Radical Diasporism

"For more than half a century Zionism has typically been represented as the solution to the problem of anti-semitism, and Zion as the authentic seat of Jewish culture. Most Jews in diaspora collude, unwittingly or wittingly, while the rich tradition of dissent around this issue has been almost entirely  suppressed. In the  United  States, the disobeyed  imperative  to make aliyah has resulted in a sort of shamefaced Zionist support industry which sends money and thrives on attack, emergency, and fear. Zionism thus displaces—deforms is not too strong a word—American Jewish identity and experience (Kaye/Kantrowitz 195)."

"The narrative of Holocaust in Europe and redemption/rebirth in Israel became, in a commonly used phrase, the civil religion of US Jews in the 1970s, replacing previous notions of a collectivity based in religious practices. It is a deep irony that US Jews focused around long-distance nationalism and victimisation precisely when they became fully integrated into US society and economically privileged (Landy 81)."

The moment my Jewishness was first made political: a friend (and crush) asked if I would help his club, Students for Justice in Palestine, put fliers on the door of every upperclassman apartment in the wee hours of the morning. The fliers were intended to simulate eviction notices frequently issued to Palestinians in the occupied territories by the Israeli government. "We regret to inform you that your suite is scheduled for demolition in three days," each notice read, followed by information about housing demolitions in Gaza and the West Bank. At the bottom, each page read clearly, "This is not a real eviction notice. This is intended to draw attention to the reality that Palestinians confront on a regular basis." 

The next morning it was outrage, scandal, chaos. The bells of antisemitic alarm rang immediately and with vigor. Jewish students began posting online that, because of the mezuzahs on their doors, they were targeted with hateful literature. Later, when they learned that all 400-plus doors of upperclassman housing received an identical notice, they did not recant, but doubled down. The school's branch of Hillel and Chabad, as well as the national Anti-Defamation League, contacted the University, equating the eviction notices with antisemitic harassment and demanding action. Some Jewish parents and alumni did the same. That week, I later learned, the nearby Jewish neighborhood put in a mass order for lawn signs to publicly express their "support" for the school's Jewish students, some of which remain proudly planted in yards to this day.

Our little protest even picked up national media attention. The fact that it was in the Jewish press was somewhat surprising, but none of us expected to be the subjects of a Fox News segment, nor that more wing-bat, right-wing publications would put out stories with such headlines as "Terror-tied SJP Muslim group hangs eviction notices on Jewish dorms." (Then again, the American Right has long been the strange-bedfellows of Israel, largely for Evangelical and/or business/militaristic reasons).

Needless to say, the University was under significant pressure to respond. Though the University police "investigated" the issue, and the various conduct councils chewed it over, all determined we were within our University granted rights of expression and no disciplinary action would be taken. However, the president sent out one of her classically diplomatic, University-wide emails in which she expressed her most sincere understanding of Jewish students who felt threatened by the mock eviction notices, noting that a rise in antisemitic acts across the country justified Jewish students' fears and outrage. Thus in her attempt at a balanced take, she too related our fliers to antisemitism.

None of these actors—Jewish students, Jewish organizations, the school president—seemed to be aware that we in SJP were calling attention to the actions of a government, a state, a set of institutions that politically and militarily control a specific geographical region. There was nothing on our fliers addressing Jewish people as an ethnic or religious group. The conflation of the state of Israel with Jewish people, whether in Israel or elsewhere, was entirely the doing of our critics. 

And herein lies a deep, deep problem. In the popular imagination of the West—and especially in internal, Jewish epistemology—Judaism is indelibly linked to the state of Israel. To discuss Israel is to discuss the Jews, and to discuss the Jews is to discuss Israel. 

This is not some accident, but the product of a very intentional Zionist project that began in the late 1800s. While the specifics of Zionist history, and the history of the region of Palestine in general, would need to be the subject of another essay (if not many), suffice it to say there have been a lot of Jewish people working for a very long time to meld Jewish identity with that little sliver of land in the Middle East. Zionists and their supporters (at different times, the British, the UN, and most recently the US) fought wars with guns, culture, and global politics to ensure the success of the world's most resourced ethno-state.

