My Stance on Israel's War on Palestine

In case you’ve missed my last seven weeks of writing here on Substack or my posts on Instagram, I want you to know where I stand on Israel’s War on Palestine—and why.

To begin, let me share a piece of my family history with you.

In 1939, when my mother was only 7 years old, Hitler began World War II by invading Poland from the West. At the same time, the Soviets invaded from the East. The Soviet authorities declared Poland “nonexistent,” and all Polish citizens to be Soviets.

On a cold February night in 1940, Soviet troops came to our family’s farm in the middle of the night, gave them 30 minutes to gather their children, and ordered them at gunpoint on a train to Siberia. They placed hundreds of thousands of Poles on cattle cars, as many as 90 to a car, with slatted openings at the top for ventilation. The cars were unheated; during the 6-week journey, many children and elders died of cold or illness. The trains stopped once each day to empty the bodies of the dead into the snowy tundra below.

My mother and her sisters, aged 5 and 10 years old, were Polish prisoners of war in the Gulag for two years. My grandmother, barely five feet tall, was given hard labor cutting down trees in the surrounding forest. Each person was allotted one piece of bread per day; my mother and her sisters frequently cried from the stomach pains caused by hunger. The Russian soldiers treated them brutally; of those who survived the exodus from Poland, countless perished in the camps.

When Germany turned around and invaded the Soviet Union in 1941, the U.S. joined the war. The Allies needed Polish men to fight; they removed those who remained alive, including my grandfather, from the prison camps. They freed many, though not all, from the Gulag; my mother and her family were sent through Persia and Kazakhstan to settle in Uganda and other parts of what was known as “British East Africa” (because, colonialism).

In a treaty at the close of the war, a chunk of Polish land the size of Czechoslovakia that included my family’s farm was given to Belarus. Unable to return to their homeland, they stayed in Uganda for several years—my mother finished high school there—before being involuntarily relocated yet again, this time to Britain.

While the Holocaust was happening to Jewish, Romani, and disabled people, a Polish genocide also occurred. More than 5 million Poles died in World War II, of which 2.5 million were Polish Jews like my family.

Whether a family was taken by the Nazis or by the Soviets came down to a matter of where in the country they lived. Our Jewish family who lived in Warsaw were taken to concentration camps, where few survived. Many of our relatives, including uncles, were killed in the Holocaust.

My mother, sisters, and grandparents survived two genocides.

My father was in the Third Armored Division of the U.S. army that liberated the Dora-Mittelbau concentration camp. He was a Holocaust scholar, and talked often of the atrocities he witnessed in the War.

I have an ethnic and spiritual proximity to Judaism, a fondness for its principles, and a firsthand familiarity with the central Jewish theme of exile. This also gives me a responsibility to speak out when Israel is committing ethnic cleansing and genocide in my name, as they are doing now.

Before I was born, my parents visited the Seneca (First Nations) reservation in Salamanca, New York, to document the U.S.’s agenda to build a dam through Native land across the country. Expecting a brief visit, they stayed for several years. The Seneca adopted my mother and me; the first 3 years of my life were spent embedded in their network of kinship.  

In the late 1960’s, President Kennedy broke his campaign promise to keep the Seneca’s land intact. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers expelled them, giving them two small tracts of land located far apart. Within a year, more than half the Seneca elders died—of broken hearts, their relatives said.

My godmother told me that upon my parents’ return to Cambridge, they threw themselves face-down in their front yard, sobbing brokenheartedly, while I sat on the grass beside them. I have no conscious memory of this, but understand how they must have felt. At the age of 29, I returned to Salamanca for the Keeper of the Western Door Pow-Wow. When the children came onto the field in ceremonial dress, I fell to my knees, only just managing to suppress an inhuman wail of grief.  

My mother suffered all her life from posttraumatic stress disorder, which affected our family profoundly. My father contended with anxiety, for which he sometimes took medication. In some ways, my precociousness as a young adult—getting my bachelor’s and master’s degrees in behavioral and social sciences in just four years—stemmed from a strong desire to grapple with and alleviate my parents’ emotional pain. It also seeded my passion for understanding trauma and embodiment.

