Iowa City Jewish mourning ritual calls for cease fire, release of hostages in Gaza

IOWA CITY — A group of roughly 60 Iowa City-area Jews and their supporters gathered Friday at the Iowa City Ped Mall to collectively and publicly grieve the loss of Palestinian and Israeli life and to demand a cease fire, a release of all hostages, and an end to U.S. aid to Israel.

Those gathered sang Jewish songs of peace, broke bread in observance of Shabbat and prayed the Mourner's Kaddish.

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The Israel-Hamas war began Oct. 7 with a military attack on Israel by Hamas, a terrorist organization that controls the Gaza strip. The initial attacks killed roughly 1,400 Israelis.

Israel’s government has pledged, in response, to eradicate Hamas in Gaza. Since then, roughly 9,000 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza, according to the Associated Press.

Event organizer Samantha Brotman, of Iowa City, said the group, which represents a span of political and ideological views, formed over its collective dismay at “the horrific events in Israel, the ongoing hostage crisis, and the increasing violence in Gaza and the West Bank.”

“We’re Jews and we honor our Jewish tradition, which is rooted in the belief that all human life is sacred. We are called to oppose oppression everywhere it lives,” Brotman said. “ … Our hearts break for the Palestinians and the Israelis who have lost their lives, and the million of Palestinians still living as refugees — still living in constant fear; many deprived of their basic human needs — and for the Israeli hostages still being held captive.”

Brotman was among more than a dozen speakers who decried Israel’s bombardment and siege of Gaza as the Palestinian death toll rises.

“We refuse to let this take place in the name of our faith and our safety,” Brotman said. “ … We stand in solidarity with our Palestinian friends and community members, and want to send a message to them tonight: You are not alone in this. … We will mourn your dead as we mourn ours. We will fight for and with you.”

A group of Iowa City-area Jews gather in the Ped Mall to collectively and publicly grieve the loss of Palestinian and Israeli life, and call for a ceasefire. pic.twitter.com/YinrROEAZu

— Tom Barton (@tjbarton83) November 3, 2023

As a young adult, Brotman said she wrestled with her relationship with Zionism, the movement for the self-determination and statehood for the Jewish people in their ancestral homeland. She traveled to Israel in college, and planted a sapling from the Jewish National Fund — planting both literal and metaphorical roots in Israel.

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Afterward, she returned to class taught by a former Israeli soldier who showed the class a map where Palestinian villages once stood. Over the decades, Israel has forced thousands of Palestinians off their land and demolished Palestinian buildings in ongoing expansion of Israeli settlements.

“I immediately recognized the place where I had planted my tree,” Brotman said. “My hands were literally and metaphorically dirty in the crime of ethnic cleansing. I felt that I had been duped into complicity and it took me a long time to realize that I couldn’t absolve myself of the responsibility of what happened in 1948 (when the state of Israel was established), and what continues to happen to the Palestinian people.”

Ariel Levin worked in a Palestinian town surrounded by Israeli settlements.

“People from neighboring Israeli settlements drove out to beat up and shoot at Palestinian herders and livestock, burned their olive trees, drained sewage water into their crop fields and dumped chemicals into their wells,” Levin, of Iowa City, said.

She said she regularly witnessed Israeli soldiers arrest Palestinians protesters “who refused to give into soldier and settler intimidation days before.”

At the same time, Levin said over the last month “more people dear to me have been forced to experience the horror of their family members terrorized, killed and abducted.”

She said cousins' family member from Nir Yitzhak (an Israeli kibbutz near Gaza) is among the hundreds of Israelis taken hostage.

The last time they were able to trace his phone it was in one of cities in Gaza bombed by Israel this week, Levin said.

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“Everyday my cousin … shares posts, statements and interviews by him” and other family members “repeating again and again that the bombing needs to stop,” she said. “No one’s family member should be sacrificed — Israeli or Palestinian.”

Every day, the pleas become more desperate, she said.

Levin joined the group in demanding a prisoner exchange — every Palestinian imprisoned by Israel for every Israeli abducted by Hamas.

“In the mornings when I don’t know how to get out of bed because everything feels helpless, I think of the Palestinians and Israelis spending every day right now fighting to save their families, because they love them more than anything,” Levin said. “More than revenge. More than an agenda. More than fear of the punishments for speaking out and protesting. … We can join them in saying all life is precious. We can disrupt war-hungry leaders who pit Jewish safety and Palestinian freedom against each other when we know they are intertwined. We can stop our government from continuing to fund the cycle of violence.”

Brotman said she does not believe the existence of the state of Israel makes her or her family any safer.

“Antisemitism is a real and growing threat. And, sometimes, I really do feel for my safety and my family’s safety as Jews,” she said. “But with very, very rare exception the Palestine solidarity and anti-Zionist Jewish movements are not a threat to the Jewish people. Quite the opposite. This is why I find is so troubling to hear people describe cease fire rallies taking place around the world as antisemitic. Nothing could be more Jewish than standing with oppressed people.”

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Erel Michaelis, a graduate student at the University of Iowa, noted Israel’s blockade of Gaza is preventing the flow of much-needed medical supplies and humanitarian aid to the Mediterranean enclave that is home to nearly 2 million people.

“The lives that are lost on the Palestinian side are not going to return the lives of those lost on the Israeli side. It will only escalate the cycle of violence that has been going on ever since the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948,” Michaelis said.

Michaelis said they were conscripted into the Israel Defense Force as a soldier and performed his military service in a military museum dedicated to Palmach strike-force of the Haganah defense organization that operated prior to the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948. They said they also sserved as a translator in a Holocaust archive.

"Hearing personal testimonies of soldiers from the 1948 war … who admitted to witnessing and participating in the atrocities that happened there radicalized me to a huge extent,” Michaelis said.

As they grew older, Michaelis said they would witness as the “Israeli occupation and subjugation of Palestinians became worse and worse.”

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“By this time I had friends, I has comrades and lovers who are Palestinian, who are Arab. And I could hear first-person stories from their families about people being detained … about people’s lives being in danger,” Michaelis said. “And I knew that I could not in good conscience call myself a Zionist anymore.

“ … I know that I lived in an apartheid state. I witnessed apartheid in my own eyes. And because of this I fight against apartheid.”

Iowa City resident Mallory Hellman’s grandparents survived the Holocaust.

“Jewish safety is not at odds with Palestinian liberation,” Hellman said. “ … Yet, the issue has been marketed to me since the morning of Oct. 8, and arguably for the entire 37 years of my life.”

Audrey Messinger added: “when we talk about the genocide that’s happening right now, we should also be talking about the fact that people whose ancestors were victim to a genocide are now committing one.

“And that is what makes what is happening right now even more devastating and even more deplorable.”

Comments: (319) 398-8499; tom.barton@thegazette.com