"And then something went BUMP!" Unwinding my conceptions of Zionism
This is the follow-up to Zionism and Me: An Unruly Quaker History, which I hope you read before proceeding. It gives important context. When you read it, you’ll see how much I love, and how much I have learned from, my many Jewish friends, some of whom I consider family. It tells how I was introduced to Zionism. It was a hard post to write.
This post though. Y’all, when I say I have agonized. Hours have led into days of writing, rewriting, staring blankly out the window, lying awake at night.
Last night I figured out why this post feels impossible.
I’ve already expressed my stance on the “War” (genocide) on Gaza. I lost readers, paid subscribers, and friends as a result.
But there’s something different about explicitly unwinding and exposing the myths that I believed about Zionism. When I press “publish,” many people, Jews and non-Jews, friends and strangers, will call me antisemitic.
That is really awful to live with.
The worst part, though, is that I believe this contingent will include the dearest, dearest of my friends. They’ve already told me that to be critical of Zionism or Israel is to be anti-Jew. It may be too late already. But this feels like closing a door.
And I have a hard time thinking anything is worth that steep of a cost.
But then I think about my core values. About who I want to be — for the record, for my child, for the young people I work with and am inspired by.
And I cling to a tiny, fierce hope that sharing my story can help. Someone. Somewhere. Somewhen. Somehow.
First, a grounding in SPICES
I’ve talked about Quaker SPICES before - these are not spices you ground up. These are spices you ground IN. SPICES is an acronym for Simplicity, Peace, Integrity, Community, Equality, and Stewardship. For this endeavor, I’m grounding myself in Simplicity, Equality, and Integrity.
Simplicity —
means speaking plainly. Quakers call it “Plain speak.”
the root of simplicity is a simple truth: we are all holy, each and every one of us. We are all children of God, or Spirit, or a Higher Power, or the Universe, or the Great Cosmic Echidna, reader’s choice. And we all have the light of holiness within us.
Equality —
so… it follows that if we are all children of the Great Cosmic Echidna, and all contain the light (even if clouded or hidden), we are all equal. Period. Full stop. Young and old; white and Black; able-bodied and disabled; Jewish and Muslim and atheist; Arab and Hun Chinese and Persian; everyone, everyone, everyone.
this belief in equality does not mean ignoring social and systemic oppressions. This is NOT about responding to Black Lives Matter with “All Lives Matter.” No ma’am. It means approaching systems of oppression with an abolitionist mindset: asking — how do we go about dismantling oppressive systems, how do we repair harm done to people, how do we create new systems — of uplift, of radical equality and equity, of love and justice?
Integrity —
means speaking the truth even when, perhaps especially when, it contradicts mainstream news, oligarchs, governments. Even when it challenges dear friendships.
means aligning my beliefs and values with my words and deeds, and aligning my words and deeds with my beliefs and values. It all needs to be in sync.
integrity is why, when I am confronted with new information that causes cognitive dissonance, I choose to get curious, and I don’t stop investigating until I can make things make sense.
Next, recall two things from my last post:
I was introduced to Zionism as a chill aspect of Judaism by a progressive, cool, feminist dorm-mate in 1991. I was taught that Judaism = Israel = Zionism. The concepts were distinguishable but inseparable.
Growing up in the 1970s-1990s mainstream U.S. culture, Anti-Arab and anti-Muslim propaganda was the air I breathed. The first Gulf War was my senior year of high school; I did not personally know, or even know of, any Arabs or Muslims in my very small, very white town. (This is relevant, trust me.)
[Quick writerly housekeeping: I’ve changed names and some distinguishing characteristics. I’ve shifted the timeline a little for clarity. Dialog is not exact; it gives the gist of conversations. CONTENT WARNING: I give examples of anti-Arab and anti-Muslim propaganda.]
Now let’s talk about propaganda.
Anti-Arab and anti-Muslim propaganda is pervasive in America. Quick and nasty example from a supposedly benign and apolitical movie: Back the the Future.
Yeah. Is that how you remembered it? Let’s process.
The shooter? A nameless, one-dimensional “Libyan.” He’s brown-skinned, angry, wields a machine gun. He’s wearing a taqiyah (or kufi), the brimless head covering that religious Muslim men wear inside mosques, because of course he is.
The driver? He is a little harder to see, but here ya go:
Yep. He’s wearing a keffiyeh. Because of course he is. (Keffiyehs will get a separate post.)
“What’s the big deal? It’s a movie.”
How propaganda works: content and REPETITION.