Nothing in my history confers on me a status apart from whiteness, or cancels out my multiple nodes of privilege.

My parents had a place to return to, while the Seneca were removed and exiled to separate lands.  

This is an emblem of my social privilege; it is also a debt unpaid.

At the same time, I know what it means to lose a cherished home and community, to be forever bereft of them. This makes me more attuned than I might otherwise be to injustice, and to the systems of oppression that thrive all around us.

This brings me to Israel’s War on Palestine. (Clearly, it is not a conflict with Hamas.)

Israel’s “War” on Palestine

Like scores of people worldwide, I felt a deep horror at the violence Hamas perpetrated on Israeli women, children, and civilians on October 7^th.

I felt an immediate solidarity with the citizens of Israel.

I condemned the actions of Hamas.

At the same time, along with countless others, I watched with growing alarm as Benjamin Netanyahu and his cabinet voiced their intentions for revenge.

What followed those intentions was far worse than I could have imagined.

It is precisely because of my proximity to ethnic cleansing, genocide, loss of land, loss of community, and assaults on statehood, sovereignty, and self-determination that I speak up on behalf of Palestinians, and in favor of their liberation from the conditions of Israeli apartheid.

The term “apartheid” refers to the implementation and maintenance of a system of legalized racial segregation in which one racial group (Israelis and Israeli Jews) deprives another (Palestinians and Palestinian Jews, Christians, and Muslims) of political and civil rights. Typically, apartheid is carried out across geographies, separating one part of the population from the others.

The policies of apartheid include prohibition of mixed marriages, banning of a specific racial or ethnic group from access to certain meetings and unions, restriction of movement (including national and international travel), military checkpoints (such as roadblocks and fences), and the prohibition of access to specific public spaces.

If this sounds familiar, it should. The term apartheid describes the regime in South Africa from the late 1940’s to the early 1990’s. It also captures the racial caste system that operated in the United States (with Black and Indigenous people), Canada, the U.K., and Europe for hundreds of years, and continues to do so today. It applies to Israel’s regime in Israel, Jerusalem, the West Bank, and Gaza as well.

In February of 2022, Amnesty International issued a report characterizing Israel’s treatment of Palestinians is apartheid, and calling it a crime against humanity.

The organization said in its statement,

“Massive seizures of Palestinian land and property, unlawful killings, forcible transfer, drastic movement restrictions, and the denial of nationality and citizenship to Palestinians are all components of a system which amounts to apartheid under international law. This system is maintained by violations which Amnesty International found to constitute apartheid as a crime against humanity, as defined in the Rome Statute and Apartheid Convention.” (Here’s their full report.)

What Do Yoga, Mindfulness, and Embodiment Have To Do with This?

The threads of my personal and professional work mean that I choose to speak directly about Israel as an apartheid state, and Israel’s longstanding oppression of the Palestinian people.

This brings me to the fields of yoga, mindfulness, psychology, and embodiment.

Many white, privileged professionals in these fields segregate individual growth from collective healing and aim to silo the therapeutic aspects of their work from ones they deem “social” or “political.” (I’ve written about this before and will do so again in next week’s column.) These are hallmarks of white supremacy and the social privilege it confers.

Cole Arthur Riley on Instagam

Frequently when I lead workshops, white people ask (in the presence of BIPOC, no less), “Does everything have to be about social justice?”

For people who dominant culture marginalizes, everything already is about social justice—or rather, the lack of it—that permeates every aspect of their lives and can’t be put aside at will.

In a recent survey of my Substack readers, several people asked me to continue writing about science, psychology, and embodiment—but to leave out the “racial focus.” This illustrates the tendency, when someone points to racial inequity, for white people to consider it a “racial focus,” when racism undergirds the very systems we live in, affects every aspect of our lives, and isn’t something that BIPOC can “ignore.”

