I Am A Zionist and A Palestinian Nationalist
Israel and Palestine. Oppressor and oppressed. Colonizer and colonized. Settlers and refugees. Murders and protectors. Both and neither. Two nations. Two peoples. Two religions. Too much horror and tragedy. Neither can live while the other survives they say, but neither will live if the other dies too.
It's that simple -- and yet, actually, it's also not that simple. Indeed, if there is ever a truism when it comes to the Middle East, especially Israel and Palestine, it's that everything is always really simple and really complicated. Forget shades of grey! We're talking about a prismatic rainbow of colors in a mosaic of gradations so subtle they confuse would confuse even a tetrachromat.
Meanwhile, the circle-jerk of blame revolves endlessly from Israelis to Palestinians to Netanyahu to Hamas to Jews to Muslims to Arabs to Westerners to Antisemitism to Islamophobia to post-colonialism to terrorism and on and on and until all the fucks you ever had have wasted away into a shriveled husk of apathetic resignation that nothing will get better and everything will get worse. All the while innocent people are still dying and the world is getting just a little bit more broken with each passing day.
***
I honestly have no idea, I really don't. I have no clue what real, concrete good would or could come from this post. I just have hope, and words are the tools I know how to wield. Words are my sword, my shield, my hammer, my light. They are what I speak in prayer to the ether. They are what I submit across the ocean of cyberspace, the proverbial parchment filled bottle, a last desperate act of a person sick and tired of the fighting.
So here I am, hoping against hopelessness that what I write will somehow provoke truth and reconciliation.
To do that I need to start at the beginning. It's a long story, hundreds of years in the making and yet, for most people, it seems like only just yesterday.
***
I am Jewish by birth and practice. My mother was Jewish, and her mother before her; by Halakhik law I am Jewish. My father is Jewish, and his mother and father before him. I was raised initially into a Conservative denomination at the synagogue where I become a bar mitzvah. However, all my rabbis have all been Reform and my family raised me as a Reform Jew. I went to Adat Noar in middle school. I joined AZA as a teenager. I took my birthright trip to Israel in my mid-twenties, praying at the Western Wall, visiting Sderot to look out at Gaza, hiking through the Negev desert. I even had a traditional bris with a mohel who drew the blood from my wound. Hell, I even took one of those 23&Me DNA tests that came back with over 66% of my genetic ancestry as Ashkenzai.
My wife is not Jewish. She is Black and was raised in a somewhat relaxed Baptist faith that, at times, emphasized Black liberation theology. She even want to Catholic school. We discussed conversion at one point in our relationship, but ultimately rejected it. We decided that it would be wrong for her to convert simply to make me happy if it would only make her unhappy and feel like a fraud to say she believed in something that she did not. Yet, interestingly, like Moses and his wife Zipporah, we have created a beautiful interfaith and interracial family.
My daughter is Jewish. She was presented for her simchat bat before my synagogue's congregation on Shabbat. She has a Hebrew name. She will go to Hebrew school. She will become a bat mitzvah when she comes of age. I hope she will feel comfortable joining Jewish youth groups, as I did. When she becomes an adult, she may choose to discard her Jewish identity. She may even choose to embrace an entirely differently faith. But she will still and always be Jewish. Her bond to our people is an eternal one, tested throughout history that, somehow, miraculously survives.
As an adult, I have seen my own bond with being a Jew change. I have, at varying times, embraced, denied, reveled, and hidden my heritage. I studied the Jewish people avidly in college and yet, I rarely (if ever) disclosed my identity as a Jew. After college I discovered I no longer identified as a Jew in the sense instilled by my upbringing, my family, or any of the experiences I endured.
