LYNNE LOPEZ-SALZEDO
In twelfth-century Spain, my ancestors were integrated into the Spanish nobility. Three centuries later, Isabella and Ferdinand’s Inquisition engulfed the Spanish Jews in a wave of terror. Some of these Jews, the Marranos, converted to Christianity on pain of death, but held secret Jewish services in underground tunnels, all the while keeping up the outward pretense of being good Catholics. Perhaps my family became Marranos before fleeing to Holland. There, they found safe refuge. For five centuries, they thrived in their new home. No longer courtiers, they found new roles as composers, lawyers, judges, translators.
Then the Nazis invaded. The safety that my family thought they had found in Holland proved to be illusory. Those who emigrated to Britain before the Second World War survived; those who stayed in Holland were sent to the gas chambers. Three members of my family were murdered in Auschwitz and Sobibor.
I know less about my father’s family. Legend has it that my paternal grandparents escaped the Russian pogroms, boarding a ship to America when they were both eleven years old. When the ship docked in Scotland, they disembarked, believing they’d arrived in America. By the time they realized their mistake, the ship had left harbor. My father and his two brothers were sent to university and became professionals; his two sisters were expected to marry and devote themselves to their families. They were women, after all. What did women need an education for? They both married “well”; that is to say, they married wealthy men.
So it is that I grew up with a seamless narrative in place: there has never been a safe place for the Jews. Whether in Spain or Holland or Russia; whether Spanish aristocrats or Russian peasants, our situation was always tenuous. When we did find a measure of safety and acceptance, it could evaporate in an instant. I belong to a persecuted people, and the only safety we Jews can rely on is having our own state, with our own strong military.
The narrative that I’ve been taught is beyond question; it takes almost a lifetime before I become aware of cracks in this seamless structure. Once those cracks appear, the entire edifice collapses like a flimsy house of cards.
My father was the ardent Zionist, not my mother. The British Sephardim were a closed, elitist society. They were wealthy merchant bankers, lawyers, judges, and successful businessmen. They kept to themselves and looked down on the Ashknenazi Jews. When my mother married my father, it was almost as if she’d married outside the faith. I grew up in both communities, learning both Sephardic and Ashkenazi customs and ways of thinking.
On the living room mantelpiece of our West End penthouse is a small, blue and white box. I know that every penny we give to the Jewish National Fund is going to make the desert bloom. Before the Jews’ return to Israel, the Mandate of Palestine had been an empty, arid land. I am vaguely aware that people called Arabs had lived there, before we Jews returned to claim our homeland. I know little about these Arabs, other than that they’re primitive and all they want to do is drive us into the sea. This is our fate as Jews: in every generation, someone will rise up to destroy us. I am a young child, and I believe all this with complete certainty. This is what my family and my community believe. I’ve been manipulated and lied to, but I don’t yet realize it.
There was another reason the myth of a perfect, idealized Israel resonated with me: my family life was chaotic and frightening. The myths I was taught fulfilled my need for a fantasy realm, a space of safety and belonging and hope. I longed for what I imagined was the simplicity of kibbutz life, where everyone pitched in together for the greater good, where everyone was happy, where everyone was equal. How different from the elitist, class-ridden London society I grew up in!
One day we were traveling by train. I ask my father why we’re traveling first class while others are in crowded, uncomfortable, second-class compartments. What makes us better than those other people? That evening, after my father has seen his last patient for the day, he changes into his favorite gray cashmere sweater and pours dry sherry from a cut-glass decanter. We sit in the living room, talking about Rilke and Alfred North Whitehead; he often reads us his favorite passages from these beloved writers and thinkers. But an ominous current sometimes invades these conversations. My relatives and our friends tell me that the “schwartzes,” as they call Black people, are good at sports and singing. But they don’t have much intelligence and they’ll never excel at science or intellectual pursuits. As for the Arabs, I’m told that theirs is a culture of death, while ours is a culture of life. They bring their children up to be martyrs, to glorify death. They’ve been our enemies since time immemorial.
How superior we are, how special! As an adult, I’ll come to realize that many members of my family were racists. Their Zionism too was an integral part of this dark and ugly current of racism that cast such a pall over my childhood.
When I was eight years old, we made a halfhearted attempt at aliyah. My father had been offered a job at a hospital in Jerusalem. The medical staff took us on tours of the wards; they told us how they cared for both rich and poor, regardless of their means. Their dedication filled me with pride. But my dad was the son of Russian peasants and wanted his daughters to have every advantage in life. Also, his Zionist ideals didn’t extend to taking the drop in living standards and status that a permanent move to Israel would have entailed. So we moved back to London. Instead of making aliyah, we summered in Haifa, sipping cocktails at luxury hotels. It was a way to indulge our Zionism without having to make any real effort.
In 1967, war broke out between Israel and the surrounding Arab states. The fledgling state of Israel was surrounded by powerful Arab foes and threatened with destruction. I believed these news headlines; I had no idea how skillfully my emotions were being manipulated.