Segregating people and segregating issues upholds systems of oppression.

If you are in any doubt about what the “right side” is in this genocide, you have only to look to the timelines of Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (and here Angela Davis comes immediately to mind) who recognize Israel’s apartheid for what it is because they have lived through it in the U.S., the U.K., Canada, Europe, South Africa. They see Israel’s suppression of Palestinians as emblematic of a racial caste system. Any white person who has done even a modicum of racial justice work will be able to see this too.

Cole Arthur Riley on Instagram

As reverend angel Kyodo williams says, “You can’t have social justice without the body.”

The converse is also true: We don’t have a personal body apart from our larger social body. Both science and our own direct experience tell us that our personal and social bodies are inherently linked. (More on that next week.)

In other words, yoga, mindfulness, and embodiment are inherently social and political.

When Russia invaded Ukraine in February of 2022, I experienced a flood of epigenetic responses. I committed to devoting 7-10 hours per week studying the war, and how Vladimir Putin has attempted to rewrite (read: erase) its true history (and in doing so, to replicate that history). I tracked related events, such as Yevgeny Prigozhin’s Wagner Military Group and its activities in Syria, Africa (particularly throughout the Sahel), and elsewhere.

My master’s degree in social sciences included a focus on global geopolitics. My professional work and personal history have expanded my understanding of world events, and how one military conflict or alliance relates to another.

I have been appalled to see a striking resemblance between the atrocities and war crimes Russia commits and those that the Israeli Defense Forces is now committing.

According to CNN and multiple other outlets, a U.S. intelligence assessment compiled by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence reports that 40-45% of the staggering 29,000 air-to-ground munitions Israel has used have been “dumb bombs”—that is to say, unguided—despite the fact that Israel has access to AI-assisted technology for use in precise military targeting.

Over the weekend of December 15-17 alone, Israel bulldozed more than 20 sick and injured Palestinians sheltering in a hospital courtyard, burying them alive.

Israeli snipers killed a mother and daughter sheltering inside Gaza’s only Catholic church.

Israeli soldiers destroyed yet another cemetery in Gaza.

They bombed the maternity ward of Nasser Hospital in Gaza.

And they have repeatedly invaded and bombed refugee camps.

And that’s just the beginning.

All of these actions constitute war crimes.

Is This Genocide?

On October 28, Craig Mokhiber, United Nations Director of the New York Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, resigned over what he termed a “textbook case of genocide.”

In his resignation letter to the High Commissioner of the U.N., he wrote:

“As a human rights lawyer with more than three decades of experience in the field, I know well that the concept of genocide has often been subject to political abuse. But the current wholesale slaughter of the Palestinian people, rooted in an ethno-nationalist settler colonial ideology, in continuation of decades of their systematic persecution and purging, based entirely upon their status as Arabs, and coupled with explicit statements of intent by leaders in the Israeli government and military, leaves no room for doubt or debate. In Gaza, civilian homes, schools, churches, mosques, and medical institutions are wantonly attacked as thousands of civilians are massacred. In the West Bank, including occupied Jerusalem, homes are seized and reassigned based entirely on race, and violent settler pogroms are accompanied by Israeli military units. Across the land, Apartheid rules. This is a text-book case of genocide.”

Many others believe that Israel is committing genocide against the Palestinian people—and that we can’t afford to wait until it’s over to decide.

Consider the following:

• Israeli Heritage Minister Amichai Eliyahu said that it was "an option" to "nuke Gaza." This echoes the nuclear saber rattling of Dimitry Medvedev, Russia’s Deputy Chairman of the Security Council of the Russian Federation.

• Israel President Isaac Herzog said, “There are no innocent civilians in Gaza.”

• Israel Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich says there is “No such thing as Palestinians, because there is no such thing as the Palestinian people.” (This last is reminiscent of the Soviet statements about Polish people prior to their invasion in World War II.)

• Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant said, “There will be no electricity, no food, no fuel; we are fighting human animals.” (This directly parrots Putin’s words about there being “no such thing” as Ukrainians, and calling Ukrainian’s drug-addled Nazis.” )

• Major General Ghassan Alian, in charge of administering the siege of Gaza before and during the war, cut off food, water, and fuel, and denied medical care to civilians

• An Israeli lawmaker from Netanyahu’s Likud party, Galit Distel Atbaryan, wrote on social media, “Erase Gaza from the face of the earth. Let the Gazan monsters rush to the southern border and flee into Egypt, or die.”

• The New York Times reported that Israel requested 24,000 assault rifles so that Itamar Ben-Gvir, a far-right minister of the police, can arm civilians who want to force Palestinians from the West Bank.

• Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu recently said, “You must remember what Amalek has done to you.” He refers to the Old Testament passage in which God commands King Saul, in the first Book of Samuel, to kill every person in Amalek, a rival nation. Samuel commands Saul, “Attack the Amalekites and totally destroy all that belongs to them. Do not spare them; put to death men and women, children and infants, cattle and sheep, camels and donkeys.” And that, indeed, is what Israel is doing to the Palestinians.

And on December 17^th, the Jerusalem Post featured an article that quoted David Azoulai, head of Israel’s Metula Council, who said: “The entire Gaza Strip should be emptied and leveled flat, just like in Auschwitz. Let it become a museum, showcasing the capabilities of the state of Israel and dissuading anyone from living in the Gaza Strip. This is what must be done to give them a visual representation.”

Israel’s invocation of the imagery of a concentration camp in their intentions for Gaza is reprehensible.

The Auschwitz Memorial issued a statement in response on X, formerly Twitter:

"David Azoulai appears to wish to use the symbol of the largest cemetery in the world as some sort of a sick, hateful, pseudo-artistic, symbolic expression. Calling for acts that seem to transgress any civil, wartime, moral, and human laws, that may sound as a call for murder of the scale akin to Auschwitz, puts the whole honest world face-to-face with a madness that must be confronted and firmly rejected. We do hope that Israeli authorities will react to such shameful abuse, as terrorism can never be a response to terrorism."

Other high-ranking Israeli officials have also made public statements, expressing their goal of depriving Gaza of access to food, water and fuel.

Human Rights Watch recently accused Israel of using starvation as a weapon of war in Gaza.

Omar Shakir, HW Director for Israel and Palestine, stated clearly:

“Look, I think there are about five pieces of very damning evidence that led to this conclusion. One is two plus months of blocking entry of food and water. Second is the blocking of all but a trickle of humanitarian aid from entering into Gaza. Putting it all together, you reach the clear conclusion that the Israeli government is using starvation as a weapon of war, which is an abhorrent war crime.”

Furthermore, according to an article by NPR, the Israeli military campaign in Gaza now stands among the deadliest and most destructive in history. In just over two months, the offensive has wreaked more destruction than the razing of Syria’s Aleppo between 2012 and 2016, Ukraine’s Mariupol or, proportionally, the Allied bombing of Germany in World War II. It has killed more civilians than the U.S.-led coalition did in its three-year campaign against the Islamic State group.

For more, see this letter from Raz Segal, associate professor of Holocaust and genocide studies at Stockton University and endowed professor in the study of modern genocide. I also recommend this piece in The Guardian on war crimes.

And here’s a passage straight from Wikipedia:

“On 19 October 2023, 100 civil society organizations and six genocide scholars sent a letter to Karim Khan, Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, calling on him to issue arrest warrants to Israeli officials for cases already before the prosecutor; to investigate the new crimes committed in the Palestinian territories, including incitement to genocide, since 7 October; to issue a preventative statement against war crimes; and to remind all states of their obligations under international law. The letter noted that Israeli officials, in their statements, had indicated "clear intent to commit war crimes, crimes against humanity and incitement to commit genocide, using dehumanizing language to describe Palestinians." The same day, lawyers at the Center for Constitutional Rights stated that Israel's tactics were "calculated to destroy the Palestinian population in Gaza", and warned the Biden administration that “U.S. officials can be held responsible for their failure to prevent Israel’s unfolding genocide, as well as for their complicity, by encouraging it and materially supporting it."^[53] 

