The seder hit different this year.
I mean, I didn't really know much about what Palestinians were facing everyday under Israeli occupation until last October, so you know what they say about ignorance and bliss. But, this year, after spending the past 6 months seeing constant reports of death and destruction on a level that would even make a supervillain in a mountaintop castle stop and go "excuse me, what the fuck?", I finally realised what's going on. Here I am, reading from a haggadah that's telling me all the reasons why I'm reclining while eating matzah, talking about the Blessed King of Israel, all the while my thoughts are still swimming with the photos and firsthand reports from aid workers in Gaza.
"We eat maror to remind us of our time as slaves in Egypt." Yeah well what about the Palestinians who have to do a veritable football scrum in a hail of gunfire just to get a single sack of flour? What about them, huh? I get to eat maror, they don't get to eat anything ever again. I get to eat matzah, entire families get gunned down in a relay race for a 5-pound sack of flour. I get to recline comfortably, they have to constantly run from one bombed-out shelter to another.
My ancestors may have been slaves in Egypt, but Rameses never kettled them into ruined buildings and set them on fire. And my rabbi has the total unmitigated audacity to bring up the shoah?! No, you don't get to trot out the shoah card everytime the IOF kills 1,000 more Palestinians. What the Palestinian territories are right now is a Raytheon proving ground. The only reason why Biden isn't letting up on Gaza is because his benefactors are making more money than ever! The defence industry is more prosperous now than any other time in history, but I gotta sit back and watch all this shit go down because your grandparents were killed in the Kielce pogrom? No. Fuck you.
My seder plate always has a leaf and rib of romaine lettuce, a bone, some charoset, parsley instead of horseradish (my mum's allergic to horseradish), and a hard-boiled egg. Most jews' seder plates look somewhat like this, with substitutions here and there for allergies and availability and so forth. From now until whatever ends the Palestinian holocaust, the karpas symbolises a free Palestine where the killing is ended and the zionists are driven out. The zeroa is the famine the Israeli colonisers have created by killing aid workers and trapping the aid that they let through the lines. The charoset is the rubble of a once vibrant city; smashed and obliterated beyond recognition, yet still able to contain goodness. The maror is the destruction that the colonisers have brought to the natural world around Palestine, the extent of which I understood only after watching Rick Steves' "Holy Land" special from 2012 and realising that the olive groves he and his host toured were razed to the ground in November 2023. And the beitzah is mourning for the thousands of Palestinians killed with such wanton disregard for life by colonisers who will no doubt attempt to justify their actions when brought before the world in the same way the Nazi officers did at the Nurnburg trials: "I was just following my orders." I guarantee their orders do not include trapping a 6-year-old girl in a car with the decaying corpses of her parents and making her watch as they destroy the only ambulance left before leaving her to die of injury or starvation.
Next year, a free Palestine.
I posted that on Cohost after the seder last year. In the intervening time, despite glimmers of hope for an end to the siege, the corrupt leader of the Israeli occupation government keeps making excuse after excuse to abrogate ceasefires, and Trump getting back into the top post sure hasn't helped. Under Biden, at least it was only a ground war in the Levant; but Trump has started to vanish Palestinian immigrants or people with any Palestinian heritage at all. Thanks to the data supplied to ICE (which now more or less stands for Innocent Civilian Executors) by Elon Musk, Satya Nadella, and Mark Zuckerberg, black vans roll up on someone walking to work, someone who posted "I hope Israel cools its jets pretty soon" on Twitter once in 2022, put a bag over their head and drive them out to a lifetime of torture and sweatshop work in a for-profit prison in the Deep South. Once they've got you in their sights, laws are irrelevant, legal counsel is denied, rights are revoked, and you have only 2 choices, work hard or die. Sound like anything you've heard of before?
I'm continuing to reblog crowdfunding posts for Palestinians on Tumblr (see also: Pictures of Cats and Motorcycles?) to the point I'm being mentioned in new posts. I've been identified as an ally of Palestine on that platform, so if Fartomatt decides to sell his dataset to Elon for a couple extra quid, I'll be vanished along with the rest of them.