Passover: Holiday of Freedom and Resisting MAGA Authoritarianism
This Passover I’m thinking about how we can resist authoritarianism in Israel and the United States. I offer two examples which aren’t organically related but share something of the same spirit of resistance. I think everyone receiving this knows that my niece, Liat Atzili, was kidnapped on October 7, 2023 from her home, Kibbutz Nir Oz, and was released in an exchange of captives with Hamas 54 days later. Aviv Atzili, her partner, fell while defending Nir Oz that day.
Kibbutz Artzi, the national federation of kibbutzim to which Nir Oz belongs, has long issued a Haggadah for Pesach that reflects its political outlook and secularist approach to Jewish identity. So, no mention of miracles or a deity in their Haggadah. Scroll down past this introduction to read Liat’s contribution to this year’s edition of the Kibbutz Artzi Haggadah. She mentions her younger sister, Tal, whose name means “dew” and who lives in Portland and alludes to her partner, whose name means “spring.”
April 17 is the National Day of Action for Higher Education. It’s appropriate to hold this day of solidarity and resistance to MAGA authoritarianism during Passover. On April 17 there will be at least 178 rallies, teach-ins, and webinars in locales across the United States to support academic freedom in the face of the MAGA assault on higher education. As part of these nationwide actions, the Liberatory Jewish Studies Network and others have organized scholars of Jewish Studies, Holocaust Studies, Israel Studies, and Middle East studies to intentionally violate the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of antisemitism.
The Trump administration is determined to implement this widely contested definition of antisemitism across the federal government, including using it as the standard for the Department of Education and the Department of Justice's attacks on higher education. The MAGA authoritarians claim to be undertaking these actions in the name of Jewish safety. This is a lie. Antisemites and Christian nationalists are among the followers and leaders of the MAGA movement. Its claims to oppose antisemitism are a smoke screen for its attacks on immigrants, trans people, and advocates for Palestinian rights, for dismantling higher education as we know it, and violating our civil rights.
The IHRA definition has been widely criticized because seven of its eleven contemporary examples of antisemitism relate to what can and cannot be said in criticizing Israel. It is formulated to protect Israel and Zionism from fundamental criticism. So after the excerpt from the Kibbutz Artzi Haggadah (whose editors and contributors may not agree with me on this), in solidarity with my colleages, I am publishing my public violation of the IHRA definition of antisemitism.
Kibbutz Artzi Haggadah 2025
by Liat Atzili - Kibbutz Nir Oz
When I was a child, Passover was my favorite holiday. There were years when we celebrated the Seder at Kibbutz Shomrat, and there were years when my own family would celebrate it in Herzliya. My love for Passover stemmed less from the content of the holiday and more from my fondness for strawberries, which always starred as the dessert of the holiday meal. Passover marked the end of the strawberry season. When I was a child, there was a season for fruits.
The Seder nights that I know are not based solely on the Haggadah. There was always additional content. When my sister, Tal moved overseas, the line "Lech Leshalom Geshem, Bo Beshalom Tal" (Go in Peace, Rain, Come in Peace Dew) by Yossi Ben Yossi became significant.
Her lack of presence at the Seder table was sweetened when we read the words "Bo Beshalom Tal".
I have always loved the meaning of Passover as the "Holiday of Spring," a holiday that marks the cycles of nature and agriculture, a holiday of growth and renewal that heralds the beginning of summer, my favorite season. I loved the lyrics of the song "Soft joy, spring has come, Passover has come." Today, these words fill me with sadness that our spring (Aviv) will no longer come...
I still love Passover, the holiday of freedom. I am still intrigued to think about the meaning of this freedom. The Kibbutz Artzi Haggadah opens with verses from the Book of Exodus describing the Exodus from Egypt. The words "Our time of freedom," "The world's constitution," "That very day you went out from Egypt, troop by troop," "Today you became a people" that appear in the biblical text are moving. I wonder about their meaning, the editors' choice of the opening verse, and their absence from the traditional Haggadah. The freedom of the Jewish people was achieved with such toil and difficulty, in those times and in this time. The freedom I seek is freedom from bloodshed, freedom from tyranny, freedom to think and create.
But this freedom is not a prize but a burden. The test of a free person and people is their relationship with others, as it is written in the Book of Exodus, "You shall not oppress a stranger, and you know the soul of a stranger, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt." The burden of freedom obliges us to take responsibility, not only for ourselves but also for others.
From our own perspective, as if we had come out of Egypt, we must strive so that all people can say, "We were slaves, but now we are free."
Violating the IHRA Definition of Antisemitism
The International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition of antisemitism is a thinly veiled attack on academic freedom and free inquiry. It attempts to censor any discussion of systemic racism, genocide, apartheid, and settler colonialism practiced by the Israeli state. The IHRA definition of Israel prevents scholars from describing well-documented historical and contemporary facts. According to the examples cited in the IHRA definition, declaring Israel as a racist endeavor constitutes antisemitism, even if one doesn’t say anything about Jews as a people or Judaism as a religion.
