Over the last three years, Jews have wrestled with many questions about the Palestine solidarity movement that emerged with great force after Oct. 7, 2023. Is it simply a movement deeply critical of the State of Israel? Is its anti-Zionism intrinsically antisemitic? Can meaningful coalitions be built between the movement and peace-seeking Jews who remain connected to Israel?
On Wednesday night, the third anniversary of Hamas’ attacks on southern Israel and the war that followed, I came face to face with what I believe are the movement’s most extreme elements. What I saw was a form of political expression that had become indistinguishable from hatred. Progressives ignore this extremism at our peril.
I wasn’t planning to go to a protest. In fact, I chose to go to the Israelis for Peace vigil specifically because the poster said that no flags or signs would be allowed. I wanted a space to grieve the day without having to argue about it.
My first thought when I arrived at Union Square in Manhattan was: I’m in the wrong place. I saw a massive crowd rallying with Palestinian flags, bullhorns, and drums. I passed a minyan of anti-Zionist Neturei Karta members in kaffiyehs davening Ma’ariv, the evening prayer.
The protesters had shown up to protest the vigil. It’s worth pausing on that: They were there to protest the vigil. Masked people carrying signs decrying Israel, with Hamas and Hezbollah paraphernalia, were sitting in the neatly lined chairs prepared for mourners.
Protesters were there to rage
The vigil still went forward. But to get in, I needed an NYPD escort.
It was almost impossible to hear the speakers over the chanting crowd. The few words I heard from the mourners were desperate cries of grief and pleas for coexistence.
The speakers recited testimonies of victims murdered and brutalized at the Nova music festival and at kibbutzim in Israel’s Gaza envelope. Organizers read letters from survivors and their families: “If we want any path forward, how dare we not talk about the pain of both peoples at this moment?”
Yonatan Zeigen, son of the legendary Israeli peace activist Vivian Silver, who was murdered by Hamas at Kibbutz Be’eri, spoke about upholding his mother’s peace-building legacy, a legacy Hamas itself sought to desecrate.
Others shared testimony from Gazans about the devastation of the war on their family and community. Many speakers at the vigil used the word “genocide” to describe the war and registered their total opposition to it.
None of it mattered. The protesters weren’t there to listen. They were there to rage.
While the slogans have been reported elsewhere, they bear repeating.
“Brad Lander, you can’t hide, we charge you with genocide!” they shouted at the Democratic congressional candidate. To Mayor Zohran Mamdani, they yelled, “Zohran, you can’t hide, we charge you with genocide!”
The protesters called the mayor a “bootlicker,” asking, “Zohran, how many kids have you killed today?” and “How dare you call yourself a Muslim?” When an imam spoke at the vigil, I couldn’t hear what he said; the crowd erupted in chants of “Traitor! Traitor! Traitor!”
The mayor said nothing, holding his candle and looking at the protesters. I wondered what was going through his head. How did he feel hearing the chant he had once defended, “Globalize the intifada,” directed at him, and at the kinds of progressive American Jews and Israeli Jews he had made kosher with his presence at their vigil? What did the phrase even mean in this context?
Of course people shout at politicians. Social movements have used ugly rhetoric before, and they’ve always had their fringes. In the late 1980s, members of the AIDS activist group ACT UP interrupted Mass at St. Patrick’s Cathedral to protest the Catholic Church’s opposition to contraceptives and LGBT rights. During the Iraq War, people accused politicians of personal complicity in war crimes.
Space for all suffering from last three years, Jewish and Palestinian alike
But on Wednesday night, hundreds of people physically surrounded a group of speakers representing some of the most progressive voices in the Jewish community: leading rabbis and activists, American and Israeli. They were there to provide a space for all the suffering of the last three years, Jewish and Palestinian alike. The mob was there to quite literally scream at them. At that gathering, they seemed to be saying that only one kind of death was worthy of grief, and it wasn’t Jewish.
The ensuing silence about these protesters from many in this movement, including, prominently, Mamdani, contrasts with the willingness of many in the Jewish community who regularly and openly issue tokhachah (rebuke) to Jews in the Diaspora and in Israel whose words and actions we believe violate our moral commitments.
The implicit argument seems to be that acts undertaken in the name of Palestinian resistance are both necessary and beyond reproach when they come from the powerless, or those claiming to represent them.
Powerlessness does not absolve anyone
This is profoundly twisted moral logic. A group pursuing what it believes to be a righteous cause is not thereby exempt from the moral standards that apply to everyone else.
Powerlessness does not absolve anyone of the obligation to recognize the intrinsic dignity of other human beings. If it did, one would assume that anything stateless Jews did in the years after the Holocaust would be justified, a conclusion that the Palestine solidarity movement quite clearly rejects.
Anti-Zionists and Jews who maintain a connection to Israel often hold fundamentally different views about the conflict. Yet Mamdani, one of the world’s most prominent anti-Zionists, chose to attend a vigil mourning all those who have lost their lives on and since Oct. 7.
The protests that greeted the mayor revealed something more troubling than a failure to bridge political divides: an unwillingness to make room for Jewish grief.
Leaders in the Palestine solidarity movement should reckon with that failure. Those who seek a just and peaceful future for all the people living in the land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea must be willing to challenge dehumanization within their own political movements.
Much of the media coverage from that night focused on what happened at the protest. There’s been less attention paid to how the vigil ended. I’m not sure if it was originally on the program, but Rabbi Amichai Lau-Lavie led the group in a recitation of Kaddish Yatom, the mourner’s prayer.
The Kaddish is commonly understood as a prayer for the dead. But the liturgy doesn’t explicitly mention mortality or comfort in grief. Instead, as Rabbi Elie Kaunfer argues, it gives voice to the experience of God’s absence. When we grieve, God can feel distant, and God’s presence in the world diminished. The liturgy responds with a collective prayer for the return of a God of compassion and justice.
Mourners typically recite the Kaddish in hushed tones. At the vigil, we chanted what was, by necessity, the loudest Kaddish Yatom I have ever heard. For a moment, holding those ancient Aramaic and Hebrew words, it felt possible to filter out the shrill screams and bullhorn sirens coming from behind us.
Protected by police barricades, we huddled together and prayed. It was a powerful Jewish counterprotest: No amount of suffering gives anyone permission to abandon humanity because we are, all of us, made in the image of the divine. In that moment, the God of compassion felt both very close and incredibly far away.
The author is a rabbinical student at the Jewish Theological Seminary.
The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of JTA or its parent company, 70 Faces Media.