Jewish Journeys from Zionism – Katy Colley (7)

JVL Introduction

This, the seventh in our series, is Katy Colley’s journey.  Through her interview with Kitty Warnock, she outlines her experiences, her thoughts and her struggles, especially since October 7th and also the connections with Palestinian people, which has been so important for her.  She covers a lots of ground and says that “We have to fight for the very soul of Judaism right now. To be honest, I think I’m the last person to be fighting it because I have never been religious, but that doesn’t mean I don’t have a place in this struggle as an atheist Jew. I’m glad and proud to stand alongside a lot of good people fighting it.”

LL

Childhood

My dad came from quite a religious household, but he rejected religion – he felt it had been forced down his throat. His siblings didn’t: in fact, one of them made Aliyah with his wife.  My mother was also Jewish but her upbringing had not been religious. But she loved the traditions of my dad’s family: the warm and family-oriented atmosphere, all about family and food. She felt very connected to it. So although we didn’t go to synagogue on a regular basis, culturally we had a very Jewish upbringing, with Friday night dinners and so on. Saturday afternoon tea was a hive of activity in my Bubbie and Zaydie’s home in Edgware, with family and friends dropping round to chat and eat Bubbie’s famous honey cake[i].

Index of all the personal stories

We went to Israel quite a few times when I was growing up, to visit the family.  We’d get together at big family events and all have a good time. I didn’t feel any particular connection to Israel. I didn’t feel much about it, other than slight discomfort at there being so many soldiers around all the time. The line I was always told was, “Your poor cousins, every time they get on a bus they have to check under the seats to see if there’s a bomb there.”  It was seen as a terrible situation that they had no control over. I was bemused by the fact that although we weren’t religious, my uncle’s family wanted us to really love Israel.

Adolescence

When I was about fourteen I joined a youth group called the Jewish Youth Study Group. I found it for myself – it certainly wasn’t something my parents particularly encouraged in any religious sense.   I went to an all-girls’ school, so I think I was just looking for some social life, some boys to snog – and I found them! We’d get together on a Sunday evening, usually in someone’s house and there might be a talk or theme to the evening. Then, we’d come together twice a year for the national groups, summer and winter camps. I fell in love, I smoked weed, I had a lot of fun. It was a real coming-of-age time for me. There were lots of religious aspects but I tried to ignore the religious side as much as possible. I don’t know what I was doing there, quite honestly, as I’d grown up in an atheist household. I remember during one group we studied the prayer, “Thank you, God, for not making me a woman,” and I was thinking, “That’s awful! Thank goodness I don’t believe any of this stuff!”

(By the way, I wasn’t totally frivolous at this stage of my life. I was a member of the Anti-Apartheid Movement, and a passionate anti-vivisectionist.)

At sixteen, I went on ‘Tour’, as it was known, just like many Jewish teenagers from north London. I think it is now called the Birthright Tour. I had no particular yearning to be in Israel – for me, it was a chance to get away from my family, go away alone for the first time, to be independent. I wanted to meet new people, have new experiences. Which I did, and it was really good fun. We did all the things that you’re meant to do, and we were even in what’s called Gadna: you dress up as if you were in the military, you’re taught how to shoot a gun, and it’s very much like playing soldiers, but you’re being trained, by the actual IDF.[ii] Looking back now, the level of indoctrination was quite shocking, but I didn’t know that at the time.

I didn’t take it too seriously. I was probably drinking too much and smoking too much dope – there was a lot of dope around, frankly. And a lot of just being teenagers. I was a good little soldier in some respects. Or maybe that’s what they tell you to make you feel connected to the experience. I just remember these IDF soldiers shouting at me in an American accent: ‘Katy, get the Jerry can!’  There were these massive 20 litre jerrycans and I was five foot nothing, staggering under the weight of them.

For four days we were ‘trained’ and I learned how to take a gun apart and put it together, but on the last day I refused to shoot it. I didn’t have any desire to shoot a gun. In any case, for me this was all secondary to the sense of camaraderie and community that they created on these trips. I met people from different parts of the UK, and you just have a laugh, you wear the “Israel 1991” T-shirts, and you sing a lot of songs – there’s a lot of singing! – and it’s all part of becoming a group, a community.