Many Palestinians have always understood that Zionism is a form of settler colonialism. The Syrian-Palestinian scholar, Fayez Sayegh, did not use the precise term settler colonialism in his 1965 book, Zionist Colonialism in Palestine, the first monograph published by the PLO Research Center in Beirut. However, he describes the Zionist project as a “settler community” and Israel as a “settler state.” Today Sayegh’s book is a common starting point for a literature review and genealogy of scholars who seek to comprehend Palestine/Israel as a settler-colonial formation.
Gershon Shafir was one of the first Israeli scholars to categorize the Zionist project as a variety “of European overseas expansion…from the sixteenth through the early twentieth centuries.” His 1989 book, Land, Labor and the Origins of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, 1882-1914 also does not use the precise words “settler colonialism,” though like Sayegh, his classification of varieties of colonialism, building on the analyses of the historians D.K. Fieldhouse and George Fredrickson, deploys similar words. Shafir designates the era of the 1st wave of Zionist immigration (1882-1903) as an inhibited “pure settlement drive” which reconciled itself to becoming a “plantation type colony” and the 2nd wave of immigration (1904-1914) as a renewed “pure settlement drive” comparable to Rhodesia or Algeria which ultimately developed into a “separatist method of pure settlement.” He locates Israel “within the general phenomenon of settlement societies” pointing to comparisons with elements of the histories of Virginia, California, Australia, South Africa, Algeria, Tunisia, Prussia and others while arguing for significant variation of specific instances within the same category.
One strong reason for understanding the Zionist project as a variety of settler colonialism is that settlement and colonization were terms commonly used by Zionist leaders and ideologues from the inception of the movement in the late 19th century until the post-World War II era of decolonization. In The Jewish State (1896), the book that launched what became the World Zionist Organization, Theodor Herzl envisioned a future Jewish Palestine as “a rampart of Europe against Asia, an outpost of civilization as opposed to barbarism,” classic European colonial and racialist language. In 1901 Herzl drafted a letter to Cecil Rhodes asking him to put his stamp of his authority on the Zionist project because “it is something colonial.” The first Zionist Bank was called the Jewish Colonial Trust.
Like all settler societies, the Zionist settlement in Palestine (known as the yishuv before 1948) and the state of Israel are necessarily supremacist projects - in this case Jewish supremacy. Since its founding, Israel has awarded rights and privileges to Jews and denied them to non-Jews. Israel's system of separate and unequal laws has been described as apartheid by Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and Oxfam, as well as the Israeli human rights NGO, B’Tselem, applying the same human rights standards to Israel that apply to all other countries.
I am a scholar of modern Middle East History with a specialization in Israel/Palestine. I could not fully participate in my academic field if the IHRA definition became the policy of Stanford University or was enshrined in US law. Engaging in the contemporary discourse of our discipline requires us to violate the IHRA definition. While there are dissenters among Middle East scholars, I concur with the prevailing view in my field that Israel is a settler colonial project. It has enshrined structural racist oppression of Palestinian Arabs by enacting some 60 laws that ensure the supremacy of Jews and discriminate against Palestinian Arabs. This meets the definition of racism according to the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination adopted by the UN in 1969.
As Shafir suggests, settler colonialism is a mode of understanding the historical sociology of settler societies, not a moral category. Settler-colonialism explains the process by which settlers come to see themselves as belonging to the land. They form a new society which is distinct from, even if connected to, the country or countries from where they came.
Jews who immigrated to Palestine and Israel, although many of the pioneers were militant secularists, drew on the long history of diasporic Jewish religious attachment to Eretz Yisrael. However, the cultural slogans of the Palestinian Yishuv and the early state of Israel were the negation of the diaspora (shlilat ha-golah), establishing a Hebrew, rather than a Jewish society, and the cultivation of a “new Hebrew man,” a manual laborer and a fighter as opposed to intellectual luftmenschen, traditionalists of the shtetl, or bourgeois German and American assimilationists. Israelis became a distinctive kind of Jew, connected to, but culturally and politically different from centers of Jewish life in the diaspora, which were not and could never be fully negated because most Jews who had a choice preferred to live there. This helps explain the divergence between the sensibilities of Israeli and American Jews today.
The category of settler colonialism is not the only thing we need to know about Israel/Palestine. It doesn’t explain why and under what circumstances Jews transformed a religious attachment to Zion and the Messianic hope for redemption into a modern political ideology. It does not fully explain how Zionism, which began as a nationalist movement seeking to liberate European Jews from antisemitic oppression, forged alliances with British, French, and ultimately US imperialism. It doesn’t explain the sharp, and sometimes violent, tensions among the various currents of Zionism. It doesn’t explain that Holocaust survivors found a refuge in Israel when other places they would have preferred to go would not take them. It does explain why the more militant, statist, ethno-national currents in Zionism prevailed over cultural Zionists, bi-nationalists, and others who, perhaps naively, sought some form of accommodation with Palestinian Arabs.