On Palestine, for the Jewish community

I am ashamed to admit that I didn’t engage in Palestinian solidarity until very recently. I’m ashamed about this for a few reasons. First is that Palestinian liberation is a fundamental part of the politics I claim to hold. Secondly, I’m Jewish, and therefore believe I have an even greater responsibility to engage in this situation given that the oppression and genocide of Palestinian people is being done in my name. Not only that but I am a British Jew, and much of this horror was started and maintained by the British. Both my heritage and my nationality demand that I listen up, speak up, and take action, but until very recently, I did none of that.

I know partly why I’ve shied away from this for so long, and I know my experience will be familiar to many. I was, like most other British Jews, indoctrinated into Zionism by virtue of my family, my wider community, my synagogue, and by the Jewish youth movement I was involved with from my mid-teens.

Unlike the scale of the propaganda we’re seeing coming out of Israel, the US and beyond at the moment, our indoctrination was much more subtle. It wasn’t that we were told not to question the existence of Israel and the occupation of Palestine, we weren’t even told there was anything to question. Bear in mind that whilst I’m not that old, the internet wasn’t like it is today when I was in my teens. Social media was only just emerging, Instagram and TikTok didn’t exist, and it was very much a space to repost Taylor Swift lyrics as you deeped your feels, looking out a rainy bus window, imagining yourself in a music video.

I have been to the state of Israel only once, aged sixteen with my ‘liberal’ youth movement. This is a right of passage for most Jewish teenagers, a massive group trip with all our friends to this land that we supposedly had some claim to. It was recognised as a natural desire to want to visit Israel, something we just did as Jewish people. This wasn’t overtly a birthright trip (a free trip to Israel paid for by the Israeli state to draw the diaspora ‘back home’), but it was meant to encourage us to feel deeper affiliation for that nation.

On this trip, we would dabble in some Zionist education before going to the beach, or wandering round a market eating falafel. In the evenings, we’d laugh until we couldn’t breathe and sing stupid songs we’d made up that day. We went kayaking, rode camels, slept in a Bedouin tent. I lay this all out because I am still a little embarrassed that I didn’t grasp the political and moral magnitude of this trip at the time, but I am also considerate that in the moment, I didn’t have the means to see this experience as anything other than a fun holiday.

Since then, I’ve never been back, not wished I was there, wanted to return, or felt called to be there. My connection to my Jewishness doesn’t come from Israel. To me, this concept is completely alien and bizarre given that I am a descendant of Eastern-European Jews. It’s striking that I have never been to my ancestral homelands in Poland and Lithuania, yet it was inevitable that I would visit Israel at such a young age.

What I have now learnt about what Israel has done and continues to do to Palestinians and their land has dramatically changed me. It has changed how I view my Jewishness and my responsibility as a Jewish person to act in solidarity with Palestinian liberation. I think of the children in Gaza who are writing their names on their bodies so they can be identified if they’re bombed. I think of the more than 20,000 people who have been killed in the last 10 weeks, of the hospitals, schools, libraries, universities, homes, leisure centres and shops that have been destroyed. This is a genocide of a people; it is also the ethnic cleansing of an entire people’s way of life.

I think of the journalists who have been targeted and killed for exposing the truth of what’s happening in Gaza. I think of a child without parents, wandering alone in dust and rubble, screaming for their mother. I think about how all of this is being done in my name, in my safety, and I break.

I hold my deepest Jewish connection with my paternal grandparents, who were from Yiddish-speaking peasant stock. My grandfather was a communist who built roads in former Yugoslavia, my grandma’s upbringing in London’s East End was traditionally Jewish and poor. My relationship to Jewishness has always been deeply intertwined with theirs, despite my own upbringing being substantially different. They built my values and politics, and even as they grew older and, as per the old person psychological phenomenon, became less tolerant, I held on. If anything, I became more radical.

