Unpacking “Ceasefire Now!”

Relief International

My family and I participate with a group of constituents of Maryland’s District 4, just east of DC, focused on persuading our Congressional Representative, Glenn Ivey, to publicly support an Israeli ceasefire in Gaza. Our actions—letters, petitions, demonstrations, sit-ins—all convey this message to him, a task complicated by his being a major recipient of funding from leading pro-Zionist pressure group AIPAC.

Several times during our group’s three-month existence, we’ve checked in with each other about possibly broadening our scope. Each time, we’ve determined we want to remain tightly focused on our original goal of calling on our representative to publicly support a ceasefire.

Even though I was among those who voted for expanding the message, I believe our group is wise. In thinking more about it, I find that what I want is not so much to broaden and perhaps dilute the singular powerful call for Ceasefire Now, which is the message Palestinians and those in solidarity around the world are all calling for, but rather to unpack it.

Here are some ideas I encountered in that process:

What are slogans for?

“We Are the 99 Percent.” “Black Lives Matter.”  “Ceasefire Now.”

Slogans are a vital part of activist culture. Packing much into few words, they:

• embody our commitment to a common goal,

• synthesize complex thinking we have forged in struggle,

• are emblems of our ability to come together around core ideas, in the midst of our diversity,

• sum up our motives, demands, and feelings,

• propel us to action,

• enable us to recognize one another,

• let us experience the power of our joined voices, and

• help us launch our power into the world in one of the unique ways open to the connected many.

We activists are often criticized for sloganeering, for oversimplifying, and that we don’t even know what is behind these phrases. Many of these critiques are in bad faith, leveled at us by people not interested in improving our efforts but merely shooting them—and us—down. But even bad-faith criticism can provide an opportunity to excavate and find deeper meaning in our words.

Ceasefire Now Means Stop Bombing Babies!

Displaced Palestinian children, New York Times

At its most raw, Ceasefire Now means: Stop dropping bombs on children.

No one can oppose this sentiment. Whether a good reason can conceivably exist to bomb anyone, humanity cannot countenance terrorizing, massacring, and displacing our young ones. No reason for doing so will ever be considered acceptable. This humanity-wide conviction gives Ceasefire Now its chief power.

Ceasefire Now is our Call as a Community

Members of our group exhort Glenn Ivey to call for ceasefire on the rainy morning of January 9, 2024, prior to holding a sit-in at his downtown office

For our group of neighbors in particular, the call for Ceasefire Now expresses our outrage as individuals and as a community. It embodies our reaching for each other to do together what we can’t do very effectively as individuals, being ordinary folks without particular wealth or power. Namely, raise our voices in ways that will be heard by our Congressperson. Faced with the weight of an entrenched establishment, we are employing our constitutional rights of freedom of speech and assembly to call our elected representative to account and push him to stand up for the vital constitutional principles that Congress is the only body that can legally declare war, and that it is the only body that should fund or defund war-making.

Ceasefire Now means Changing the Narrative

Simone Zimmeran showing her childhood art project of US and Israeli flags in the film “Israelism,” which documents the indoctrination of American Jews into the dominant narrative about Israel.

In the US, we have long been told we must support Israel as the refuge of a people fleeing the horrors of the Holocaust, a people who, despite being beset from all sides, managed to create a democratic nation and make the desert bloom. If we are Jews, we are assured that the entire land of historic Palestine, now called Israel, is our exclusive, God-given homeland.

Ceasefire Now means calling for an end to being bombarded with the simplistic narrative of Arab/Palestinian aggression and Israeli defense.

Though I wasn’t raised as a Zionist (this post says more about my religious upbringing), I still find myself struggling to fully recognize that this narrative is as false as any other justification for colonial domination, just as Christianity has been used to justify the conquest and colonization of much of the global south. Standing with a group of Jews and allies and saying Ceasefire Now helps me name what Israel is doing to the Palestinian people.

The hold this narrative has on Jews and others cannot be overestimated. Years ago, in a poolside chat, a man remarked to me that “all Palestinians are terrorists, even the babies.” He was utterly serious and matter-of-fact, assuming that I, as a fellow Jew, would agree.

Palestinian journalist Laila Al-Arian recounts a recent experience of being erased by the dominant narrative:  

I asked a member of Congress if he would support the call for a cease-fire. “They’ve been fighting each other for thousands of years,” he responded. It was galling. “That’s not true,” I responded. “It’s been 75 years. My grandparents became refugees after Israel was created.” “Thousands of years,” he responded, walking away.

Ceasefire Now means resisting this relentless barrage of self-serving mythology and rejecting the view that the only way to protect Jews is to eliminate Palestinians.

Ceasefire Now Means Acknowledging History

16 CARTES ÉVOLUTIVES D'OCCUPATION ISRAÉLIENNE DE LA PALESTINE

Ceasefire Now means ending the entire situation that has put the government of Israel in a position to disproportionately rain fire down on Palestinians. That situation is the occupation and colonization of historic Palestine without the consent of the Palestinians.

While the slogan Ceasefire Now specifically calls for halting the current bombing and ground invasion, it contains the growing realization that this Israeli aggression is the latest result of an unequal firefight set in motion decades ago, when the very real, horrific suffering of my people, the Jews, in Europe was used to take over the land of another people.

