Jewish Journeys from Zionism – Amy Wilson (1)

JVL is collecting stories of people’s journeys away from Zionism and have just completed the pilot phase, resulting in four moving and thought provoking pieces following interview with JVL member, Kitty Warnock. Further interviews are planned.  For all those interviewed, the events and following October 7th have been pivotal. We will publish the first four over the next few days and others as they become ready.

The first is Amy Wilson, who was born in Israel.

Just a bit more background: one of our Executive members spoke with three other Jewish people about how we came to be active in the struggle for justice for Palestinians.  The meeting was planned for – and did take place on – October 7th.  To their surprise, the room was packed and there was deep interest: two Jewish people in the audience felt empowered to speak out and the idea for this series of interviews was born.

Kitty Warnock has been a secondary school teacher, worked in development in the Middle East and Africa, and taught for four years at Birzeit University in Ramallah. From her interviews with many Palestinian women about their experiences of social change and occupation through the twentieth century came her book “Land Before Honour” (Macmillan; Women In Society series)

Family background

My name is Amy Wilson. I was born in Rehovot in Israel. My mother is Israeli: she was born in a Kibbutz in the north, in a religious family, leaving the kibbutz as a young child. My father is English, and converted to marry my mother. They met at the Jewish Free School in London when they were both teaching there. I spent the first four years of my life in Israel and then we moved to North London, and I’ve mostly been in London since, with a few forays – to Israel and Palestine, and to America.

Index of all the personal stories

My mother’s parents were from religious communities in the Carpathian Mountains in Romania. Her father was involved in a Zionist Youth movement – which saved his life, essentially. He got out of Romania with the movement to go to then-Palestine. My grandmother left a bit later so things were a bit trickier.  They were both teenagers, on their own, when they left. Many of their relatives were deported to Transnistria[i]. Some survived and went to Israel in the end. My grandfather wrote a book about the shtetl that he was from, and one about the previous five generations of his family. They are very careful books, with pictures and maps. It’s important to retain this knowledge. The book about the family was in Hebrew, but my mother is translating it into English now.

Family Zionism

They went to Israel and were part of the religious kibbutz movement. I grew up thinking that was normal, and only later found out that it was quite niche, to be both deeply religious and deeply socialist and Zionist. My grandfather wrote a lot, and spoke a lot. One of his writings was a Zionist Haggadah, a special Haggadah for Passover written for the State of Israel as a Zionist tale.

I feel that, being in Israel, being a Zionist was kind of like being a Jew.  It is different in the UK where you have to define who you are against the rest of the society, but there it’s just the air, the fabric, the texture. The importance of Zionism and my family’s Zionist values were definitely there and stated, so for me, Zionism was just the fabric of life, the air that I breathed: the Jews need a homeland, obviously, it’s a requirement, there’s no other possibility, and it had to be in this land. When I heard about ideas of Jewish people going somewhere else I thought, ‘But what’s the relevance?’ For my grandfather and for my mother, Judaism was connected with the land so deeply.

I trace my own feelings back to my grandfather in a lot of ways. He would never have questioned his Zionism, but he was a very moral and thoughtful man. In his memoirs there’s a story that always makes me think, ‘Yes, that’s where we get it from.’  When he and my grandmother had left their kibbutz, with a young child, and were looking for somewhere to live, they were shown beautiful Arab houses. He writes about walking into one of them and thinking how lovely it was, but then opening a cupboard and seeing a doll – and he thought, ‘No, this is someones house.’  He could see that this had been someones home, a child had lived here and left in a hurry leaving their favourite doll – and he couldn’t live in that house. They went instead to a new-build, where they were crowded together with other families, instead of having a big house to themselves. On the emotional side, the human understanding, he felt strongly, but at the same time he couldn’t conceive of not having a safe home for Jews, and I don’t know if he looked closely to see what had actually happened, how those people had gone. He had this kind of purity where he seemed not to know the true horrors, so he maintained his ideological views. I think he really couldn’t accept what had actually happened. I think that if he was alive now, it would break him into pieces. I don’t think his soul could survive it.

