If we’re talking about Jewishness and Judaism right now, in this time, the beginning middle and end has to be that any writing done contributes to the collective project of bringing about the end of Israel and the end of Zionism.

Everything else is commentary.

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This is a work in progress. I am deeply ambivalent about writing it, about writing about Jewishness in this moment. My diasporism is rooted in ambivalence (about some things. about other things – ie nationalism and the violence of the genocidal nation-state – it is very certain). My diasporism is based within brokenness and shards. It is relational, wherein I am primarily in relation with and accountable and responsible to Aboriginal and Palestinian peoples and lands. It is their resistance, their ways of making meaning, from which I learn how to be in this world. My primary community at the moment is not, really, a Jewish community as such. Nor do I want it to be. There are other ways of being Jewish, of being in this world as a Jew, that is. There are other ways and horizons of being. (that are, must be, unapologetically, relentlessly, anti-Zionist. Like abolition is a positive and generative political project, so too is anti-Zionism.)

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There are many projects of writing, and it was through writing – and one of its accompanying practices, reading – that I found my way to Jewish diasporism and thus my way out of Zionism.

It was not only through writing and reading about Jewish diasporism that I got there – it was also and primarily via learning about the colonisation of this continent, and First Nations resistance to that colonisation, and learning about Palestinian knowledge of Israel and Zionism and practices of resistance, and learning how much I had been lied to (I have been asked the question of ‘how did you become anti-Zionist’ so many times over the last two decades, and even more over the last two and a bit years, I have the story down pat) – but learning about Jewish diasporism played an important role.

Jewish diasporism that is, not Jewish diaspora. There’s a fundamental and important difference. Jewish diaspora says that there is a Jewish homeland from which all of us Jews come and that we are all attached to. It says that there is a centre and a periphery and the centre is where we should be, and that it holds a significant and unitary place. Jewish diasporism – in the version of it which I am most drawn to – says that home is not the most useful category for us to think about, but if there was to be a Jewish home it would be in the networks, interstices and in-between places; it would be as a guest on other peoples lands, appreciating the richness that comes from reliance on and community with others; it would be in humility and ambivalence, about belonging and place and community and meaning. It would be – for those of us in settler-colonies – in knowing our place: that is, that we are first and foremost responsible to our relationships with Indigenous people and land, and need to actively break any responsibility to the settler state. That we need to honour the lands and relationships that come with living on First Nations land, by materially practicing Land Back, working to dismantle settler-colonialism (with all the outcomes of that which might eventuate), giving ourselves and our resources to the fight, while always knowing that we are out of place and that our practices are inadequate. That is, home would be in a set of feelings, utterances, and connections. It would also be in a set of practices and rituals. It would not be in thinking of ourselves as Australians (which remains a colonial category that we should actively eschew – you’ll never find me describing myself as a Jewish Australian. Feh.) or any other colonial identity.

I have in the past felt very connected to some Jewish rituals: I keep the rituals of Pesach (Passover), and eat the restricted and particular diet of unleavened bread which is meant to remind us that we were slaves and that we have responsibilities to others who were (are) slaves. The most meaningful hour of the year has been the last hour of Yom Kippur (Day of Atonement), the Neilah service, where we stand, having fasted at that point for 24 hours, and pray with meaning and intent to commit ourselves and our practices for the year ahead.

But those rituals were taught to me by Zionists and so their meanings are warped, that is very clear to me now. Are they redeemable? I don’t really think so.

I also, in this moment, don’t really care.

The task right now isn’t to dwell in redeeming Jewishness or Judaism, at least for me it’s not. I keep undertaking some rituals because there will one day be a future made present in which Israel and Zionism doesn’t exist and there’ll be people who will probably keep being Jewish then, so I keep doing things now in anticipation of that future. Maybe, hopefully, those people will be wiser than me, than any of us Jews alive now, and they’ll know what to do with these dregs that are so infected and infested with genocide. With this Jewishness and Judaism that is so deeply grotesquely rotten.

I am angry. Not for me or any other Jew as a Jew, to be clear. We are beside the point.

But there are no adequate words for my anger and my rage at what Israel and Zionism continues to do to Palestinians.

Our collective anger and rage needs to push us to ending settler-colonialism and state violence and the horrors horrors horrors of this world. We need each other to do it.

We need words and we need physical strength and we need each other. #swoletariat

(on Friday mornings these last few weeks I’ve driven to Carlton, past Goldhar Place (named for Pinchus Goldhar, a Yiddish writer who was born in Lodz and died in Naarm), and I go to the bakery and get a challah to take for dinner at my parents place that night, and I also get a hot cross bun, and then I drive to the pool and swim my laps. And the woman in the bakery has come to know that I’ll get a challah and it amuses me to get this ritual Jewish bread and this ritual Christian baked good, and then to do this exercise in the service of strengthening my body and my mind for the fight. This set of Friday morning activities (rituals?) is one instantiation of my diasporism.)

