Next Year In Legoland
I’ve been doing a lot of processing since the events of October 7, 2023. I’ve long been a pretty staunch critic of the Israeli government, so I was horrified to see the events of and following October 7th unfold. I was horrified by both the murder of 766 Israeli civilians by Hamas fighters, the taking of 247 civilian hostages. Thereafter, I’ve been perpetually and continuously horrified by the murder of tens of thousands of Palestinians by the Israeli army, and also by the defense by American Zionists of what is pretty clearly and overtly a genocide.
The entire episode should be traumatic for, of course, not only the victims of the attacks and the ongoing incursion by Israel into Gaza, but also by anyone in a civil society, with or without friends or family in Israel– or Gaza. This is especially close to home for me as a kinda-sorta-Jew and for me as a Detroiter, living in a city with a large Arab population and a strong Jewish community. The cognitive dissonance of having a pro social justice community also supporting what is either ethnic cleansing or genocide was one thing; another layer of cognitive dissonance was added after many Arabs voted for Trump in the November 2024 presidential election, only to be shocked when it turned out that his appointed ambassador to Israel has big plans to help Netanyahu assist in the continued displacement of Arabs from the West Bank and Gaza and, quite possibly, the entirety of Eretz Israel.
On Being A Real Jew Or Not
I used October 7th not as an excuse to get onto a soapbox, because that’s not terribly interesting to me– but to think about my own Jewish family’s history, and to think about some of the fundamental tenets of Jewish faith and culture as it has been telegraphed throughout my own life. I began by trying to unravel the thread of this complicated question of how the Jewish part of my family sorta stopped being Jewish– religiously if not culturally.
Many Jews will often argue that Judaism is a culture as well as a religion, so you can be 100% Jewish but also reject the faith in its entirety. But in the same breath, many of those same folks will paradoxically argue that you automatically stop being Jewish if your mother isn’t Jewish, even if you adopt the faith. The rigidity of halakha in prescribing matrilineal lineage of Jewish-or-not is, in fact, a gross oversimplification of the complexity of Jewish society at large. My extended family, for example, includes both halakhically-Jewish-by-matrilineal-descent people, ethnically-but-not-halakhically Jewish people, halakhically-Jewish converts, religiously Jewish but not halakhically Jewish people, and folks in between.
I argue that, as in many other elements of life, Judaism is not simply one thing. You can be a Jew without being a militant Zionist. You can be a Jew without seeking to adhere to the 613 commandments of the Torah at every second of every day. You can be a Jew without your mother being Jewish. But you cannot really be a Jew without exercising the quintessentially Jewish activity– mitzvah, one might even say- of continually engaging in discussion and debate about religion, faith, family, or social issues. The ability to have conversations about this is hard-coded into the religion itself because the religion emphasizes humanity’s ability to debate. God, Jews believe, gave mankind the ability to wrestle with concepts as humans. The divine is ubiquitous, but so, too, is our free will and our ability to solve problems.
Jewish Faith vs. Jewish War vs. Jewish Survival
Beyond the untold humanitarian toll, the official tally in my own limited sphere is that one person has unfriended me on social media, one person has stopped talking to me, and one Israeli friend even lost his job in Israel as a result of posting on social media content sympathetic to Palestine. I’ve been called a Bad Jew. I’ve been told, “I hate Jews like you.” I’ve been told that I’m an accessory to the Nazis. In every conversation, I’ve tried to avoid sharing vacuous memes, and instead have attempted to point out that murder is bad, and that the Talmud pretty explicitly forbids wanton and indiscriminate punishment, even as a response to bad things.
Certainly, at any level, it’s horrific to see children being murdered by my tax dollars. It’s similarly horrifying to see people defending this action as though it’s either inevitable (horrible take) or justifiable (absolutely fucking inexcusable take). Judaism teaches that most sins are forgivable, but murder is unforgivable by man, because the victim is dead and the dead person cannot forgive, so it is only forgivable by God. A commonly used illustration comes from the Talmud, which explains that a single life encapsulates the value of an entire universe, tracing the lineage of every human being back to Adam, the OG.