It wasn't easy. Since childhood I was bullied. Holocaust jokes to my face. Mockery of dead ancestors. I was attacked with slurs even from children younger than me. My synagogue was defaced and vandalized with swastikas and Antisemitic graffiti, Torah scrolls trashed and defecated on, precious relics thrown on the ground and twisted. I was jumped by neo-Nazis, more than once. I was singled out by teachers in school for insults. People called me a Christ-killer. I had to sit alone anytime there was an Easter or Christmas activity. Even people I thought of as friends ridiculed me and my heritage, joking that I was one of the "good Jews" because I gave them money with no hope of repayment and tolerated their horrible behavior. Hell, my nickname in high school was "the Jew." As part of my drama class, the entire school in audience cheered at the sight of me being hit with a baseball bat (an actual baseball bat) as part of a stupid comedy sketch.
I could go on with examples, but you get the point -- as a Jew as I was persecuted almost endlessly. It slowed down as I got older, as I secluded myself from Antisemites, and especially after I moved to the San Francisco Bay Area where people were (or used to be) nominally more tolerant. But it still happens sometimes, and generally I say nothing, because I am still afraid.
See, growing up as a Jew, you are instilled with this knowledge of how your people have been persecuted throughout the ages. You get the highlights: the exile in Babylon, the slavery in Egypt, the Diaspora by the Romans, the Inquisition in Spain, the pogroms in Eastern Europe, and, of course, the Holocaust. You're taught from a young age about Jewish history and you really do absorb the collective trauma of your ancestors, carrying that weight as you go out into the world to live your life as best as you can, knowing that so many people fought, suffered, and died in order for you to do so. So you try to do just that, filled with a kind of survivor's guilt and a zeitgeist of post-traumatic stress that at any moment the world could suddenly turn on you.
I wrapped and hid myself in those feelings right up till my last semester in college. It was then that I realized I didn't fit in as a Jew in any of the ways that I had been raised with or studied about. I was looking for something else, some other way of being Jewish that made sense to me, but all I kept becoming was lost... Until I started studying Jewish mysticism in the Kabbalah, specifically Gershom Scholem's collection of lectures entitled, "Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism."
Now, the mystical, magical, pseudo-Gnostic scribbling wasn't what changed me. (Admittedly, it is extremely interesting stuff and I encourage people to read about, rather than that bullshit peddled by Hollywood weirdos.)
No, it was discovering such a thing as Reconstructionist Judaism.
Basically, it's a form of Judaism that emphasizes individual interpretation of what it means to be a Jew and live a Jewish life. It's discovering the spiritual aspects of Judaism that resonant with you, that give you hope and joy and understanding of a chaotic world. You can be mystical and/or spiritual. You can take some things literally and others figuratively. You can be Jewish without having to get circumcised or jumping into a swimming pool, or even necessarily believe in God!
It's not perfect. There are disagreements, especially from other denominations of Judaism, and even within Reconstructionist congregations. People do not all practice their faith the same and some do not have any faith at all, but rather embrace a more cultural heritage of Judaism as a civilization.
Discovering this was a transformative experience for me as a Jew, as a man, as a person. I am still finding out new things about myself, about what kind of a Jew I want to be and what kind of a Jewish life I want for myself as well as my family -- most especially my daughter, who represents a kind of Jew that eschews our denominations, rejects our geographic ethnicities, and challenges our dogmatic connections to Judaism.
I digress... This isn't meant to be about me, but learning who and how I am as a Jew helped me to understand Zionism and Palestinian Nationalism. My hope is that by telling you about me, you'll be able to see through my lens, and the lens of so many other Jews like me, into the conflict that has seemingly and unfortunately defined generations of Jewish people since the end of World War II.
***
Zionism. It's one of those words that people think they know the meaning of but, with rare exceptions, they actually don't. Many people think Zionism is colonialism, racism, and even "creepy."
The official definition of Zionism generally is: "an international movement originally for the establishment of a Jewish national or religious community in Palestine and later for the support of modern Israel." This, more or less, aligns with Theodore Herzl's intent in founding what is now modern, socio-political and spiritual Zionism.
The definition of Zionism to me is: the radical idea that the Jewish people have the right to self-determination in their historic, ancestral homeland.
