For me, the dominant association with Israel’s Independence Day is people hitting each other over the heads with plastic hammers that make an unpleasant noise. I found this custom distressing and obnoxious even before my eyes had been opened to the harm done by Zionism. I now find it emblematic of that double harm, done to Others and to ourselves, as Jews, by adopting the ways of violence necessitated by the nation-state and particularly the ethno-state, most especially the religio-ethno state.

It is emblematic to me that our way of celebrating has become an enactment of symbolic violence, a sign of the erosion of sensitivity to others that once was a vaunted hallmark of our culture. I am not saying that Jews were ever individually better ever than any other human beings or even collectively as a group; only that the cultural aspiration was to a kind of gentle concern that precluded, in aspiration, violence. There is a new Jewish word now for the honest and the gentle; they are both called in Israel, friars, suckers. Through pursuit of temporal power, exclusive sovereignty, and wealth, we have become a people our own grandparents would not recognize, so I mourn on Independence Day.

Far more important than my narcissistic concerns for Judaism and its future and the harm done to them by Zionism is the harm done to the Palestinian People. Their own potential sovereignty in a land in which they have lived for thousands of years (the myth of recent immigration having been exploded well and truly by Israeli scholars) was wiped out in one moment on Independence Day. Half the land of the Israeli Palestinians, if not more, has been appropriated for immigrants from Europe, not refugees because of anything Palestinians did to them, but owing to what Europe did to them. The Palestinians ’ culture has become a second-class citizen in their own homeland, as have their bodies. Forty years ago, an enormous territory belonging entirely to Palestinians was appropriated by Israel for its expansionist projects to control all sites holy to Jews. Such massive theft of a People ’s Land and also of so many people’s land is a huge act of violence in its own right; maintaining that military occupation further perpetrated untold violence and continues unabated, even exacerbated, every day. Jews, good people most of them, support this carnage having convinced themselves that it is necessary: for what? for whom?

Isaac Deutscher many years ago compared the Jews in Europe to a man standing on the roof of his burning house. He jumped off to save himself and landed on a neighbor whose bone he broke. Instead, however, of apologizing, helping the neighbor up, calling the doctor, and paying for the damage, he began cursing the neighbor for having been under him when he jumped and punishing him for lashing out in pain.

Hitting folks over the head with plastic hammers is the perfect celebration of this Nakba, this catastrophe for everyone involved, both perpetrators and victims, on the sixtieth anniversary of the Nakba of 1948.