So, without further ado, I give you:
Next Year in Legoland: Building Blocks for Peace in the Middle East.
I thought I’d make a series of images to characterize some elements of the current conflict. I wanted to explain some historical context that many people– including militant Zionists, or perhaps especially militant Zionists- appear woefully unfamiliar with. I also wanted to satirize some things that I think are quite silly. This is not meant to be “ha ha funny,” but rather as a sort of illustration of how I’ve been processing my own journey and inner monologue about the subject.
So, I hope no one takes it too seriously. I process things by creating characterizations of them, whether in written or visual form, and I also think it’s probably pretty quintessentially a part of my New York Jewish heritage to process darkness with similarly dark humor, for whatever it’s worth. This was a tremendous waste of time using Midjourney. Yes, I have big problems with AI image generation software. But I also think some of it is kind of fun, and some of it can be useful to help me process and understanding things. Anyway.
Lego Set #1: Taglit Birthright Israel
If you’ve never heard of Birthright Israel, it’s an organization that sends young Americans to the Holy Land to do things like drink for the first time, make out, and take selfies with hot IDF soldiers. I’ve heard variously that it’s a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. Or, that it’s a militant Zionist indoctrination campaign, one. Either explanation sounds believable to me.
But good or bad, Birthright has long been bankrolled substantially by one of the worst people in American politics, which tells you a lot about the alignment of militant Zionism with the Christian Right in the United States– even though our main man is Jewish, he’s definitely, certainly, absolutely, very much in league with Those People. The propagandistic approach to the relationship with the IDF also tells you a lot.
Finally, that the organization includes “birthright” in the name, tells you a lot about the organization’s politics– as one journalist put it, it’s odd to think that an American youth could have the “birthright” to travel to Israel on an all-expense paid trip, but an Arab born in Haifa in 1946 wouldn’t have the right to move there. The idea of a birthright is very much a one-sided thing. The justifications for why some people have that birthright and others don’t through no fault of their own– but by way of conferring their parents or grandparents’ compatriots’ politics on the younger generation- is very much at odds with the Jewish exploration of the question of the sins of the fathers, explored exhaustively in both the Torah and in Talmudic exegesis.
In other words, it is kinda fucked up that Zionists will argue that it’s okay to blame Arabs for things that their parents or grandparents or great grandparents may or may not have had any involvement with, by justifying the fact that some people have this mythical “right of return” while others do not.
Lego Set #2: The Israeli Civil War That Wasn’t Quite, or, the Altalena Affair (1948)
Bear with me for some roundabout historical commentary on this next one. One of the biggest things that I think people misunderstand about Israeli history is that a lot people subscribe to what I call the “Virgin Birth Theory of Israel.” This holds that Israel was founded after Jewish Holocaust survivors fled to a faraway land, and thus began an exotic adventure of benign wonder and virtue.
The Virgin Birth Theory of Israel goes something like this: Uninhabited at the time, the barren, neglected land would become the Jewish homeland. Optimistic new settlers, fleeing from the antisemitism of Europe in the aftermath of the hitherto untold atrocities of the Nazi Holocaust, brought progress and prosperity to build a pluralistic State. However, the hateful neighboring Arabs decided to kill the Jews, because antisemitism, and because the terrible, primitive Arabs hate progress and the friendly newcomers to their lands to which, by the way, they’re not even native. Israel successfully defended itself against the evil Arabs and now is a thriving democracy, where milk and honey flow freely in the streets– when times are good, which is, of course, always (shoutout to Edward Woestman for this last line, which he coined to refer to Michael Moore’s bizarrely pollyanna characterization of Iraq in the film Fahrenheit 9/11).
