TALIA BAURER
I grew up imbued with a strong Jewish identity, a fascination with my family’s Holocaust legacy, and a deep love for and pride in the state of Israel. These three things were totally and inextricably linked. The first two are still at my core.
Jewish education and, with it, Israel education were a priority for my parents in raising my two older sisters and me. We grew up attending synagogue regularly, went to Jewish day school for elementary school and, in my case, for middle school, and were active in Jewish youth groups through middle and high school. At my elementary school, I learned about Tikkun Olam, the Jewish social justice principle that posits that Jews have a responsibility to repair the world. I was taught to value and take pride in the legacy of American Jewish solidarity with the civil rights movement. In the same classrooms, I learned that Palestinian schools taught children that Heaven was beautiful so that they would grow up to be suicide bombers, and that Israel (“we”) kept ceding more land to the Palestine Liberation Organization or PLO (“them”) while being met with greater demands and ceaseless violence. I learned that this was my issue, the current event that affected my life perhaps more than any other.
My family also periodically visited relatives in Israel, and I celebrated my Bat Mitzvah in Jerusalem. I grew up knowing that Israel was my homeland, that I had deep biblical and historical roots there, and that its existence made me safer in the world (among other insidious myths). Though my parents did not subscribe to the extreme right-wing Zionism of some in our community, and did not agree with all of my teachers’ mischaracterizations of the region’s recent history, these core assumptions were never questioned. Neither at home nor in school did we ever talk about the true lived experiences of Palestinian people.
In order to make sense of this handed-down worldview that I held on to throughout adolescence and in order to relate to my school-aged self, I now hold on to memories of moments in which the foundations of my Zionist illusions began to splinter, even slightly. When I was in high school, my family went to visit my sister at college and, sitting in her dorm room, I watched her take on my parents in a heated, emotional debate that brought into question the core ideas on which our Zionism rested. On another weekend a year or two later, I was trained in “Israel advocacy” through my youth group. This meant learning a few talking points that could be employed in the face of the opposition, who were represented in one training exercise by someone who shouted us down and behaved aggressively while yelling one-line arguments. I later expressed my frustration to a friend: “What if they aren’t yelling in your face? What if they have valid points?”
In late high school and early college, I began to feel, rather than understand, that I leaned further left on this issue than my childhood friends or the groups like J Street that existed on my campus. I was (and still am) fortunate to know that my older sisters—my most trusted political and ideological guides—disagreed with and challenged our upbringing. I was too intimidated by my own ignorance to attend a Students for Justice in Palestine meeting or to ask my sisters for resources. And although they were careful not to impose their views on me, I trusted their support of the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement (which made sense to me even then) and, later on, their appreciation of Jewish Voice for Peace. After my freshman year in college, I spent a month in Israel and visited the West Bank for the first time. My group toured the Palestinian town of Susya with Breaking the Silence, an Israeli human rights organization, heard from its residents, and later that day saw the hauntingly segregated streets of Hebron. I finally let go of the historical narrative of my childhood education and began to hollow out my own sense of what Israel and Zionism meant for my life, my community, and the world in general. I had unlearned enough to distance myself from my past beliefs, but I had not relearned enough to articulate my new ones. I settled into uncomfortable silence.
In the summer of 2014, I was an intern at a sexuality education and training organization where I got to do justice-oriented work that I loved with like-minded people. Part of my job was to coordinate the organization’s Facebook and Twitter, so I spent a lot of time on my intern shifts scrolling through various progressive news sources as well as my personal and work feeds. On July 8, 2014, when Israel launched Operation Protective Edge, I was a month into my internship. From that day on I spent shifts glued to my computer, distracted from my organization’s page by the most recent news, opinions, and heartbreaking stories about the assault on Gaza. My uncertainty abated, my well-cultivated connection to Israel faded into a sense of emptiness, and, as I watched the mounting numbers of Palestinians being murdered in my name, I woke up. In the face of isolating, useless despair, the cry of “Not in my name” and the JVP community gave me words and action to shatter my lifelong silence and complicity. That summer I, like so many others, felt whatever was left of my carefully constructed illusions crumble and fall away.
I read and reposted furiously, sought support and guidance from my sisters and friends, got over the feeling that I didn’t know enough to engage, and returned to the Wesleyan college campus, determined not to be quiet or unsure any longer. I turned down the opportunity to lead Wesleyan’s Birthright trip; co-taught my religious school students a multifaceted narrative about Israel and Palestine; and cofounded a JVP chapter on Wesleyan’s campus.
I wrote my undergraduate thesis on Spanish historical memory of the Franco era, and my adviser—one of those unique professors who, in an hour of conversation, would give me more to think about than other professors did in a semester—asked me why I found historical memory to be such a compelling topic. My default (and true) answer was that it helped me reflect on my family’s Holocaust legacy. But twenty minutes later, I found myself speaking fervently about all that had clicked into place when I found my commitment to Palestinian solidarity work. I expressed my consuming anger and sadness at the way my own family history of oppression had now been co-opted to justify Israel’s human rights abuses. I reflected on what happens when different collective memories conflict. I am still preoccupied by this question.
On my journey of unlearning the Zionism I was raised with, I have discovered new histories, ideologies, and political views. I have learned to love and celebrate the diaspora and all that it means for me and my family. I have met the very same civil rights veterans I learned about in school, such as Angela Davis, heard their unapologetic and undiluted views about civil rights in the U.S. and Palestine, and seen them turned away by the Jewish establishment that taught me to be proud of their legacy. I have found a deeper mutual love, respect, and solidarity with my siblings than I knew was possible. I use diffeent vocabulary now, see humanity I was never supposed to recognize, and—perhaps most difficult—I have recently started to unlearn the powerful, pervasive myth that this discussion is actually about me. Palestine is still the issue that most compels me, but not because I am the most affected.
I want to keep learning and discussing and processing my experiences; I want to change my community; I want to take to the streets on this issue more than any other. But I must remember that I am not doing these things for myself first. As a white Jew in the United States, I must enter into this struggle following the leadership of Palestinian people who face the horrors of occupation, oppression, and apartheid every day in Palestine and Israel. I have a place in this fight because my voice is proof that anti-Zionism is not antisemitism, because I know from my own education that Zionism is racist, because my U.S. taxes support the Israeli military, because my history has been appropriated as a tactic to oppress others in my name. I work now to undo the Zionist notion that, because I am Jewish, pro-Israel activism is somehow “my struggle.” This journey has led me to understanding how this is a struggle of solidarity.