A Brooklyn Rabbi Makes the Case for Palestinian Liberation

"If Jews have a right to freedom and self-determination, Palestinians should have the same right," Rabbi Andrue Kahn told me in an interview about Gaza. "That’s what the focus should be right now."

I haven’t written about Gaza yet in this newsletter, in part because it feels a bit out of my lane as a national politics/reproductive rights reporter. But as a human, and as an American citizen whose tax dollars are paying for Israel to indiscriminately bomb refugee encampments full of children, I’d also feel somewhat complicit in these atrocities we’re seeing videos and images of every day by ignoring them on this platform. 

To that end, I’ve done my first bit of original reporting for Nightcap: an interview with Andy Kahn, a Brooklyn-based rabbi with both extensive knowledge of the Israel-Palestine conflict and a moral clarity on the matter that I deeply respect. Andy studied in Israel in high school and college, spent his first year of rabbinical school in Israel from 2013-2014, speaks Hebrew, and just recently traveled back to Israel during Passover to try and carry food aid into Gaza himself. He sat down with me for an hour to react to some common Zionist talking points we’ve been hearing from politicians and the mainstream media, to make the case for Palestinian liberation, and to discuss how the Jewish community’s views on what Israel is doing have shifted since the initial shock of the October 7 attack on the kibbutzim. 

This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity. 

When you lived and studied in Israel a decade ago, was your perception of its conflict with Palestine more or less the same as it is now? 

I’d say pretty close, but not fully. 2013 was actually a really formative year for me, because I was placed in an internship with an organization called Rabbis for Human Rights, which focused on maintaining civil and human rights for Palestinians. So we spent a lot of time organizing trips for other rabbinical students to the West Bank, particularly around the olive harvest, because during the olive harvest in the West Bank settlers will often attack Palestinians to keep them from harvesting. If international people are there, they’re less likely to attack, so we went in and helped. 

What was going on in Gaza during that time? 

There was no Israel “occupation” by that point, but Gaza was fully cordoned off from the rest of the world–on three sides by Israel and on one side by Egypt. So while Israel had technically retreated from Gaza after 2005, it still completely controlled the air space and what came in and out of Gaza. The people of Gaza were living on the brink of total disaster, even then. Most of the water there was non-potable, the average age was extraordinarily low, unemployment extraordinarily high, and there was extremely limited capacity for people to imagine a better future, because they couldn’t leave this tiny area that was one of the most densely populated areas in the world. 

And that was all before the war in 2014. 

Yes. I think for a lot of American Jews, especially Millennials, who woke up to being really intensely anti-occupation, the attack on Gaza in 2014 was one of the primary movers on that, because it was a really intense bombing campaign on Gaza that killed a lot of civilians. That was after I left. Then in 2021, there was the “Great March of Return,” where the Palestinians were marching to the border between Gaza and Israel, and it was by and large a peaceful protest. I think rockets were still being fired occasionally, and Gazans used “fire kites,” where they’d send a kite over where it would fall and light fields on fire in Israel. But by and large it was extremely nonviolent, and the repression from the IDF to those marchers was extreme. They were shooting people’s kneecaps to suppress opposition. 

Since then, because of all the different things that have led to Hamas remaining in power in Gaza, there have been pretty consistent rockets fired out of Gaza into Israel. These are unguided rockets, so they can kind of fall anywhere, but the Iron Dome is used to shoot them out of the sky. They rarely hit anything or do any real damage; what they do is disrupt life as usual in Israel, because sirens go off and people have to run into their bomb shelters. One can imagine what it would be like to be woken up in the middle of the night by a siren warning you that rockets are coming, and you have to run down to the basement shelter—especially if you have mobility issues, or have children. Everyone knows it’s unlikely that the rockets will hit them, but they can’t take the risk, and it’s a harrowing experience.

Considering all of that context, what was your initial reaction to the news of Hamas’ October 7 attack?

Before I even knew the extremity of what Hamas and the other insurgents had done to the Israeli civilians after they broke out of Gaza—before I knew about the hostages–when I had only seen videos of Palestinians flying out of Gaza, knocking down the fence, and so on—I knew it was going to be an extreme military response. Very quickly, very harshly. And I thought that it would be about what we’re seeing happen, to be completely honest. 

Is it hard for you to believe reports that Israel funds Hamas and that they’d ignored extensive intelligence warning about the attack? 

I would separate out the “funds Hamas” thing, because it was already well known that Israel has channeled funds to Hamas in Gaza for various political reasons. And yes, there’s also been very compelling reporting that the IDF had been warned this attack was going to happen–that Hamas was behaving differently, training differently–but that they’d been warned primarily by low-level female soldiers. And because of patriarchy in the IDF, those women’s warnings just got dismissed. So instead of heeding those warnings and beefing up those military outposts around Gaza, Israel just kept funneling those resources to the West Bank to defend settlements. 

Do you think there’s any justification, religious or otherwise, for Israel building settlements in the West Bank?

No. 

What is your reaction to the talking point often used to justify Israel’s response to 10/7, that “Israel has a right to exist and to defend itself.” 

