WASHINGTON—A growing group of Rabbis For Ceasefire will keep at their campaign to pressure the U.S. government to change U.S. policy towards Israel “for as long as it takes,” says one of their leaders, Rabbi Elissa Wise.
And the group is growing. It began with 80 members when it was organized last year just after the right-wing Israeli government launched its war on Gaza, she said. It’s now up to 360 rabbis, from all four branches of Judaism, and counting.
And it made its presence felt early on. October 27, just 20 days after the war began, its rabbis marched into the UN Security Council during the world body’s session on Palestine and Israel, sat down in the center of the chamber, and began to read and pray.
“Who’s going to tell a bunch of praying rabbis to leave?” Wise asked.
Prayer wasn’t the rabbis’ only move. They also briefed UN Secretary-General António Guterres on the growing support within the U.S. Jewish community for a ceasefire in the war and negotiations for a permanent Israeli-Palestinian peace.
That rabbinical stand, early on, went unreported in the mainstream media, Wise noted. The media accepted the Israeli government’s and the pro-Israel lobby’s line that the genocide was justified “retaliation,” a line Democratic President Joe Biden agreed with. He now criticizes its “excessiveness,” but hasn’t pulled the arms aid.
Guterres has taken the same stand. As a result, the right-wing government of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu later barred him from the country, due to his outspoken criticism of the deadly Israeli retaliation for Hamas’s attack a year ago.
The retaliation has killed at least 43,000 Palestinians, wounded more than double that number, turned Gaza into a smoking ruin, and left the other two million Gazans as refugees. Thousands are starving, or ill, as a result of cutoffs of humanitarian aid, including food, water and medicine, and sporadic power.
The Israeli onslaught has all been done with U.S. weapons, bombs, ammunition, and planes, courtesy of the Biden administration and to the benefit of U.S. arms contractors. That’s led the rabbis to speak out and led the Institute for Policy Studies to award them and their allies, the Institute for Middle East Understanding, Letelier-Moffitt Human Rights Awards at an October 10 ceremony.
“We expected to soon see an end to the war on Gaza” when the rabbis issued their initial call for a ceasefire, during another prayer service in a U.S. House office building, before they went to the UN, Rabbi Wise told a capacity crowd for the awards ceremony.
“We also sent a protective delegation to the West Bank” where Israel has turned rabidly right-wing Jewish settlers loose against its Palestinians.
Initially, “most of the organized Jewish world was going along with Israel’s plan to destroy Gaza,” the rabbi said. Not anymore.
Fueled by the U.S.
“Israel, fueled by the U.S., in the name of safety, is destroying homes, universities, hospitals, schools, and more. Dozens of Israeli hostages remain in Gaza, abandoned by their own government,” Rabbi Wise said. The Institute calculates the U.S. “has spent $22.76 billion on Israel’s assault on Gaza and U.S. militarism in the region,” since the Israeli war on Gaza began.
Abandonment of the hostages has set off mass protests in Israel, led by their families, progressive Jews, Netanyahu foes, Israel’s Palestinian residents, and its labor federation, Histadrut. It’s also led to a mass shift in public opinion among U.S. Jews about the conflict, the rabbi said.
Of the original 250 hostages, Hamas still holds approximately 100, though some may be dead. The original Hamas attack on Southern Israel killed 1200 people—one small part of a long war that has flared off and on for slightly more than a century and has killed tens of thousands of Palestinians who continue to die in large numbers now as each day passes. Netanyah’s so-called retaliation alone has killed more than 42,000 in Gaza. Pro-peace groups have condemned it as genocide and call it completely disproportionate to what Hamas did in Israel last year.
The Israeli labor federation actually called a short-lived general strike over the Netanyahu government’s refusal to even consider the fate of the hostages, much less arrange a ceasefire and their release. Israeli courts shut down the strike, ruling Histadrut can strike only over labor and economic issues.
But all the protests “have not been enough” to move either Netanyahu’s far-right regime to negotiations or to move Biden to cut off arms. “So what do we do now?” Rabbi Wise asked.
“We have to let go of what we know, by re-reading and re-re-reading our sacred texts in a new light,” she said—one that emphasizes peace, justice, and co-existence. The Israeli right, Rabbi Wise stated, reads the texts “as a real estate contract” and a justification for their imperialism.
“That must be stopped. We will keep at it as long as it takes,” the rabbi promised.
The rabbinical group and their allies in the Institute for Middle East Understanding received the domestic Letelier-Moffitt Awards, named for the late Chilean Foreign Minister Orlando Letelier and his aide, Ronni Karpen Moffitt. The Institute provides journalists with access to Palestinian sources to set the record straight on the conflict.
Both Letelier and Moffitt were working at the Institute for Policy Studies. He was its Transnational Institute Director. Both were assassinated in D.C., blocks away from the site of the ceremony, by a car bomb planted in September 1976 by agents of Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet.
Aided by the Nixon administration and its CIA, Pinochet overthrew the elected government of Marxist President Salvador Allende three years before, killing him. Letelier, who was Allende’s Foreign Minister, became the de facto leader of overseas opposition to the Pinochet regime.
The international Letelier-Moffitt Award went to the Concejo de Autoridades de 48 Cantones de Totonicapán, a coalition of Guatemalan Maya-K’iche community authorities who banded together to defend democracy and increase opportunities for Indigenous people in Guatemala’s fragile democracy.
Financial backers of the awards include the AFL-CIO and two former top federation officials, Thea Lee and Bill Fletcher.
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