}{{ Partially tongue-in-cheek aside: since Europe has for centuries been the epicenter of Jewish suffering, perpetrating multiple expulsions, ethnic cleansing, genocide, and massive prejudice against our people, I wonder why Europe did not atone by offering the Jews a homeland there, instead of sending them off to colonize an already inhabited West Asian territory? }{{

Ceasefire Now Means Rejecting Our Own Domination

Modern US destroyer—a juggernaut that exemplefies the whole juggernaut

Calling for ceasefire now connects to the worldwide struggle to rein in, defang, and demobilize the military juggernaut that is the empire we live in. The beast that rages around the world waging war, or inducing proxies to make war on its behalf. The monster that has for centuries acted as though it has the right to dominate the planet.

We who live in the United States, the belly of the beast, must play a key part in that struggle. In calling for Ceasefire Now, we demand a different relationship with the world, saying we are not exceptional or special, just regular people. We want to join the world as ordinary equals.

The Jews in our group assert that we do not consider ourselves “chosen” or entitled to rights and power over others. We do not want to be considered exceptionally bad or exceptionally good. Just people with the same rights and dignity as everyone—no more and no less.

Ceasefire Now Means Acknowledging Responsibility

The US is actively backing Israel’s assault on Gaza, with billions in taxpayer-funded weapons and with moral, political and economic support. US people cannot claim to be bystanders; we’re more like a gun seller who watches their biggest customer walk out of the store armed to the teeth and spray bullets in a crowded street.

Except much worse. We know for certain that the weapons we’ve supplied, including 2000 lb. bombs and white phosphorous, are not fired randomly or mistakenly but purposely target a population with the intention of eliminating and dispossessing it. Ceasefire Now says we recognize and abhor this crime, and will no longer be a party to it in any way.

Further, we are saying, as Jews, Christians, moral people of all kinds, that we accept responsibility to repair the harm our country, the “greatest purveyor of violence in the world,” as Martin Luther King said in 1967, has caused in our name.

We are aware that a ceasefire, while essential, is only the first step in helping achieve justice and human rights for Palestinians. Ceasefire Now implies taking on the tremendous effort that will be needed to restore and repair life for those whose already difficult existence has now been completely devastated.

Ceasefire Now means Protecting All of Us

More of us are realizing that ceasing fire is the only way to protect not only Gazans and other Palestinians, but also Jews, Arabs and the other inhabitants of the region, and, ultimately, all of us.

The Emotional Unpacking of Ceasefire Now

Rage, Krisztina Horvath

For US advocates of Palestinian rights, Ceasefire Now is a cry full of rage, frustration, guilt, and helplessness.

It’s a helplessness different from the profoundly terrifying helplessness of watching bombs fall on one’s own home and family, something I must be grateful only to experience in nightmares. Yet the helplessness of watching the government that purports to represent us supplying weapons to commit genocide is a terrible thing to live with.

Every day that the “now” of Ceasefire Now does not come today means another day of fighting harder against feelings of despair, helplessness and futility. It’s heartbreaking to keep crying Now Now Now!—when each “now” that slips away means more death and suffering.

Each “now” that dissolves into yesterday means expending more energy to keep going. We get tired, fed up, we want to look away; other tasks call us.

We must recognize and weather this danger. Hearing the call of Ceasefire Now reverberate around the world must lift our spirits, as it does those of the Palestinians themselves. We need to maintain the call’s sharp edge, so it continues to slice through all attempts to discourage and tire us.

Ceasefire Now does not mean siding with Palestinians against Jews

We want no one to be bombed. We want all hostages and abductees to be released and be safe. That includes the 130 Israeli hostages held by Hamas and the 6300 Palestinian hostages held by Israel.

Our urgent call for justice for a people actively targeted with genocide does not mean we condone injustice and aggression toward others, any more than saying Black Lives Matter means other lives don’t matter—even though this criticism is often thrown around.

It also does not mean we don’t care about the many people suffering treatment similar to that experienced by Palestinians elsewhere in the world, even though their plight is much less in the spotlight at this time. In the broadest sense, even though we focus on Gaza, Ceasefire Now applies to massacre and mass displacement everywhere.

Ceasefire Now is a call for, and an Assertion of, our Sanity

This straightforward call for basic humanity helps us resist the many crazy-making pronouncements that attempt to twist reality and take events out of context. It contests the egregious bias and lack of balance that has led to condemning, suspending, firing people who speak up for Palestinians, equating this with antisemitism.

Ceasefire Now takes a stand against gaslighting notions such as that a democracy can contain apartheid, or that a religion can grant one people’s lands to another. Or that pouring entirely disproportionate firepower onto hospitals, schools, and refugee camps constitutes self defense.

The call for Ceasefire Now cuts through the manipulation and confusion, pointing to basic truths and standards of international law, reason, and moral principle.

Ceasefire Now is a Challenge

Our immediate demand is to stop the horrendous bombardment, invasion, and displacement occurring in Gaza. But things cannot return to how they were before October 7.

When the acute phase of this conflict ends, we will be tempted to slow down, even stop. But unless massive changes are made, after ceasefire Palestinians will be left much worse off than they were before, in unimaginably terrible conditions, including being made permanent exiles. The underlying causes will remain untouched, other than being covered by another layer of atrocity and trauma.

We need to embrace the challenge not to let this happen, and, instead, to keep demanding lasting justice, equality, and reparation for Palestinians, so that they, as well as Jews and everyone else, can live in peace.