Jewish Journeys from Zionism – Frank Fisher (5)

I’m 79, but I like to say I’m in my 80^th year.

Childhood

I grew up in Glasgow. My parents were traditional but not really religious Jews. My mother was a Londoner; her parents came from Odessa, but they had died when my mother was young, so I never met them. My paternal grandparents were immigrants from a city called Grodno, which was then in Lithuania, then Poland, and is now in Belarus. They probably spoke Yiddish to each other – they had strong accents in English – and my father was keen to distance me from them. I did spend time with them but he didn’t want them to Judaize me, I was to be a British Jew. He wanted us to assimilate, although his attitude was, “The goyim do such-and-such, the goyim have smelly food.” My parents kept Kashrut at home, but I went to a mixed school where there weren’t many Jews. Once I went to a friend’s house, and they gave me a ham sandwich. It wasn’t vicious, they just didn’t understand. While I was eating it they told me it was ham, and I physically felt sick.

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A lot of being traditional fell to my mother; she had to kosher the meat and so on. She went to synagogue just three times a year, like my father – a United Synagogue, with a women’s section. I don’t think she really cared about it, but most of their friends were Jewish. My parents spoke a broken Yiddish to one another when they didn’t want me to understand, so of course I picked up a few words. Almost everyone my age has this story. There’s a return to Yiddish now; a lot of younger people are learning it.

There was a short period around the time of my Bar Mitzvah when I was more observant. I wore Tzitzit in school, which of course was visible when we did sports. But soon after that, I started thinking about religion and identity more. I realised that my father, who was a commercial traveller, was going to synagogue three times a year, and he really believed that he would have a bad year if he didn’t do this. I felt, ‘This is pure superstition’, and I turned against religion. A few years later I would be standing outside the synagogue on Yom Kippur with a pork pie! I don’t remember whether I actually did that, but I certainly wanted to. If I did, it was probably not right at the door. By the time I was sixteen, I was really anti-religion. I don’t think I talked about it much with my parents. I was becoming very rebellious about lots of things, and my relationship with them, particularly my father, wasn’t good.

My mother was a lukewarm Zionist. She didn’t express strong views about anything; she just went along with it, as many people did at that time. But my father was in Poale Zion[1]. He told me that he went to Cable Street as part of a delegation[2]. I’ve got a feeling he was also at the big Fascist meeting at Olympia[3]. He wasn’t very sociable, and I think a lot of his social contact was through Poale Zion. And the Freemasons. He belonged to a Jewish Lodge, I believe. He told me when I was about sixteen that he was a Master Mason – not as high in the hierarchy as it sounds – so I could join earlier than I could have otherwise. I said, “Thanks but no thanks.” I think their main activity apart from rolling their trouser legs up was raising money for charities – and business contacts. When my parents later moved to Australia, I think he used Masonic contacts to get work there.

Although my father identified as a Zionist, when I became very involved in Zionism he tried to discourage me, especially when I started talking about going to live in Israel.

Habonim years

I joined Habonim when I turned fourteen, and it quickly took over my life. There were a lot of very charismatic people involved. One of my near contemporaries was Tony Lerman who later wrote ‘The Making and Unmaking of a Zionist’ (2012). It was a national movement; we got together a lot in summer camps and so on. By the time I was sixteen I was absolutely convinced I was going to go to Israel, to be a kibbutznik. I was considered extreme within Habonim: I argued that people should go to Israel and offer their talents instead of going to university, this kind of thing. At seventeen I went to Habonim’s Eder Farm in Sussex. It was for training people to go to Israel – Hakhshara. I was on the year-long programme for younger people, working half the day and half the day studying Hebrew and Jewish history. I’d been learning Hebrew for a couple of years already: we used to get up on a Sunday morning, go swimming, and then go to the Hebrew class. I was very keen so I advanced quickly.

