This diary has been bouncing around my head for the past several days, but after writing this comment yesterday in LaFeminista's diary on the possibility of a one-state outcome to the Israel/Palestinian conflict I kind of thought I had gotten it out of my system. But then Christopher Day suggested I turn the comment into a diary, pointing out the power of personal narratives in breaking down stereotypes and prejudices.
I knew he was right, so on the flip -- if you're interested -- you can find how I went from young Zionist to something quite different today.
My parents are secular Jews. The story in my father's family is that my grandfather ran away from home as a boy because his father, my great grandfather, was forcing him to study to become a cantor. Instead, grandpa Will ran away to sea, joining the crew of a merchant ship as a cabin boy in the early years of the twentieth century. My dad used to tell the story of his only visit to schule when he was a child. He stayed home from school one Rosh Hashanah, playing stickball on the stoop with his brother. When his dad came home from work and found them playing on the street, he marched them straight off to services. His opinion was that religion could not be a simple excuse to miss school, either you take it seriously and go to services or you go to school. From that time on, dad went to school.
My mother's family was more religious -- my maternal grandfather moved in with us when I was about three, and I remember his silver-bound copy of the Torah which he seemed to read regularly. Still, his religion only went so far: when he left the house every day to walk down to the Temple, he meant the Temple Delicatessen, then and now (I last visited in the summer of 2005) the best Jewish restaurant in downtown Cincinnati.
Grandpa may have read the Torah, but my mother identified with Reform Judaism and the compromises of her marriage to my dad meant that though we celebrated the holidays in the house, we didn't keep the Sabbath, we didn't keep kosher, and we didn't belong to a temple. I never really went to services as a child, but I always identified as a Jew.
In second grade, for one year, my parents enrolled us in Hebrew school. I never really knew why they pulled us out of the school after a year, though it may have had to do with a difference of opinion between my parents over whether we should get bar mitzvahs. In any event, my Hebrew school experience was enough to get a first exposure to the alphabet and to begin to learn in an organized way about this wonderful country halfway across the world where people like me could find shelter and a new homeland. I learned about the kibbutzim, those egalitarian cooperatives that were so highly productive they could make the desert bloom. I may be conflating a bit, but it may have been in Hebrew school that I first learned of drip irrigation agriculture, the great symbol of Israeli agrarian innovation. We also learned folk songs, and I kinda fell in love with my Hebrew teacher, who was young, pretty, wore long cotton skirts and had long brunette hair, and played the guitar.
It was 1967.
That summer, as I said, I was out of Hebrew school and I'm still not entirely certain why. But coming out of school didn't affect my own personal Jewish identity. We continued to celebrate the holidays -- in our house, that meant Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur, Purim, Hanukkah, and Passover. For some reason, we didn't celebrate Sukkot, and it wasn't until I was an adult that I realized we were missing a major holiday. Someday I'll ask my mom about that. Around that time also my family joined Cincinnati's Jewish Community Center. I particularly remember playing in the JCC's youth basketball league, though I was never particularly good at that sport.
As I finished my year of Hebrew school -- and the second grade -- Israel fought and won the Six Day War. As a precocious eight-year old, I was aware enough to follow the news. I cheered as Israel handily defeated its Arab enemies, the war itself confirming everything I had learned in Hebrew school about Israeli ingenuity and proving through force of arms that we Jews really did have a right to that land.
We were the good guys, and we showed it in battle.
In the summer of 1968, the summer of love in the US, we went to Israel for a three week visit. My mom's aunt had made aliyah (which is to say, immigrated to Palestine) in the 1920s, she and her husband had one daughter, who had married and had two children at the time of our visit. The older son, Zvi, is just a year or so older than I am.
Zvi and his little sister Orit lived with their parents and grandparents on a moshav in coastal Israel not far from Netanya. A moshav is a kind of agrarian coop where the villagers own their own plots of land but share different kinds of expenses for marketing or production. It's similar to a kibbutz, but allows for more private property. My cousins raised chickens at their house in the village and grew sugar beets and other crops on their farmland outside of town. I particularly remember when my cousin's dad took us out to the farm to harvest the sugar beets. I also remember eating yogurt for the first time in my life, long before yogurt became a common food in the United States.