There is, of course, some major issues with starting a country from scratch and importing all new residents to a land that is already inhabited. Unsurprisingly, there is a through line from the beginning of the contemporary Zionist movement to the present of unimaginable violence against the region's previous Arab residents and their descendants (those known today simply as Palestinians). Indeed, in the first few years after Israel declared independence in 1948, some 700,000 Palestinians were made to leave their land and homes. These people were pushed into the Gaza Strip and the West Bank (together less than half the area of the original region), or made to be refugees in neighboring countries. Book-loads of bloody history has elapsed since this initial dispossession in the continued construction and growth of the Israeli state (again, perhaps the subject of another essay), but today the country may be accurately described as an apartheid state, one in which two categories of people receive fundamentally different treatment. Jews and non-Jewish Israeli citizens take part in a conventional Western democracy, vote, have legally protected rights, and so on; those living in the theoretically independent, but practically Israeli-controlled Gaza and West Bank have no rights, little ability to participate in decision making, and are routinely subject to military violence, the destruction of their homes, the usurpation of their lands, imprisonment, and death.  

There is no shortage of critics of Zionism in this world. It doesn't take a bleeding heart to take issue with the long ongoing violence of Israel. Palestinians, first and foremost, rebel against their own subjugation incessantly, and nearly all of Israel's neighboring Arab countries have long opposed its state project, many engaging the country in protracted warfare. Anti-imperial and anti-colonialist movements the world over have also taken up the case of Palestine. Even in the United States, where support for Israel has been the cornerstone of a "democracy in the Middle East" politics, many folks left of center scratch their beards or shake their heads when Israel comes up. 

However, there are relatively few Jewish people who are downright and outspokenly anti-Zionist. This isn't entirely surprising given that it is us who have always been the ultimate subjects of the Zionist project; while convincing other key allies of the necessity of Israel was important, you cannot make a Jewish state without a lot of Jewish buy-in. 

My father speaks of growing up in the Jewish-American South in the '70s and '80s. Support for Israel, he says, was taken for granted. Zionism was a quiet but powerful undercurrent in the synagogue, at Jewish summer camp, in political discussion. As was common in his circles, he spent a bit of time living in the country in his youth, as did both his siblings. Some of his friends even moved there permanently.

Little has changed for the Jews of my generation. The vast majority of Jewish youth I have met hold strong support for Israel. Many have spent time there—a year before college, a program of some sort—and almost always in an entirely uncritical way. If anything, the propaganda machines have grown more institutional power since my father's youth. They operate with larger budgets, greater technology for global reach, and the powerful fervor generated by desperation. For while time and technology have greased the wheels of global Zionist coordination, they have also increased the visibility of the Palestinian struggle and the blood on Israeli hands. As documentaries and other video clips circulate popular and social media, Zionism must work doubly hard, must play a constant game of counter-narrative, to avoid losing the support from the single most important demographic for its own reproduction reproduction: the next generation. 

Birthright is the most insidious tool to this end. Israel, in conjunction with private funders, sends 50,000 Jews from the diaspora on free, carefully curated 10-day trips through the country. The name of the program alludes to the State's promise that every Jew, no matter where in the world they are from, has a birthright to—a right to citizenship in—Israel. (This is of course an unfathomably cruel gesture, when the vast majority of Palestinians, despite their generational attachment to the region, have no such guarantee.)

I myself went on one of these Birthright trips in December of 2017. At the time, I was developing a burgeoning critique of Israel and was more than wary of the program, but my Jewish family convinced me it would be worthwhile. They argued that even if I went with a critical eye, there was no replacement for seeing things in person to form my thinking and politics on the matter. Besides, how often does a free 10-day trip to a foreign country present itself?

Consciously and willingly walking into an indoctrination program, I felt an ethical imperative to prepare. At the time, I knew very little about the history of Israel-Palestine and felt I would be vulnerable to whatever narratives the Birthright tour guides and my fellow travelers would offer. And so I spent the weeks leading up to the trip reading the Palestinian-American scholar, Edward Said and the account of an Israel-critical American Jew who went on Birthright, How to Understand Israel in 60 Days or Less.

Having imagined a feast of lies, I was shocked by how apolitical the trip actually was. Yes, there were moments inline with my anticipations: visiting the graves of Israeli soldiers who died on missions into the Occupied territories (what should properly be called invasions), and being encouraged to mourn for them; our tour guide (an American Jew who had moved to Israel and begged to be able to serve in the military when he was not initially qualified) frequently lamenting the unrelenting terrorism of Palestinians and the torment it caused poor Israeli citizens; visiting Yad Vashem, the Israeli Holocaust memorial, and being reminded the reason that Jews need our own religious/ethnic state. But on the whole, the trip was structured around having a good time and avoided the politics of where we were. Only later did I realize the genius of this tactic. Rather than try to win us over with a Pro-Israel "side of the conflict" (a potentially risky endeavor), it was safer to mostly avoid this territory, to wine and dine us, with occasional reminders of the world's antisemitism thrown in for zest.