After that year I went on to something called the Machon, the Institute for Youth Leaders from abroad[4]. Zionist youth movements from all over the world sent people to this.  Six months of it was in Jerusalem, in old Arab houses in the Katamon district, then six months on a kibbutz. The idea was that you went back to your country as a youth leader for a couple of years, and then emigrated to Israel. Unusually, I was with people from the south – some southern American people, and Moroccans – who were at that time conducting a clandestine operation to “persuade” Jews to leave Morocco. (In Morocco Jews weren’t under any pressure, there was no reason for them to leave.) The whole experience was wonderful, very intense.

1963-65, I returned to the farm in Sussex. I did a little bit of youth leadership, and I travelled to Cardiff to set up youth groups there, but mostly I was just working on the farm. After two years it was going a bit sour for me. I had had enough and I wanted to get to Israel. I joined one of the “garinim” or Seed groups that were formed every now and then to prepare to go together to settle in a kibbutz. I argued that the group should go to somewhere near Gaza. I thought it would be thoroughly Israeli, and in the desert, more pioneering.  If I’d had my way we would have gone to one of the kibbutzim that was involved in October 7^th. But the group decided to go to a kibbutz in Galilee where there was a previous generation of British Habonim people. I didn’t wait for the whole group, but went on my own, in 1965, just as I was turning 21. I arrived as a keen young Zionist, but the young Israeli kibbutzniks were much more cynical and a bit sceptical about me, and they mocked my accent. Immediately I didn’t feel all that comfortable. When my group of a dozen or so arrived from Britain a few months later, they started having families and got very involved in them.

Disillusionment

By the time the men were called up for army service, I was in such a state that I got out of serving in the army. I was feeling very sceptical, not just about the kibbutz but about Israel as well. I was going through a crisis, beginning to question everything.

While I was there the kibbutz was changing a lot. There was talk about doing away with the children’s houses and the communal dining room. Adverts in the cities were saying, “Come to a kibbutz, we have big swimming pools” – attracting people to a luxurious lifestyle, which was very much counter to what my vision had been.

I didn’t know much about political currents in Israel. I knew that one of the kibbutzniks was a supporter of Uri Avnery[5],  who ran a journal a bit like Private Eye and believed in the Hebrew Nation – non-Zionist but with a Hebrew culture. I picked up a few bits of ideas about this, but didn’t really understand it until later. I also picked up some of the ideas of Matzpen[6], which was a small Trotskyist group. I had a friend in the kibbutz, who is now a professor at Dartmouth College in the U.S. He had a very antagonistic view of the kibbutz, and I talked to him a lot.

I joined something called a Young Generation Group of Upper Galilee. It was young people who wanted to cooperate: kibbutzniks, moshavniks, and city people.  We started talking about all sorts of projects, including cooperation with Palestinians. But we only met a couple of times before the Six-day war came and everyone disappeared.

My father came to visit, in May 1967. He travelled around the country, and when he got back to the kibbutz he said, “There are huge movements of troops.” This was the Israel that supposedly wasn’t expecting a war. I said, “I don’t know, but there’s a lot of tension, something might be about to happen.” And a few days later, just after he went home, it did – the war broke out in June.

When my kibbutz friends came back from the war, they were cock-a-hoop, some bragging about how many people they had killed, and organising tours to go and see the “conquered land.” By this time I was fairly fed up, to say the least. After the war, Matzpen were arguing that this was the opportunity to make peace. But of course the very opposite happened. Settlements began to be established in the occupied territories immediately. A group of British Habonim formed just after the war to settle in the Golan Heights. I remember thinking, this is going to go on for at least another 20 years, but I totally underestimated.

Return to the UK

The seeds of my crisis were already there. I had already rejected the reasons I had gone to Israel in the first place, but the ‘67 war brought it to a head, and I decided to leave at the end of that year. I had devoted six years of my life to Israel, so it was very serious. I had been so convinced that this was my path that, despite lots of advice to the contrary, I hadn’t thought of any other options. I had completed my schooling, but it was Scottish Highers, not A-levels, not acceptable for English universities.

I had no money. The kibbutz gave me the fare to Haifa, but I had to borrow money to get home. I decided to go back to Glasgow, where I could get a job and take A-level classes so that I could apply to a university in London. Latin A-level hardly took me any time: it seemed to be a much lower level than other A-levels – which I concluded must be to make sure that public-school boys could get it! Maths took longer, as there was a bigger gap between the Scottish Higher and A-level. After about a year I came to London, got a job, and continued my studies, and by the summer I had enrolled at LSE to study econometrics.

