Anti-Zionism & Me

This is a personal reflection on my relationship to Judaism and to the apartheid state of Israel. If that's too navel-gazey for you, feel free to skip.

I don't believe in "great men of history". I think that while there may be people born with some innate gift for leadership or analysis, it's mostly an accident of history and personal circumstances that lead people to their worldviews and to become important figures in the socialist movement and make them influential. Our politics aren't shaped by being "good" people, it's broader historical forces and the machinery of social reproduction that mold us into who we are. So while I think that the moral case for anti-Zionism is clear, I don't feel proud that I think that way; I feel lucky.

I feel lucky that my family didn't end up in Israel, and that it's easier to build my worldview independently of what those relationships would look like. Most of my family came over from Poland in the late 1870s and early 1880s. One great-grandfather was born to settlers in Jerusalem (his birth certificate said Jerusalem, Palestine) and fled the Ottoman Empire's draft in World War I, briefly stopping in England before he moved to New York. One grandmother left Poland with her family in the 1930s and luckily made it under the quota for Jewish immigrants that the United States had at the time.

I feel lucky that I was able to go through Hebrew school without ending up a Zionist. Classes ran for two hours, twice a week, with one hour for learning Hebrew and different prayers to prepare us for our b'nei mitzvah and one hour for religion and culture. In the second class we learned about Torah, holidays, the Holocaust, and Israel without any great distinction as to importance. Despite it now being the year 5784, our education would have had us think our history started in 5699. Thousands of years of culture built in the diaspora have been thrown in the garbage in favor of a settler-colonialist state, and we are all poorer for it.

The school was attached to the reform congregation my family belonged to, and our engagement with tikkun olam was putting spare change in the tzedakah box so that the JNF could plant trees in Israel. We Jews love trees. We weren't told that the trees were being planted in the pursuit of seizing Palestinian land, disrupting indigenous agricultural practices and redirecting the water supply. We weren't told about the destruction of olive groves. We were told that the settlers "made the desert bloom".

I was lucky to have one Hebrew school teacher in the 5th grade who told us to always question things, who gave me the tools to later sniff out birthright as a propaganda trip and could avoid it. I can't bring myself to blame my classmates and other individuals who got swept into Zionism, because I know how geared our Jewish education was to have only Zionist perspectives put in front of them. I also know that it is possible to bring people over to the side of justice, having gotten my father from being a mainline liberal Zionist to an anti-Zionist, but it takes time and patience. That is the nature of political struggle.

We must all contend with the reality of Zionism instead of the filtered view that is presented to people in the diaspora, or what they wish it would mean. There used to be many Zionisms. There are the labor Zionists that naively thought they could manifest Arab-Jewish cooperation to create a worker's paradise, without confronting the realities of the violent dispossession of Palestinian land. There is an enormously complex set of circumstances and ideologies that brought us to this point, and that we could argue about until the end of time, but there's only one Zionism left as a real force in the world, and it's the white supremacist settler-colonialist Zionism of Herzl. Herzl wanted to create the "new Jew", and hated us as we actually existed in the world. I love the diaspora. All of the ways that we have adapted, how our practice has evolved, and how we have fought for survival. Netanyahu's disdain for the diaspora is not an aberration, and it is crucial to understand that if we want to continue the movement for justice and Palestinian liberation within the diaspora.

I don't think that any revolution is clean. All revolutions have some element of misery and brutality, and the actions of the last week have clearly been brutal. It's the inevitable result of colonialism and apartheid, and the oppressed deserve the right to fight back against their oppressor. It does not make the revolution less necessary. I empathize enormously with those too young or without the means to make it out of Israel, those who went to prison for refusing to join the IDF and those staying to fight for Palestinian liberation, those who fled pogroms and the Holocaust and had to find somewhere that didn't put quotas on their migration, because I understand it is mostly luck that has me living where I do and having the positions that I do.

For the majority that keeps voting Bibi into office, for the settlers continuing the terrorism of the Irgun by bulldozing homes and cutting down olive trees, for everyone who is at peace with the idea of keeping two million people in the world's largest open-air prison and now possibly committing a genocide there: what did you expect? Is this what you thought would be good for the Jews? What I see is a deep sickness in the soul of our community, one that needs healing, and one that can only be healed through an interrogation of our values, and the truth of what you stand with when you say you stand with Israel.