We Should Not Celebrate Dispossession

This month, Israel is celebrating its 60th anniversary. American Jews will be invited to join in those celebrations. But, in refusing to recognize that its national existence rests on the expulsion of more than 700,000 Palestinians from their homeland, Israel fails to speak to Jews of conscience. Here is why I cannot join the celebration.

My grandmother, my mother’s mother, was a seamstress. She was known for the loveliness of her embroidery. Before WWI, she had made a career of sewing flowers onto fine silk ball gowns destined to be worn in Vienna’s imperial palace, the Hofburg. Eventually, her hands became too rough for the silk and she was fired. Thereafter, she raised three daughters in a one-room apartment in Vienna’s 2nd district, a Jewish neighborhood nicknamed “die Maztosinsel” (Matzo Island). She supported herself by helping merchants at a nearby open-air food market clean their stalls at the end of the day. In return for her labor she was given the half-rotted food that was no longer good enough for paying customers and, in this way, she was able to feed herself and her daughters. But even in conditions of such dire poverty, she went on sewing and was known for the beauty of the embroidered quilts that covered her daughters. I have always thought of her as my quilt Omi (an affectionate term for grandmother).

As time went on, political danger was added to economic privation. By 1932, Austrians were living under a home-grown fascist regime. My mother was fired from her job, but joined a youth group working to get children out of Austria. Then, in 1938, Hitler’s armies annexed Austria. Soon, Hitler came to visit the newest possession of the Third Reich. On a sleety cold day, the Viennese lined his parade route 10 deep for the 8 hours that his train was delayed, screaming themselves hoarse on “Heil Hitler.” So my mother and her mother knew that they were living in a nation of collaborators. More