In my second year I drifted out – I used to say I retired to the bar – and I didn’t take the final exams. I had rather lost my way, and decided I was doing the wrong course, but nobody in the university ever asked me what was going on. I believe LSE wanted to be a graduate school and wasn’t interested in undergraduates.

When I left Israel, I had thought that eventually I would go back, but within two or three months I’d realised that was not going to happen. After university I just got a job, in the post office, where I stayed for 25 years.

Opposing Zionism – and the pushback

LSE was a hotbed of politics, of course. When I arrived, the first thing I noticed among the student stalls in the concourse was the Palestine Society, or perhaps it was an Arab Society. Their stalls had piles of literature, arguing the case. The Jewish Society, which was really an Israel society, just had lots of blue and white ribbons and flags, and some small leaflets. They weren’t making arguments, it was just “Come and join us.”  In retrospect – but this may not really be true – it was when I walked into that concourse and saw those two stalls that I became definitely a non-Zionist.

I met Arab students who were supporting Palestine. We tried to set up a discussion group to bring Jewish and Arab students together, but the Jewish Society completely blocked it, so it never happened. But I stayed involved. At one meeting I went to, a PLO speaker – it might have been Said Hammami, the first PLO representative in London – was talking about the one-state solution, which was the PLO line at the time. I asked a question about how they envisaged the one state, what they thought the relationship between Jews and Palestinians would be. There was somebody at that meeting who I had known from Habonim days, who had links with the Israeli embassy. Not long after, I heard that several of my friends in Israel had been questioned about me.

About 1982, the time of the Lebanon war, I joined the Jewish Socialists’ Group. It had started a few years earlier as a way of explaining Zionism from a left point of view; but later had a critical view of Zionism. A member I met encouraged me to join and gave me a number to ring. When I rang they were very suspicious – Who are you? Who do you know? this kind of thing. It gave me a feeling they were under some kind of pressure.  I joined, but immediately got into a dispute: they had recently formulated a two-state policy, and I was saying, “You should have a peace policy, committing to a just solution, not necessarily two states.” That’s where I was at that time. But they were not prepared to rediscuss it.

Around 1990, there was an organisation operating under the Board of Deputies called the Community Security Organisation – it later became the Community Security Trust. Their existence wasn’t declared, but you would see them at Jewish events, standing like security guards. As you came into the event they would search your bags, looking not for bombs but for literature. If you had Jewish Socialists’ Group literature or anything they didn’t like, they refused you entry. The first time it happened to me was at an Israel Film Festival at the Everyman in Hampstead, run by the Spiro Institute[7]. I and a number of other JSG people were refused entry, and so was Derek Malcolm, the film critic, who was supposed to be introducing one of the films. Nitza Spiro, the organiser, came out and got him in, and she said to me – I was on good terms with her – “I think you should come in.”  But the CSO people said, “If you let him in we will withdraw our security.” There was a big media scandal about this. On another occasion I gave out JSG leaflets outside a big Holocaust memorial meeting at Friends House, and I was refused entry to that.

There was quite a lot of conflict in the community at that time. We had a campaign of writing to all the main organisations, especially the Board of Deputies, asking them what information they held on us. We were sure they had some: for instance, a newsletter article attacking prominent JSG member David Rosenberg mentioned details of all the meetings he had attended. According to the Data Protection act, they were required to tell us what data they held, but the only reply we got was, “We don’t have any”. So I contacted the Data Protection people, and they actually went and searched the offices, but they said they didn’t find anything. I suspect all the information on us was held at the Israeli Embassy.

The PLO delegation set up a consultative committee to which various organisations – mainly Jewish and church organisations – sent representatives. I was the JSG’s representative, and I got to know the delegation quite well.

