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Mon, 09 Oct 2023 14:57:32 GMT

With the current war, I cannot stop thinking about two conversations: one when I was a child, and one with a member of my shitty abusive ex's family. I can't stop thinking about them because they are what got us here. Not directly, of course, but you'll see what I mean.

If you've followed me for a while or know me IRL, you'll know I had a, shall we say, unusual childhood. My parents were extremely politically conservative, even by the standards of hyperobservant Jews, and learning I was queer and trans despite their best efforts

(homeschooling, joining a Lubavitch congregation) only made them even more so. Anyway, my mother was insistent we learn to love Israel, taking us to Zionist marches and protests from a young age, teaching us that Palestinians were an invented people,

openly advocating for the deaths of Yasser Arafat and the leadership of the PLO, and even cheering when Yitzhak Rabin as well, and demanded he be buried with Palestinians "if he wanted to be one so badly." My mother said that Israel was what the Jewish people were owed

for what the world had done to us, and the Palestinians had been created by the world because they could not even give us that. No one had lived there before the Nakba (which she insisted never happened), and no amount of historical evidence could persuade her otherwise.

Israel as some kind of reparations, as recompense, was a deeply held part of her being, and the idea that you could receive reparations from someone else's land was entirely anathema to her. Anyway, she was so convinced of her position on Israel that she said not being a Zionist was a greater sin to her than being trans, and when I became an organ donor, she was furious because it meant I could not be buried in the ultra orthodox cemetary plot she said she had reserved for our family in Israel.

It did not matter to her that being an organ donor saved lives, or that I did not *want* to be buried in an apartheid state; to her, the day I became an organ donor and thus could not be buried in her selected plot in Israel was the day I stopped being Jewish.

The second conversation was about a decade ago with my ex-wife's aunt at High Holiday services. This woman is a dual citizen of Israel and the United States who was an ardent supporter of Netanyahu from the very beginning. I don't recall exactly what started the argument - I *think* we had done a prayer for Israel and I asked for a prayer for Palestine as well - but suffice to say, I made an objection to the exclusion of Palestinians that was not taken well. (As Mercy has often noted, I am a blunt instrument and never did learn to keep my mouth shut.) In the resulting argument, she openly argued that settling all of the West Bank and Gaza was a mitzvah (commandment/good deed) and, when I protested that there were people already living there, flatly said that "they shouldn't have decided to live on our land." I pointed out it was not, in fact, our land, and things escalated until she finally just shouted "I hate them and I want them dead!" I was horrified and recited a Hebrew line from the Torah about our obligation to "blot out the remembrance of Amalek (evil) from under heaven", a commandment I have always taken to mean that we must strive to eradicate evil. But she unironically thought that Palestinians ARE Amalek and thus we are Biblically commanded to eliminate them, and her soft Hebrew unironic "yes" when I recited that line was one of the most chilling moments of my life. "Oh my G-d" was the only response I could muster in the face of an open call for genocide. Her response, however, garnered a standing ovation. And I cannot stop thinking about that as Israeli bombs fall on Gaza again.

Mon, 09 Oct 2023 14:57:03 GMT

Mon, 09 Oct 2023 14:56:15 GMT

Mon, 09 Oct 2023 14:55:42 GMT