Take for instance the "Mega Event." About half-way through the trip, my group of forty young Jews from the American South joined every single other Birthright group in the country at the time—some thousands of people— in a humongous convention center. The lobby was packed with bodies, and all kinds of organizations (from pseudo-military, to tech, to farms) hawking "opportunities" for us to come back to Israel and live, work, or play. After some time of chaotic mingling, the masses of us gathered into the enormous, central event space and found our seats. A smartly dressed MC led us through a bizarre evening of nationalist entertainment. The country's prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu (responsible for intensifying the occupation, supporting Israeli settlements in the occupied territories, and, most recently, working with Trump to annex large areas of the West Bank into Israel-proper) spoke briefly, surrounded by secret service. Right-wing American billionaire and Birthright's main funder, Sheldon Adelson, also spoke, rattling on in the incoherence unique to rich, old, white men. But most of the evening was spent rocking out to Israel's most popular bands. Young people who had met only days before threw their arms around each other and swayed to the music. Birthright provided each participant with an LED, remotely controlled light-up bracelet. As the music played, all of the thousands of bracelets changed colors in sync to one another and the music. The video of this evening is worth a skim, just for a taste of the ludicrous. But while I was there, I did not feel entertained, either in a genuine way, or in a mocking one. I moved far away from my group into an unoccupied sections of seating and felt physically ill. 

I left the country feeling everyone around me had been duped. They hadn't so much been filled with false histories—as I had expected—as simply had a great, care-free time. They were told, "we love you, you are welcome here, come back" and left with fond memories and a love for that twisted country. Not a soul had been forced to engage with the political reality, so much as the existence of, Palestinian life. 

(I want to give a parenthetical nod here to the young people that walked off of their Birthright trip about 6 months after I was in Israel. Watching videos of them challenging their tour guide and fellow Birthright participants and ultimately walking away from the group to visit the occupied territories, my heart swelled with pride, but also regret; holding my tongue for ten days not only caused me great personal consternation, but every young person on my trip left with the state's spoon-fed narrative (or non-narrative, as was more the case) unchallenged. It would have been a mitzvah to offer my fellow travelers something else, however meekly. And for all I know, there were other people on the trip who felt similarly to me, but also stayed quiet.)

When I returned home, I was rather depressed. I determined I would no longer identify with Judaism in any way, shape, or form. I could not hold onto something, religiously, culturally, ethnically that was so thoroughly corrupted. As David Landy writes in his lovely study of Jews who don't like Israel, "disillusion and disidentification do not necessarily lead to movements for change but often to withdrawal (85)." This was certainly the direction I was heading when I got home: get me the hell away from this.

I remained in this state of detachment until the following year, when the eviction notice scandal made me suddenly realize the political potential of being a Jew defected from the status quo of Zionism. During the hellish two weeks following the late night-posting, my (suddenly-reclaimed) Jewish identity had some utility in defending SJP against charges of antisemitism. I was able to speak with a different kind of weight and legitimacy than my peers about the inhumanity and hypocrisy of Israel. I could not be so easily dismissed as prejudiced against my own people (although "self hating Jew" is certainly a moniker earned by many an anti-Zionist Jew). The events of that time pulled me from my place of withdrawal and opened the door to a more serious interest in anti-Zionist/pro-Palestinian activism, and started me asking questions about how I could mobilize my Jewish identity to serve this end. This is more or less the place I remain today.

Throughout the vast majority of my time dissenting from Zionism—from my initial skepticism of Israel, through my shamefaced rejection of Judaism after Birthright, and to my eventual reclamation of Jewish identity in an explicitly anti-Zionist form— I felt very much alone. This loneliness speaks to the overwhelming hegemony of Zionism among Jews. I attended school with one of the highest Jewish population of any college or University in the US (about 1,200 people in any given year), and yet I was the only Jewish person in my school's SJP. While one Jewish woman tried to start a chapter of Jewish Voices for Peace (the world's largest Jewish Israel-critical organization), and spent months advertising around campus, I was the only other person who expressed interest in joining. Meanwhile, our school had four distinct clubs that supported Israel as a central part of their mission. 