He was now Israeli, he had raised an Israeli family, and he believed strongly in our connection to the land, but he did think it went the wrong way. In the ‘67 war, he did not approve of the land grab and wrote to people in power about this. All he wanted was safety, and he couldn’t see clearly what was happening to enable him to live in relative safety.  He wanted to maintain morality and religiosity, he wanted to be able to relate to the scriptures he knew, it was those things that were important to him. He didn’t want to be in a situation where he was supporting something that very clearly went against them. He did support the state, but he was never certain, never wholeheartedly agreed with everything, always had questions and concerns.  He lived until the early 2000s. He saw the consequences of ‘67, and he was sad about the direction things were going.

Strength of family

My immediate family was not religious.  My mother had run away from it. Her university rebellion was to give up religion, to step away from the religious community where people watched everything you did. Because she was religious, she taught instead of going into the army for her national service, and then she went to university. When she graduated she went to the Jewish Agency and said, “Where can I go and teach? I speak French, can I go to France?”  They only had a place in London, and she accepted it though she didn’t speak a word of English. She came to London, by herself, in her early 20s, and started teaching Hebrew at the Jewish Free School. That’s where she met my father. He was teaching maths there, though he was very much not Jewish. After a four-year gap they got together again and got married, and my brother was born in the UK, but my mother insisted that the family should go back to Israel – she didn’t want to raise children in the UK. They lasted four years there. I’m very grateful now that my father didn’t get on with living in Israel.

Across the wider family there are very broad differences of opinion. Here is me ending up in London, non-religious: even so, my aunts still tried their best to find me a husband, despite how ‘alternative’ I am.  There are a few of us ‘alternative’ people in the family. Many are Orthodox, some socialist Zionists, like my grandparents, and then we have settlers, and Hasidim in New York – but everyone is family together.  There was always an understanding that there are different relationships to our identity, to our home, and to Zionism.  The most important thing is, it’s family. Everyone’s welcome at the table within the family. I’ve sat many times at the table with people with a very different view. We would have discussions, and they would tease me. Differences were very present but accepted. Only once did a family member walk out of a conversation with me: he had been a combatant in some pretty horrific situations, so I think he was a bit – emotional. I was questioning the entire concept of the occupation at this point. And once a conversation with an aunt stopped when she burst into tears. I was pushing, “Let’s talk about inhumanity.” She’s a very intelligent and feeling person but she had sent her children into the army and she couldn’t deal with the question …because, then what?

The story of my life

My mother kept me away from the Jewish community in the UK, which I think saved me.  She thought, ‘These people are nothing to do with me’. It was a different culture, and they practiced the religion differently from the religion she had grown up with – which  she didn’t even practice any more. She sent me to Sunday school to learn Hebrew, but I also felt I didn’t have a shared culture with the other students. You’d have to pick at straws to find any shared culture. My mother’s religious background was different. She felt, “If it’s not Orthodox, it’s not Judaism”. If you’re not Orthodox, you’re secular. I’d go into Reform synagogues where someone was playing a guitar or talking English and I thought, “What? are you Christians, what is this?” Now I’m more tolerant and understand different types of religious practice, but that saved me from a particular Zionist view. It meant that when I got to SOAS I didn’t have a Jewish community in the UK to report back to or to tell me that I was signing up to “The School of Antisemitism”.

