Why Don't Jews Get to Go Home?

Live this morning from Washington DC.

Tens of thousands have gathered to celebrate what they’re calling Independence Day. In the eyes of most of the world, this land remains stolen Native American territory. But for the people here, well, they believe this is the moment America was born. A Piscataway woman is brought out, shouting that the land is hers. The mood is half euphoric, half angry.

The Vice President arrived earlier at an ancestral Piscataway burial ground. There are fears worshippers may be confronted during prayer. Does that bother you? Do you care what the world thinks? No, one marcher tells us. This is our destiny. One nation under God.

In the streets ahead, all the shops are closed. You will not see any Piscataway faces.

That broadcast does not exist. No editor would commission it. No correspondent would file it because the framing would be branded racist by lunch and someone would be cancelled by dinnertime.

But last week, with names and places swapped, that broadcast aired from Jerusalem on Sky News1. Watched by more than nine million people on YouTube alone.

I have danced up to the Western Wall on Jerusalem Day. I have flown an Israeli flag on the same Jerusalem street where a suicide bomber walked into a Sbarro pizzeria2, where friends I love still walk with pieces of that bomb inside their bodies. I have sung in a city that has woken me from sleep with the sound of bombs meant for people just like me. I have danced for the friends who are no longer here to dance with us.

That is Jerusalem Day. Joy and grief in the same breath. Defiance and gratitude in the same step. A people told for two thousand years they would never come home, coming home anyway.

The Sky News broadcast did not show any of that. It showed a different side to the City of Gold.

It called the day “a day of violence, tension and abuse” and told viewers that “in the eyes of most of the world, East Jerusalem is still occupied territory,” framing the Jewish celebration as belief and the occupation as fact. It elevated a small group of dissenters and made them the moral centre of the story, as if locating dissent in Jerusalem were a journalistic achievement rather than the easiest assignment in the Middle East.

The report closed on empty shops and Palestinian absence, without mentioning that police order Old City shops closed before large marches as standard preventive practice. The same way Boston closes streets during the marathon. The same way London shuts roads for Notting Hill Carnival. Crowd control, not conspiracy.

When Indigenous peoples threw off colonial rule across Africa and Asia, the world called it liberation. When Greece asked for the Parthenon Marbles back, UNESCO formally recognised the claim3. When the Land Back movement demanded the literal return of ancestral land to Indigenous stewardship, 144 nations affirmed the principle at the United Nations4 and indigenous return became international law.

Reclamation. Return. Homecoming. The vocabulary is sitting right there. Anyone can pick it up. The world picks it up for everyone except us.

We have been kicked out of Jerusalem before. Babylon dragged us off in chains. Rome scattered us across continents. The list is famous. Two thousand years of exile, two thousand years of saying next year in Jerusalem at every Passover seder in every country we ended up in. And when we finally come home, not because we conquered, but because three Arab armies tried to destroy us in 1967 and failed5, the world’s most-watched news networks have a one-word verdict.

Occupation.

There is no other indigenous homecoming in modern history that the world insists on calling occupation. There is only one. Ours.

The Arab states started a war in 1967. They lost it. Sixty years later, they’re still throwing a tantrum because they didn’t win. And the journalists, instead of reporting that, repeat this re-writing of fact. Sky News last week didn’t cover Jerusalem Day; Sky News joined a sixty-year-old tantrum, threw over the chess board, and put a press pass on it.

Yes, war is bad, and yes, some people set out on Jerusalem Day to cause trouble, but you don’t have to look very far to find the people who are celebrating with love and peace in their hearts.

You can, and should, grieve the cost of any war and you can still tell the truth about how it came about in the same breath. You can hold every nuanced position about borders and settlements and what comes next. Serious people are holding these conversations across the political spectrum, but you cannot rewrite a two-thousand-year exile into an act of modern day hooliganism. You cannot ignore the Balfour Declaration6 and the UN vote that birthed the State of Israel7 just because the history doesn’t fit your narrative. When you apply the moral framework of every indigenous return on earth and then quietly retire it the moment the indigenous people in question are Jews, there are serious problems with your position.

The world has a name for Jews who try to go home. The world has names for Jews when we try to stay. We are home. We have been home since 1984, since 1967. We were home before Babylon. The only thing that has changed is who is telling us we are not.

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