Image: CC BY-SA 4.0
An old Catholic friend emailed to wish my husband Max and me a “Happy Hanukkah… with lots of fun and good cheer.”
“Thanks,” I replied. “But with Israel bombing the lights and the life out of Gaza, it’s not a very ‘Happy Hanukkah 2023’.”
I’m actually on the fence about every Hanukkah—loathing its might-is-right story while loving its gifts, games, hot wax and flickering lights.
But this year’s ruthless, relentless bombardment is far too dark for even the world’s biggest menorah to brighten.
This Hanukkah Just Isn’t Very Happy
Of course, the Zionist apartheid has long been brewing this toxic stew that exploded in its face with the brutal 10/7 Hamas attack (and yes, I do condemn Hamas!), which—like 9/11and Pearl Harbor—could have been prevented with a little of that much ballyhooed Israeli Intelligence… though maybe a politically desperate and depraved “Bibi” Netanyahu just *let* those horrors happen. We may never know.
What we do know is that then came the monstrous, fire-breathing vengeance, the slaughtering of thousands, the insistence that there are no Palestinian “civilians,” not even children, and the targeting of Palestinian doctors and poets in their homes, hospitals and schools, bombing, bombing, bombing beyond war crimes (really, beyond words).
And still it comes, with nary a “pause” in sight.
These are Zionist—not Jewish—crimes, but unfortunately, most non-Jews conflate Zionism with Judaism. It’s understandable, but maddening, and this mistaken conflation, stoked by the Jewish Zionists (as well as American Christian Zionists), compels me to join my fellow “Jews for Peace” in crying “Not in Our Name!” to IDF bombing and Zionist apartheid, even though I have Zionist friends from high school days now living in Israel who won’t follow my advice to leave. I haven’t stopped caring about them though; I worry daily for their safety, and their sanity.
Antiochus Netanyahu
I grew up among Zionists (including these friends who “made Aliyah”), though I never felt that Israel was *my* country, or even a place I wanted to live. Its gung-ho, GI-Judah spirit was a turn-off when I just wanted to make love, not war. For years, I could ignore it, but as the Zionist cancer grew, I had to “come out” against it.
Now Netanyahu is Antiochus, the brutal villain of the Hanukkah Story.
Hannukah’s traditional tale of the Jewish people under the occupation of the Syrian Greek Seleucid King Antiochus IV in 160 BC has some very eerie parallels to the modern story of the Palestinian people under the occupation of Mad King Netanyahu (or as Max calls him, “Net Nut”) in 2023.
According to the first Book of Maccabees, Antiochus was a sadistic king, always trying to humiliate his Jewish subjects, making them bow down to statues of strange gods, eat pork and probably commit sexual perversities. Now we have Netanyahu’s IDF humiliating Palestinians, stripping them down to their underwear, blindfolding them Guantanamo-style, and forcing them to kneel before the Almighty smartphones that broadcast their humiliation throughout the universe.
Worse than Antiochus, Net Nut goes beyond humiliation to annihilation, dropping his mass-murderous bombs—high-tech Hanukkah gifts from his good friend, Genocide Joe—even as this wanted-for-corruption, narcissistic Nut has the chutzpah to piously light the first candle of Hannukah 2023 flanked by a paid-off Rabbi at the Western Wall.
If Antiochus is like Netanyahu, do the Maccabees of Hanukkah correspond to Hamas of Palestine? I’m no fan of horrid Hamas (didn’t I just condemn Hamas?), and I’m sure I’ll be called a “self-hating Jew” for saying this, but Judah Maccabee and his brothers are the quintessential extremist religious fanatics, “terrorists,” in the eyes of their occupiers… kind of like Hamas.
Miracle of Peace
Partly because it’s so GI-Judah, the ancient rabbis did not classify Hanukkah as a major Jewish holiday. But it’s a Winter festival, so it piggybacks on Christmas and the gift-giving angle makes it good for capitalism.
However, Hanukkah (Hanuka, Chanukah, or whatever phonetization you prefer) is much more than gifts and war. Like all winter holidays, it stems from the original Winter Solstice, honoring the most basic natural miracle that a cold, dark, half-dead Earth comes back to life with warmth and light. The Christmas miracle is the virgin birth of “God” in human form. The Miracle of Hanukkah is the “everlasting light,” the sacred lamp of the Jewish Temple. According to legend, it only had enough oil to burn for 24 hours; yet lasted eight days (thus the eight candles of the menorah), providing enough time for those heroic terrorist Maccabees to get fresh olive oil to replenish the eternal flame.
Speaking of oil, perhaps Netanyahu, the Zionists and their Uncle Genocide Joe are after a different kind of oil—or natural gas—in or off the shore of poor little rich Gaza.
Oil is often a motivating factor in occupations, but it’s not 160 BC anymore or even 1948, and the whole world is watching with disgust.
So how about that miracle? The one so many of us wish for—whether actively marching in the streets or more passively witnessing from our devices—that the Palestinians will be free of Zionist occupation, and that Jews—wherever we live—can once again be a people of peace and wisdom.