My move away from Zionism was a long process. It started when I volunteered on a Kibbutz when I was 18, and met Palestinians for the first time. The Kibbutz was quite left-wing, with an institute for studying the environment, and there were Palestinian students. They drove us to parties on Friday nights; in Ramadan they invited us to break fast with them; we went out a lot, played backgammon, smoked shisha, and had a great time. And I started asking myself, ‘Who are these people?’  I was not at all conscious at that point.  Much of what they said probably went straight over my head. I remember one of the French volunteers saying pointedly to me, “Do you see the inequality?”.   I thought, ‘Hang on, what? There are inequalities?’. It was a shock, but I thought about it more and more, and it got into my head and into my heart.  In the second part of my gap year I went to Morocco on a youth solidarity camp. This was the kind of thing I had learned from my grandparents – socialism, togetherness, revolution, the land. These values were very deep in my heritage.  But I was used to saying cheerfully “Hi, I’m from Israel,” without any concept that for many people I’m igniting a fire when I say that – I didn’t have a clue. In Morocco I was in the centre of arguments between people, going “Er? What are they talking about?”  One time I went to have a nap, and when I came back half the camp weren’t talking to the other half. One half were defending me while I was sleeping. I didn’t know how to defend myself – from what? I had no clue what they were even talking about, or why they were so emotional. But that piqued a lot of curiosity in me, and a feeling that this was important.

I was enrolled at SOAS to study Hebrew and Anthropology. When I first walked into the shop, in 1999, they were playing an Algerian musician called Khaled, who I’d heard a lot in Morocco, so I exclaimed “Khaled!”. The guy behind the counter said, “Yes, I am”. “What?” “I’m called Khaled, I’m from Gaza” – and I spent a lot of the next few years sitting in the bar talking to him. The SOAS bar was the place I learned an enormous amount. Palestinians, other Muslims, and Israelis, we spent hours playing backgammon and talking politics. At that point I was definitely still supporting Israel. My hard line was, “You can’t take Israelis out of Israel” and I didn’t yet fully comprehend the levels of brutality Palestinians have always been subjected to – I still don’t think Israelis should leave, I think there should be a single state that people can choose to leave if they don’t want to live peacefully with their neighbours. Back then I did believe that Israelis had the right to live there and have a state.  I was becoming more aware of the horrors, but – there was always a but – there was still the concept of Jews needing a safe space. This need of a safe space over the existence of others only very slowly mutated itself and lessened and became softer and less emotional.

Most of the friends I made were Muslim, though not Palestinian. They were my community. I got involved in the Jewish Society, which at that time was a force for what I would call Good. They always had joint events with the Palestinian Society, and opposed official speakers from Israel. I don’t remember whether there was any questioning of Zionism itself:  for me, it was the violence I was against, taking land, chopping down olive trees.  It wasn’t “I don’t think Zionism is OK,” it was, “You don’t do it like this.”  Even my grandparents had had discussions like these: what does it mean to be the chosen people, is it a land thing? It was never a given. You never know what God wants. You’re always ready to hear the opposing view.

As part of my course I spent a year in Jerusalem. The second intifada started while I was there, and there were bombs everywhere. One day I went to the bus stop to go to the university, found I had forgotten something and came home – and the bus stop was blown up.  After I left, the café we used to eat in was bombed. I was still close with the Palestinian guys I’d met before, and I would get calls, “Amy, don’t use Egged buses this week.” They’d been hearing things, and they wanted to keep me safe.  I wasn’t angry about it. I was very entrenched in the leftist world, and we knew why this was happening. I felt it was just a horrific situation.  Ideologically at that point I thought, ‘Why can’t they just resist peacefully?’  Now I know, ‘Of course not, it won’t work, they tried it a million times and it absolutely didn’t work,’ but at the time I had this removed ideological position.

I was working at B’Tselem and I saw how fractured the left activists in Israel were. Some of the main conversations were bitching about other leftist groups, and I felt, ‘What are we supposed to do? We need to join together, otherwise we’re powerless, it’s impossible.’

When I came back to London, SOAS was starting a Master’s degree in Israeli culture.  Five or six students came in for it from the Jewish societies in Manchester and Leeds, and they went nuts, seeing so much support for Palestine which they felt was antisemitism. They covered up Palestine posters, tore things down. I was part of the school magazine and involved in school politics, so I said to them, “Come and sit down and talk together, and you will see that no one here is trying to hurt you. Look at me, I’ve been here for years, with these people you fear.”  Was it fear, or was it aggression? I don’t know. I said, “If you don’t want to talk to them, talk to me. I’ll interview you, or you can write something and we can put it in the magazine.” They did write something but it was vile, we couldn’t publish it. Then without asking the Student Union, they arranged for the chief rabbi and the Jewish Chronicle to come and give a talk at the university, and then a horrendous article appeared in the Jewish Chronicle, naming and misquoting and demonising people in the Union. So I saw the horrific and violent nature of the pro-Zionist PR campaign.