Like most Jews in this country and, I imagine, beyond, my grandfather changed his surname when he was eighteen. It was too Jewish, too Polish, too foreign, and he knew it would prevent him from getting work. That legacy of antisemitism of course lives on in my own surname, something that defines me in such a specific and shallow way. I have grown up with that knowledge, but I have also always been aware that as a middle class white person, I have never faced discrimination the way many people in this country have. I have never been shouted at in the street and told to go home. I have never been passed over for a job, called racial slurs, my health and life expectancy are not limited by virtue of my Jewishness. I am not targeted by the police or the state, I am not at a greater risk of prison or arrest. Unless I state my Jewishness, I am just white.

I won’t delve too much into the whiteness or otherness of Jews here, except to say that there must be both an acknowledgement of the whiteness of white Jews, and our history – and sometimes present – of being racialised as other. Race is a social construct and dependent on context. In one country I am just white, but in another I am Jewish before I’m white, or perhaps not considered white at all. It’s complex and nuanced, but I acknowledge that in my own life and existence, I benefit from all the privileges and power of whiteness.

It’s important to point out that some Jews in Britain do experience more material discrimination, namely those who are more visibly Jewish. Black Jews and Jews of colour also have unique and specific experiences of intersecting racisms that I have never and will never experience. Much of this occurs within the Jewish community itself, as well as outside of it. I think it’s also important to hold that our whiteness doesn’t entirely prevent antisemitism. I have experienced it in small, subtle, nuanced ‘microaggressions’, and I have also seen it happen in bigger, scarier ways. I don’t undermine the existence and lived reality of antisemitism, but I think it’s crucial to examine how it manifests and ensure that we hold that in solidarity and contrast with all forms of racism.

Though I am still grappling with the exact language to use when describing Jewishness in racialised terms, what became clear to me aged sixteen upon returning from Israel was that antisemitism and the marginalisation of Jewish people was not a particularly profound reality. Indeed, we had our own entire country, one that would pay us, give us a house and a job if we were to ‘return’.

At this time in my life, I had also become interested in the abolition of the death penalty, of the deep racial inequalities of the prison system, of structural racism, racial capitalism and institutional inequality. In contrast, my friends, family and community seemed to be concerned with one thing and one thing only: Israel. Antisemitism was the only form of racism they seemed to want to talk about, and we othered ourselves in a way that I didn’t see us being othered by non-Jews. It was totally at odds with my emerging understanding of racialisation, structural oppression and marginalisation. I became bored, frustrated and angry, and I gradually began moving away from my Jewish friends and the community more widely.

The further I delved into my learning, the more I pushed down antisemitism as something to think and worry about. Then, Corbyn. The Corbyn era. This is where everything changed for me. Suddenly, claims of antisemitism were everywhere. There was no doubt of its powerful reemergence, and it was scary. Actually, it was terrifying. At least, that’s how it felt at the time. For so long I had considered antisemitism something that didn’t require much attention. I was grateful for my whiteness and seldom had to worry about my identity being a problem or something I should hide. But, suddenly, the atmosphere in the UK seemed to change. Any mention of the Labour Party was intrinsically linked to a sense of unsafety. Corbyn’s name became synonymous with antisemitism, and the atmosphere in the UK became tinged with something I had not yet felt.

I can see now that all this was part and parcel of the Zionist indoctrination I was surrounded by. I was told that this particular narrative was antisemitic, and so I was scared. Fear made me mute, uninquisitive, disengaged. I backed away and accepted what I was hearing without the type of critical analysis I apply to everything else.

I think this is what is happening now for many Jewish people. I know that many Jews feel as scared as I did back in the Corbyn era about facing antisemitism in pro-Palestine spaces. One of the fundamental learnings I’ve undertaken in the past two months is that the majority of what I was told and believed to be antisemitism back in 2019 was, in fact, not. Like then, we are being fed the same story that this current moment has caused a sudden spike in antisemitism and that we should be scared. Antisemitism is being used as a tool to scaremonger people into silence. This is obviously a problem, not least because it minimises actual antisemitism.

