ROSALIND PETCHESKY
I grew up in Tulsa, Oklahoma, the “oil capital of the world”—not a place where one expects to find a thriving Jewish community. But thriving it was, both culturally and economically. I never knew there was such a thing as poor Jews until I moved to New York City many years later.
As a distinctly minority community in a sea of white Christians (Christian evangelical groups conducted assemblies in our public high school every year), Jews in Tulsa tended to band together and to conduct many of their social activities within the confines of the two local congregations, a Reform temple, where my family belonged, and a synagogue that called itself Orthodox but was closer to Conservative.
My father, who had gone to Hebrew school in a Brooklyn yeshiva and was a biblical scholar, filled in for the rabbi when he was out of town. My maternal grandmother, a Russian immigrant and autodidact, was a devout Zionist, president of the local Hadassah chapter, and one of the first women in the United States to travel as a delegate of U.S. Jewry to the “Promised Land.” Planting trees in Israel and enacting pageants based on the lore of Israeli land pioneers were routine activities in our Temple Israel Sunday school. As a musically trained teenager, I always led the performance of Israeli songs and dances, ignorant of the fact that these songs and dances were part of the cultural apparatus invented to promote modern Israeli nationalism, and in no way an authentic part of age-old Jewish tradition.
A huge part of this Zionist upbringing in our town—and our region of the Southwest—was BBYO, the B’nai B’rith Youth Organization. I attended BBYO chapter meetings and regional and national conventions with great enthusiasm, and BBYO became a substantial part of my teen social life. Naturally, I leapt at the opportunity to participate in a nine-week BBYO trip to Israel, which promised a connection to the Holy Land, its beauty, and the romance of meeting young Israelis. If all this sounds familiar, the BBYO trips were the precursor to today’s Birthright, and likewise funded by wealthy Jewish Zionists as a strategy to cultivate a new generation of fervent Israel backers to, in Netanyahu’s words, “change their lives forever.”
But the use of romance to inculcate Zionist ideology, while nothing new, does not always succeed according to Zionist plans. Reading recent ex-Birthrighters’ reports about the “rollicking tour buses” packed with American-Jewish kids “crisscrossing the country,” and the romantic encounters with Israeli soldiers, I felt a jolt of recognition. That was me: I did that, way back in 1959. And it did change my life forever, but not in the ways the B’nai B’rith Youth Organization and its wealthy sponsors had intended.
I did meet and have a crush on a handsome Israeli soldier assigned to our group. But I didn’t marry him. In fact, I never went back to Israel, but became instead a questioner of much of my devout, though liberal, Jewish upbringing. My anti-Zionism began in the state of Israel—at the very moment the U.S. civil rights movement, in which I had become involved in Oklahoma, was bursting forth. And as it happened, in that same year, unbeknownst to me at the time, the first international anti-apartheid conference was convened in London.
Historical context matters. It affects how we see and what we see, or don’t see. If I hadn’t already been working in Tulsa, trying to fight racial segregation in schools and public places, would I have seen the stark incidents of racism my sixteen-year-old eyes witnessed in Israel? Not only Jew against Arab but also European white Jew against dark-skinned North African Jew. (We weren’t introduced to “Israeli Arabs,” that is, Palestinians living inside of Israel, on that trip but observed Bedouin encampments, on display like tourist attractions.) If the murmurs of protest against what we then called “prejudice” hadn’t been burgeoning all around me in the United States, how could I have seen the racist nature of Israel?
My most vivid memory is of hanging out around the swimming pool of the kibbutz where we were staying. A white female member on the kibbutz, who spoke with a distinct Brooklyn accent, warned me not to talk to a dark-skinned young man because “he was African” (he was probably a Yemenite Jew). I was shocked and hurt because this blatant racism seemed to contradict everything I’d always been taught about Israel and Jewish ethics as bastions of justice and “brotherhood.”
Even worse was the cruel shock upon coming home, giving talks around my town, trying to tell honestly what I’d seen—and having the conservative rabbi disparage my report. Advising an elderly woman listener that I was just a young girl and didn’t know what I was talking about, he went on to say that he had recently been in Israel and none of what I said about racism was true. This was my first experience of being dismissed and muzzled for criticizing Israel—or any authority. It is why attempts today to stifle debate about Palestine and BDS resonate so bitterly with me. By 1974, B’nai B’rith’s affiliate, the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), had defined the “new antisemitism” as any criticism of Israel, and this has become Zionist dogma up to the present.
