KENAN JAFFE
My ongoing struggles with Zionism have been defined by the fact that it was Zionism that radicalized me in the first place. I grew up in a mainstream and traditional Jewish household and community in which allegiance to Israel and a vaguely right-leaning politics were assumed, but in which few, if any, people actually had a personal or ideological relationship with Zionism. The world changed for me when my parents, just by happenstance, sent me to a summer camp run by a Zionist youth movement. As a specifically Labor Zionist organization, it traced its roots to the original secular founders of the Israeli state and attempted to marry attachment to Israel with a progressive belief in creating a new socialist society. Graduates of similar movements, particularly those, like mine, with very well-cultivated ideological and social worlds, will understand when I say that describing the effect that my upbringing in “the movement” had on me is next to impossible. Suffice it to say that it was utterly transformative, and even liberating for me, both socially and politically, although not entirely in ways that were intended.
It was at summer camp and on affiliated programs that I met some of my very best friends and had some of my most powerful and defining experiences. It was also in Zionist education that I first learned to develop a critique of society and to think about the ways that class and race and gender contribute to privilege and inequity in my daily life. Most significant was the idea that ideology and a critique of society demanded action and the upheaval of one’s life, the highest ideal being living in communal groups in Israel. Today, friends of mine who made that choice live communally in Israel and work toward (mostly) socially beneficial goals.
Some people have fun at summer camp and move on, but I am constituted to fall in with things deeply and emotionally, and I was hooked on Zionist youth movement life. I thought seriously about moving to Israel, but eventually decided it was too ideological and narrow a path for me. I have a distinct memory of being at a seminar in Israel and listening with annoyance as a movement guru gave a distorted and mystical explanation of Jewish history that advocated aliyah to Israel. I realized right there and then that I was not cut out to be a true believer and couldn’t commit. I had academic interests and non-Jewish friends, and the world’s horizons seemed larger than Labor Zionism.
Kenan as a child at his Zionist summer camp
Photo courtesy of the author
To be perfectly honest, however, although I had entertained occasional nagging doubts, I did not, and could not, develop a true moral and political critique of Zionism itself until I had left my youth movement behind. It was only when I left my Labor Zionist world in New York to leave for graduate school that I began encountering new ideas and new people, including many leftist Israelis, who forced me to confront what I would now call the truly relevant issues. It had been easy as a teenager to ditch the right-wing Zionism at my synagogue in favor of the hip and socially-conscious Zionism of my youth movement, but the next stage in my evolution was lengthy and agonizing.
Realizing that for all its claims to independence and radicalism, the youth movement that I adored was a wholly-owned subsidiary of the (racist) institutional Zionist world and a staunch defender of the (reactionary) liberal Zionist status quo has left me feeling betrayed and in need of regular de-programming conversations with fellow ex-members. Challenging the centrality of Zionism to my Jewish self-identity, not to mention facing the living nightmare that it has been for Palestinians, took years of emotional and intellectual work.
The most significant blind spots that were nurtured in me via my liberal Zionist education were the following:
1. I could acknowledge the immorality of the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza and I clung to the possibility of creating a Palestinian state for those Palestinians currently under military rule, even as Israel made such an option impossible. I simply did not know that the Israeli state as it exists violates the basic standards of democratic governance by, for example, coordinating with global Zionist institutions which import and settle Jews in Israel and the occupied territories, and by categorizing its citizens by religion and defining its sovereignty as being beholden to world Jewry rather than the state’s citizens.
2. I used to accept the implicit understanding that the occupation is an internal Jewish matter that Jewish education and Jewish values could solve, and therefore I would become upset by non-Jewish criticism of Israel. I had to be forced to acknowledge that the same principles that have defined every previous system of oppression define this one: power and privilege give up nothing except under pressure. Israel’s treatment of its Palestinian subjects is a global human rights issue, and we must invite and welcome criticism and pressure from all responsible actors.
3. Because I had been so taught, I assumed that Zionism was the inevitable end product of Jewish history, that it had definitively “won the battle of ideas” against competing notions of Jewish modernity. In fact, it was non- and anti-Zionists in the early 20th century who most accurately predicted what the consequences of Zionism would be and what the state of Israel would look like. Exposure to their predictions and analysis was revelatory for me, especially when it came paired with my creeping acknowledgment of the corruption that Zionism has wrought on contemporary Jewish politics, culture, and theology.
4. I did not grapple with the reality of 1947–9, and did not allow talk of the Nakba to shake my view of the justice of creating a Jewish-majority state in a place that did not have a Jewish majority. And then I did.
I am not proud of how long it took me to reach my current convictions, and it devastates me to know that justice in Israel/Palestine will be achieved only over the objections of so many Jews whose minds will change too slowly (or not at all). There is no excuse for the century of colonialism and bloodshed that Zionists have enacted to further their goals, and we must unequivocally and forcefully oppose the current political reality, for the liberation of Palestinians and also for the sake of the Jewish future. The hour is late, and the crisis is upon us.
And yet, as angry as I now feel about the education I received and about how a similar education has misled so many others, still I cannot regret the consciousness that my time with Zionism afforded me. I continue to believe that Jewish attachment to the land of Israel is real and historical, and even that Zionism was an understandable (if ultimately catastrophic) Jewish response to 20th-century Europe. I do not call myself an anti-Zionist, although I personally want nothing to do with Zionism any longer.
I am glad to have seen and felt Zionism from the inside, to have understood it not only as a nationalist enterprise but as an attempt to revolutionize Jewish life, and to have internalized some of the hopes and dreams that went into it. I am grateful for this most of all because from such understanding comes the possibility of sympathy for the moral failures of the Jewish community to which I belong and for which I care deeply. I for one hope to see a single egalitarian state in Israel/Palestine that decouples Jewish peoplehood and religion from state power. In service of that goal I want to offer Jews and Israelis hope that their (Zionist?) desire for safety and cultural permanence in the land of Israel can still be met, precisely if they can give up the oppression and exclusive control on which they currently rely.