Weaponisation of Jewish texts
For decades, Israeli political, cultural and religious leaders have been shaping the social, legal and psychological landscape with repugnant guidance – inhumanity they serve to their public as divinely ordained truth. Some examples: In 2010, Rabbis Yitzhak Shapira and Yosef Elitzur wrote The King’s Torah, a rabbinical instruction manual outlining acceptable murder of Gentile babies, children and adults in which it claimed that the commandment “thou shalt not kill” applies only to Jews. The book was widely distributed throughout Israel from their yeshiva, which was funded by the Israeli government and by US tax-exempt charities.
In 2016, Israel’s chief Sephardic Rabbi Yitzhak Yosef declared publicly that non-Jews should not be permitted to live in Israel except as servants to Jews. In March 2018, the same chief rabbi compared black people with monkeys and later defended this racism as being supported by the Talmud.
In April 2018, a translation of rabbi Ophir Wallas’ lecture revealed he was teaching upcoming soldiers that they are religiously permitted to commit genocide against Palestinians, but that fear of international condemnation is preventing it.
These are not proclamations by fringe Israelis. They are not poems by writers with no material power. Rather, they constitute a deeply embedded ethos of a huge swathe of Israeli society, including politicians, generals and spiritual leaders with extraordinary power – with planes, bombs, tanks, bulldozers, and toxic chemicals they use on Palestinians regularly.
They aren’t just hurting people’s feelings, but spurring real and profound injury to millions of human beings, every hour of every day, one generation after another, producing the soul-crushing statistics of an ancient people’s slow erasure from this world.
Selective condemnation
Yet those denouncing Alice Walker and calling on Palestinians to do the same did not once take up space in the New York Times, New York Magazine, or other prominent media venues to denounce the dissemination of the worst ideas from Jewish texts, which continue to inspire violence against Palestinians, their properties and holy places, including the increasing “price tag” assaults.
Nor have Palestinians called on allies to do so. We who are killed, humiliated, and destroyed in visible and invisible ways by Israel’s notions of Jewish supremacy do not expect our allies to prove over and over where they stand.
We also never point to the religious teachings Israelis consistently use to justify their barbarism. We take painstaking care to always make the distinction between the awful political ideology of Zionism and the religion to which it clings.
That Alice Walker used literary creativity to highlight the specific religious sources verifiably used to promulgate hatred does not make her racist and it is not a reason to turn on a beloved elder.
The real offence
Ms Walker’s real offence is her defiant support for Palestinian liberation. It is her unapologetic endorsement of BDS, the international Boycott, Divest and Sanction campaign against Israel.
Only weeks before the Zionist machines began clawing at Ms Walker, they were trying to skewer Professor Marc Lamont Hill.
Before them, there was Jimmy Carter, Jeremy Corbyn, Desmond Tutu, Roger Waters, John Mearsheimer, Stephen Walt, Helen Thomas, Richard Falk. And before them was a whole generation of black revolutionaries. The list is too long to go on.
Their crime isn’t that they’re actually anti-Semitic. It is a sinister violation of public imagination to put any of these individuals under the same word as the attacker who opened fire in a Pittsburgh synagogue, or the white nationalists who chanted “Jews will not replace us”, or those who paint swastikas on their bodies and fly Nazi flags.
Alice Walker’s legacy has been one of love, defiance, and living one’s truth. She is a towering cultural figure, a civil rights leader, an ardent feminist, and a brave champion of human rights. She is also imperfect and not beyond criticism. But an anti-Semite she is not.