Judaism and Jewishness (as vague as those words are – there is, after all, nothing which unites all the people who would call themselves Jewish, and indeed it is a Zionist project of homogenisation in the service of colonialism to pretend that we are all one coherent group and that that group must be reified) are being centred throughout the west in ways which are reprehensible and contemptible. The Jewish supremacy that Zionism works through is being spread around the world. That the Al Aqsa Mosque was closed for Ramadan and that the Church of the Holy Sepulchre was closed for Easter (for the first time in the history of Christendom!!) must be at the forethought of our minds, for the way it instantiates the brutality of anti-Palestinian racism and anti-Muslim racism and spreads these violences around the world.

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This world is broken. We’re all so broken. We need each other to keep fighting. This world is full of love.

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That I am not interested or invested in redeeming Jewishness does not mean that I am not Jewish. I am, and always will be, it’s not a matter of choice, and thus the things that I do are Jewish things, by virtue of the fact that I am Jewish and I am doing them.

The Boyarin brothers (Daniel and Jonathan, that is) in their piece ‘Diaspora: Generation and the Ground of Jewish Identity’ wrote that ‘we not only do these things because we are this thing, but we are this thing because we do these things’.

Our bodies and our minds are invested. It’s why I like the rituals I do, because they bring together our bodies and our minds and our practices.

Diasporism is circular. Diasporism is ambivalent. Diasporism is certain that we are interconnected and that we have ethical responsibilities to each other and to the world.

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Our commitments must be to those facing war and genocide, in Palestine, Lebanon, so-called Australia, Sudan, and on and on.

In the face of ongoing genocide – of the spreading project of ‘greater Israel’ – there is an urgency and I don’t think any of us know how to meet it properly. I don’t know how to meet it properly. And I talk with my friends, we talk over and over, brainstorming and scheming and theorising and living with the agony of a million different cuts inside us.

Not all of our emotions are important. Some of us need to shut the fuck up about our feelings. Feelings that do not move us towards liberation, towards looking outwards, need to fuck off.

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I used to think that the worst sound I’ve ever heard is that first thump of soil onto a coffin, thrown by a family member. That’s a key sound in a Jewish funeral. I think I’ve written about it somewhere. That sound, that sound.

But in the last over two years of heightened ongoing Nakba I’ve heard so many sounds from Gaza that pierced my ears and my heart and my brain (and know that there’s smells that accompany those sounds, but they are beyond my experience, knowledge or imagination). And so when I went to a funeral recently and that first clump of soil fell, it registered only in its inadequacy. Because when I go to a funeral now all I can think about is the great injustice that lies in the fact that some people get buried intact, with large families standing witness, and time to mourn and grieve, and the knowledge that the graves will remain there forever. To die and be buried and mourn like that is a privilege in the settler-colony. It’s disgusting that this is so.

This world is disgusting.

And I know that there is beauty and joy too, but really – we need space for our disgust. For our disgust and our anger. (if I was reading a draft of someone else’s work and they said this I’d make a comment here, ‘who is we? who is our?’.)

Diasporism is in the collective. It’s a queer practice of creativity, connection, discernment, theorising, unravelling and building. It’s in a collective that shifts and changes. It’s a collective which is not state-based, never state-based. The state, as it is currently manifested, is violence incarnate, I think. But for me, this diasporism is ultimately a way of cultivating humility because it says that we need each other, that we rely on each other, that physically we belong nowhere and so we are always someone’s guest. This is a shared vulnerability. I love that. It’s the opposite of Zionism, of settler-colonialism. We come to someone else’s place not to colonise, but to work alongside and be of service to those who face the violence. (who, again, is this we? and do we actually?)

So the writing that needs to be done right now is the writing which reminds that there are other ways of being. Jewishness doesn’t need to be redeemed and I don’t write here to redeem it but to say that within my tradition there are other ways of being a human and they work for me and they don’t need to work for anyone else and that that’s the way to live a life. Not to impose on others through colonialism and violence. What I’m sketching here won’t work for everyone. It’s not as important for everyone else that we eschew the nation-state. It is vitally important that Jewishness and Judaism abandon the nation-state. The nation-state is not the site for our self-determination. Feh.

Always to be learning from others. Always to be discerning. Never deciding that you have to embrace everyone or everything. Know your enemy. We should know them. We should know how they work and why they’re our enemy.

And know our friends. We should also know how they work and why they’re our friend.

Name settler-colonialism. Name justice and liberation. Name apartheid. Name reparations and land rights now. Name bravery.

Be humble and be discerning. Live in the interstices. Learn from others. Know your place. Be part of the fight. This is my diasporism. I think.

Fight for justice and liberation for and with others. All the rest is commentary.

Because fuck this war-filled world. Fuck it. We desperately have to do better.