Among my Jewish family, things were not too much better. Several of my relatives (especially my father and one of my cousins) developed criticisms of Israel in recent years, but they mostly held these passively. Other Jewish family members are still actively supportive of the country, and many have spent time there on traditionally Zionist programs (those that mostly brush "the conflict" under the rug).

Indeed, for the first twenty-plus years of my life, my exposure to actively Israel-critical Jewish people was severely constrained: a few speakers here and there and a few friends in disperse locations, who themselves felt lonely in their political views. That all changed recently. One of these rare friends, god bless her, took the initiative to try to bring together the anti-Zionist youth from around Atlanta. This effort eventually led to the creation of a semi-regular "radical Shabbat" on Friday evenings. Although I have only attended a small handful of these, I have been very pleasantly surprised. There are far more of us young Jews that don't love Israel than I ever imagined, and being in shared space with them is incredibly relieving and affirming all on its own. 

Ok, now, at long last, to get to the title of this essay: Radical Diasporism. At one of the first radical Shabbat gatherings, a new friend brought printed copies of "Towards a New Diasporism," a chapter from the final book of queer Jewish activist and academic Melanie Kaye/Kantrowitz.  Paper in hand, he explained to me that so much work of Israel-critical is negationist. We protest the evil-doing of the state of Israel, we try to call the attention of other Jews to the violences happening right under their collective nose. But what is the positive vision we offer Jews in Israel's stead? What are we asking our Jewish communities to actually do? What is the future we want for ourselves?

Enter the diasporists. As Kaye/Kantrowitz lays it out, diasporism is an incredibly simple idea, only made "radical" in a context where Zionism reigns. It simply reimagines Jewish identity to embrace our diverse, dispersed, and non-unified status. Jews have, after all, lived most of our historical existence in places other than the biblical land of Israel. Even today, after decades of Zionist recruitment, 70% of the world's Jewish population lives "in the diaspora." The diaspora is not, as Zionism tells it, the result of ancient tragedy in need of correction, but rather who we are, who we have become. We have lives and communities in the United States, France, Canada, Russia, UK. Small pockets of us live in Central and South America, and we have a non-negligible numbers, even still, in Eastern Europe. The dispersion of our ancestors to these places may have been involuntary, not infrequently at the point of a gun, but we are now people of these places. In fact with Israel in its seventh decade and most Jews still elsewhere, it is fair to say that the vast majority of us have chosen not to "return." Judaism is whatever Jewish people are doing, tied to wherever their feet are. It serves no Jew, argues diasporism, to live their life in the diaspora as a a kind of deferred dream, every year at the seder chanting, "Next year in Jerusalem."

For Kaye/Kantrowitz, the issue for Jews today is primarily our "narrowly prescribed options for expressing and nurturing Jewish identity; rarely venturing beyond Zionism; religion; and anti-semitism/the Holocaust (195)." We could be—we are—so much more than this. But the flip side of a coin that melds Judaism to Israel is, necessarily, the erasure and quieting of all parts of Jewish identity that do not fit, or even threaten, this mold. Rich histories of Jewish opposition to Israel, in addition to the vibrant Jewish radical-left from the nineteenth and twentieth century in general, are conveniently forgotten. 

From the diasporist perspective, with Israel and Judaism decoupled, it becomes much easier to take issue with Zionists' frequent exploitation and weaponization of antisemitic alarm for the protection of Israel. When we acknowledged that Jewish identity is not reducible to this one nation state, that in fact most Jews live apart and unconnected from it, and that many of us, if we were to take our own values seriously, are ideologically opposed to it, it no longer makes any sense to shut down critics of the state with the language of prejudice; the fact that entire generations of privileged Jews have grown up learning how to tactfully mobilize oppression/victimization language to defend Israel becomes very disturbing. 

