gaza.

On September 30 of last year, my husband and I had a Jewish queer wedding. We signed a ketubah (a Jewish marriage contract), said the Shehechiyanu (a prayer for special occasions), and danced the hora. My mother walked me down the aisle and my father blessed the challah. Having been raised in a Jewish community that largely espoused negative messages about queerness, I understood the significance, for myself and for others, of the day.

A week later, news broke of the October 7th attacks. My gut plunged as I read the accounts of the people who were killed, harmed, and kidnapped. I messaged Israeli friends. Non-Jewish American friends checked in with me. One day I was eating my lunch and an interview with the mother of a 23-year-old kidnapped Israeli American started playing through my headphones. Her son was badly injured in the attack, and then taken into Gaza. In the bluntness of this mother’s pleading for help, I heard my own mother. I struggled to collect myself and get back to my workday.

At the same time, my anger grew over reports of Israel’s bloody response. Netanyahu’s new blocks on aid to Gaza starved infants to death and forced others to eat grass to survive. The Israeli military made Gaza the most bombed place on the planet. With sudden evacuation orders, Israel forced two million Palestinian families to abandon their homes, trek miles along simmering, cratered roads, only to face more destruction and displacement when the Israeli military picked new targets.

As Israel escalated its retaliation on Gaza, I grew more wary of the messages being released by many Jewish organizations, including Louisville synagogues, affirming their steadfast, unqualified support for Israel. Yes, Hamas’ October 7th attacks were vile and should never have happened. Yes, I believe Hamas violated human rights by kidnapping Israelis and continuing to imprison 120 of them nearly a year later. But no, I could not ignore Israel killing so many innocent Palestinians.

Mid-October was when I first heard a call for Israel and Hamas to enter a ceasefire. Arab, Black, and Latino members of Congress led this push. The first Jewish people I saw demanding a ceasefire were queer. Among those was Rabbi Ari Lev Fornari, who is trans and leads the Philadelphia Reconstructionist synagogue Kol Tzedek. I had attended services there a handful of times with my friend Abby, a member of the shul’s board.

On October 18th, Rabbi Ari Lev demonstrated at the Capitol with thousands of other rabbis and Jews. In one video, with a tallis dangling from his shoulders and a Kol Tzedek kippah on his head, Rabbi Ari Lev led a call-and-response: “You cannot exploit our grief. You cannot call our grief a reason to kill, to fund killing. We are here to call on President Biden and [the] U.S. Congress to use their power to deescalate Israel.”

Soon after that demonstration, Kol Tzedek’s board voted to support a ceasefire, including by emblazoning their website with the “Synagogues for Ceasefire” banner.

The early pro-ceasefire actions from queer Jews I knew, along with statements from other prominent queer Jews, such as Rabbi Abby Stein, Matt Bernstein, and Adam Eli, built on legacies of queer Jewish intellectuals like Judith Butler and Sarah Schulman.

The voices of queer people in the ceasefire movement have pierced the echo chambers of Netanyahu and his supporters, as shown by their weaponization of transphobia and homophobia to attempt to muzzle us. Megyn Kelly did this to Rabbi Jessica Rosenberg, who is a gender non conforming femme woman, in November. Netanyahu did this again in his speech to Congress this week, when he said gay people advocating for Palestinians were like “chickens for K.F.C.”

Kelly and Netanyahu would gain from listening to queer Palestinians and Jews about why so many of us stand together in the face of injustice. In her 2012 book, Israel / Palestine and the Queer International, Sarah Schulman cites a queer Israeli anti-occupation group, Kvisa Shchora (Black Laundry), in explaining why so many queer people oppose Israeli human rights abuses: “Our own oppression as lesbians, gays and trans people enhances our solidarity with other oppressed groups.”

Here in Louisville, I joined events organized by Louisville Coalition for a Ceasefire and Jewish Louisvillians for Peace, and I also urged my Metro Councilman, Phillip Baker, to vote for the proposed ceasefire resolution. With the support of over 1,100 Louisville residents, the resolution was modeled on one passed in Cincinnati, and was revised to minimize opposition from local Jewish groups. It advocated a ceasefire that would encompass “all parties” (i.e. Israel and Hamas), and would “secure the return of all hostages.”

Yet, when the measure advanced in the Metro Council, it was opposed by the rabbis of all five of Louisville’s synagogues, along with two other major Louisville Jewish organizations. In their letter, the groups wrote that they opposed the resolution “on the grounds that it was absolutely divisive.”

The Metro Council Chair pulled the resolution and it is now unlikely to receive a vote. The decision angered me, especially given the hostile message it sent Louisville Palestinians, like Nick Tawasha, who pled with readers of this publication to help “Prevent the eradication of [his] people,” and Leen Abozaid, who spoke at the Metro Council meeting in support of the ceasefire resolution, and who lost at least 53 family members in Gaza since October 7th.

This summer I went again with my friend Abby to her synagogue, Kol Tzedek, in Philadelphia. Like nearly all Jewish services I’ve been to, this one closed with the Mourner’s Kaddish. Usually congregants stand during this prayer to honor family members who recently passed. Except in this Kaddish, Rabbi Ari Lev invited the room to also rise for those killed in Gaza and Israel, including Palestinians. Almost everyone rose.

As we near 300 days since October 7th, and the country focuses on the coming election, it will likely be harder to convince our leaders to act on Israel/Palestine. But as the lion of a Representative and Palestinian-American, Rashida Tlaib, demonstrated, when she held up a placard that read, “war criminal” for the duration of the Israeli Prime Minister’s hourlong address, and the hundreds of Jewish activists who were arrested for staging a sit-in at the Capitol before Netanyahu’s visit, we can – and must – do more.

 

Some ways to take action:

• Get involved with groups like Louisville Coalition for a Ceasefire, Louisville Showing Up for Racial Justice, and Jewish Louisvillians for Peace
• Urge Kentucky members of Congress to support a ceasefire and halt arming Israel’s genocide
• Donate to organizations providing on-the-ground relief in Gaza