And this is important. Antisemitism is real and it has reared its head in this moment, but in order to take it seriously we must make accurate calls on what is actually antisemitism, and what is being fabricated, enhanced or blown out of proportion in order to prevent action.

We all know that social media is not helping. I acknowledge my luck in already having radical leftists in my life who have patiently, powerfully and crucially educated me through online and in person conversations. But I am constantly reminded about what British Jews are up against in coming to learn, really learn, about Palestine.

I say this again: I am ashamed, rather sickened, in fact, that it has taken me this long to come to stand in solidarity. To take up the anti-Zionist stance with fervour. But I am also trying to give myself grace, to recognise the indoctrination I am having to break through, and the disengagement I’ve held for so long with this reality because it felt too difficult, too scary and overwhelming to broach.

It is no longer viable to simply sit in the discomfort. I must push through it, and I am. I am learning every day, and I am unlearning. I still have many questions, reservations, fears and thoughts that ruminate and feel impossible to address – but I know that is no excuse.

We have just seen the US Congress declare that anti-Zionism is antisemitic. Perhaps sixteen-year-old me might have bought into this, but now I believe with my entire soul that it is the existence of Israel that constitutes the most antisemitic project on the planet. I am convinced more and more every day that the need is growing for Jewish people who support Palestinian liberation to speak up about it. We are not the most important voices by far. But within our own families and communities, we have immense power to relieve ourselves of Zionism, to relinquish the control it has held over us and engage in active solidarity.

It’s at this point that I falter between wanting to explain what anti-Zionism is and why it must be, and not wanting to regurgitate information that’s already out there. Because I have started in this vein, I’ll speak a little to why I believe that Israel is an antisemitic project, why it does not have a right to exist, why Jewishness and anti-Zionism are inextricably linked, and why the liberation of Palestine is a core Jewish value.

I don’t believe that Jewish safety is the central concern here. However, what I have come to see is that it can’t be discarded entirely. Particularly within our own community, the question of what happens to Jews without Israel is one we can’t ignore. I will take a moment to explain why Palestinian liberation is intertwined with Jewish safety, but I can only do that by first making it clear that the safety and existence of the Palestinian people is and should be our first and foremost consideration. There is no hierarchy of who deserves to live free from oppression – we all do – but in a world where there is an occupier and an occupied, the latter will always be at the centre of liberation struggle.

Jews have undoubtedly been persecuted going back as far a history exists, driven out of every place we have settled. Today, it is also true to say that Jews are able to live and work freely, comfortably and safely in most of Europe, but this safety is conditional, and the conditions revolve around our assimilation to whiteness. The more we assimilate, the safer we are, and so, naturally, we have assimilated.

In fact, we have assimilated far too much. Israel is an example of how we have imbued white supremacy. We were once not white, and not able to assimilate, and so we have taken on the idea of whiteness as power because we were once powerless. Israel is one way we have been able to move into whiteness, and we have done so with vim. But it comes with a great cost that we should never be willing to pay. We must also recognise that whilst Jews and Zionism are not synonymous, Zionism is carried out in the name of Judaism. As Jewish people, we must reject this violence and occupation in the strongest terms, whilst acknowledging that it is Israel who perpetuates the blurring of these lines through exerting the ethnonational white Jewish state.

Israel is described often as a settler colonial project. It’s a complex phrase, but the reality is relatively simple: white European people displaced and replaced those native to the land of Palestine. The reasons for doing this were not in the name of Jewish safety. In fact, if anything, antisemitism was the driving force, alongside political power grabs.

As Yoav Litvin wrote for Al Jazeera: “Zionism is a racist and settler colonialist movement, which opportunistically coopts aspects of Judaism in an attempt to justify its criminal practices of apartheid and genocide of indigenous Palestinians. White supremacy is dominant within Israeli society, which privileges white-skinned Ashkenazi Jews at the expense of dark-skinned African Jews, Sephardi and Mizrahi Jews as well as African refugees. African/black Jewish communities are often denied recognition by Israeli authorities with some members even deported.”