On November 1, 2023, the Defence for Children International accused the United States of complicity with Israel's "crime of genocide."^[54]

Mother Jones reported recently that forty-seven percent of Israeli Jews said in a poll conducted last month that Israel should “not at all” consider the “suffering of the civilian Palestinian population in Gaza” in its next phase of fighting.

I ask: How can any Jewish person, whose identity is so linked with the pain of exile, permit—or justify—the exile of another oppressed group of people?

Who I Am + What I Stand For:

The distinct threads woven into my family history and the throughline of my work and mean that I acknowledge and feel tremendous compassion for survivors of the Holocaust, the Polish genocide in World War II, the Native genocides in the U.S. and Canada (as well as in European, South American, and other countries), centuries of enslavement and Jim Crow, and all forms of epigenetic and present-day trauma.

Several people have commented on my social media posts that they always agree with my stance on issues of social justice—except for this time.

Or that I’ve “changed” my values and am no longer true to the principles of my previous work, or yoga/yoga therapy/psychotherapy/embodiment/fill-in-the-blank.

These people have not been paying attention.

The throughline of my work is the intersection of science, psychology, social equity, justice, and embodiment. That has always been and will always be my throughline.

Those who don’t agree with me “this time” are really saying that they would like to make an exception for Israel—which is to say, an exception when it comes to the Black, Brown, and Indigenous people that Israel oppresses.

I’m appalled that we can muster so much empathy and grief for the loss of American children killed by gun violence, but feel such apathy for alarming numbers of Palestinian children killed by Israel’s indiscriminate targeting of civilians.

I’m deeply concerned that many people aligned with social justice principles can begin to acknowledge the harms of mass incarceration of BIPOC in the United States, but deny Israel’s decades of mass incarceration of thousands of women, children, and civilians in “administrative detention.” (This term means that there need be no reason for detention, and in most cases they are not given a trial.)

I’m incredulous that many of us can muster grave concern for the 20,000 Ukrainian children that Russia has killed or kidnapped from Ukraine in the last two years, yet consider the deaths of nearly 10,000 Palestinian children in just two months the unfortunate cost of Israeli “safety” or urban warfare.

I’m deeply disappointed that yoga and mindfulness teachers and practitioners who have given voice to the ahimsa (non-violence), the most important principle in yoga and mindfulness, have decided that Israel-Palestine is an exception to this principle, and that it’s OK for violence to be committed on Palestinian bodies.

Understanding genocide and undertaking activism on behalf of humanity are a central component of anti-oppression frameworks.

If you’ve done the work of ferreting out the ways in which you (and me, and we) uphold white supremacy, and what it takes to ensure inclusivity and equity for all, you know that speaking on behalf of Palestine is part of that work.

It’s abundantly clear that speaking out on behalf of Palestinians is also pro-Jewish, and honors Jewish (and yogic and Buddhist, for that matter) values and traditions.

Yet there is tremendous social pressure in the U.S., the U.K., Canada, and Europe to not speak out—to be silent.

Many years ago in an anti-racism group, the facilitators asked us each to choose a guiding question for the year. I checked in with my body, and waited for that question to surface. When it did, it rang like a gong through my body. I knew that I this would be a lifelong question, one I would need to hold myself to account for again and again for the rest of my life.

What am I willing to give up in order for true social inclusivity and equity to be possible?

(Do you have a guiding question in your quest for social justice? If so, I’d love to know what it is in the comments section below.)

To be clear, this isn’t laudable; it’s the absolute bare minimum we should be doing to dismantle the apartheid systems that exist within us (on the inside) and all around us.

Being against genocide should never be controversial—period.

