Happy Passover from Palestine

Many are on your side, showing you the way out.

Passover Seder plate.

In 2022, Jews in Israel and around the world will celebrate Passover beginning on April 16. Passover is the seven-day holiday of the Feast of Unleavened Bread, commemorating the ancient Hebrews’ escape from enslavement in Egypt. Ancient Hebrews may have set themselves free, but modern-day Hebrews remain enslaved like no other — shackled to military occupation, to a society built on militarism, hate, denial, and above all, a deep sense of superiority that is witnessed as racism in its rawest form.

I extend my hand to help this damaged community free itself once and for all.

As I’m learning, the Passover holiday begins with the Seder, a traditional ceremonial meal. Its centerpiece is a special Seder plate containing six symbolic foods, each having a particular significance in the retelling of the story of the Hebrews’ exodus from Egypt. The stack of three matzos, or unleavened bread, a kind of cracker made of plain white flour and water, has its separate plate on the Seder table.

For each of the six traditional items on the Seder plate — listed here by its Hebrew name — I note its traditional symbolic role and offer an additional, alternative interpretation. I hope my alternative can help Jews around the world, and especially in Israel, connect with a broader perspective on the meaning of Passover right here, right now, in the land assumed by many as the endpoint of that ancient exodus.

Maror — Bitter herbs symbolize the bitterness and harshness of the slavery that Jews endured in Egypt.

Slavery: severe curtailment of one’s freedom. Today, Israel’s jackboot of dispossession and military occupation presses harder than ever before on the necks of an entire people. Particularly horrific, two million Palestinians in Gaza continue to taste the bitterness of freedom denied, hermetically sealed in their encircled enclave with no end in sight. Over forty-seven percent are under the age of 18. The Jewish citizens of Israel have hardened their hearts to this reality, and they have expected the rest of the world to do likewise. For how long will you wait for Palestinians to vanish?

Charoset — A coarse mixture of chopped nuts, apples or dates, and wine, meant to symbolize the mortar used by the Jewish slaves to build the storehouses of Egypt.

Today, Israel severely restricts mortar, cement, or any other building materials, to enter Gaza. Let them sleep in tents! This, after multiple assaults on Gaza, internationally documented war crimes (and possibly crimes against humanity), causing thousands of deaths — leaving scores homeless in the rubble and another generation of Palestinians damaged for life. Is this the freedom Moses envisioned? The freedom of the “Jewish” state to suffocate an entire people, in Gaza, Jerusalem, the West Bank, and in refugee camps throughout the region? To push an entire generation over the cliff of despair? Doesn’t sound very Jewish to me. Not at all.

Karpas — A vegetable other than bitter herbs, dipped into salt water (which represents tears) to recall the pain felt by the Jewish slaves in Egypt.

Tears! Pain! In your name, my Jewish friends, Israel is on a renewed killing spree throughout the West Bank, while it continues its inhumane siege on Gaza. We Palestinians shed tears as salty as anyone’s; our pain is beyond description, particularly for those in Gaza. Two of every three of today’s Gaza residents originally lost their homes in what is now Israel when the state was established. Seven decades later, they find themselves living a nightmare, a kind of living death: their economy in ruins, their neighborhoods in ruins, their educational and health systems in ruins, even their sanitation systems in ruins. Israel refuses to allow reconstruction. Any 18-year-old in Gaza today has never, ever lived with 24/7 electricity. What comes after stripping Gazans — or, for that matter, any part of the fragmented Palestinian community — of their last remaining sense of sanity?

Z’roa — A roasted lamb shankbone (or a chicken wing, or chicken neck) symbolizes the paschal sacrifice offered originally on the eve of the exodus and later in the Temple in Jerusalem.

Sacrifice! Do you insist on sacrificing the possibility of a sustainable future for modern Israel in the name of its founding myth — since discredited — that Palestine was “a land without people, for a people without a land”? The majority of today’s Gazans are from the families that Israel expelled. Gazans have remained steadfast under conditions even the early Hebrews might have found intolerable in Egypt. Gazans, together with all Palestinians, are the people that Jews in Israel are destined to live with, today, tomorrow, and forever. The only uncertainty is how much more hate will be generated by military occupation and armed assault before a process of shared rehabilitation can begin.

Beitzah — A hard-boiled egg, symbolizing the main festival sacrifice that was offered in the Temple in Jerusalem. The egg is a symbol of mourning. Eggs are the first thing served to mourners after a Jewish funeral. The egg on the Seder plate evokes the mourning over the destruction of the Temple and the subsequent inability to offer sacrifices there in honor of the Pesach holiday.

Mourning! As Jews, you know a lot about mourning. Consider the over seven decades of mourning, consider every day of every one of those years, among the people — real people, with real names and real children — in the West Bank, Gaza, and in squalid refugee camps all around Israel (and some still in Israel) who can see their homeland with the naked eye, but are denied their basic human right of returning home. Seventy-four Passovers and counting. All I ask of you on this year’s holy day, as you contemplate the egg on the Seder plate, is to remember them.

Seeing is believing

My Jewish sisters and brothers, you can continue to look away as Israel claims to speak and act in your name. It kills and maims in your name. It dispossesses and occupies in your name. It builds settlements in your name. It demolishes houses in your name. It uproots trees in your name. It talks peace and wages war in your name. If you turn a deaf ear to their mourning again this year, if you harden your heart again this year, if your voice is not raised this year in protest — then you are acquiescing in the ongoing ethnic cleansing of another people, in your name. If you cannot see Palestinians as fully human now, you will hear them trying to give voice to their humanity in your nightmares, year after year, until you can see and until you can hear.

Many are on your side, showing you the way out. UN Human Rights Council Special Rapporteur (3–2022), Addameer and the International Human Rights Clinic at Harvard Law School (2–2022), Amnesty International (2–2022), Al Mezan Center for Human Rights (11–2021), Human Rights Watch (7–2021), B’Tselem (1–2021), Yesh Din (7–2020), and Palestine Peace Not Apartheid (By Jimmy Carter) (7–2007), just to name a few. They are all shining a light on what must be addressed, and soon.

Others have noted that We do not see things as they are. We see them as we are. You, collectively, are not military occupation and Apartheid, no matter how much indoctrination informs you to think otherwise.

I urge you, while you commemorate the Hebrews’ ancient slavery and deliverance, to see yourselves finally as equals in this world: equal with your neighbors, neither their masters nor their slaves. I urge you to see yourself and your children in the image of every Palestinian mother, father, and child in Sheikh Jarrah, Gaza, Sabra, and Shatila. Let this year be the year of your shared redemption!

Despite everything, Happy Passover from Palestine!

Sam Bahour is a Palestinian-American business consultant and frequent independent political commentator from Ramallah/Al-Bireh in Occupied Palestine. He blogs at ePalestine.ps. @SamBahour