Now, there are many people, even Progressives I admire, who would call me their enemy, curse me as a colonialist oppressor while befriending those who demean my very existence and promulgate Antisemitism in a false-garb of well-intentioned social justice, twisted identity politics, or bad faith bigotry. They spread, knowingly and unknowingly, conspiracies of a "Jewish influence" complex, or some greater Jewish cabal controlling government, nations, and even the entire world. These stereotypes, built on hatred as much as ignorance and fear, hearken back to times when simply being Jewish was to be thought of as a devil, consuming the blood of unbaptized children, turning into cockroaches, killing Jesus Christ, and stealing money from "virtuous" Christians... to times when simply being Jewish was enough to earn you a death sentence, along with your family, friends, and neighbors.
And this has been a hard truth. Whatever I am going to say about Israel and Palestine, or whatever you believe about this conflict, Antisemitism from the Right and the Left in the United States has increased. Even Europe, still covered in the blood of millions of murdered Jews, has seen a precipitous rise in their historical hatred and persecution of Jews.
This is not to say that everyone who criticizes Israel is Antisemitic or vice versa. Not even close. This is merely to point out that in this backdrop of dying Israelis and Palestinians is the ever-present specter of a prejudice as old as ancient Alexandria in the 3rd century, BCE.
Indeed, if I'm going to explain today's conflict, it's paramount that you understand the (brief, abbreviated) history of the Jews, especially their in Israel and the Middle East. Beginning with the Assyrian conquest in 722 BCE and Babylonian Exile in 586 BCE (ending in 538 BCE), the Jewish people had a yearning to return to a land that we saw as promised to us by God through our biblical patriarch Abraham and his descendants. This was a yearning that is most famously documented during our slavery in Egypt, but found its first historical roots outside of biblical scripture when the then Kingdoms of Israel and Judah were conquered by the Assyrians and subsequently the Babylonians, thus establishing the first diasporas.
However, it wasn't until the Romans invaded and conquered what they called Judaea, that the Diaspora, as it is properly called now, came to be. The Jews fought a series of guerrilla wars against the Romans, revolting and rebelling against them repeatedly until, eventually, the Romans wholly destroyed the Jewish people's ability to resist. It began with the sacking of Jerusalem and destruction of the Second Temple. It ended with the failure of the Bar Kokhba revolt and the renaming of Israel to Syria Palestine (though the specific rationale for this is, admittedly, disputed by some), the depopulation of Jewish communities in Israel, and even the shattering of Jewish unity.
There begins a tale of hundreds of years of exile, persecution, and even genocide. But it's also the tale of brilliance, beauty, and innovation that brought so many wondrous gifts to humanity.
Jews were forced to live a life as outcasts and second-class citizens, paupers in every nation they could find refuge in. Yet, impossibly, we thrived. We survived the Inquisition, pogroms, riots, laws aimed at destroying their religion and community, as well as the wholesale genocide of millions. We kept our religion alive, our community, our hope and faith and love. We made almost innumerable contributions to the world, despite constituting just a small fraction of its population. We took the broken glass of our lives and made them into beacons of light.
***
Israel was founded in 1948. In the aftermath of the Holocaust (to us the Shoah) carried about by the Nazis, who were aided and abetted wittingly as well as unwittingly by the Western World. At that time, the British began divesting themselves of their colonial empires in the wake of numerous socio-political changes taking place around the world, including the collective guilt of the Allied and (some of the) Axis nations for the untold suffering of the Jewish people.
(It should be noted, as an aside, that the British United Kingdom won a mandate controlling what was then called Palestine after defeating the Ottoman Turks in World War I. Indeed, the Turks obtained control of it from the Malmuks, and the Malmuks from the Crusaders, and the Crusaders from the Fatimid Dynasty, and so on back through Roman times when it was renamed Syria-Palestine, and even further back beyond the 12th Century BCE when the original, ancient Israelite tribes were first documented within Israel/Palestine.)
But that guilt was only partly the reason Israel was founded. Zionism had long been a movement by and for Jews to obtain their right for self-determination in their historical homeland, particularly for the express purpose of ensuring that they would be able to defend themselves again from the horrors of Antisemitism, should the need arise. (Which it has, repeatedly.)