Content: not every single piece of propaganda is a lie, so it sneaks in, looking a little like facts or truthiness.
Some Arabs and some Muslims wear taqiyahs or keffiyehs — just like some Jews wear yamulkes.
Some Muslims may be radical fundamentalists — as are some Christians.
Some Arabs engage in violence or terrorism — as do some white Americans (Oklahoma City Bombing, for example).
Repetition: we see these images AND ONLY THESE IMAGES — violent, irrational, scary, one-dimensional, terrorist, brutish Arabs or Muslims — over and over and over. And over.
We do not see counter-balanced, lovely, complex, humanizing depictions on nearly the same scale. Or, really, at all.
And these images are so ubiquitous the propaganda becomes invisible. It is the air we breathe.
This is how we dehumanize people through propaganda. We make it seem like Arabs or Muslims are always, only bad guys and “evil-doers,” and that this is just a universal truth that everybody in American knows.
Quick demonstration: Name five mainstream movies or shows with Arab or Muslim bad guys.
Off the top of my head: Back the Future, Homeland, 24, True Lies, Iron Man, G.I. Jane, American Sniper, Argo, and Indiana Jones - Raiders of the Lost Ark and The Last Crusade. That’s ten in a snap.
Now name five mainstream movies or shows with Arab or Muslim heroes.
Yeah. I can’t name five either.
What does Arab mean, anyway?
Do, yes, let’s define terms. The American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC) defines Arab as “a cultural and linguistic term. It refers to those who speak Arabic as their first language. Arabs are united by culture and by history. Arabs are not a race. Some have blue eyes and red hair; others are dark skinned; many are somewhere in between. Most Arabs are Muslims but there are also millions of Christian Arabs and thousands of Jewish Arabs, just as there are Muslim, Christian, and Jewish Americans.”
And for the record: Muslim means someone of the religious faith of Islam, which shares Abrahamic history/origin with Judaism and Christianity. The ADC says the five countries with the largest Muslim populations are: Indonesia (170M), Pakistan (136M), Bangladesh (106M), India (103M), and Turkey (62M). The only Arab country making the top ten is Egypt.
We clear? Yay! Great. Away we go.
Things start to go BUMP: Humanizing Muslims and Arabs
Alara.
In 1992, my sophomore of college, I share an apartment with Alara [not her real name], a graduate student from Turkey. She studies microeconomics, loves old movies, knocks back thick Turkish coffee like whoa. She’s Muslim. She shares stories about Istanbul. Alara tells me her mom is a “liberated woman — what you would call a feminist.”
None of this comports with my (propagandized) conceptions of Muslim women. She’s not shy and subservient to men, she’s not religious, and she does not wear a headscarf or hijab.
I start to go, “Hmm.” Maybe I begin to notice some of the propaganda that was once invisible. I realize there are other ways of being Muslim than I’ve been told.
Kareem.
OK so in 1998 in my mid-twenties, I fall head over caboose for my boo, the light of my life, my sweet dearest husband Noah. (For the record: Noah was raised culturally Jewish on his dad’s side; atheist/agnostic but with Christmas trees and Easter bunnies on his mom’s side.)
Noah’s stepfather is Kareem [not his real name]. Kareem is thoughtful and generous. He has a warm, wide smile. He is constantly reading and he’s always game to discuss social movements or current events because he’s getting his Ph.D. in sociology. He emigrated to the U.S. as a young adult from Africa.
Kareem, like Alara, was raised in a Muslim family. He considers himself culturally Muslim but not religious. Unlike Alara, Kareem is Black.
So once again I’m sharing stories and food and ideas and conversations with someone (and that someone’s friends and family) whose experience of “being Muslim” is not at all what I’ve been propagandized to think.
Now I’m not just noticing the propaganda: I’m getting a little mad.
I start to ask questions, seek out “other” voices.
Whoopsie doodle. Turns out there are gaps —by which I mean ginormous chasms— in my education. It’s overwhelming to know where to even begin minding the gaps. So I begin with my go-to: books and novels by Muslim writers.
Sarah.
It’s 2000, my first class of grad school. Sarah [guess what, that’s not her real name] looks cool and smiles a friendly smile so I plop down next to her.
As class starts, Sarah whispers something so unexpected and hilarious that I burst into the kind of laugh/snort where snot flies out your nose. At which point the hoity-toity professor goes silent and stares laser beams at me, so I try to suppress my laughter until I’m just bobbing up and down like an idiot, with tears streaming down my face.