It’s the Bonobo Way, the way of peace through the pleasure; the pleasure of sharing love, sex, food, medicine, knowledge and resources, the peaceable pleasure of seeing our own humanity in the moist, open eyes of the stranger.
Candles for Palestine
This is what I wish for as I light the candles for our Anti-Zionist Hanukkah, singing the Hebrew prayers for Palestine, hoping my tears don’t douse the flames, any one of which could be the everlasting light of miracles that we all need.
Baruch atah Adonai elohenu melach ha’olam ashair k’dishanu b’mitzvotav l’hadliq nair shel Palestine.
Blessed art thou, O God of Gods, who commands us to light the candles for Palestine.
Amen. Awomen!
The Super Zionists say that an anti-Zionist Jew for Palestine like me can’t or shouldn’t celebrate Hanukkah because it’s a Zionist holiday, and sure, it celebrates military might (which isn’t my cup of Manischewitz), but telling me I can’t honor a holiday of my youth because I don’t agree with your politics is downright anti-Semitic.
Turns out that Israeli and Christian Zionists are some of the worst anti-Semites, maybe because they don’t separate politics from religion or Synagogue from State.
Hot-Wax Hanukkah
Hanukkah games are fun, and it’s a mitzvah or “good deed” to have sex with your spouse on Hanukkah, a commandment we’re very happy to fulfill, but what I really like are the lights, fire and hot wax.
O hot wax, how I do love thee… having played with it obsessively since I was a pyrophiliac child, scolded not to do what God did to Sodom and Gomorrah to our house. Little did my good parents know, they were helping to stoke a fetish for the kinky pleasures of dripping hot wax skillfully on the beautiful bodies of consenting adults in Hanukkah Girls Gone Wild (2010), Massive Musical Orgy of Love, Lights & the Bill of Rights (2012), Hot Wax Chanuka in Bonoboville (2015), Xmas Eve Confessions with Hanuka Hot Wax (2016), Hot Wax Hanukkah & the Alabama Miracle (2017), Squirting Hot Wax Hanukkah (2018), FemDom Hot-Wax Hanukkah (2019) our Coronapocalyptic Hanukkah-Xmas Bedside Chat 2020, and last year’s Saturnalia-Hanukkah-Sonata. I’m pretty sure these amazing, blazing events would get me burned at the stake by the Zionists who obviously prefer the bomb-fires of demolition to the warm, relatively safe pleasures of hot, dripping love, not war.
Creating Trauma in Real Time
About that “war.” It’s no war; it’s just a war crime—though it’s also a time of great heroism for Palestine. And it’s a shame, a great sin of Biblical proportions, a Shanda as they say in Yiddish, for Israel. It’s also a shame for America, providing these bombs paid for with our taxes and supported with ghastly enthusiasm by our political representatives on both sides of the aisle. The U.S. just vetoed a Security Council resolution for a humanitarian ceasefire. How shameful can you get? How low can you go?
Hanukkah 2023 is a time of collective trauma for all thinking, caring non-Zionist Jews. It’s nothing like having your house reduced to rubble, your limbs blown off or other unspeakable horrors being visited upon Palestinians from Gaza to Vermont. Still, it’s sad to witness the relics of my Judaic youth destroyed by Zionists. Like the Nazis ruined a perfectly lovely Buddhist symbol of peace, turning it into the swastika of hate, now the Zionists are ruining the Star of David, turning it into a symbol of violence and oppression.
No Candles for Henry Kissinger
Speaking of murderous Zionists, one of the worst, Henry Kissinger, just died—finally!—last week at age 101. I don’t light any Hanukkah candles or shed any tears for Kissinger, but I do for his millions of victims: 3 million+ Vietnamese, 2.5 million+ Cambodians, 200,000+ Laotians, 3 million+ Bangladeshis, 10,000+ Indians, 10,000+ Pakistanis, 15,000+ Egyptians, 3500+ Syrians, 6500+ Cypriots, 40,000+ Chileans, 30,000+ Argentinians, +10,000+ Zimbabweans, 60,000+ Mozambiqueans, 900,000+ Angolans, 11,000+ Guinea Bisseauans, 300,000+ East Timorians, 1,000,000+ Indonesians, 20,000+ western Saharans, 1,100,000+ Iraqis, and on and on into War Crime Hell.
Kissinger’s Cambodian massacre particularly incenses me, as it includes the murder of my late great friend Haing S. Ngor, a Cambodian gynecologist (so we often chatted about sex), as well as an actor who won an Oscar for his portrayal of NY Times journalist Dith Pran in the 1984 cinematic masterpiece, The Killing Fields. One reason that Haing did such a great job playing Dith struggling to survive the prison camps and valleys of death that Kissinger’s bombs and the subsequent Pol Pot-led Khmer Rouge reign of terror had inflicted upon Cambodia, is that he managed to survive the same sort of harrowing journey.