This Zionist-influenced immigration began to noticeably increase from 1896 up to 1948. Yet, it is important to note that Jews had always been living in Israel, even since the beginning of the Diaspora, and we never as a people gave up our intention to return home. We fled and returned. We hid within the boundaries. Many of us returned over the hundreds of years of our exile, whether it was during the Rhineland massacres in 1096 or the expulsion from France in 1254. Many of us were also refugees from Islamic nations across the Middle East. Indeed, at the time of Israel's founding as a modern nation, approximately 650,000 Jews had returned and were living in Israel. Some were recent immigration, but many were also as indigenous as the Palestinians, as the local Druze, as the communities of Arab Christians, as even the Bedouin. And they desired their independence.
Unfortunately, many Arabs in the region, specifically the Palestinians, saw this as more European colonialism. Some also saw it far more bigoted terms, seeing Jews as subhuman infidels and invaders, rather than exiles and refugees returning at last to our homeland.
As violence began to erupt between the Jews and the Palestinians, the British found themselves unable to control it. Of course, as they were still reeling from the war and similar postcolonial movements across their empire, they appealed to the UN, who voted to divide Palestine/Israel into two separate countries.
While it's arguably true the UN had no right to mediate this matter -- the land did not really belong to the powers of Europe but to the Jews and the Palestinians, among other non-European nations, communities, etc. -- the fact is that they divided the land to prevent further violence. (See the history of the White Paper of 1939, for instance.) The division accorded the land as equitably as could be expected by a neutral party with little understanding of the historical and ethnic borders that existed within Israel and Palestine. For instance, the Jews got the Negev desert as well as many important Jewish cities like Tel Aviv, Haifa, etc. The Palestinians got Gaza, nearly the entirety of the West Bank of the Dead Sea, as well as the land surrounding Jerusalem. (Jerusalem itself would remain independent and owned by no one nation given its historical and religious importance to Christians, Muslims, and Jews.)
Nonetheless, the Palestinians and their Arabic allies declared war on Israel immediately upon its founding. It was the first in a series of wars that the Palestinians and the Arabs lost. Each time they were the aggressor. Each time Israel fought them back, despite sometimes overwhelming odds. These wars inevitably led to Israel taking more and more land from Palestine (and sometimes other nations too, such as the Golan Heights and the Sinai Peninsula), partially the spoils of victory in war and partially as part of their own self-defense.
The wars of 1948 and 1967 are especially important as they, in large part, defined the current borders that Israel and Palestine exist within and that are currently debated among the various proposed solutions to the ongoing conflict.
Because Israel defended itself from annihilation and counter-attacked, it obtained more land, no different than almost every other nation. No worse and, unfortunately, no better.
***
And what of Palestine? What of the Palestinians? Are we to blame them for their own deaths? Are to assume that they are merely extensions of Hamas? It's impossible to discuss this conflict without reckoning with the horror that is daily life for the average Palestinian, especially in Gaza. We need to recognize the dehumanization that Israel and many in the US engage in as a way of ignoring the stark tragedy that this conflict is.
It's difficult to take the position that because previous generations fought stupid wars, their descendants should suffer doubly from them, whether that is a worker in Bethlehem or a beggar in Shuja'iyya. I cannot say that Israel, my fellow Jews, and I bear no responsibility for the current conditions endured by the Palestinian civilians caught in the crossfire of a war that began hundreds of years ago over three monotheistic religions, and continues to this day by proxy of Islamophobia, Antisemitism, and avarice.
But I'm going to take a different, no less difficult, step in saying that the Palestinians circa 1930 to 1967 (and maybe even 2005) are the cause for their descendants suffering today. I'm going to say that it's also the fault of Egypt, Jordan, Syria, and Lebanon, who not only expelled their Jewish populations, but refused to take in any of the Palestinians, their fellow Arabs and Muslims, in favor of egging them on to more war. I'm going to say that it's also the fault of bad actors across the world stage who only stand to gain, in money, weapons, and more, from the continued bloodshed.