Going to a kibbutz was part of the trip, and there was talk about ‘making Aliya’. It was almost Messianic:  the tour leaders would tell us, “I remember the first time I came on Tour, it was amazing, it changed my life.” You were made to think you were on a life-changing experience. These leaders weren’t far away from you in age, and you really related to them. There was lot of freedom to take drugs, smoke, drink – you were made to feel it was all OK. But I never met a Palestinian and I never heard a Palestinian perspective.

Passive Zionism

After that I just went off and lived my life – went to university, met new people, had different experiences in other countries. As I said, I felt no connection to Israel and didn’t think much more about it.

My parents were what was commonly called ‘liberal Zionists’. They felt that Israel had to exist, and there was just no argument to be had there. They’d been brought up in the shadow of the Holocaust, thinking there wasn’t any other way.  And perhaps there was still something romantic about it in their minds, about ‘plucky little Israel’. But to be honest, we didn’t discuss it much.  I assumed ‘doing Israel’ was just part of Judaism. At a Bar Mitzvah, you all got up to toast the President of Israel, there were JNF collecting boxes in every synagogue, everyone had some connection to Israel. It was just part of being Jewish.

Perhaps one of the reasons I didn’t feel much connection to Israel was that Israeli culture felt very macho, very militaristic. Men seemed to have such a lot of power in society. Power came from force. Guns were everywhere. I didn’t feel particularly safe there. I came from a very egalitarian household where my mum ran a business, my dad was a house-husband, and guns just didn’t feature in our lives.

I sometimes wonder if my rejection of Judaism was in some way a rejection of the Israeli nationalist ideology. All the Jews I knew “did Israel” but I didn’t want to do it. It’s very difficult to separate.

Perspective begins to shift

For the next decade, in the same way as my religion didn’t have much to do with my life, neither did Israel. I was a journalist, with an exciting career, and Israel didn’t play a part in it. That is, until I met my husband, when I was thirty. His opinion of Israel was very different from mine. From early on he was saying things I’d never heard before, about Israel being a terrorist state. We had heated arguments, sometimes involving my parents; I remember sitting round the table and them saying, again, “Israel has the right to exist, you can’t argue with that”. I had still never heard the word “Nakba”, and I’d never heard any Palestinian narrative or experience. But it was the start of a shift in my perspective; at least I tuned in a bit more to what was going on. The Iraq war changed my thinking in a lot of ways. I was very strongly against it, and I left my job the week the war broke out: I was working for the Sun, and resigned because of their rabidly pro-war stance.

Then came the 2014 war on Gaza – “Protective Edge” – and I remember how horrified I was. I was paying a lot more attention. My husband Phil and I staged a two-person protest outside the Imperial War Museum, where there’s that quote attributed to Edmund Burke, “All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.”  We stood at that spot on a Saturday, with our signs against Israel’s actions in Gaza.

The Break

Things got quite difficult between me and my husband during the years of the manufactured antisemitism crisis in the Labour Party after Corbyn became leader. I was saying, “There must be something there” – although I couldn’t see where the antisemitism was. There were no examples of it as far as I could see, but friends who were in the party at the time were telling me how dreadful it was – they were leaving the party – poor Luciana Berger – they were very alarmed about what was going on.  I was asking, “Where is it? Am I blind?”  and Phil was saying, “It’s not about antisemitism, this is about Israel, this is about Palestine.” We had terrible rows. I was so angry and confused, eventually I said, “I need to find out more.” So we went along to a local Palestine Solidarity event, where the writer Ben White was speaking about his book, Israeli Apartheid: a beginner’s guide.[iii] I read the book in advance, and thought, ‘Oh, that’s a bit shocking,’ but it was told in such a dispassionate and factual way, it was easy for me to really receive the information.

Hearing him speak, explaining the basic injustices that I had not really learned about until this moment, opened my eyes that there was something seriously wrong with what I had been told and had believed – the core foundational myths of Israel that it was a land without a people for a people without a land, and so on. I got very interested and started reading more: Ilan Pappé’s The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, Ghada Karmi’s In search of Fatima.  I went to meetings, and tuned in to media that I hadn’t been reading before, like Middle East Eye and Al Jazeera.

I realised, ‘I’ve been missing half the story all this time.’ And since then everything’s changed. After that first meeting I went to another, and then we started going to the group’s planning meetings, and within two months one of the founders of the group – Gill Knight – said, “I think we should make Katy the chair!”  At this point I was still very ignorant and undeserving of the role, but I’ve learned a lot since.