Recently, an angry pro-Israeli yoga studio owner DM’d me to say that I’d “never work in this field” (meaning yoga) again. (My colleagues understand this, which is why many of the yogis I taught alongside at Yoga Journal conferences and in locations all over the world for decades have been silent, or have posted only a story or two on Instagram that vanishes in 24 hours.)

Others have called me a “terrorist” or “Nazi,” showing just how easily those labels can be weaponized in the service of maintaining systems of power—and in the process, serve to obscure our collective focus on the very real problem of anti-Semitism.

Still others have shared, though they know me through public discussions to be a survivor of sexual assault, in graphic terms what they believe (read: fantasize) Hamas will “do to me.” (I have seen many Zionist women do this to women who speak up on behalf of Palestine, and it disgusts me.)

I’ve been treated to vile racist diatribes lamenting “reverse racism” by supposedly social justice-oriented yogis.

And to be clear, this isn’t about me. It’s about an ongoing ethnic cleansing and genocide of a people who have done nothing wrong—who have by gift of birth been born Palestinian.

The guiding question What am I willing to give up? is clear in this moment.

It means that speaking out against Israeli’s atrocities will cost me professional work and perhaps my career as a whole.

I have lost and will lose more students, followers, colleagues, friends, professional work, and possibly my professional reputation.

I have lost, and will continue to lose, income at a time when four years of Covid-19 have ravaged our profession.

I have reckoned with this cost and am more than willing to pay it.

And what a small cost it is, when Palestinians—so many of them children!—are paying for Israel’s oppression with their lives, as they have done for 75 years.

My ancestors suffered so I could have the freedom and the privilege to speak.

My inner compass asks that when I acknowledge injustice and genocide in one case (such as Native genocide), I do not excuse it in another.

It asks that I if I point to uncomfortable truths in one case (say, the history of apartheid in the U.S.), I also metabolize uncomfortable truths in this and every other one.

For me, standing up on behalf of the sovereignty and humanity and rights of Palestinians is not an option; it is a biological, moral, and spiritual imperative.

Where We Go From Here

In a devastating story in the Atlantic on German memorials (and remembrance) of the Holocaust a year ago, Clint Smith III wrote,

"American soldiers wondered how thousands of people could have been held captive, tortured, and killed at the camp, while just outside its walls was a small town where people were going about their lives as if impervious to the depravity taking place inside. Buying groceries, playing soccer with their children, drinking coffee with their neighbors."

I think about the many small acts of dissidence that occurred for me to be born:

The Russian women who gave my aunt small pieces of bread hidden in their pockets when their soldiers weren’t there to see it.

The soldier with an attack dog who let my grandmother live when she stole small pieces of carrots because her children were starving.

The generosity of spirit of the Ugandans in welcoming my people, when they themselves had suffered so much.

And, of course, the quietly heroic and generous acts of so many who hid and protected Jews, some of whom were my direct family members, from the Nazis.

History will look back upon these times, as it now does with the Holocaust, and hold us accountable for our silence.

If you have followed my work integrating science, psychology, embodiment, and social justice, my stance on Israel-Palestine should neither surprise nor upset you.

If it does, you’ve been cherry-picking from my work for your own individual ends, and overlooking its most important themes and reasons for being.

If that’s the case, you are free to unfollow, unsubscribe, unfriend. (But please do so quietly and without fanfare, since I’ve had enough pro-violence and “we need to be safe” arguments to last a lifetime.)

May all beings everywhere be free from suffering.

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Note: This column is not an invitation to send notes of disappointment, threats, or harassment. I have evolved strong boundaries, and ask that you respect them by unfollowing, if you need to, without further discussion.

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If you’ve missed my other pieces on the conflict, check out the following:

A “Talking Points” guide to the Israel-Palestine Conflict

An article about the children of Gaza

A stunning interview on the Israel-Palestine conflict with Gabor Mate and his daughter

A piece on Israel’s indiscriminate destruction of Palestine’s olive trees

A column on the making of refugees