After my year in Jerusalem I gave up a bit in my activism. It felt so hopeless. I’d joined things, trying to do something, and all I saw was infighting. I needed to remove myself a bit. I went in different directions: I trained as a lawyer, didn’t like it, was a secondary school teacher, taught RE for almost a decade, worked with young refugees and asylum seekers. I did a lot of that kind of work, because I still wanted to fix everything! I was a leftist, and I knew what I didn’t agree with, but I was never consciously anti-Zionist. I’ve just come back to activism after a couple of decades.

October 7^th

October 7^th was like a knife cutting through me. It severed any ties I had with Zionism. Before that I would say, “The occupation is a horror story, settlers are doing horrific things, I’ve been in Hebron, I’ve seen the reality”, but on Oct 7^th something reawakened. It was extreme. My perspective shifted.

I woke up and my husband was saying, “Something’s happened, they’re attacking Israel.” “What do you mean?” I had a quick look, and my heart dropped. I felt, ‘Everyone in Gaza is dead. That’s it.’ I felt sick.

It was because I knew how it works. Netanyahu had known for a year that Hamas was planning something, and the Egyptians had reminded them the week before. My mother heard of reservists, who went down there and found the army bases were empty of supplies as well as people; everyone had been redeployed to the West Bank. Evidence, I don’t know, but I’m adding one plus one. People were waiting eight hours, in a country that takes four hours to drive from north to south. What can you conclude from that? They left kibbutzniks, because kibbutzniks don’t vote for them?  My immediate thought was, and of course I may be wrong, ‘I know why they’ve done this. They want to wipe out Gaza.’ It’s a plan they’ve had since they got the settlers out, to flatten the place. They’ve talked about it openly. And I felt ‘That’s the end, for me’.

It felt like a physical blow, when the realisation hit me of how low this had gone.  My mother has always said that when the Jews left Egypt they needed 40 years before they could create a state, because they needed to process the trauma and have a new generation arise who had not known slavery and oppression. Israel didn’t do that, it has never processed the Holocaust, it has never had a new generation.  When you do that, you can’t but repeat what has been done to you, as Hannah Arendt predicted. And here it is. We can’t any longer say, “Maybe we’ve got a chance to go the other way”. There’s no chance of going any other way, now. For me there’s no way of coming back from it. These days I feel that as an ideology Zionism is wrong, and I would say that I am vehemently anti-Zionist.

Working backwards to a new perspective

I’ve looked into the history of how it came about, and I think, ‘Woah, this is not OK’. There is a bigger picture here that I wasn’t aware of. In all my previous discussions, I was very ready, I had all the building blocks, but I had not been looking at the foundations. The cut-off point of October 7^th made me think, ‘I can’t just coast along.’ It was such an emotional time, I was seeking out voices I could relate to.  I’m quite into Jewish mysticism, and I suddenly saw that most of the people I’m following online in that realm are politically of the same view as me. I’d had no idea, I hadn’t paid attention before. They started having conversations about how Zionism had begun, and the wider international context. I’d always known that it had come out of the specific form of European nationalism at that time. I did my undergraduate dissertation on “The Eurocentric hegemony of the Israeli education system” – looking at how this affected Arab Jews, who go into school and are taught that Jews went from this land, to the holocaust and back to this land, erasing their entire history as Mizrahi Jews.