For six days, we hear nothing at all. The stirring narrative of how the tiny, endangered state of Israel is fighting against overwhelming odds is heightened by a media blackout. I join thousands of volunteers waiting to fly out to Israel as soon as commercial flights resume. We all mill around the large intake center in Central London, waiting impatiently for news. Then the news blackout ends and we hear that Israel, through brilliant and amazing military maneuvers, has emerged victorious. A couple of days later, I arrive in Tel Aviv. I’m sent to a kibbutz close to Jerusalem. I get up each day just before dawn and head out to the fields to pick peaches. Afternoons are spent sleeping off the worst heat of the day and swimming in the kibbutz pool. In the evening, IDF soldiers who have just returned from the front join us around the campfire, and we sing triumphant, patriotic songs into the night. There’s a high in the air, a fierce euphoria. Something about it frightens me. Something isn’t right. I can’t name this fear I feel and quickly put it out of mind.
I was the perfect example of how diabolically effective propaganda can be. Intelligence and decency are no match against a well-coordinated PR machine. I believed all the myths. After all, I had no information to contradict them: Israel is the only safety the Jews have against persecution; Israel is our ancient homeland, and after thousands of years, we’ve now returned; Israel is building the perfect socialist society, embodied in the collectivist kibbutzim.
Decades later, I learned more about those newly planted forests that our contributions to the JNF were funding. Beneath the modern cities of Tel Aviv and Haifa and Jaffa lies a hidden world. Beneath those forests lie the ruined villages of the indigenous inhabitants of Palestine. I read about Deir Yassin and Lydda, the unfamiliar names of Palestinian villages whose very existence had to be disappeared, like the people who once lived there. When the Zionists came to power, there was no safe place for the Palestinians, who were demonized and massacred. Some of them escaped, but many did not. Now the former inhabitants of what is now Israel languish in the open-air jail of Gaza or in the occupied enclaves of the West Bank.
Once I started reading, I couldn’t stop. I read about rapes and murders, villagers running for their lives and being gunned down by the Israelis as they fled. These were the “Arabs” I’d once been so contemptuous of. They were the indigenous inhabitants of the land the Zionists stole from them. They weren’t in any way responsible for what had been done to the Jews during the Holocaust. In fact, they’d been living peaceably with the Jews of Palestine for hundreds of years. They were simply in the way.
While it’s true that the European Jews desperately needed a safe place to call their own in the aftermath of the Holocaust, that in no way justified stealing the land of Palestine. But that is what transpired. The Zionists stole the Palestinians’ land and their livelihoods, their farms and orchards and olive groves and aquifers. Since this could not be said, an elaborate mythology was created to whitewash the truth. I was duped into believing these lies. My family was duped.
Fast forward to 2014: images from Protective Edge stream across the Web. On Facebook and Twitter and alternative media sites, I read that five hundred Palestinian children have been killed; two thousand people in all, most of them civilians. I see photos of the corpses of Palestinian babies stuffed into ice cream freezers, because there simply is no other way to store so many corpses of dead children in the intense heat. A Twitter feed documents the murder of four Palestinian boys playing ball on the beach. Israel is on a killing spree, and no amount of Hasbara can cover this up. On live TV, an UNRWA official breaks down in tears; the interview goes viral. UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon is forced to object to the slaughter. This puts even U.S. President Obama in a position where he is forced to make a statement condemning Israel’s tactics. The war ends the very next day.
One night in New York City in 2015, after watching a movie about the Nakba, I was introduced to a Palestinian man whose family fled Jerusalem after the 1967 War. We were walking through Washington Square Park to the subway and the winter wind was bitterly cold; we could hardly hear each other through the howling gusts. As we walked, he told me about how his mother was murdered in her own home, how his sister was so traumatized that she simply stopped speaking for two years. His family were intellectuals from an old Palestinian family. They’d fled for their lives, some of them eventually finding safety across the seas. How similar his story is to my own family history! While these terrible things were happening to his family, I was living on a kibbutz a few kilometers away, celebrating our victory. It is truly awful to realize that I’d been celebrating not a victory but a massacre. I told him this and he fell silent.
He told me he’s making calligraphic paintings. Whenever he meets someone who listens to his family’s story and shows solidarity with the Palestinians, he adds the person’s name to his painting. He asked me to write down my name; he wanted to include it. I scribbled my name on a piece of scrap of paper and handed it to him. Then he got off at Fourteenth Street, and the subway lurched on.
I second-guess myself a lot. Why did it take me so long to realize the truth? Being part of a community that silenced the truth was certainly part of it. But once I understood that most Jewish communities do this, I no longer wanted any association with mainstream Judaism. There are many reasons why I couldn’t bring myself to part with the narrative I’d believed since childhood. But I finally freed myself. And with that freedom has also come a new responsibility: to work in solidarity with the Palestinians, who were, and still are, innocent victims of nationalist Zionism’s worst crimes.