I’ve been making a journey in my understanding and analysis – and I’m really very, very proud that my parents have made this journey with me. I was already involved when lockdown happened, and I said to my mum and dad, “Come along to one of our Zoom meetings.” That’s when we had Ilan Pappé and Ghada Karmi speaking, and they were brilliant. From that point on my mum and dad too started to read, and I sent them books. They were discovering a lot they didn’t know.  One time my mum said, “But they planted all those parks.”  I said, “What do you mean?”  “They made the desert bloom.” Another foundational myth! I showed her all the articles by Stop the JNF[iv] on how they destroyed Palestinian villages and planted parks over the ruins to cover up the crime of ethnic cleansing and prevent the Palestinians returning home. All those elements to the settler-colonialism, we’ve been picking it apart, seeing how it has been promoted to us. My parents recently found out that they can opt out of paying the monthly contribution from their synagogue membership to the Board of Deputies. My mum is furious at how they’ve promoted the Israeli narrative, even as Israel carries out a genocide in Gaza.

Reflecting on the one-sided view

I think Jewish communities in Western countries have been used, unwittingly, to serve the purpose of ethnic cleansing and dispossession of the indigenous Palestinian population. I think we were hijacked, brainwashed, and indoctrinated. I’d never understood that until I read about the Nakba from Ben White. I wonder why it was that book that got to me: perhaps because it came from a completely dispassionate place of facts. You know the Jewish guilt we’re famous for? There is nothing quite so powerful as the inherited trauma that we have been made to feel down the generations, that we are permanently under threat.  I never heard it discussed in any other way than emotional, and I adopted that attitude as well, which prevented me from looking at it with clear eyes.

Another reason I think I failed to engage with the question of Zionism was that we were always told it’s complicated by our Western press. I was an intelligent person, I went to Oxford University, I shouldn’t have believed that. The media have a terrible role in this, the way they strip out context from the events they report in Israel and Palestine. To this day I can look at a BBC report on a murder in the West Bank and have no idea what the meaning of it is, because it is so stripped of context it is impossible to understand what’s going on. So you think, ‘Yes, it does sound complicated.’

I’m not excusing my blind ignorance for a long time, but it was absolutely accepted that Israel is part of being Jewish. The film Israelism explains that Israel has almost replaced religion as a way of being Jewish. Your devotion, your dedication and your love of Israel is now your identity instead of Judaism. No wonder some people feel that criticism of Israel is an attack on their person, on their personality: they have adopted Israel as a new form of Judaism. The conflation of criticising Israel with antisemitism has been deliberate, of course – to make Israel untouchable and allow it to do whatever it wants to do, and to dehumanise the Palestinians. A lot of people have become frightened to say or even think anything against Israel, because of this campaign to conflate antizionism with antisemitism – which is how we have come to this place, where we are watching a genocide take place and no one is saying a damn thing about it. I’ve never said I’m Jewish so much as I have since becoming part of the solidarity movement. I’ve spent a lifetime ignoring it, but now I can’t stop banging on about it, just to help people understand the distinction between a religion and a political, nationalist ideology. I want to give people the confidence to speak out because fear of saying something wrong has become automatic and reflexive. And that fear is killing Palestinians.

In the UK, if you are Jewish, and to some extent if you’re not, you will have undergone indoctrination from a young age. Look at the diabolical state of history teaching on this subject.  I actually intervened when my daughter was being taught about it in a geography lesson. There was no mention of the Nakba, no mention of the Amnesty International report about apartheid[v], which I thought was absolutely landmark. I gently suggested to the teacher that she should include these in lessons, and I mentioned some resources, and she said, “Yes, thank you, I will.” It’s very important to counter the idea that being Jewish makes you automatically identify as a Zionist.

Criticism of Israel certainly doesn’t touch my own Judaism, which is all about family, culture, food, getting round the table on Saturday afternoon, homemade biscuits and bridge rolls and cards and maybe a row – that’s my Judaism.

