Yesterday, I read (with the kind of resigned, predictable anger tempered with fatalism that we’ve all come to know) of the British Museum’s decision to postpone a lecture on “Ancient Israel and Judah in the British Museum” set for this week. It came as a part of the Museum’s participation in Britain’s first ever ‘Jewish Culture Month’, but the Museum determined that they had to postpone because of a flood of registrants who were known agitators, intent on disrupting and endangering the participants. Why were they registering? Simply because any historical, factual representation of Jewish ancestral, aboriginal connection to the land, any artifacts, any archaeological evidence of the clear, unambiguous Jewish connection to and ancient presence in the land challenges their hateful, dangerous agenda. And so they protest, disrupt, deny, they essentially boycott.
It’s not only London, and it’s not only museums. Last year in Montreal, and this past week in Rome, some of the largest Pride parades across the planet have decided to bar Jewish LGBTQIA+ groups from participating, deeming them insufficiently anti-Zionist or too connected to Israel - which is, as you know, the only country in the middle east that welcomes LGBTQIA+ individuals, has a huge Pride parade, a proudly gay Knesset speaker, and is a haven for those fleeing neighboring countries where LGBTQIA+ identity can be a death sentence. Such incoherence and hypocrisy. We’re grateful for the allyship that our local Pride Center leadership has shown and continues to show with our proudly Jewish and Zionist community, and we hope that it has a positive influence beyond Rockland.
And it’s not only museums, not only parades. It’s also the Park Slope Food Co-op in Brooklyn, which voted by 67% majority this week to apply BDS to its products and remove the 9 or so Israeli products it has from its shelves. These pitiable souls daftly boycott Israel, but use hundreds and sell thousands of products from China, a country that put millions of Uyghur Muslims in concentration camps, exploits dozens of third world countries and hundreds of millions of their citizens for profit and influence, propping up murderous regimes and gobbling up ports in its ‘Belt and Road’ initiative, while buying illegal oil from a regime that just slaughtered 40,000 of its own citizens in the streets. They stock Turkish products, even though Turkey has brutally occupied and ethnically cleansed northern Cyprus since 1974. They stock Spanish products, even though to this day, Spain maintains colonies (COLONIES!!) in Ceuta and Melilla on the African mainland. Bravo. And they also use Israeli tech in every digital photo they take, every byte of flash memory they store, every camera in their security system. For these supporters of real murderers, colonizers, occupiers, imperialists, the hypocrisy is truly staggering.
Do not forget any of this. Remember it when you buy, when you hire, when you vote, when you give. We are the people who have upheld the Shabbat for over 3400 years, Zecher LeYetziat Mitzrayim - in memory of the exodus from slavery in Egypt. We are the people who remember and uphold the principles of sovereign responsibility for our indigent brothers and sisters even though we were without sovereignty in our land for 1900 years. We are the people who remember our lost and loved, our martyrs of the Shoah, our fallen Soldiers at every celebratory service on our holidays.
To paraphrase Walter White/Heisenberg from the acclaimed TV series ‘Breaking Bad’, we must each turn and face these gutless, masked, and dangerous mobs to say:
“I am the One Who Remembers.”
If this is where those who choose to hate place themselves, take a polaroid. File it away, and as I’ve said and acted on for years now, ensure there is a financial, legal, electoral, legislative and social cost to inciting, allowing, or acting on hatred of the Jewish people or their sovereign identity.
While you are remembering, you can do more. We applaud and echo the approach of our partners at UJA Federation of New York, who will be purchasing 20,000 units of the famous Bamba snacks that the Park Slope Co-op is boycotting. We will endeavor to participate in a similar manner, and you can do so too on an individual level, supporting Israeli businesses by buying Israeli products, and by patronizing hard-hit Israeli entrepreneurs as we have done partnering with ESEK.biz.