We traveled all over the country, from Eilat on the Red Sea to Kfar Blum in Galilee, from Haifa to Jerusalem. While I remember my parents saying we hadn't gone to the Occupied Territories (only a year after the war, remember) I also know we visited Jericho and my parents and sister visited Bethlehem (I had diarrhea and stayed in the hotel in Jerusalem that latter day).
I remember soldiers hitch-hiking all over the country. I was thrilled when our driver would stop and pick one up, strong, proud young men carrying rifles and very friendly and open. This one guy we picked up on the road to Jerusalem spoke no English and we spoke no Hebrew. Somehow my mom pulled out enough rudimentary French to communicate with him and we were able to at least exchange greetings. I remember the rusted ruins of tanks in Galilee and around Jerusalem, and it was explained to me that these were solemn reminders of the war, a memorial to the destruction that war can bring. I also remember walking the border with Lebanon, a country which had not participated in the 1967 war, and wondering about and being sad at the barbed wire marking the international boundary.
Why do they hate us? I said to myself. We're only doing good things here, making the desert bloom.
When we got back to Cincinnati I ran into my father and my brother having a discussion about the treatment of Israeli Arabs. My brother was about fifteen at the time and he and my dad had both picked up that Arabs were treated as second-class citizens in Israel. They also had heard my cousin's dad making comments they characterized as racist. I remember arguing with them, that it wasn't true. How could they say that about our relative? He was a great guy, and he even knew how to drive a tractor! He showed me how to harvest sugar beets. I figured my dad and my brother were nuts, that they simply didn't know what they were talking about.
The years after '68 were bad ones for the Arab-Israeli conflict. With the defeat in '67, the PLO decided that only terrorism would work to bring down Israel and some spectacular Palestinian terrorist attacks followed. Plane hijackings became common, as did assassinations and kidnappings. For me, this was tragic, but it also made sense. They were jealous of our success, and they were lashing out as the less-civilized, less-ingenious beings we had repeatedly shown them to be.
I mean, we invented drip irrigation agriculture and made their desert bloom. We had beat their armies in 1967. We had won every previous war we had ever fought against them, including the Independence War when five separate Arab armies invaded our country even as we declared independence. But even though we were small and weak and had no allies anywhere in the world, we still beat all their armies combined. I knew all about that.
I grieved at the Munich massacre and cheered at the Entebbe rescue. I read in the newspaper that the Mossad was the most sophisticated, the most professional, intelligence agency in the world, bar none, and I believed it implicitly. My whole life experience convinced me that the Jewish state, made by people like me for people like me, was clearly and absolutely superior to its Arab enemies.
In high school, I joined Habonim, the Zionist youth group. I loved folk dance and Habonim had a dance troupe which performed around town. The dances we did were mostly Israeli with a few Eastern European thrown in, and we had to dress in costumes for our performances. I did it for two or three years, from about 1973 to 1975.
But at the same time I was in Habonim I also joined a statewide high school student organization. Our focus was on students' political rights. We published a monthly newspaper and organized kids to participate in the annual Walk for Development, a fundraising effort to promote development projects in poor communities.
The guy who led my chapter of the group was an American whose father had spent some years in Cairo in the diplomatic corps. Bob starting telling me about Arab culture, which he had actually experienced first hand. He was also the first person I'd ever met who was sympathetic to the Palestinian cause.
We argued. I was pretty set in my ways, and I was kind of shocked that anyone would even think of defending people I knew were terrorists by nature. But Bob and I agreed on a whole lot more than we disagreed on, so I was willing to accept him despite his soft spot for terrorists. I explained that part of it away due to his having lived in an Arab country.
The late 70s was the period I took the least interest in politics, being a lot more interested in sex, drugs, and rock-n-roll. In 1981, though, I transferred to a state university, knuckled down on my school work, and got active in campus politics. I was an ecumenical political activist. I tried to organize a boycott of Nestlé foods (for their baby formula marketing strategies in the Third World), I worked with Students for Nuclear Disarmament (probably the biggest campus issue in the early 80s), I did solidarity work with the Central American resistance organizations, and I supported the anti-apartheid movement in my town. I read the Nation, In These Times, and, when I could get my hands on it, the (New York) Guardian.
