By Rebecca Croog & Noa D’Ror Dettwyler
On Friday Sept. 27, 2024, the residents of Asheville, North Carolina, awoke to the devastation of a once-in-a-thousand-year storm. We awoke to houses destroyed, massive downed trees blocking roads, and debris everywhere. We texted our loved ones to make sure they were OK and anxiously waited for responses. After the initial shock, it soon sunk in that we would not return to our normal lives for a long time.
The two of us have spent the past year protesting the Israeli military’s assault on Gaza, which is funded by the United States government. The day after the storm, as we surveyed the destruction all around us wrought by Hurricane Helene, we thought of the people of Gaza, whom the Israeli government has relentlessly bombed for the past year, destroying their homes, schools, markets, hospitals, places of worship, as well as crucial components of their water and food systems.
We have always opposed the Israeli military’s destruction of Gaza—one that began long before Oct. 7, 2023—but in observing the destruction in our own backyards and neighborhoods that day, we felt more committed than ever before to ensuring that our government stops sending the bombs that destroy life, land, and infrastructure in Palestine. In our grief, we committed to working toward the restoration of life from Asheville to Gaza.
Since Oct. 7, 2023, the U.S. government has sent $17.9 billion in military aid to Israel, including $3.8 billion from a supplemental appropriations act in April 2024. Meanwhile, a request from FEMA for an additional $9 billion for disaster relief efforts in the U.S. did not make it into the most recent funding bill, a shortfall that limits recovery efforts in Western North Carolina and other areas hit by Hurricane Helene. The numbers tell the story: The U.S. government invests in death while neglecting the lives of people and our planet.
As Western North Carolina University professor Robert Clines wrote in a recent op-ed in Mondoweiss: “The devastation from Hurricane Helene and Israel’s escalation in the Middle East may not seem connected. But they are linked through the United States’s commitment to mass militarization, imperial arrogance, exacerbation of climate change, and refusal to work toward a just global future.”
We and other Appalachian Jews are speaking up from the depths of climate devastation, demanding collective liberation now. Anti-Zionist Jews like us live in every corner of the United States and are essential activists and organizers in Southern struggles for environmental justice and collective liberation. Promoting Jewish safety means investing in life rather than death. It looks like fighting real antisemitism in communities that we love and protect, even when we’re cast out by pro-Zionist institutions, including our own religious congregations.
And that is why, on Oct. 6, 2024, we made the decision to still hold a tashlich action that we had been planning for months. Tashlich is a ritual that is part of the Jewish high holiday season and centers on atonement and repair. Out of necessity, we shifted the location from a riverfront park—as the riverbank was washed out and much of the surrounding area was coated in toxin-laden mud—to a bridge overlooking the French Broad River, a waterway so inundated by Hurricane Helene that its currents smashed buildings; carried away people, animals, and vehicles; and spread rocks and mud and trees on its banks for many miles.
The two of us stood on the Haywood Road bridge together and talked of teshuvah—repentance—contemplating how our country’s unwavering support for the Israeli apartheid regime makes all Americans complicit in the genocide of Palestinians. Rather than toss pebbles into the water, as is customary, we opted not to add to the debris lining the riverbed; instead, we placed them on the railing of the bridge, a choice that we later realized was reminiscent of the Jewish tradition of placing stones at gravesites to mark the occasion of visiting the deceased.
In Asheville, we have begun the process of rebuilding from the hurricane. Gazans, on the other hand, cannot, because the Israeli military has not stopped dropping thousand-pound bombs on their land. Human Rights Watch has reported that the Israeli military is even targeting aid workers—those who are instrumental to the process of survival. Between October and May, the Israeli military targeted at least eight convoys of aid workers. This is a horrid violation of international law and a devastating act of inhumanity.
In mid-October, Israeli forces killed four water engineers who were on their way to conduct repairs to Gaza’s water infrastructure, which is itself being destroyed by Israeli air strikes. Receiving news of such killings is always heartbreaking, but after spending the past three weeks contributing to water-crisis response efforts here in Western North Carolina (along with other community-led efforts being coordinated by the Rural Organizing and Resilience and Holler Harm Reduction networks), a story like this hits even harder, as we imagine the horror of doing this already-challenging work of delivering aid and humanitarian efforts while under constant threat of state violence.
As we continue to rebuild and heal here in Western North Carolina, we recognize that the destruction we face is a fraction of what the people of Gaza endure daily. While we recover from a single storm, Gazans endure an unrelenting succession of human-made storms being driven by a genocidal war campaign, even as the people working toward recovery and crisis response are themselves being targeted as enemies in this war.
We will continue to demand that our government stop funding the Israeli military, and to instead spend our tax dollars on repairing harms in Gaza, Asheville, and everywhere there is human suffering.
This editorial was originally published in YES Magazine