This is, of course, not exactly how Shit Actually Went Down. In reality, mass migration to what was then just called Palestine– both during and predating the British Mandate of what we call “mandatory Palestine”- came in many forms over many years. The British, for their part, tried to restrict Jewish immigration into Palestine because, ever the responsible stewards of their colonial charge, they were wary of pissing off the Arabs. But nor did they adopt a cuddly approach to the idea of Jewish immigration in general, similar to how the US turned away Jewish refugees of the Holocaust in the 1930s. This created enormous problems for Jews trying to flee Europe, especially from Germany in 1933-1946.
Zionism– the idea of the formation of a Jewish homeland in the ancestral homelands occupied by Jews thousands of years ago and, to at least a tiny degree, continuously occupied by Jews since- wasn’t just a single idea, and it would take more than a short paragraph or even a long-ass article to explain exactly how the modern institution arose, to say nothing of the thoroughly fraught linguistic problems associated with people’s apparent inability to differentiate “the belief that Jews should have a place in the world to live where they aren’t threatened with genocide” and “the belief in the first one that also itself leads to the creation of an ethnic supremacist state and the intentional displacement of people who have been living there for thousands of years.” (I wrote about this linguistic complexity last spring).
We now know the IDF, which is the military “of record” of the state of Israel (as opposed to, say, armed settlers who operated with the sanction of the right-wing government in committing acts of anti-Arab violence, especially in areas like the West Bank).
But in those complicated, halcyon days of Young Israel, there wasn’t the IDF. There was Haganah (“The Defense”), and there was Irgun. Haganah, associated with the likes of Zionist socialist David Ben-Gurion, was differentiated from Irgun in its politics. Haganah sought to defend settlers against potential acts of violence by Arabs. It based its military policy on the notion of proportional response in self-defense, rather than on religious extremism or concepts of conquering territory.
Irgun, in contrast, were politically rabid freedom fighters often verging on being just straight-up terrorists. Their leadership was heavily inspired by the notorious European fascist movement in its adept use of militarized youth movements and broad social organization to supplement political objectives. Led by Russian-born Jewish militants Ze’ev Jabotinsky and Menachem Begin, who later became prime minister of Israel, the group carried out acts of everything ranging from petty violence (they once sent basically a lynch mob to beat up a bunch of British soldiers) to the bombing of the King David Hotel in 1946. Irgun’s contention with the Ben Gurion-ites was that Haganah’s official policy of restraint wasn’t getting Zionist settlers where they needed to get to (wherever indeed that was), so more violent action was needed.
Violence, surely, will get us where we need to be! I missed that wisdom in the Talmud, honestly, and as I wrote in my Hanukkah musings from the end of 2023, there is a profound irony in the wartime celebrations of a military victory from an era during which Jews were actually more involved in things like wars of conquest and aggressive religious conversion.
Anyway, to make a long story short, in the summer of 1948, the nascent state, all of a month old at that point, negotiated the purchase of a bunch of arms, to be transferred on a ship, the Altalena, to Israel. Menachem Begin headed the Irgun, who, along with fellow right-wing paramilitary group Lehi, had just agreed with the newly-formed IDF that they would centralize all arms purchasing through that new military entity. But Begin wanted in on the Altalena deal because he wanted the Irgun to have access to those arms, and, realizing that Ben-Gurion wanted the arms for his military, threw a shit fit, accordingly.
Ben-Gurion was in a dilly of a pickle at this point, because he needed those weapons. But Begin was a hardliner and refused to give up, because he wanted to keep the arms for his Irgun buddies to help realize their vision of so-called Revisionist Zionism, a territorially-maximalist interpretation of the “Jews living free from the threat of oppression in their own country” that encompassed a lot of frankly imperial and frankly shitty ideas that now form a backbone of right-wing extremist United States foreign policy toward Israel as well as that of the Likud government and its ultra-right-wing coalition allies. While Zionism in its most general sense doesn’t even explicitly demand a Jewish ethnostate but rather a homeland for the Jews in the historical land of Israel (“Practical Zionism” and, later, under Ben-Gurion and friends, “Labor Zionism”), Revisionist Zionism said, cool, that’s fine, but also, we’d like the new State to stretch damn near the whole way to Iraq.