Ros in Israel with BBYO, July 1959
Photo courtesy of the author
So what, really, is new here and what goes on seemingly forever? Antisemitism is ancient and still exists. It demands our moral outrage, as do anti-Black and anti-Brown racism, Islamophobia, and all the hatreds based on who a person is, how they look or believe, or where they come from.
In 1959, a rash of antisemitic incidents—swastikas painted on synagogues and in Jewish cemeteries—had occurred across the United States. As a high school senior and the “International Citizenship Chairman” of B’nai B’rith Girls, I was charged by the national offices of both B’nai B’rith and the ADL with addressing this crisis. It never occurred to me then—and doesn’t now—that fighting antisemitism and criticizing Israeli state policies and Zionist ideology, or any ethnic nationalism, were inconsistent. Then as now, it seemed to me that equating anti-Zionism with antisemitism is a philosophical and moral fallacy. At the same time, I did learn a life-changing lesson: the first fight, against antisemitism, would win me praise from the predominantly male leaders of my white ethnic community, while the second fight—against racism in any guise, especially Zionism—would bring scorn and repudiation. For fighting this second fight, I was dismissed, not just as a race-traitor and heretic, but also as a know-nothing girl. My earliest feminist anger took root in this particular caldron of religion, race, ethnicity, and gendered power.
Many subsequent influences helped to solidify these values. Foremost was my college mentor, the brilliant Palestinian scholar-in-exile, Ibrahim Abu-Lughod. Professor Abu-Lughod was the opposite of the arrogant Jewish men who had dismissed my criticisms of Zionism and tried to stymie my antiracist activism in Oklahoma. He taught me international law, tolerated my ignorance about Palestinian conditions, and never tried to counter my family’s Zionist beliefs with arguments, but only by example. Born in Jaffa, he participated in militant Palestinian resistance before 1948, and then became a refugee when his family, like most Jaffa residents, was driven out during the Nakba. After coming to the United States and earning a Ph.D. at Princeton, he taught at Smith College, where I was a student in the early 1960s, and then at Northwestern University, in political science and African studies. He also became part of the Palestine National Council (PNC) and an important behind-the-scenes advocate for Palestinian self-determination, along with his close friend, Edward Said.
Just before Oslo, Professor Abu-Lughod resigned from the PNC and returned to Palestine to teach at Bir Zeit University, where he helped establish a graduate program in international studies. In 2001, amid the turmoil of the Second Intifada, he died (at age seventy-two, younger than I am now) of a long-standing lung disease, and was buried near the beach in his beloved Jaffa. But, in order to be buried in his birthplace, as he’d wished, Professor Abu-Lughod’s body first had to be transported covertly and perilously from the West Bank to Jaffa. No Palestinian refugee has been allowed, even in death, to return home. Yet the necropolitics of check-points and creative resistance created a perverse “right of return” for one illustrious Palestinian.1
Over time, my anti-Zionist sentiments have drawn sustenance from transnational movements against war, racism, colonialism, and gender hierarchy, as well as from the courageous examples of beloved Palestinian feminist friends and students, both in Palestine and in exile. Most particularly, I have learned tremendously from the ideas and courageous example of my former student and decades-long friend, Dr. Rabab Ibrahim Abdulhadi. Becoming part of Jewish Voice for Peace and the global struggle for BDS and against Israeli aggression was the natural outgrowth of all these years of activism, in the classroom and the world. But my youthful “trip to Israel” was the catalyst that set me on a path that brought me to this place, aided along the way by loving relationships and history.
The Zionists understand that no politics can succeed without passion and love, but, sadly, they fail to see how that love, turned exclusively inward, is ultimately doomed.
Postscript: Sixty Years Later
When I wrote “On Becoming an Anti-Zionist Feminist” almost three years ago, it was accurate to say I never again returned to Israel. Since then, I have been part of two delegations to Palestine, in May 2017 and June 2019, with the group Eyewitness Palestine (formerly Interfaith Peace Builders). I think of these, not as returns, but as my first journeys to Palestine, almost entirely disconnected from my long-ago expedition as a teenager. Even when our bus passed Lake Kinneret in the Galilee and the kibbutz where I had my early awakening sixty years before, it felt like a very different place. Though our groups had to pass through Ben Gurion Airport in Tel Aviv and had illuminating visits with Israeli feminists, army resisters, and LGBTQ activists in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, our main intention was to see the land and the cities through Palestinian eyes, to walk alongside Palestinian friends and allies. Many highlights stay fixed in my heart; here are just a few, compiled from both trips.