I’ve been reading and listening. One of the things that I didn’t realise before was how Christian Zionism was a big part of the picture. For me this was like the moment when puzzle pieces start fitting together. in Jerusalem I’d seen Christian Zionists, American evangelicals, giving money to build new temples, and I’d wondered, ‘Why are you Christians interested in that?’ but I didn’t understand it. But later I was living in southern California, where there are a lot of evangelicals and Baptists. I was working on empowerment for young girls, working with counsellors at a large California state middle school. One day the counsellors started talking to me about revelations and the End of Days, and how the Jews are so important to bring everyone to the land of Israel, but then – “You know, you guys are going to die and we will rise.”  There were guns and things involved in what they were telling me. I thought, ‘Oh Wow! This is normal for them, they feel perfectly comfortable saying this in their school office to someone who is Jewish.’  So when I started reading about Christian Zionism, it made sense to me. The slogan, “A land without a people for a people without a land” – I found out it had been coined by a Scottish Christian Zionist. The whole foundations of political Zionism, the political, actual, enacted, physical Zionism, appeared inextricably linked to this antisemitic movement. That’s not good for Jews, none of this is good for Jews. That made me have this real shift. I am clear now that actually Zionism is incredibly dangerous for Jewish people. This that’s happening right now, for me, is the most dangerous thing for Jews globally of anything that could happen.

The need to extricate Judaism from Zionism

What’s the future for Israel? At the moment it looks like a total self-destruct. Absolute horror. I will do whatever I can to try and support those voices that are doing what I am trying to do – to forge a Judaism that is not tied to Zionism.  I feel that extricating Judaism from Zionism is the most important work for Jewish safety at the moment. People must see what Zionism has done and what it is doing and how against the actual faith it is, against our culture and our history and our ancestry which I feel very strongly about and very connected to. I feel better able to practice my Judaism and to hold that practice and to talk about it now that in my soul Zionism is extricated from it. Coming back to the roots of our identity is what is powerful for me. Judaism has been around a great deal longer than Zionism. All I see at the moment is horror, but my dream would be – it’s good to talk about dreams – that from the river to the sea everyone is free and living together equally.  Doing what the PLO offered many years ago, which was, “Let’s rule this land together and whoever wants to stay stays. You’re welcome to be here together, with us, as equals. If we can all be here together as equals fine, let’s work it out.” It’s the only way that makes sense to me.  What are the other options? That’s the dream – but how that dream comes to reality from the present reality, I don’t know. I do know that this position would horrify most Israelis.

Joining a movement, talking about it

After October 7^th, I went to one of the first protest marches with a friend from school. I was in such a state of fear, I was finding a lot of generational trauma coming up; I was seeing images that were giving me physical symptoms, feeling nauseous, shaking.  But my friend had sent me an invitation to join the Jewish bloc in the march, which gave me the confidence to go. I saw people wearing Na’amod T-shirts and thought, ‘You guys look organised’. I felt they had a new energy. I’m not joining anything that doesn’t have a new energy, because I’ve been in the old and it didn’t do anything and I felt hopeless. So far it’s been good. I felt very alone, I didn’t know who to talk to except for my non-Jewish friends and it isn’t their job to hold me through my Jewish pain.  But Na’amod is bringing together lots of people, especially from the margins of the Jewish community, which one could say is one good thing about it all. I’ve found a lot of people who share my view. New people are joining constantly.

My mother’s with me. After I joined Na’amod she did too: she is supportive but not active as she finds it physically difficult these days. I think it’s very hard for her emotionally. Her formative memories are of hiking  through the desert with the youth movement, singing songs and learning the flora and fauna of this country she felt so deeply rooted in – over the years she has become aware of all the destruction that made her early Zionist dream possible. One of her close friends said, “I have to go to Israel to see family, but I’m not going to be quiet, I’m going to shout at everybody.” But my mother can’t go and shout at her family, she knows where their views lie.