Another old friend Spalding Gray, who played the “US Consul” in The Killing Fields, introduced me to Haing and we bonded as friends for several years before he was murdered in 1996, seemingly by a Khmer Rouge gang in LA. Watch The Killing Fields, and you might understand why I fully blame Henry Kissinger for Haing’s murder, along with the other millions listed above.
Creepy Kissinger wasn’t *just* a war criminal, but also a killer of romance for saying “power is the ultimate aphrodisiac.” Sure, powerful people get laid, but it’s usually a lay for pay. Power is more of a meal ticket than a real turn-on, in this sexologist’s experience.
Disgraced Nixon aid (weren’t they all?) John Erlichman thought Kissinger was the Watergate informant they called “Deep Throat,” but it was probably FBI agent Mark Felt. Besides, being a whistle blower was too honorable a role for “Nixon’s Metternich.” However, Kissinger’s obsession with Daniel Ellsberg whom he dubbed “the most dangerous man in America” for leaking the Pentagon Papers, probably helped to motivate the Watergate break-in itself. Funny how often big bad war criminals are also two-bit thieves.
Or exhibitionists…
Hanukkah Follies: Rabbi Shmuley in a Towel
Antiochus tried to humiliate the Jews, and Netanyahu tries to humiliate the Palestinians, but some Zionists are just humiliating themselves this Hanukkah 2023. Take Super Zionist Rabbi Shmuley Boteach—please! I’m a little embarrassed that I interviewed Rabbi Shumley on my show back in 1997 about his book Kosher Sex. We actually agreed on some things, like marital sex (we both think it’s good) and disagreed on others, like masturbation (he thinks it’s bad, and well, most of you know what I think) and in between interviews, he invited Max and me to a lovely Passover seder with his family. As he became more Zionist—or I became more aware of his Zionism—we parted ways.
And then I saw him in nothing but a towel.
I don’t remember Rabbi Shmuley’s views on exhibitionism, but it’s against his Orthodox Lubavitcher branch of Hasidic Judaism’s rules of strict modesty. Nevertheless, he’s always been a bit of a show-off, so I wasn’t totally shocked to see the viral video of the Naughty Rabbi filming himself running half-naked and “terrified” down a hotel hallway in Tel Aviv.
Thanks for the share, Robbie Martin! Robbie, his fantastic sister Abby Martin and her husband Mike Prysner, provide the BEST Israel/Palestine coverage (along with Counterpunch). Check out Media Roots and the Empire Files.
But back to “America’s Rabbi” scurrying down the hotel corridor, telling his phone he didn’t have a minute to put on more than a (tiny) towel, though he has plenty of time to film his bare chest bouncing down the hall as he kvetches about how scared he is.
Being a sex therapist, normally I’m fine with seeing folks half or fully naked. Free the nipple! Even religious folks. However, when these same religious folks are hypocritically opposed to the sexual freedom of others, like Rabbi Shmuley has been, I’m not so fine. And now here he is, filming his towel-draped self for the pleasure and terror of his avid followers, and perhaps a whole fetish genre of Rabbi Voyeurs.
But seriously, how distasteful! Palestinians are being forced to disrobe—not to mention bombed relentlessly with Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman and Raytheon’s fine, mostly lethal products—and here’s Rabbi Shmuley “terrified, running for [his] life” in a towel because he hears a siren. Even the cleaning woman looks bored and slightly grossed out as she points to the “Bomb Room” Shmuley demands to see, whereupon he then scurries to a stairwell and proclaims, “this is how Israelis are living,” as though sitting on a stairwell is comparable to Palestinians living in rubble, if they’re living at all.
And then there’s the slightly creepy fact that the people on that stairwell can look up and (nonconsensually) see the Rabbi’s balls.
Oy vey! Vermin Time
Speaking of running, the Trumpus (much worse than the Krampus) is running for President, just as he is running from the law (much like Netanyahu, his Zionist counterpart-in-crime), and is gaining ground even as he faces various indictments and promises to bring fascism to America, calling Lefties “vermin” just as Net Nut Antiochus calls the Gazans “animals.”
Oh guys, stop with the terms of endearment!
The problem is that, ridiculous as it seems, the Trumpus menace is real. After all, Bomber Biden was greeted in LA on the first night of Hanukka with “Genocide Joe has Got to Go,” just like folks in the ‘60s chanted, “Hey, Hey LBJ, how many kids did you kill today?” to another Democrat president, Lyndon Baines Johnson, who squandered some decent domestic policies with a horrible war. And then we got Kissinger. So, things can get worse.
Censorship is certainly getting worse—in politics (especially if you support Palestine)—and in sex (especially if you’re a sexy lefty)—which makes everything else worse, because then who knows WHAT’s going on? So, I am taking META to arbitration (more about that later).
Speaking of free speech, free JULIAN ASSANGE. Free Palestine! Free those poor Israeli hostages that Bomber King Antiochus Netanyahu doesn’t care one bit about. Free us all. Go Bonobos for peace through pleasure. Ceasefire Now! Happy Hanukkah.
