Why we are holding an anti-Zionist Palestine Solidarity Seder

This article is one half of a debate. Read It isn’t a Seder if it contradicts the core narrative of the Jewish people.

The Jewish Council of Australia (Jewish Council) is collaborating with the Loud Jew Collective (LJC) to host a ‘Palestine Solidarity Seder’ this year, 5785. The LJC has hosted an anti-Zionist Seder for some years now and the Jewish Council, as an organisation committed to fostering diverse expressions of Jewishness, is eager to work with them this year, just as we were eager to join six other Jewish groups in a call to sanction Israel in March. 

It is both unsurprising and disappointing that some in the Jewish community have responded to our initiative with outrage. Still, I am grateful for the opportunity to briefly respond to their denunciations. 

This Seder identifies itself as anti-Zionist. However one might define Zionism, it is a political ideology which has led to the displacement of Palestinians from their land, and the prioritisation of the rights of Jewish people over the rights of Palestinians. Many people who identify as anti-Zionist reject this prioritisation of the rights of Jews over the rights of Palestinians, whilst still acknowledging the spiritual significance of the land of Israel to Jewish people. 

Not all of our 1000+ Jewish signatories identify as anti-Zionist, and we have many different views within the Council itself. That said, all of our Jewish supporters are horrified by the criminal atrocities that Israel is committing in their name and against the Palestinians of Gaza and the West Bank. Forensic Architecture, led by Eyal Weizman, has documented many of these atrocities in great detail, and recent days have brought revelations of new crimes, such as the execution and mass burial of 15 clearly marked aid and emergency workers in Gaza. According to Israeli Human Rights Organisation B’Tselem, Israel has killed more than 1000 Palestinians in Gaza since March 18 2025, more than 300 of them children. In this period, Israel has continued to block aid and displace the population while publicly discussing plans for ‘voluntary immigration’.  

As with our other events and discussion groups, we are organising this Seder in order to provide a community space for Jews who have been excluded from right wing Zionist institutions because they stand against Israel’s crimes.  

But what does it mean to gather for a Seder when inexcusable atrocities are being committed in our name? How do we hold to our traditions while allowing them to speak to and for us?  

This is an old problem and the LJC has solved it in the most traditional way - by drawing from a living Haggadah tradition, one which has always shifted with time, place and circumstance. 

Reading the LJC Haggadah with this in mind, I am moved by the inclusion of a simple and hopeful prophecy from the second chapter of Isaiah (so different in tone to the despairing condemnation of the first): 

לֹא יִשָּׂא גוֹי אֶל גוֹי חֶרֶב לֹא יִלְמְדוּ עוֹד מִלְחָמָה 

Nation shall not lift sword against nation, neither shall they learn war anymore. 

The Palestine Solidarity Seder is an invitation to imagine this future. In what follows, I offer my own.  

When Jews meet for the Seder, we are required to teach our children that we ourselves once suffered as slaves in Egypt, and that we were made free by a power that is far beyond our control. There are many ways to interpret this injunction to bring our collective memory into the present. I offer only two. 

1. Many seek to shackle the Pesach story to the story of the Israeli state, but this is a strained interpretation at best. The call to teach our children that we were slaves in Egypt is attributed to Rabban Gamliel in Mishnah Pesachim 10:5, and it is firmly attached to the imperative that we remember God’s role in securing our freedom. This means that Pesach is not a holiday in which to celebrate human actions such as the violent formation of a state apparatus on otherwise inhabited land. Instead, it is one in which we are required to be grateful for “what God did.”  

Pesach is therefore not a time to celebrate military victories, ethnic supremacy or a high tech occupation; it is not a time to wave a flag, sing a national anthem or reinforce an Iron Wall. Instead, Pesach is a time to recognise our smallness, our dependence and our vulnerability. It is a time to give thanks for the freedoms we now possess, despite our condition.   

2. We can also read this imperative through the long arc of Jewish history. From this standpoint, it is a warning that our freedoms have never been guaranteed, and that they never will be - but it is both dangerous and self-defeating to stop there.  

Any student of history knows that we Jews are not unique in our suffering; many other peoples have suffered at the hands of oppressors throughout the world, and many still do, not least the Palestinians. Furthermore, we also know that the mitigation of oppression requires, amongst other things, countless acts of solidarity from a mass of regular people.

Given this, alongside the emphasis on kindness and good deeds in our tradition, we might interpret the Rabban Gamliel’s imperative in the Haggadah as a call to fight against oppression wherever we see it.  

This is not only a call to do good for its own sake. As Martin Niemöller’s famous Holocaust poem reminds us, such action is for our own benefit as much as it is for the benefit of others. Such, at least, is the meaning that I take from the celebrated words of Hillel in Pirkei Avot 1:14 

 אִם אֵין אֲנִי לִי, מִי לִי. וּכְשֶׁאֲנִי לְעַצְמִי, מָה אֲנִי. וְאִם לֹא עַכְשָׁיו, אֵימָתָי:    

If I am not for myself, who is for me? But if I am for my own self [only], what am I? And if not now, when? 

This article is one half of a debate. Read It isn’t a Seder if it contradicts the core narrative of the Jewish people.