I haven’t asked what she feels about the word Zionism. It’s not a requirement for being in Na’amod, as long as you want to end the occupation. It is a non-Zionist organisation, but members don’t have to be, it accepts everybody. That’s what brought me in. Leftist groups I had been in had spent all their time arguing about who is allowed in, who is not, who is right and who is wrong. No. Right now we have an urgent need to stop the violence immediately. Whoever is behind that, come and join us. I understand the difficulty in letting go of Zionism. The pull is strong. I probably only exist because my grandfather was a Zionist, my grandparents met on a Kibbutz on the land. That kind of story is present for a lot of people.

I’m lucky that there’s no one in my day-to-day life that I can’t talk to about this. Since October 7^th I haven’t spoken to my family in Israel. I’m getting to an emotional stage where I can imagine going there, but at the moment I can’t listen to someone I love saying things that make me want to throw up. They haven’t spoken to me either, they know where I am. I’m not talking publicly on social media much either, because I know what it would do to my family. I’m not ready. Instead I’ve spent a lot of time talking to strangers in comments sections online. I’ve had people applauding me for turning someone round, so I’ve felt, ‘Perhaps I can do this!’ But practising on strangers on the internet is much easier than your own family. With a stranger if it doesn’t work it doesn’t matter, but with family, it could be the end of relationships.

Finding an Alternative Jewish tradition

Some time ago I got into Tarot and other esoteric things, but because they were mostly Chinese, Japanese, Indian, I felt uncomfortable – why weren’t there any from my own heritage?

Then I found that some people, including women, were doing the Counting of the Omer through Tarot. Counting of the Omer is something Kabbalists do, meditating on the tree of life – I was surprised, because I had grown up believing that you had to study for thirty years before you can begin to study the Kabbala and women can’t anyway, and the whole modern Kabbalist thing that Madonna does made me very angry – but now I got involved and met people who have been practicing their Judaism in very different ways. It’s mostly in the US. There’s the Kohenet movement[ii] exploring the history of women’s role in Jewish mystical life. I learned how after the Jews came to Europe a lot of practices had to be hidden because Judaism was conflated with witchcraft. A lot has been lost but there are some oral traditions. There’s a community of people trying to reach back to it.

I felt a lot of power in the female line of my family. My grandmother was oppressed by my grandfather, as women were at that time, but I could feel there was something there. She was a potter like me, but gave it up because my grandfather wouldn’t let her learn to drive, and she couldn’t get to her studio without asking him to take her. One of her ceramic works was a mirror frame, which was always at the front door of my grandparents’ house. When I was deep into my esoteric studies I looked at it and thought, ‘There are twelve symbols – I wonder if it’s a zodiac?’  I put it out to my new online community of Jewish mystics, and one of them replied: “That is a zodiac. Here is what the symbols mean. My grandmother was from the same region of Romania, and she used these symbols”. Apparently there was a community of Jewish women following ancient esoteric practices in that area. Nobody in the family knew anything about my grandmother holding this knowledge, but her grandparents were a Kabbalist and a herbalist, the mystical power couple, so she had that in her heritage.  If my grandfather had known what the mirror meant, he wouldn’t have had it on show! She had also made a jug of a female figure, and after they died, we found it broken in the attic. I imagine my grandfather had said, “Not in this house” and tossed it up there.

A lot of it is probably fantasy but it’s a great fantasy and I’m into it. A few years ago I built three goddess sculptures. After I’d made them I realised that they were three goddesses of the Canaanite pantheon – Asherah, Anat and Astarte.  I got very interested in Canaanite spirituality, did a lot of work with these three figures, and learned Ugaritic and the cuneiform script. This going back and back I feel is part of my Judaism. It’s very much not about Zionism, patriarchy, all the forces that have come against Jewish and women’s spirituality. There’s a growing community of us.

[i] Transnistria, Transdniestria, an area that is now a disputed part of Moldova, was occupied by Romania 1941-44. During this period between 150,000 and 250,000 Jews were deported there from Romania and Ukraine. Many were executed, or died in ghettos and concentration camps.

[ii]The Kohenet Hebrew Priestess Institute was founded in 2005 by a woman rabbi. The Institute closed in 2023 but the Kohenet movement continues to develop feminist Jewish leadership.

Index of all the personal stories