DANA Erlich, Israeli Ambassador to Ireland, declares that many Israelis and Jews living in Ireland have expressed "fear and insecurity since last October" and that "the entire nation of Israel and Jewish people" have been vilified by extremists.
Erlich claims to speak for all Jewish people here but she does not. She ignores Jews, both here and internationally, who reject the Israeli government’s war against the Palestinian people and who see, as stated by the ICJ, a genocide unfolding in real time before our eyes.
We stand proudly as Jews, from Skibbereen to Derry, rejecting the false claim that Jewish security is more important than the lives of nearly 34,000 Palestinians brutally murdered, including 14,000 children, that it justifies withholding water, electricity, food and aid to ordinary people in Gaza while we watch children and babies starve.
It is precisely because the nation state of Israel depends on a cruel system of inequality, inhumanity, ongoing violence and land dispossession that we reject Zionism. And let us be clear, fighting against Israel’s genocide of the Palestinian people is in no way, shape or form antisemitic.
On the contrary, our Judaism has nothing to do with the Zionism espoused by the nation state of Israel which stands for Jewish supremacy and which has developed a cruel system of domination characterised by Amnesty International as the "crime of apartheid" and a "crime against humanity".
Along with hundreds of thousands of Jews across the world, we continue to call for an immediate ceasefire and an end to the genocide. We support what Rabbi Elliot Kukla of the Jewish Voice for Peace Rabbinical Council said when he stated he would be calling for a ceasefire in Gaza to honour the memory of his father, a Holocaust survivor.
Sue Pentel,
Jews For Palestine – Ireland