So my response to this is always, a right from whom? From where? And a right to exist how? Should Israelis’ rights supersede other people’s rights? This is an extremely complex question of international law that, frankly, I don’t have the legal knowledge to answer. I know it’s sort of a cliche rabbinic thing to do to answer a question with a question, but I don’t think the answer of whether Israel has a right to exist and defend itself is a simple yes or no. There are a whole host of contextual, historical and international legal issues that need to be addressed as part of that answer.

What’s your reaction to President Biden saying, “No Jew in the world will be safe without Israel?” 

My Jewish great-grandfather moved here in 1909, about 40 years before Israel was declared a state. He was very safe here. He had a great life here. And I don’t think Israel helped him or my grandparents be safe. So I actually don’t even know what Biden means by that. I believe the United States should be committed to the safety of all of its people, regardless of whether they have a sovereign nation or not. 

I think there’s been a history of conflating the issue of Jewish refugees with the existence of the state of Israel, because around WWII, a lot of horrible things happened to Jewish refugees who didn’t have a place to go. So part of the reason a Jewish nation-state was created was to resolve what was referred to as the “Jewish refugee problem.” But I think a better way to deal with a refugee problem, not just for Jews but for all refugees around the world, is to have a better and more robust set of international laws to allow them to find a place to live safely in the places that make the most sense for them. The idea that every group that could possibly ever become refugees has the right to re-establish sole sovereignty over some plot of land is just not feasible, nor is it helpful. Because as we see in the case of Israel, the creation of Israel led to a whole other refugee issue. 

Pro-Palestinian college campus protests have been interpreted by many in the mainstream media to be inherently antisemitic. The chant, “From the river to the sea,” in particular, has been interpreted as a call for the murder of Jews. Do you see it that way?

I think it’s a chant that can mean lots of different things in lots of different contexts, and isn’t inherently antisemitic. Certainly people who are antisemitic have said it, and certainly people who are not antisemitic have said it. You could mean, “From the river to the sea, everyone who’s living there now will be equally free.” I don’t think that’s antisemitic. I’ve been at protests where it’s been chanted, and it doesn’t make me feel threatened at all. The people I have encountered protesting for Palestinian liberation do not see it as necessitating the death or destruction of other people. 

Do you think there’s been a spike in antisemitism in the wake of October 7, or have you personally experienced it?

Personally, no. I walk around with a yarmulke frequently, and I haven’t had any problems. I have heard from a lot of kids, because I work with kids in an education setting, that they are experiencing antisemitic bullying via this issue. And I think that’s probably legit, because kids are jerks and often don’t fully understand what’s going on. But I’m not on a college campus, so I can’t speak to exactly what’s happening there. I have spoken to and read about multiple Jewish college students who have participated in the encampments and do not seem to be experiencing antisemitism, though.

I do think a lot of Jewish people believe and are raised to believe that anti-Zionism is antisemitism, because they are also raised to believe that Zionism is an integral part of their identity and inseparable from their Judaism. I don’t think they are pretending; I think they genuinely do believe that. To them it may be very scary to hear from people in positions of authority that all these protests are actually anti-Jewish. But I personally don’t believe that Zionism is a necessary and integral part of Judaism. Zionism is a Jewish nationalist movement that started in the 19th century, along the same lines as other nationalist movements of the era, and Judaism existed long before without it. And ever since its inception, there have been Jews who dissented against it.

Given the violence and suffering we’ve seen in Gaza over the past few months, and particularly since the murder of the World Central Kitchen aid workers and this weekend’s attack on the refugee camp in Rafah, it feels to me as if public opinion of Israel has shifted significantly since October 7. Have you noticed the same in your circles? 

Yes. Initially, and for many months thereafter, calling for a ceasefire was viewed as completely out of bounds. I think the desire in the Jewish community was to say that Israel has a right to defend itself, and to give Israel a chance to free the hostages through military action. The mainstream of the American Jewish world wanted to give Israel the benefit of the doubt in that, which I understand, because a lot of Jews are deeply invested in Israel and Zionism as part of their identity. So I think many folks genuinely believed at first that the Israeli military incursion would lead to the release of the hostages. 

But then, I think, they started to see that it wasn’t working. And the amount of Palestinians being killed was becoming clearly so egregious that it no longer made sense to continue in this direction. I think it started to change around the turn of the year, even before the World Kitchen folks got killed, as people started seeing Israelis and the actual families of the hostages, themselves, protesting in the streets against Netanyahu and the IDF. The hostage issue, I think, has been the primary issue for the Jewish community from the get-go, so seeing that the military option wasn’t leading to freeing the hostages sort of turned the tides. 

Another common rebuttal I hear from Zionists in response to the outrage about civilian casualties in Gaza, particularly online, is, “Well then, what should Israel have done?” So what do you think Israel should have done?

I think that Israel and its international partners, including the United States, should have spent the past 76 years actually trying to figure out a way for everyone to equitably live in that plot of land, so that Palestinians and Jews, and everyone else living there, have freedom and equal rights and the ability to build futures for themselves. Actually working toward a peaceable reality would have prevented what’s happening now. 

I don’t have a prescription for what needs to happen now. I just know that what’s happening in both Gaza and the West Bank is horrific and unjust and needs to stop. If Jews have a right to freedom and self-determination, Palestinians should have the same right. That’s what the focus should be right now.