• In the Hebron Hills We join around two hundred international and local Jewish Palestine solidarity activists to build a stone retaining wall that will keep settler vehicles from invading this piece of Palestinian land. I haul stones from a field for hours, not knowing whether I will make a difference, but feeling happy anyway. My sign reads: THIS AMERICAN JEW SUPPORTS JUSTICE FOR PALESTINE. TEAR DOWN THE WALL! FREE ALL POLITICAL PRISONERS! RETURN STOLEN LAND! I felt proud to be Jewish here, working in solidarity with Palestinian siblings.
• Dheisheh Refugee Camp (outside Bethlehem): We visit the Palestine Youth Action Center for Community Development (Laylac) and learn about the conditions Palestinian political prisoners endure from Naji Odeh, who has been incarcerated repeatedly, and his son, Murad, who enlightens us with his brilliant, passionate lectures on the Palestinian struggle. I and two other members of our group are staying in the home of Murad’s aunt, who is in mourning for her son, recently murdered by the IOF. Murad and his wife, Maya, the daughter of JVP members from the Midwest, will name their new baby after their martyred cousin, Mumtaz, whose picture remains on the door of the house, like the haunting faces of other martyrs we see along the camp’s inner wall. So many kinds of walls.
• Ramallah and Jaffa: I go on my own to visit Birzeit University and see Professor Abu-Lughod’s portrait at the Institute of International Studies, which he founded. The program’s current director, Lourdes Habash, tells me about the Palestinian leaders whom Professor Abu-Lughod taught over the years, and we share his influence on us as students. When I ask her how she copes under occupation, she says: “We want to be here, we want to resist. We can’t change the facts on the ground but can resist mentally, refuse to leave—and that’s a form of resistance.” Later, on a group visit to Jaffa, our guide will tell me proudly that he was one of the pallbearers at Professor Abu-Lughod’s funeral, along with hundreds walking with his casket the mile from the mosque to the burial place.
• Jerusalem and its environs: Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian is one of Palestine’s most brilliant and original feminist scholars, researchers, teachers, and activists. In the mornings, she accompanies children, mainly girls from the neighborhood, on their walk to school, to protect them from harassment by soldiers; in the evenings, after teaching her classes, she may be protesting yet another house demolition. Her books about the impact of Israel’s “security theology” on the lives of Palestinian women and children are the greatest source of my understanding about the subject, and the lens through which I am able to see Jerusalem.
Nadera is my dear friend. She takes me walking through “her” Jerusalem, the Armenian quarter where she and her husband Gaby live—surrounded by security cameras and soldiers and by Haredi settlers and invaders everywhere. As we move across rooftops, above Palestinian shops that have been taken over by Yeshiva students, a private security guard approaches us. Nadera speaks politely to him in her fluent Hebrew and, despite his leering at her, she continues to stand with dignity: the life of a Palestinian woman scholar under the “normal” stresses of colonial occupation. Two days later, I hear raucous commotion in the street under the window of Nadera and Gaby’s apartment, facing the Western Wall. Hundreds of Orthodox Jewish revelers are celebrating the Jewish holiday of Simchat Torah—rabbis, boys in kippas and payot, girls in long skirts, dancing and singing—every note seeming to deny the reality of the Muslim and Armenian neighborhoods and people around them; every note a triumphant cry, an arrogant claim of ownership and possession. This is what Nadera has called the “occupation of the senses,” and I, too, feel its lacerating sting. Not my people, I think.
Unlike me, Nadera manifests a kind of humanity and capacity for seeing the Other that is rare in this world. Some of her favorite students at Hebrew University, where she teaches, are settlers, she tells me. She loves them, she says, and, more understandably, they love and revere her, as evidenced by a female settler student who raves to her daughter about her Palestinian professor. Two years later, I think about this when I’m back in Jerusalem, walking from a meeting with Reuven Abergel, one of the founders of the Israeli Black Panthers, and Philip, one of our two Palestinian-American group leaders. My rage and frustration at the Haredi settlers around us suddenly surfaces, and I share with Philip—who is a Christian—how difficult I find it to feel any forgiveness or compassion toward them. His perception is that the Haredi Jews are actually a minority group in the Israeli political context, and not always treated well. Implying the inevitability of a one-state future, he says, “But I have no choice; we are going to have to live with them.”