So, a standoff ensued, and Ben-Gurion blew up the Altalena. Had they shot at each other, it may well have derailed the nascent state altogether, and it remains the closest the state has ever come to a civil war in spite of the insanity of disparities in Israeli society between right-wing religious extremists, religious extremists who aren’t necessarily hawks, and hilonim (secular Jews), who range from hawk-right-Zionists to garden variety commie pinkos to American expatriates who have no interest in the Jewish faith but love the idea of being able to move to an exotic faraway land that isn’t the United States.
This is the stuff they don’t tell you in the Virgin Birth Theory of Israel. I’m not telling this story to say that Israel is a fundamentally illegitimate state, because no states on God’s earth exist without fraught origins or revisionist origin stories, certainly, as I mentioned in my article about language on Israel and Palestine. But rather, this is to show that the founding of the state was marred by the same internal conflict and violence that Israel pretends it doesn’t condone or even actively encourage in the context of things like settler violence against Arabs. And that this history is wholly disregarded in characterizations of what’s going on today. There is a Talmudic edict that basically demands that Jews stick together in order to survive, and some Jews take this to mean that you can’t criticize Jews in any meaningful way in the public eye– or, taken to the more extreme, that you can’t criticize Medinat Israel without undermining the Jewish people at large.
Lego Set #3: Khiam Detention Center (1975-2000)
The Khiam Detention Center was a notorious prison used by the South Lebanon Army (SLA) from 1975-2000. Originally the site of a military base built by the French (the Middle East bearing ubiquitous scars of European colonial history), it was later used by the Lebanese Army until being taken over by the Israel-backed SLA during the Lebanese Civil War, a protracted conflict that has left still-open wounds on the small, impoverished country that has already been struggling with the legacies of being trampled by decades of colonially imposed dysfunction.
Khiam was infamous for the unspeakably brutal treatment of inmates detained there. Israel even barred the Red Cross entry to the camp on at least one occasion, likely to try and obscure the incidence of abuses. The facility was mostly destroyed by an Israeli airstrike in 2006, possibly to try and erase evidence of what all went there.
Israel frequently has supported groups like the SLA, who have employed brutal tactics, and then denied culpability by suggesting that they had no knowledge of what said group was doing. This is, of course, patently ridiculous, the same way it’s ridiculous for the United States to deny culpability for supporting the Taliban when the Reagan Administration definitely fucking supported the Taliban (because they were fightin’ the reds, and it was therefore politically feasible!).
Israel used the same defense in attempting to evade responsibility in the aftermath of the Sabra & Shatila Massacre in 1982, in which the IDF-backed SLA slaughtered a still-to-this-day-unknown number of Palestinian civilians in the Shatila refugee camp– probably thousands dead. It wasn’t simply that the IDF backed the SLA– it was that they were right there when this was happening. Ariel Sharon was later uncovered to have all but directly encouraged the massacre. An expansive paper trail that covered everything from IDF records to American intelligence didn’t exonerate him by way of plausible deniability.
Ariel Sharon, of course, was later elected prime minister.
Like terrorist freedom fighter Menachem Begin before him.
Noticing a trend? The somewhat unusual terrorist-to-prime minister pipeline! Can’t wait to see what horrors await us in Trump II!
Let’s also examine some limited edition minifigures in the Zionist Lego sets.