Israel was founded to satisfy the UK and US’s desire to exert power in the Middle East, a region they had not yet managed to colonise. They leapt on already existent Zionism and welded it together with their own antisemitism. We know that the West didn’t want Jews to settle there. The idea that they could be shipped off to a far away land was received and endorsed with glee. The West combined these evils in a project that has led to the genocide and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians for the last 75 years.

Zionism is harmful to Palestinian and, perhaps in less obvious ways, it is also harmful to Jews. Those who resist both within and outside of Israel face harsh punishment, police violence and detention. In the diaspora, many of us are experiencing the isolation that comes with openly expressing pro-Palestine views. I know people who have been banned from their synagogues, no longer speak to members of their family and shunned by their communities.

Zionism is a violent project, mostly for Palestinian people – but also for Jewish people. “Israel’s apparent lack of concern even for its own people, as it attacks Gaza wholesale while 199 Israelis are reportedly held hostage there, should remind us that human lives (including the lives of Jews) are not its top priority,” write Sarah Lazare & Maya Schenwar in Truthout.

And Jewish Voice for Peace, an anti-Zionist US-based movement, wrote this in 2019: “Many of us have learned from Zionism to treat our neighbors with suspicion, to forget the ways Jews built home and community wherever we found ourselves to be. Jewish people have had long and integrated histories in the Arab world and North Africa, living among and sharing community, language and custom with Muslims and Christians for thousands of years.”

Some claim that Israel is the natural and necessary response to the Holocaust; a Jewish state for those who managed to survive and their ancestors. But in its creation, it catalysed another genocide. How can anyone agree with the existence of a state supposedly designed to keep one group of people safe by enacting onto another the exact same horrors that were enacted onto us? Hypocrisy is not strong enough of a word to describe this farce.

Nation states do not have the right to exist – people do. Jewish people do, and Palestinian people do, but Israel sets forth the concept that in order for the former to be true, the latter cannot. That is not a concept I can accept, and it’s not one I understand that any Jewish person can live with.

We should not need a ‘Jewish’ reason to oppose the state of Israel – we should do this because of our humanity disconnected from our heritage. But if you need it, if you are searching for the Jewish roots of anti-Zionism, it is precisely because of what happened to us that we can and should reject the existence of the state of Israel in the strongest terms.

If you’re not Jewish and you’re scared to be outspoken for Palestine, I am here to tell you that you cannot use antisemitism as an excuse for that fear. There is a strong lobby pushing the agenda that any support for Palestine is antisemitic. I know how strong this lobby is, because until very recently I believed that too.

You need to look further and deeper, you need to speak to anti-Zionist Jews and not rely on the mainstream, right-leaning, pro-Israel Jewish community. You need to look at a statement and ask yourself, is it really antisemitic to say ‘free Palestine’? Is it really antisemitic to support resistance to a violent, apartheid colonial project that has displaced hundreds of thousands of people from their homes and land, and is committing a genocide? Is it really antisemitic to march at a demo for the liberation of those people, to demand that they should be able to exist?

To my Jewish community, we must remember that as a historically persecuted people, we have a duty to unlearn the fear and indoctrination that has led us into supporting, being apathetic to or not outrightly condemning a genocide.

And all of us need to very seriously reconsider what we mean when we talk about antisemitism. It exists, it’s real, and in some guises it is getting worse. It is not, however, an excuse to disengage. We cannot allow antisemitism to be weaponised and therefore minimised. If anything, this is a perfect time to learn more about what antisemitism is and how it manifests, and therefore why Israel is an antisemitic project, and how Jewish people can truly be safe.

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Big huge thanks to everyone who read this before I published it, especially R who gave extraordinary edits and insights. Thanks also to every Palestinian who continues to share their stories of occupation and terror to ensure we know what is happening. You empower and inspire international struggle and solidarity. From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.