In June 1982, at the end of my first year at the state university, Israel launched a full-scale invasion of Lebanon in the context of the ongoing civil war that had ripped that country apart. In September, Lebanese Christian militiamen allied with Israel conducted brutal massacres at Sabra and Shaatila, Palestinian refugee camps in regions of Lebanon under Israeli control. Israeli complicity in, if not outright responsibility for, the massacres was absolutely clear at the time, and it was subsequently confirmed by independent investigations. At that time I didn't understand why there were Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon, but I did understand that what had happened was horribly, horribly wrong.
The Sabra and Shaatila massacres shocked the world, and they shocked me. We hastily organized a protest rally downtown and one of my friends handed me a megaphone and asked me to speak. There weren't many people at the rally, maybe 50 or 100, and I don't really remember what I said. What I do remember is the anger and the pain I felt. This was a massacre of innocent civilians, and Israel was responsible for it. Israel wasn't supposed to massacre civilians: everything I had learned and everything I believed had taught me that Palestinians kill civilians, that Israeli citizen-soldiers protect civilians by surgically taking out the murderous bad guys. Entebbe, not Sabra! Munich, not Shaatila!
There were some Palestinian students in my town who sometimes worked in coalition with us, and though they weren't open about it I learned later they belonged to organizations that were part of the PLO. They were good guys, they worked hard, they kept their word, and you could rely on them. They didn't look or act like terrorists, and they were even willing to work with Jews. I'm pretty sure I met them at the Sabra-Shaatila protest. I didn't exactly trust those guys, but from them I started to learn that the Palestinian struggle was not about terrorism and antisemitism, but was in fact one of national liberation.
I started dating my first wife about halfway through my first semester at the state university. Her family was very active in local Jewish politics, and she had even done her high school junior year abroad in Israel -- at Kfar Blum, of all places, where my family had spent a couple of nights at the guest house! After graduating high school, she had moved to Israel and lived there on her own for three months before coming back to the US to start college.
Among her close family friends were people active at the higher levels in the Conference of Major Jewish Organizations. I remember one year in particular, probably about 1984, when we traveled halfway across the US to attend a seder at one of their houses. This guy was a political scientist, a university professor, a committed Zionist, and in line with accepted Zionist opinion at that time opposed direct negotiations with the PLO. When my girlfriend said during the seder itself that she was praying that Palestinians would someday soon have a homeland of their own, it turned his head around. He argued with both of us at the time, but the following year he had come to advocate a two-state solution, one in which Palestine would be demilitarized and the Palestinian state would assume responsibility for reining in Palestinian militant groups.
That position, by the way, is the formal negotiating posture of Israel today.
In the 1980s I still didn't know an awful lot of Palestinian and Israeli history. I eventually learned that the massacres at Sabra and Shaatila weren't horrendous exceptions in the history of Jewish-Palestinian relations, but in fact fit well within a pattern of such actions by Jewish terrorists going back to before the Independence War itself. I learned that most Palestinian refugees were forced out of the country by Jewish armies, their homes destroyed by bulldozers and dynamite, and the trees I had collected money for in Hebrew school were planted to hide the ruins from public view. Even drip irrigation, I learned, wasn't as effective as I had been led to believe. Sure, it provides a marginal utility benefit, but by itself was incapable of "making the desert bloom." Jewish economic success in Palestine was due not to any greater ingenuity or creativity than the Palestinians, but to the fact the Jews lived in intentional communities, the kibbutzim and the moshavim, which were institutionally organized around the profit principle. Jewish communities controlled their own surplus and reinvested it in productive infrastructure, whereas Palestinian communities were organized around landlord/peasant structures, where the absentee landlord skimmed off peasant surplus in order to finance a luxurious lifestyle in a distant city.
The Zionists also prospered because their deep cultural familiarity with and personal experience in European societies allowed them to construct international trading networks to penetrate markets Arab merchants simply could not access.
This story is getting very long, however, and it's not really about the reality of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict. The story I've told here is instead a very personal one, of my journey from dedicated and enthusiastic Zionist to committed critic of Israeli human rights practices.
I still love Israel, by the way. My heart skips a beat and a tear comes to my eye when I see the Israeli team compete in international soccer competitions. But my love for Israel is similar to that which I have for my brother -- he's my family and I love him and I will always hold him dear. By no means, however, do I endorse everything that he does, and I will never give up my responsibility to warn him when he puts himself or his family in danger.