That’s Sarah’s ability to make me laugh. I immediately fall in friendship-love. We weather grad school together. She is from the southwest and will whoop in delight when she sees her first frozen puddle - she insists that I come look at it while freezing my ass off in frigid Boston wind. She’s first-generation Egyptian-American, was raised in a religious (Sunni Muslim) family, speaks Arabic fluently.
I admit: before Sarah, hearing Arabic made me uneasy. A discomfort verging on fear, thanks to George H. W. Bush and the Gulf War, thanks to movies and TV poisoning my brain to think of Arabic as the language of bad guys and terrorists.
Well friends, that’s the thing.
You live, you learn, you make friends, and then Arabs and Arabic, Muslim and Islam, aren’t “other” anymore.
The “other” becomes the known, the cherished: the housemate, the step-father, the bestie.
Uh. Oh. That’s dangerous.
Here’s why it’s dangerous: When you replace propaganda with real human voices and perspectives, you will learn new-to-you truths.
These new truths will subvert the dominant, mainstream paradigm.
If the voices weren’t subversive, those voices would already be allowed in the mainstream. Dehumanizing propaganda would not be necessary.
More things go BUMP: Learning about Palestine and the history of Zionism.
The Nakba.
I’m loading the dishwasher after a scrumdiddlyumptious dinner with Noah and his mom, cooked by Kareem. I’m humming tunelessly and doing some casual eavesdropping on their conversation in the other room. Kareem’s voice rises to his impassioned pitch, so my ears prick up.
They are talking about Lebanon, Israel, Gaza. Kareem says, “But you must see, Noah. Since the Nakba, since the Palestinian people were pushed out of their homeland, they are living under Israeli occupation. You must understand what this is like to the Palestinian people.”
I freeze. A chill crawls down my back.
Israeli occupation? Pushed out?
This talk seems … dangerous. Seditious.
It feels like things bad guys in movies would say.
But I trust Kareem. Conversation after conversation, he’s been reliable, informed, thoughtful. Which actually makes this scarier because maybe I need to take it seriously.
But … no. Israel was “a land without a people for a people without a land.” That’s how I learned it.
Gah, cognitive dissonance makes my brain hurt. The cure is information. Rigorous scrutiny. I jot it down, Nakba.
Later, I find it: Nakba means “catastrophe” in Arabic. It refers to something that happened in 1947-1949.
The Nakba was the expulsion of 750,000 Palestinians from their homes, by Zionist militias and the new Israeli army, to establish Israel as a majority Jewish state.
Oh, my God. Wait. What? Can this be true? I thought it was a barren land?
I check other sources, historical documents.
Yup. There were people in Palestine — hundreds of thousands of people, most of whom had lived there for centuries, generations. Arab people. The Palestinian people. Some Christian, a few who were Jewish, most of them Muslim. Real people, with a real culture, which was tied to the land. People with families, homes, schools, farms, gardens, villages, cemeteries, restaurants, music, mosques. This was their home and their homeland.
They were forced to leave.
I can’t get past this.
These aren’t movie caricatures. I think of Sarah. And her mom and her dad and her brothers and her aunties. They are as fully human as I am. As fully human as my Jewish friends are.
I think of the house I grew up in. The marks Mom made with a ballpoint pen on my brother’s doorframe to keep track of our growth. Our back yard: the lilac trees, the huge pine we built a fort in. The kitchen: making cookies, talking with Mom as she made dinner. How would I feel if one day I was forced to leave? If settlers took over my house? Or bulldozed it?
I could understand if people wanted to move to our town to escape, to be safe from something awful. I would welcome them.
But expelling us? Why?
How do you justify that?
"Jewish villages were built in the place of Arab villages. You do not even know the names of these Arab villages, and I do not blame you because geography books no longer exist, not only do the books not exist, the Arab villages are not there either... There is not one single place built in this country that did not have a former Arab Population." —Moshe Dayan, Israeli military leader and politician, in Ha'aretz [Israeli newspaper] April 4, 1969.
If I didn’t know about the Nakba, what else don’t I know?
I examine my other beliefs about Zionism.
Israel as a safe place for Jews after the horrors of the Holocaust.
This was the first thing I learned about Zionism. That after the Holocaust, or the Shoah (the Hebrew word for catastrophe), in which the Nazis systematically murdered 6 million Jews, Jewish people wanted a place to guarantee their safety. So they established Israel as a Jewish state.
I thought that was the beginning of Zionism.