The single historical event that most strongly undergirds the political power of "crying antisemitism" is, of course, the Holocaust. The genocide of 6 million European Jews during the Second World War was undoubtedly an unimaginable tragedy. But it is also an event that is routinely mobilized to Zionist political ends. My visit to Yad Vashem on Birthright made abundantly clear how the horrors of those years can be directly translated into the assumptive necessity for a Jewish "homeland." Kaye/Kantrowitz notes that Jews, and actually the West in general, have a veritable obsession with particular narratives of the Holocaust that border on fetishization. Our culture(s) are replete with stories of the heroism of Allies and Nazi-dissenters on the one hand, and the great suffering and perseverance of Jews on the other. My Jewish grandfather reads novel after novel, monograph after monograph, following the stories of Jews during the War. Tragic, heroic, he doesn't care; he—like so many Jews—consumes these very particular kinds of Holocaust narratives with hunger. And my non-Jewish grandmother (on the other side), is similarly obsessed with these histories. One result of this trend in popular historiography is to create an epistemology that tells us that Jews are an exceptional case of oppressed humanity. It detaches what has happened to Jewish people from universal trends of mistreatment and suffering to cast us as uniquely despised. Such a people, after such suffering, who could argue, are deserving of their country. 

This obsession is taken to obviously problematic extremes. Jewish histories completely overshadow other important Holocaust narratives. Indeed, 5 million non-Jews were killed in Nazi death camps—"the disabled, the gypsies, the slave workers, the communists and Jehovah’s witnesses, the Catholics, the queers (Kaye/Kantrowitz 201)"— and yet we have largely left the stories of these people behind. Similarly, it has become a general faux pas to compare contemporary genocides (Rwanda, Myanmar) with the Jewish experience in the Holocaust. Such comparisons are invariably treated as bordering on sacrilege or treason. There seems to be a necessity to always foreground Jewish suffering; and we cannot separate this necessity from Israel's self-justification. Of course it is important to "never forget," so that the Holocaust is never repeated, but it may be equally as dangerous to weaponize memory.

All in all, diasporism takes an honest appraisal of Zionism, its history, the impact it has on both our own Jewish identity, and its consequences for Palestinian life (though this last point often lacks prioritization; more on this later). After a survey of these facts, the diasporist rejects Zionism as a project doomed from its beginnings, one that leads directly to the suffering of other people and the bastardization of Jewish identity in a homogenizing and nationalistic direction. The alternative it presents is the embrace of what already exists—an amorphous group of people spread throughout the world connected by loose religious traditions and shared histories.

For Jews like me, who have flailed about with self-pity in the annals of Jewish identity, diasporism is certainly an attractive arrival. The vision of American Jewish youth rejecting Israel, rejecting the state-supporting fear mongering, the crying of antisemitism; the vision of many of us coming to understand ourselves and our religious/ethnic identity free from nationalism,  rediscovering buried Jewish radical histories—this excites me to no end. A radically new paradigm of what it means to be Jewish. A kind of twenty-first century multicultural Judaism that relinquishes fear of losing itself into assimilation, and instead embraces our mixed up diversity. 

However, before endorsing this line of thinking fully, its worth bringing up a few well deserved criticisms.

Firstly, as elucidated by Julie Cooper, in focusing so heavily on the terrain of identity (you say this is what it means to be Jewish, when really it should be this), diasporism does little to answer pragmatic and material questions about what Jews are to do with themselves. According to Cooper, advocates of diasporism (and the big names here actually do not include Kaye/Kantrowitz but are rather famed gender theorist Judith Butler and the brothers and co-authors Jonathan and Daniel Boyarin) fundamentally misunderstand Zionism. Although it may appear to us this way now, Zionism was not and is not about constructing a nation based around identity, but rather surviving in a hostile world, developing forms of life that can provide respite from oppression. Obviously a nationalist identity comes as part and parcel of this project, but it was and is ultimately secondary to more tangible concerns. Cooper is concerned that diasporists (with whom she is in complete political agreement about the mess that is Israel) "neglect to mount a direct rebuttal of Zionism's political claims" and instead "trust that elaborating an ethically compelling vision of 'Jewishness' will yield the desired political stance (89)." In other words, to change the way Jews think about themselves will not, on its own, change what the state of Israel does, nor will it answer the political-social question of: what are Jews to do in the face of prejudice? 

Cooper's point is well taken, and I agree that in addition to revamping our understanding of what it means to be Jewish, Jews need to be thinking about structural and social forms we can live in that meet the needs that Israel claims to address.  