Returning in 2019 to Jerusalem with Eyewitness Palestine, after just two years, was a profound shock. The settlements had expanded everywhere, replicating the massive Ma’ale Adumim, with its forty thousand Jewish settlers and apartheid roads and barriers looming high above the Palestinian villages. On the outskirts of the Old City of Jerusalem, we visited the Palestinian neighborhood of Silwan—the most ancient part of Jerusalem where some fifty-five thousand Palestinians currently live, like their ancestors, but now threatened with imminent expulsion; where Israeli-built underground tunnels are destabilizing the foundations of Palestinian homes, and a huge, new cable car will ferry settlers and link settlement sites.
A jarring visit to the so-called City of David—a kind of theme park for Jewish tourists and archaeological dig—awakened me to the Zionist hubris that weaponizes the triad of archaeology, tourism, and biblical history as tools of Judaization and displacement. So far, not a shard of evidence has been unearthed to validate the claim that this is the site of the first Jewish temple and the town where King David lived. In the process, other ancient artifacts are being removed and destroyed. This destruction is replicated throughout the West Bank: more Palestinian neighborhoods, homes, and land are confiscated to make way for Israeli national parks and excavation sites as well as for settlers to move in.
Almost everywhere we journeyed, this massive imposition of Israeli sovereignty was visible. It was most blatant in East Jerusalem and its environs, but it also loomed throughout Area C, which forms two-thirds of the West Bank and has been entirely under Israeli control since Oslo. Area C now has some four hundred thousand settlers, as opposed to two hundred thousand Palestinians. Israel’s sovereignty was jarring not only in urban residential zones but also in rural and industrial ones, such as the Jordan Valley and the Dead Sea area, where Israeli companies privatize the water and titans of the “beauty industry,” like the Ahava cosmetic company, extract valuable minerals and exploit migrant labor to enhance the skin of Western women. My main takeaway from traveling to Palestine in 2019—sixty years after my trip to Israel—was this: the annexation of historic Palestine, from the river to the sea, is no longer just a threat by Israeli right-wingers and the Trump administration; it is a fait accompli, Zionism’s deadly legacy.
The murals of the public art project “I Witness Silwan” (see p. 40) face the Old City and can be seen from Israeli tourist centers miles away. The project emphasizes transnational solidarity, which can be seen in this vinyl print by Salvadoran-born American citizen Josué Rojas of Alex Nieto, a California Latino man who was killed in 2014 by police in San Francisco.
Photo by Jinan Maswadeh
Yet we also encountered inspiring evidence of Palestinian resistance everywhere we went: Grassroots Al Quds and its defiant spokeswoman, Fayrouz Sharqawi, who revealed to us the Palestinian towns and villages that Israeli maps have erased; the neighborhood organizations and defense committees of Silwan, which have protested evictions since 2004; groups like Laylac in Bethlehem, Youth against Settlements in Hebron, and Mossawa in Jaffa, with its Coalition against Racism in Israel; advocacy organizations like Addameer and Defense of Children International-Palestine, supporting Palestinian political prisoners; Al Qaws for Sexual and Gender Diversity in Palestinian Society; and Al-Haq, a human rights organization based in Ramallah. Most of all, it was courageous individuals like Naji and Murad, Fayrouz, Lourdes, Nadera, and BDS founding member Omar Barghouti, whose refusal to give up the struggle for justice gave me hope.
Ros participating in nternational resistance against settler invasions in Hebron Hills, June 2017
Photo courtesy of the author
We were honored to visit the home of the extraordinary Tamimi family in Nabi Saleh, the village where Palestinian resistance originated in Ottoman times. That resistance has persisted more recently from the First Intifada to the present, even though Nabi Saleh has been the target of over three hundred Israeli military raids. Bassem Tamimi, the great Palestinian grassroots organizer, jailed more times than anyone can count, summed it up for us in two words: “We continue!”
1 Lila Abu-Lughod, “My Father’s Return to Palestine,” Institute of Palestine Studies 2001, No. 12-11, 2001 (https://www.palestine-studies.org/en/node/147860). Many thanks to Lila Abu-Lughod for helping me reconstruct her father’s story.