Allow me to speak on behalf of my own Jewish people – mother and father, grandparents, sisters, cousins and friends, all Jewish people whom I have cared for and continue to love deeply.
I am very proud of Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine who is leading the war against Russian oligarch Vladimir Putin who wants to see the former Soviet Union as it was before Michael Gorbachev in l993 pronounced glasnost liberating Poland, the Baltic States, Ukraine and Crimea then under its iron grip.
I am equally content knowing that Antony Blinken, also Jewish, is Secretary of State under President Joseph Biden. Charles Schumer, also Jewish, is doing a good job as the Democratic Senator from New York.
Built in l907 I am also a member of the Nairobi Hebrew Congregation. We always keep tabs on our own Jewish people. Although a non-believer, being Jewish means more than religion.
Coming from a two-class family, I have tried my best to take my late father's advice, my father, a psychiatrist whose judgments on all things I admired. A few days before he died he said, "Whatever you do, always stay close to your own Jewish people!"
Despite knowing better Kiswahili than Hebrew or Yiddish, we even spoke our own language called Yiddish! On one side, my grandfather Joseph Seidenberg was a shoemaker and member of the anti-Zionist Socialist Bund. Believing strongly that in a unified Poland, we Jewish people could be integrated into the larger society when Poland was liberated from Tsarist Russia.
Often called ‘a people apart’, we knew of the many pogroms we had suffered; ghettoised Jews often invaded by Christians and either killed off or maimed. We knew about Kishinev where a pogrom had taken place in l905; our story scripted by Kenya's famous writer, the late Marjorie Oludhe Macgoye. We were outcasts: no-one wanted us around. By l911 my grandfather's mother told him to leave, an act of true love, knowing she would never see her son again. Grandfather Joseph Seidenberg left Poland for New York and was saved.
On the other were the Aprils whose name I also carry. Leaving what is today Germany in the 1840s, the Aprils went to live in New York; their offspring setting up a hat factory in New Jersey, then considered their industrial area.
Here contextualisation is significant. Why?
By the l930s, Adolph Hitler came to power. Calling Jewish people "Christ-killers" and smirkingly "the chosen", we were sent on trains to Auschwitz, Bergen Belsen and Mauthausen. Killing 6 million of us off was unheard of, a genocide: it is an event we named The Holocaust or violent storm in simple English.
By l948 called the War for independence, my own Jewish people, wanting a state of their own, did what had been done to us, just imagine, kicked out the Palestinian people from their own land. Grandfather Philip April headed the Union of Hebrew Scholars and gave enormous donations to build Israel's Technion, a university for learning to grow food in a desertic climate.
Had we learnt nothing from our own history of deprivation?
Called the Nakba, "the Exile" in Arabic, as a Jewish woman who loves her people, I can never support the country now seen as "the promised land" of Israel. As one who loves justice as much as my own life, I wholeheartedly support the Palestinian people.
I loathe Binyamin Netanyahu, voted in despite corruption charges, and wonder about my own people who live there with conviction. Let it be called The Holy Land, Republic of Haifa, Palestine/Israel or anything else, I ask for one secular state for anyone who seeks refuge to go and live peacefully. My ‘promised land’ is Kenya—Nakupenda malaika.
Yours with expectations of one single nation at peace with itself.
