I’ve always loved Passover, dragging in the big tables, turning the living room of our small Cape house into a dining room, inviting visitors who had nowhere else to go or nothing else to do, or finding silly props for the ten plagues. The home-made Haggadah my wife and sister-in-law created back when the children were small, the dog bone substituting for lamb shank for the vegetarians among us, my wife’s matzoh ball soup, the different charoset recipes, all these adaptations have kept Pesach going after our generation stepped up to replace beloved parents, aunts, and uncles no longer at the table.
On occasion we’ve added oranges and olives to the Seder plate, as we honor the liberation of real people in real times. The same cacophony of “Dayenu” being sung in several keys simultaneously by my tone-deaf family can also be heard when we belt out “Tell old Pharaoh, Let My People Go.” Liberation is liberation, at least in our book. When we say, “Next year in Jerusalem” my thoughts used to fly to a peaceful Jerusalem, one in which both Jews and Palestinians had somehow managed to work things out. Despite the hopeless odds and the ugly reality, I had always hoped for a Two State solution, long after logic told me it was impossible.
But this year Passover will be quite different. By the time April rolls around, the Two State solution will be a dim memory. For the first time in the experience of everyone around the table, there will no longer be even the illusion that, if only everyone had talked things out, there could be peace. Talking and photo ops went on for the better part of my adult life. The only constant in all this theater was the building of settlements on Palestinian land. Without a state or land of their own, Palestinians are now the subjects of a Jewish Pharaoh enforcing Jewish laws. While little bloodshed is likely to follow next week’s U.S. veto of a Palestinian state in behalf of Israel, there will be no peace for generations. The quest for a Palestinian homeland must now necessarily turn to a battle for civil rights in some new version of Israel that ensures rights for all, not just for Jews.
What is so different this year is that it is no longer possible to hold that sweet old picture of interdependent Jewish and Palestinian liberation in my mind. For years I believed that Israel’s survival depended upon Palestinian liberation. I believed also that the establishment of the state of Israel itself was incomplete because Israel had chosen the role of the Egyptian taskmaster, and only by repudiating oppression could it ever hope to survive in the long term. And I also believed that, as Jews, we could never support oppression by a supposedly Jewish state. Now that hope for Palestinian self-determination is about to be destroyed, there is nothing left but to acknowledge that, by these actions, Israel is simply another flawed state and not the deserving recipient of any prayers. At least this Israel.
Oppression and occupation have been institutionalized for so long that Israel cannot conceive of its existence as anything but a Zero Sum game in which a Palestinian state cannot also exist. And most of this has been accomplished through the cheerleading, political support, and funding from American Jews. The point of no return has finally been reached. The lovely postcard images of Jerusalem as the City of Peace have been replaced by the stark photographs of Palestinian “squatters” being kicked out of their houses by settlers in formerly Arab neighborhoods. This is now the only true image that can remain of Jerusalem.
Next year I’ll have to have to find a way to celebrate a Passover which celebrates liberation, justice, and hopes for the City of Peace. But next April it will no longer be Israel’s story.