The second point of concern, as raised by David Landy throughout his book, applies not only to those taking an explicitly diasporist position, but pretty much all Jews  criticizing Israel. For most of these folks (myself included), the starting point of our divergence from status quo Zionism has to do with Israeli mistreatment of Palestinians. In any number of ways, we encounter the horrors of the state of Israel and the generational consequences for Palestinian people and are radically shaken. But, as Landy points out, the result of our discomfort quickly turns personal. Often, we enter protracted crises of identity that tend to push the actual and ongoing experiences of Palestinians to the margins, if not leave them behind entirely. Like the white person first confronting their complicity in structural racism, the first questions we ask are "what does this mean for me?" and "what am I to do now to become an ethical person in my own eyes?" We wallow in guilt and confusion, and more often than not moves toward "disidentification" before constructive activity.

Even for those Jews that do become agents of change, our activity tends to focus on intra-Jewish dialogue; bringing other Jews away from Zionist hegemony through education, discussion, and debate. Of the many Israel-critical Jewish groups in Landy's study, very few engaged in collective organizing with Palestinian groups or focused primarily on support and solidarity for Palestinians. Often, activists feel that because Zionism is so dominant, they must act moderately or risk alienating their Jewish communities (a tired reformist argument if ever I heard one). And moderate action, of course, avoids engagement with Palestinians unless in a charity-based way.

In all cases, diasporist thinking does not center Palestinians. In fact, if we were being really cynical, we could say a primary function of diasporism is to clear the conscious of diasporic Jews through reimagining our Jewish identity so as to free ourselves from bloody entanglements in the Middle East. Rather than engage, we wash our hands of it all. But of course we cannot run nor hide from what has been done in our name, even if the doing-in-our name—the conflation of our Judaism with Israel—was something we never signed up for. Even as we successfully wrestle Judaism away from Israel, we must contend with the last seventy years.

So ultimately, I am excited by Kaye/Kantrowitz's question "What if, instead of  assuming diaspora as a problem, we identify as a problem the narrowly prescribed  options (in the United  States) for expressing and nurturing Jewish  identity; rarely  venturing  beyond Zionism; religion; and anti-semitism/the Holocaust (195)?" The expansion of Judaism into a messy collage of ways of being across the globe thrills me. But at the same time, this alone will be relatively weightless. So what if we start thinking of ourselves in different terms? Perhaps it will slow the flow of Americans to Israel. Perhaps it will diminish interest in Birthright trips. But there are massive political, economic, and military structures supporting that place. Whether I do or do not personally is largely meaningless for the plight of Palestinians and for the fate of Jewish institutions on the whole.

If diasporism is to be anything more than escapism, it must extend beyond the realm of "identity-work" into activism and action. And active Jewish, Israel-critical groups certainly exist (Landy's book gives a very good overview of the organizations in the US and the UK). These groups typically vary in just how critical of Israel they are willing to be. Do they criticize the Occupation, or just settlements? Do they continue to support a two-state solution, or do they acknowledge that one state is the only possibility with any hope of decency for Palestinians? Do they go so far as to make the diasporist claim, that in fact Israel was a project doomed to inhumanity from the beginning and perhaps should be abandoned (few do)?

The actual activity of these groups varies from merely lobbying for a two state solution (J Street) to supporting the Boycott Divest, and Sanctions movement and attending demonstrations in solidarity with Palestinian groups (Jewish Voices for Peace). IfNotNow is probably the most interesting group to arise recently in the US context, holding demonstrations against Trump's immigrant detention facilities and discouraging American Jews from going on Birthright.

Of course, the fact that the United States provides Israel with a tremendous amount of aid and considers the country its most important ally in the Middle East adds an important layer of complicity to Israel-critical Jews in the US: these terrors are not only done in my name, but funded by my tax dollars. What's more, Israeli and the US have military and policing "exchanges," in which the two share tactics and technology for surveillance, coercion, protest control, and god knows what else. Overwhelmingly, these new, cutting-edge technologies of violence are used against Palestinians in Israel-Palestine and against Black and Brown people in the US. In my home state of Georgia, we have the Georgia International Law Enforcement Exchange (GILEE) that works first and foremost with Israel.

Jews do increasingly hit the streets on these issues, but still not nearly enough of us. 

For better or worse, the most felt impact of visible, politically-active Jewish-critical groups is simply fracturing the illusion of unity of Jews around Zionism. Non-Jews (many of whom, for good reason, conflate Israel and Judaism fully) get to see that Jewish people are not a monolith in unequivocal support for Israel. By creating a growing bloc of active Jewish dissent from Israel (or at the very least its most egregious activity), the house of cards may begin to fall.

The Irene, as it was intercepted by the Israeli Navy. 