Calling myself antizionist

I didn’t know what to call myself for a long time in regard to Zionism. I was still a bit confused and muddy in my thinking. I related to the statement from Jewish Voice for Peace, that Zionism is a failed answer to the very real question of European antisemitism, but I was still scared of using the word, antizionism.  October 7^th – or rather, Israel’s response – crystallised things a bit. Now I’m absolutely clear: I think that Zionism is the political movement at the heart of the colonisation of Palestine, and it needs to be defeated, as an idea and an ideology. It’s very different from Judaism, which is a religion. Thanks to Professor David Miller, we are now able to say that we are antizionist in the workplace and we are protected from discrimination[vi]. Not enough people know about this but it’s such an important legal protection. It has also given me confidence to speak openly about my own antizionism. The Miller judgement drives a coach and horses through the IHRA definition[vii].  One of the examples attached to the definition is that you’re not allowed to say that Israel is a racist state.  Antizionism is the belief that Israel is a racist colonial state. In order to create an exclusively Jewish state, you have to get rid of the existing population.

Even though I’m not a religious person and come from a quite loosely Zionist household, this journey has been long and difficult for me. I imagine some people will never be able to make it. It’s going to take a long time, and a lot of understanding and compassion on all sides. Some non-Zionists say, “I can’t talk to this person, I can’t talk to that one,” cutting people out of their lives because they’re Zionists. I understand that, and have certainly felt the same in the last five months. At the same time, I’m aware that the person they are talking about could have been me ten years ago.

There’s a whole side of my family that probably considers me the enemy now, and I don’t think we’ll do much talking in the future, but with other parts of the family I’m OK. I think there’s a lot of disruption in Jewish families right now, and it’s really difficult for a lot of people but this is the reckoning we all need. This is the only way to reclaim Judaism from Zionism.

Despair and hope

Among my friends, I haven’t cut anyone out, but there are some I haven’t phoned, because I feel they might not understand how I’m struggling at the moment: the genocide, the actual pain. I never thought we’d come to this. It’s just horrendous, day after day. I don’t think I’ve enjoyed a meal for five months. I’ve tried to say to myself, defiantly, “This isn’t going to ruin my life,” but actually it kind of is. I don’t think I’m the same, I feel so much anger, so much despair.  It’s really deep, it’s life changing.

Since I started my journey towards Palestinian solidarity work, I’ve listened to so many Palestinian voices and stories and met so many amazing Palestinian people, women in particular, who have inspired and impressed me. Through PSC I’ve made incredible connections: I can’t believe I know so many people in Ramallah, Nablus, Jerusalem and Gaza.  I’m always amazed and full of admiration at how much warmth they have, especially towards me as a Jewish person.  They give me a lot of credit for that, which I feel quite conflicted about. I try to maintain hope, as they do.  I take my cue from them, I try to learn as much as possible about their struggle.

They use words in ways I didn’t understand before, like “Martyr”: “so-and-so has been martyred.” I didn’t understand, how have they been martyred? But every single Palestinian I’ve met feels a sense that this person killed is part of their people, their liberation from occupation. They are all part of a long tradition of struggle. Now I understand how every person killed in that struggle is a martyr to the cause. I honour that. Every single Palestinian is part of the same struggle, wherever they are – Jerusalem, Hastings, they are all connected, they’re one people.

I love being part of our local Palestine Solidarity Group – it has been such a fantastic source of learning and community for me. And it helps to be organising instead of sinking into despair and anger. For example, we don’t just do protests, we also put on cultural events like Palestine on the Pier, we’ve hosted loads of speakers and fundraisers. We’ve tried to vary our events, to give people a way in, to give them a way to find us. I believe groups like ours play a crucial role in educating people, given all the propaganda and the deliberate attempt to keep people ignorant by the mainstream media.

I went to Belfast in 2022 to a conference of an amazing international educational project, the Hands Up Project, which connects children in Palestine with children and volunteers all over the world. They pioneered a new dramatic art form called Remote theatre, plays that children write and perform (in English) via Zoom. They were using Zoom before anyone else had heard of it. Through the Hands Up Project I’ve made many more connections and I now have friends in Gaza.

The duty to speak out

On October 7^th, that very day, we had arranged in our community in Hastings to have a meeting about Journeys from Zionism. The idea had come to me when Jenin was attacked last summer, and we had an “I stand with Jenin” vigil. I was in the middle of a speech, once again making the point that “Being Jewish does not mean I’m a Zionist.”  And at that moment, I looked around at our group and every other person was Jewish! I thought, ‘My goodness there are so many Jews in the group, a far bigger proportion than you might expect given the small size of the Jewish community in Hastings.’ That’s when I asked the group, “Shall we have a meeting on this, how you came to this point? You all have very different stories to tell.”