But I soon learn that Zionism predates World War II. “The Jewish State,” by Theodore Herzl, was written in 1896. The Balfour Declaration, in 1917, says, “His Majesty's Government [Great Britain] view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people.”
From what I understand, in the late 1800s and early 1900s, Jewish people were seeking safety from pogroms and other violently antisemitic governments and economic systems. (I’m sympathetic to this. It feels … familial. My husband’s paternal grandmother escaped the 1918-1921 pogroms in Ukraine on foot with her sister, walking overland until they could find passage to the U.S. We’ve listened, with horror and rapt attention, to her traumatic story.)
What seems clear is that there was a Zionist project before World War II, and that after World War II, it really gained steam. Jewish settlers came in much larger numbers, enough to violently expel Palestinians and establish a majority Jewish state.
Okay, what else was I told?
Palestine as Judaism’s Biblical homeland.
I mean, if we’re being honest, conversations (or arguments) about Zionism often end up here. In my experience, it’s the backstop of Zionism.
And for good reason.
Because good luck arguing with anyone — be they Jewish, Christian, Muslim, or otherwise — who believes that Palestine is their Biblical homeland, and thus they have a right to it.
(Confusingly, though, Argentina and Uganda were also briefly in the running for Zionist settlement.)
My thoughts on Palestine as Judaism’s Biblical homeland come not so much from my reading as from from my core value of Equality.
Thought one: this rationale is more of a conversation ender than a conversation starter. Christianity, Judaism, and Islam all have roots in “the Holy Land.” Who is supposed to decide who deserves to live there more? How can it be decided? What can you possibly say in your own claim to the land? “God promised it to my people even more than He promised it your people?” “It means more to us than it does to you?” “We called first dibs?”
Thought two: this seems to elevate Judaism above other religions. Is there a path to having a good faith (pardon the pun) conversation about who is or isn’t more chosen or beloved by God? I haven’t found one. Plus, I’m coming from a different perspective: one that holds all humans, whatever their religion, are equally beloved by God.
Connecting the dots
It’s an awful thing to realize, but I will stick to plain speak: Zionism, as it existed to settle in Palestine, expel Palestinians, and create Israel as a majority Jewish state, seems to have required thinking of Palestinians as less than.
Less human, less favored by God, less advanced, less entitled to the land, less civilized — any or all of the above.
And that’s where anti-Arab and anti-Muslim propaganda has been so useful.
Propaganda upholds systems of power. It makes Americans unable or unwilling to question how Israel was founded.
It erases the Nakba.
It tells us what I have heard repeatedly, directly from close Jewish friends: that "they” [Arabs, Palestinians] “just don’t value life as much as we do,” that “they” “just can’t get it together to make the Gaza strip a nice place to live.”
It tells us that Israel is “the only democracy in the Middle East” — even though it is an apartheid state that is actively perpetrating an ongoing genocide on the very people it expelled to create it.
Zionism seems to require thinking of Palestinians as less than, or the whole project falls apart.
And that’s just not okay with me.
I wrote pages more, stories and thoughts and anecdotes, but honestly I think that’s a wrap.
To paraphrase Ta-Nehesi Coates in his recent book and interviews about changing his mind on Palestine, there is no “because” adequate to justify apartheid.
There is no “because” adequate to justify an ongoing genocide.
Either apartheid is allowable or it’s not. Either genocide is allowable or it’s not.
And to me, it’s not. There’s no because that can justify it.
I see now why these conversations are regarded as so dangerous
These conversations are labeled antisemitic as a tactic to scare you from reading widely, from thinking, from believing your own eyes.
Because if you listen. If you read. If you watch. The illusion crumbles right in front of you.
You are left with questions.
And probably grief.
It’s good to learn about Jewish Voice for Peace and IfNotNow.
It’s good to learn that you can separate Judaism from Zionism and Israel.
It’s good to learn that there are many, many Jews who do so.
It’s good to learn that there were Jews speaking out against Zionism before the earliest settlements in Palestine, before the Nakba, before the founding of Israel, and ever since.
It’s good to learn that many Jews acknowledge and want to repair the harm that Zionism did, and that the state of Israel continues to do.
It’s good to learn that you can love Jewish people, and Judaism, and all its beauty at the very same time that you can work against the injustices and horrific war crimes Israel is committing, underwritten by U.S. tax dollars.
It’s good to be with Jewish comrades at protests.
There’s a lot at stake. There’s a boulder of grief in my heart. But it’s good to be in community with folks who seek, and speak, truth.
XOXO