In 2010, a group of Israel-critical Jewish activists from around the diaspora attempted to sail the Irene through the Israeli blockade of Gaza with aid and supplies. As soon as the boat crossed the blockade, it was boarded by the Israeli navy. Its passengers were all soon after deported.

For the time being, however, Zionism continues to dominate the Jewry. In my last semester of college, two Jewish professors offered a one credit class on the history of the "Israeli-Palestinian conflict" (as they called it). They reached out to me, as the single Jewish member of SJP, in hopes I could recruit some pro-Palestinian activists to the class and bolster its diversity. I took this as a bad sign. If these professors were reaching out to me, a student they hardly knew, to recruit a different perspective to their classroom, that did not bode well for a "balanced" course. In fact, it implied they were so trapped in their own (presumably Zionist) biases that they knew no Palestinian-supporting people themselves and did not take the initiative to overcome their own limitations by finding a facilitator of a different perspective and more intentionally recruiting non- or anti-Zionist students.

Nevertheless, I shared the course with the rest of SJP, who were predictably and reasonably suspicious. Both the course description and the academic track record of the two professors did little to convince them that the course could be anything other than a history by and for the victors (an analog, perhaps, to a Southern history classes taught by a white professor to a classroom of exclusively white students. There may be some critical self-reflection in such a class, some regret, some retrospective moral finger-wagging, but at the end of the day, no one's ancestors were enslaved and all participants would be current beneficiaries of that history). I agreed to take the course, but no one else in SJP wanted, in their words, to "subject themselves" to what they knew they would find there.

All our concerns, as it turned out, were well merited. The class was about 75% white Jewish students raised in Zionist households. As we did introductions, it became clear that for most of the class, pro-Israel education in Jewish day school and youthful trips to Israel had matured into strong political support for the country. The rest of the class consisted of a couple completely uninformed and neutral goyim (non-jews), a couple who took issue with Israel, and two of us Israeli-critical Jews.

To the teachers' credit, they assigned an excellent book, Side by Side:Parallel Histories of Israel-Palestine. The text attempts to simulate the wildly different histories Palestinian and Israeli children receive of the same historical events by literally having the two histories on opposite pages from one another. Each chapter covers a certain time period, the left pages giving "the" Israeli take, and the right, "the" Palestinian. Though poorly translated, I think the book does an outstanding job of making clear beyond any doubt how downright inhumane, exploitative, and murderous Zionism has been since it first set foot in Palestine. Notably, the chapters from the Israeli perspective do not really deny any of the atrocities, but rather frame them as important and necessary steps to the establishment of a Jewish state, and occasionally express regret. Meanwhile, the Palestinian chapters make abundantly clear the unimaginable loss that each event left in its wake.

What was utterly baffling to me was that the plurality of the class remained somehow unmoved in reading about one massacre, one dispossession, one broken promise, after another. So strong was their Zionist conditioning that when confronted with horrifying histories, they felt no rage, no sense of betrayal by their upbringing, no guilt at their complicity and active support of a government of terror, an apartheid society. I wanted to hold up the book, wag it in their faces, and scream "Did you read this?!"

I hope small seeds were planted in that classroom, seeds that will one day lead to some shifting of perspective. But mostly I felt the whole class was a waste of time. The amount of heat I felt in my chest, and the amount of breath I spewed (for I did not hold my tongue this time; doing so once on Birthright was plenty of silence on Israel for one lifetime) certainly did not have much of a reward. 

If there is one take away here, it is that the work of us diasporists (or really any Israel-critical Jew) cannot be focused on the polite persuasion of our Zionist Jewish networks. It is tempting to debate our families, to sway our friends, to bring challenge to the synagogue. And of course, these things have import—deep change in the individual is often the result of interpersonal intervention—but there are better venues for systems change. We need to be participating in collective organizing, direct action, and, where we historically have not shown our face, in explicit solidarity and support of Palestinians. 

References

Julie E. Cooper, "A Diasporic Critique of Diasporism: The Question of Jewish Political Agency" in Political Theory, Vol. 43, No. 1 (February 2015), pp. 80-110.

David Landy, Jewish Identity and Palestinian Rights: Diaspora Jewish Opposition to Israel, Zed Books, 2011.

 Melanie Kaye/Kantrowitz, "Towards a New Diasporism," in The Color of Jews: Racial Politics and Radical Diasporism, Indiana University Press, 2007.