On October 7^th, I woke up to a text message from Ya’ir – who refers to himself as a “former Israeli” – asking if we should postpone our meeting because of the attack. Of course we knew it was a big thing, but I said “Why? I don’t think we should postpone. It is always important to show people that there is this journey that needs to take place, this deprogramming.” When we told those stories on October 7^th, it felt like a really important thing.

We have to fight for the very soul of Judaism right now. To be honest, I think I’m the last person to be fighting it because I have never been religious, but that doesn’t mean I don’t have a place in this struggle as an atheist Jew. I’m glad and proud to stand alongside a lot of good people fighting it. I appreciate too that I am privileged to make known my views, and I must use that. I feel it is my duty, since I have the ability to speak out. A lot of Palestinians don’t – they are silenced.

When I went on the first march after October 7th, with my sign saying “This Jew stands with Gaza. End the Occupation!”  I had a lot of media attention, and I made sure that I spoke to as many press teams as possible, to say there are many Jews of conscience like myself who stand against the occupation. It was a really emotional day. I connected with a lot of Arabic and Muslim women who were surprised but pleased I was there, making such a strong statement. We held each other and cried. Subsequently, my parents have been on marches too and they have had people come up to them and shake their hands, saying, “I just want to say, thank you for being here.”  Our existence destroys any argument that speaking out against Israel is in any way antisemitic. Hence, I don’t think there is anything more important than speaking out to counter real antisemitism.

The future for Israel

I want to see apartheid and Zionism dismantled, the way apartheid was dismantled in South Africa. I’d like to see that way forward, for every person in Palestine and Israel to be free and equal citizens side by side. Right now the path to get there looks very dangerous but I do expect to see a free Palestine in my lifetime. I take so much strength from my Palestinian friends. Sumud, they tell me, the Arabic word for steadfastness, and I practice Sumud. I am in this fight now till the end and nothing will deter me or throw me off course.

How are Israelis going to learn to live side by side with Palestinians as equal citizens? I know for most it’s going to be hard. However much gas-lighting we’ve undergone, it’s far worse for them. Israeli society is racist from top to bottom. I hear historians and commentators saying “The Zionism project is over, it’s the end of colonialism” – I’ve heard it from Ilan Pappe, and others and I think that is probably true.  But I don’t know how it happens, what it looks like. It’s true that young people all over the world are antizionist. And the reason for Israel’s existence no longer holds: Israel was sold to us as a safe space for Jews, but I can’t think of anywhere less safe now. Who would make Aliya now? You would have to be a fanatical Zionist, probably a Christian Zionist. As the justification for Israel’s existence, and thus its deliberate policy of ethnic cleansing and violence against the indigenous population, is shown to be wholly false, I can see that it will not take too long for the whole weight of the project to collapse in on itself. How and when that happens is a question none of us can answer.

[i] Bubbie and Zaydie – Yiddish for Grandma and Grandpa.

[ii] Gadna is a program for young people established in the early 1940s by the Haganah which became the core of the IDF. Alongside preliminary training for military service, Gadna clubs taught Zionist history, promoted love of the land of Israel and encouraged members to engage in farming and volunteerism.

[iii] Ben White, Israeli Apartheid: A Beginner’s Guide, Pluto Press, 2009, 2^nd ed 2014

[iv] Stop the JNF is an international campaign launched in 2009 to educate people about the role of the Jewish National Fund in the continuing displacement of Palestinians and to end the charitable status the JNF enjoys in many countries

[v]Israel’s Apartheid: cruel system of domination and crime against humanity, report by Amnesty International, Feb 2022

[vi] Professor David Miller, Professor of Sociology at the University of Bristol from 2018 to 2021, when his employment was terminated following allegations of antisemitism. On 5 February 2024, an employment tribunal found that Miller’s dismissal was unfair, because his antizionist beliefs qualify as a philosophical belief and a protected characteristic under the 2010 Equality Act.

[vii] The “IHRA definition” is a definition of antisemitism adopted in 2016 by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance. Several of the examples appended to the definition are seen by the definition’s opponents as referring to criticism of Israel rather than to antisemitism, and the campaign to get the definition adopted by governments, government bodies and institutions has been controversial.

Index of all the personal stories