Around 2000 I was involved in setting up a new non-Zionist organisation, called Just Peace UK. Some of the others involved were Israelis who had recently come to the UK who had been involved in the Israeli left party, Hadash[8]. We were quite active, campaigning and leafleting and joining demonstrations. It was the early days of the internet, and we set up an e-group for discussion and debates. I was one of the moderators. I closed it in 2020, because there were so many alternative channels for debate by then and the organisation itself had become inactive as members were involved in so many other things.

Now I’m aging, I don’t walk so well, so I’ve stopped going to demos. I never really liked them anyway, people shouting slogans they didn’t always understand or fully agree with. I’ve never been much of a writer. But I go to lots of meetings. One organisation that I’ve kept in contact with – partly because an old friend from Habonim chaired it for a while – is Meretz UK[9]. They are Zionists, but I sometimes go to their meetings. I try to put my position whenever I can, though it’s becoming almost impossible to put in a public meeting in the current climate.

My position is that any resolution of the Israel-Palestine situation involves the dissipation of Zionism. If you have a two-state solution, a Zionist state is still going to be maximising the proportion of Jews and being expansionist. And as long as Zionism is still the central ideology amongst Jews, one-state isn’t going to work either because all the time they will be looking at who’s in the majority, and every time a Palestinian is born it will be seen as a threat. The ideology has got to be based on a state for all the citizens. We need to be attacking the assumptions of Zionism, not just talking one-state, two-state.

This has become very hard to say – particularly since October, but already before that in the time of Corbyn.  A few examples: back then I was in a Yiddish class, along with some quite extreme Zionists.  Somebody had used the class email list to send out an attack on Corbyn by Anthony Julius – a really nasty piece – and I objected to them using the list to send things like that. As we came out of the class two guys said to me, “You didn’t like the article?” I said, “That’s not the point, the point is it shouldn’t be sent, but I could go through that article sentence by sentence and refute practically everything in it – but not to a bigot like you.”  This guy was a senior surgeon, but he completely lost it. He pinned me up against the wall, and I’m sure he was using his medical knowledge to screw his knuckles into my ribs. I was in pain for weeks afterwards. That was the atmosphere then, around the Corbyn thing.

I go to a Hebrew group because I don’t want to lose my Hebrew which I’ve hardly spoken for 50 or 60 years. I soon realised I can’t discuss Israel-Palestine with the others in the group.

Even the Bund has become Zionist. The strongest modern Bundist organisation is in Melbourne, and most of their members are Zionist, though not extreme. Historically it was anti-Zionist. The Forward, the American Yiddish/English newspaper, is also moderate Zionist, it’s definitely not antizionist.

Keeping in touch with Israel

Immediately after I left the kibbutz, I met some members of my Garin, and told them some of how I felt about the kibbutz. They were devastated, and probably angry with me. For a while after that I used to be invited to social gatherings with people who were coming and going on visits. I was less discreet than I could have been, and talked about aspects of Zionism I wasn’t happy with. Soon it exploded, and I was often cut out of the invitation list.

I’ve visited Israel twice since 1967. The first time was in 1986, in a group organised by Uri Davis[10]. Uri wanted to run trips to Israel-Palestine for meeting a range of Palestinian figures and leftists in Israel. This was a pilot trip; the leaders were two of the people who later wrote the Rough Guide[11]. We met amazing people like Haider Abdel-Shafi[12] in Gaza – who would have succeeded Arafat if he was younger – and the mayor who had his legs blown off[13]. In Israel we met a number of small groups on the left – where I noticed that although it looked as though there was a proliferation of groups, it was the same people at all the events. Uri’s travel scheme never got off the ground as the 1^st intifada started the next year.

My second visit was in 1995, for a 30^th anniversary reunion of my Habonim Garin. It was a very touching event. People came from all over the world; a lot of them weren’t active Zionists anymore. I stayed with some other friends, a Moroccan brother and sister. My last day with them was the day Rabin was murdered[14]. It turned out that my friends knew about the rally where it happened – I don’t know why I hadn’t picked up that it was happening myself – but they deliberately kept it from me, because they knew I would want to go, and they didn’t want to take their children there. They had a feeling something was going to happen: there was so much tension, and Rabin was being called a traitor.