I'm going to say the inconvenient truth that Hamas is a theocratic, terrorist regime that steals aid money and uses it for rocket attacks and tunnels for ambush attacks on Israeli civilians. Hamas seeks the destruction of Israel, the extinction of the Jewish people, I'm going to say the sad reality is that the Palestinian Authority is inept, corrupt, and disinterested in peace because they care more for their own power, regardless of how much their people suffer.
The Palestinian people think their leaders care for them, but ultimately are just used as fodder for this war. They begged the world to help them, but instead we bicker over the worth of a brown-skinned child's life, plaster dead bodies in pornographic wanton, and pretend that we are Right & Good while everyone else who disagrees with us is A Terrible Monster.
I'm going to make the obvious statement that the US has been a bulwark against further violence and simultaneously a thorn in the side of any potential peace deal. The US has enabled the worst excesses of both sides by placating the bloodthirsty in power among Netanyahu's government as much as engaging the fanatically insane or greedy sloths among the Palestinian leadership.
I'm going to disagree with those who, in their ignorance or their grief, call Israel an apartheid state. Israel is no more an apartheid state than Palestine is a fictitious place. Israel has its problems with racism. It certainly has shown a troubling tendency to shoot first and never ask questions later when it comes to their national security. But, then again, if I felt surrounded on all sides by enemies beset on not just the destruction of my family, my nation, and my people, I'd probably be more than a bit irrationally paranoid too. This does not make it right.
I'm also going to say the terrible truth that while I condemn Israel's violence, I cannot condemn Israel itself. But yes, Israel has done terrible things to the Palestinians. They have killed hundreds of civilians, strangled their ability to be self-sufficient in many ways, and refused to stop settlers from illegally occupying Palestinian land. Indeed, the atrocities are almost beyond words. Yet, I cannot condemn Israel itself, because I cannot say, given the stakes, if I would be any better or worse.
Some will call me a Kapo, others a bigot, and many a coward or colonizer, but I say that what is happening in Israel and Palestine is more than just more than Jew vs. Muslim, more than Good vs. Evil. What is happening is so complicated that even when we're right, we're still wrong. Yet, it's not all that complicated once you just look.
The violence has caused so much pain that Israel is shifting away from democracy, fearing to even declare her own borders. Conversely, the Palestinians are becoming more and more radicalized to the point that peace seems pointless. But I know there is a place of commonality, a place where our pain, our anger, and our loss can find respite; where we can talk and understand each other as human beings.
***
I say that Jews cannot be colonizers because we are refugees.
I say that Palestine exists and so do the Palestinians.
I say that I am a Zionist and a Palestinian Nationalist.
And I don't give a goddamn if you think I'm crazy, if you call me names, if you think I'm suffering from cognitive dissonance, or if you just disagree. Respectfully, fuck your juxtaposition.
***
Yet... I also say, with regret, that intersectionality has, in some ways, abandoned the Jews. The ADL is called an organization that advocates bigotry while it continues working quietly to fight against it, particularly in the closed halls of the local police station, the barricaded DC capitol corridors, and behind the scenes of nearly every major social justice movement -- even when they attack and denigrate us.
I say that intersectionality has abandoned Jews, but we refuse to abandon it. We still, somehow, find the strength to do what is right instead of what is easy. It's something that I take a unique pride in, our timeless ability to persevere, to find our path and walk it with integrity.
I highly recommend this Open Siddur Project prayer. In it is more than the information that informs my position -- it reflects the spirituality, the social justice, as well as the ethical and moral values of my life. It is a gift of knowledge and wisdom by two people I have never met but am now forever connected to because I stumbled upon their creation in random cyberspace.
If something so unlikely can instill compassion and understanding in a person with every privilege and every adversity, with every reason to hate and fear, to be angry... Then I have to hope that my words here can do the same for someone else out there.
I have to hope because it is precious, because life is precious. I hope because I have seen Tikkun Olam. I hope because my ancestors did not give their lives for anything less. I hope because I did not survive the suffering of my childhood to give up now. I have hope because I want to plant a tree in whose shade I will never sit, but that maybe, maybe, my daughter, or my daughter's daughter, someday will.
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