Limited Edition Minifigures
There is a strange thread of famous figures in right-wing extremist and militant Zionism not even coming from Israel, even in the modern day. Good examples are current prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who, while born in Israel, spent much of his youth in the suburbs of Philadelphia (actually went to the same high school that my grandmother went to!). Golda Meir, Israeli Prime Minister who famously said that Palestinians don’t exist (setting a precedent for a long litany of bullshit seeking to undermine the notions of self-determination and even peoplehood), grew up in fucking Milwaukee. And a classic example is extremist Meir Kahane, who both was born and died in New York.
Kahane is sort of like Zionist Donald Trump, except with less vacuous bullshit and more guns. Kahane argued for unapologetic militancy in the Zionist cause. He also pioneered the use of the term “Never Again” as a rallying cry. Jews, Kahane argued, wouldn’t fall victim again to atrocities like the Nazi Holocaust if they were schooled in self-defense, and armed appropriately! This is the same argument the 2A people use in the United States when they say that “it was never about the guns, it was always about control,” pointing out how the Nazis confiscated people’s guns to prevent an uprising. I mean, he’s not wrong about the protection with guns thing, right? After all, I made the same argument in 2020 when I pointed out that protests were less likely, it seemed, to be brutally repressed by state violence when protesters were armed. Case in point was the Black Panthers– and that’s why California has such strict gun control!
The interesting thing, though, referring back to the Irgun in 1948, is that Meir Kahane’s objectives weren’t simply about protecting Jews. They were about stirring shit. Kahane’s goals transcended self-determination and community organizing into promoting terrorism. This included bombings, attempted assassinations, and conspiracies to commit various other acts of terrorism and murder. Kahane even started his own political party in Israel, which was later banned because the party promoted terrorism.
And people still love the guy. I remember reading that you can still see Hebrew graffiti in Israel proclaiming that “Kahane was right.”
Let’s Stop Playing Around With History
I’m not publishing this content to claim that the state of Israel is fundamentally illegitimate. Israel is no less legitimate than the United States. I’ve mentioned this a lot before– how both states were built on land that was more or less stolen, even if the previous ownership was perhaps not 100% defined. The United States justified Manifest Destiny by arguing that it was not only necessary, but virtuous, to civilize the untamed wilderness and the savage peoples thereof, with a Christian value system (n.b. “industrial capitalism”). Israel argued that because Jews lived in the Holy Land thousands of years ago, they had a divine right to that land.
However, Zionists didn’t all argue that the state of Israel was only viable with the violent expropriation of the entire Arab population. With notable exceptions, there were many Jews living in Palestine well before 1948. The fact is that any time you’re transplanting large amounts of people into a place where other people already live, shit is gonna go down. This is going to happen via climate-effected migration. This is happening right now with the migrant caravans that come into the United States, fleeing the violence and economic destitution of dysfunctional regimes (whose dysfunctionality was largely exacerbated by shitty regime change and other American foreign policy).
This is not going to stop happening.
What could start happening, though, is approaching the way we treat other human beings on this planet with empathy. This, too, is a concept hardcoded into the very soul of the Jewish faith. It is a concept many militant Zionists have forgotten in their quest to erase traces of the actual Jewish faith in pursuit of some perverted, distorted interpretation of that faith. These folks have replaced the fundamentally Jewish concepts of empathy, charity, and good faith negotiation in problem solving, with a bellicose thirst for territory and punishment.
And as people continue (as I write this in January 2025) to die completely tragically and utterly unnecessarily– from illness, starvation, and an endless parade of precision American-made munitions being dropped on their heads- it remains, and will forever remain, vital for us to continue to push for peace and for accountability, in the pursuit of a more just world. While we may enjoy the fun of building the imaginative world of play using Legos, we as Jews are commanded to build a more just world by following the mitzvot (commandments) and loving one another to get there.
The images rendered here are from the Midjourney platform and have no official affiliation with the LEGO Group, LEGO A/S, Kirkbi A/S, or any of their respective affiliates or subsidiaries. The images are not intended to represent an actual product, are produced here purely for novelty purposes. Please don’t sue me.