Hope for the future

The last time Israel got it really wrong strategically and tactically was the Yom Kippur war[15]. Have you seen the film Golda?  I think a lot of it is verbatim record of meetings. They were caught unawares, and it was a sort of defeat, though now they’re trying to present it as a victory. After that war, the peace process started. Though that didn’t end well, it was a step forward in terms of mutual recognition. I think the same thing could happen this time. People will start questioning, “How long can this go on for? What is stopping it progressing?” What has really shaken the Israelis is that the promise that they were invulnerable has been shown to be empty. As long as they’re looking for a military solution, there’s no hope; they might start questioning that as a result of this disaster.

Notes:

[1] Poale Zion, “Workers of Zion”, a movement of Marxist-Zionist Jewish workers, founded in Europe in the early 20^th century after the Bund decided not to support Zionism. It became a worldwide movement, and was very important in the establishment of the state of Israel.

[2] The Battle of Cable Street, in the East End of London on 4th October 1936, was a series of clashes between the police, protecting a march by the Union of Fascists, and anti-fascist demonstrators. The demonstrators far outnumbered the Fascist marchers. C 150 demonstrators were arrested, and 175 people were injured.

[3] On 7^th June 1934 the British Union of Fascists held a rally in the Olympia Stadium in London. 10,000 people attended. The meeting was disrupted by anti-fascist protesters inside and demonstrators outside. There was violence on both sides, and the event was subsequently discussed in the House of Commons.

[4] Machon L’Madrichei Chutz La’Aretz (“Institute for Youth Leaders from Abroad”), is a gathering of young people in Jerusalem from different  Zionist youth movements, which educate and strengthen youth leadership, focused on Israel and Zionism. The Machon opened in 1946, at the initiative of the World Zionist Organization.

[5] Uri Avnery 1923 – 2018, journalist, MK and activist. He visited Yasser Arafat in 1982, and founded the Gush Shalom peace movement in 1993.

[6] Matzpen, a revolutionary socialist and antizionist political organisation founded in Israel in 1962 and active until the 1980s. The founding members included Moshe Machover and Akiva Orr.

[7] The Spiro Institute later became the London Jewish Cultural Centre then split to become The Spiro Ark.

[8] Hadash is a far-left political coalition in Israel founded in 1977 and led by Ayman Odeh MK. The majority of its supporters are Palestinian citizens of Israel. It generally has four or five seats in the Knesset.

[9] Meretz is a social-democratic and secular political party in Israel emphasising a two-state solution. It was formed in 1992 by the merger of Ratz, Mapam and Shinui parties, and was at its peak between 1992 and 1996 when it had 12 seats in the Knesset.

[10] Uri Davis, born 1943 in Jerusalem. Held many academic posts in the UK eg in Bradford dept of Peace Studies. Describes himself as a “Palestinian Hebrew of Jewish origin”. He is the first Jewish person to be elected to Fatah’s Revolutionary Council, in 2009. He converted to Islam on marrying a Palestinian Muslim in 2006, and lives in Israel.

[11] Israel and the Palestinian Territories: the rough guide, Daniel Jacobs, Shirley Eber and Francesca Silvani, 1998

[12] Haider Abdel-Shafi, 1919-2207, Gaza physician, founder member of the PLO and leader of Palestinian Delegation to Madrid conference 1991

[13] Bassam Shaka’a, 1930-2019, Mayor of Nablus 1976-1982. He lost both legs in a 1980 car-bomb campaign against Palestinian mayors by a Jewish settler terrorist group, Jewish Underground

[14] Yitzhak Rabin, Israeli PM from 1992, played a lead role in the signing of the Oslo Accords. In November 1995, at the end of a mass rally in Tel Aviv in support of the peace process, he was assassinated by a right-wing extremist.

[15] Yom Kippur war, 6-25 October 1973, began with a surprise attack by Egypt on the Sinai peninsula and by Syria on the Golan Heights. Though Israel regained the territory lost, the war led ultimately to the 1978 Camp David accords, the return of the Sinai peninsula to Egypt and the 1979 Egypt-Israel peace treaty.

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