Unraveling Zionism

An essay about deprogramming and becoming untethered 🧵

I first wrote this essay in December of 2023. I came back to it in March as Israel’s genocide in Gaza continued unabated. It’s now May and the assault on Rafah, Biden’s one red line, is being roundly ignored by Israel. They are bombing tents. Israel with America’s support, two hugely powerful nuclear states, are bombing the tents of desperate civilians in the last “safe area” of the concentration camp that is Gaza.  

I’m not sure how relevant this essay is in this context. My hope is that in sharing my personal and embarrassingly slow journey of unlearning Zionism others might be encouraged to do the same. That is, to unwind this ideology from our religion, to see the harm it causes and to understand this is not where our safety will be found.  Beyond that, I ask the mainstream Jewish world: what is your plan here? Because this, this story so many of us are taught, it is very obviously falling apart at the seams. Young people, university students, are galvanized and organized. Amongst them are Jewish students doing the unlearning I did, except at ten times the speed.  Some have gone from Zionist to anti-Zionist in just a few months. What will happen to Jewish institutions, almost all of which are deeply Zionist, if a significant number of younger Jews come to reject Zionism?

The inciting incident of my deprogramming happened long before October 7^th. It was late 2005. My Belgian officemate at the UN tribunal in The Hague where we both worked said, “Israel is the worst thing that ever happened to the Jews”. Her family survived the Holocaust.

I.               

My questioning of the Zionist narrative was a slow unraveling at first. It took time for the full picture to come into focus. For starters, I didn’t know Zionism was a political ideology distinct from Judaism; that I could be Jewish and not a Zionist. These two things were conveniently conflated. Meanwhile every Palestinian I know was very specifically taught to differentiate between the two at the risk of being called antisemitic. In my world, no one spoke of Zionism at all. Just of Israel. It was the key to our safety in a world where most people hate us and a magical place where everyone is Jewish. According to my grandmother, “Jessica, even the doormen are Jewish!”

It wasn’t so long ago I realized Hatikvah was the Israeli national anthem and not a goodbye prayer we sang at the end of Hebrew class and to this day at the end of synagogue services. In Montreal, Quebec, Canada. Only a few years ago, I realized allowance money I donated as a kid to plant trees in Israel went to the Jewish National Fund (JNF), a Zionist organization established in 1901 to promote the settlement of land exclusively for Jews. After 1948, the new Israeli government appointed itself custodian of the land it took in the war and sold a large portion of it to the JNF, because, as a non-state entity, it would not be subject to international law, making it easier to circumvent UN Resolution 194, mandating the right of Palestinian refugees to return to those areas.

The trees were planted “to make the desert bloom”. They were also planted to prevent refugees from returning to their homes. Palestinian villages were destroyed and covered with forests erasing evidence of what once existed and what happened. The expulsion of Palestinians from their homes and the JNF’s forestation to assert sovereignty continues to this day. But it was only in writing this, that I learned about Canada Park. Created in 1973 and funded by JNF Canada—by people in my community—the park is subsidized by the Canadian Government because of its tax-free charitable status. Canada Park sits on top of three Arab villages: Imwas, Beit Nuba, and Yalo. On June 6^th, 1967 Yitzhak Rabin, ordered soldiers to bulldoze the homes in those villages. Villages on the Palestinian side of the Green Line. Residents who tried to return, even just to collect a few of their things, were turned away at gun point. Stones from these homes now line the walking paths of the park. The ruins of a cemetery are visible from the picnic tables.

If I had to pinpoint the thing that broke me. The moment everything that is Israel fell apart for me, it was the trees. Maybe because I had been implicated. Or maybe it was the idea that if even the trees were nefarious, what wasn’t? I had felt proud of my contribution at the time. Meanwhile, there I was, being made complicit in a war crime as a child under the pretense of, of all things, environmentalism! Trees which I also learned, caused serious environmental harm. The JNF planted mostly pines, because they spread quickly and the forests reminded the newly arrived Europeans of home. But the pines, planted in areas where flora and fauna and agriculture existed, killed the natural woods around them. Pines are also highly flammable so they’ve also killed a significant number of people in several forest fires. If colonialism was a song, the JNF trees hit every single note.

When I talk about the Zionist narrative unraveling, this is what it looks like: a series of increasingly upsetting discoveries. Usually when Israel is in the news for bombing Gaza or oppressing Palestinians in a way that makes mainstream headlines, I read something that causes me to look a little deeper. The bombardment of Gaza in 2021, was the trees. It starts with, what’s the JNF? The JNF does what? Bad for the environment? Canada Park! Each time the Israeli war cabinet decides to “mow the grass” – exact a heavy price on Gaza to deter Hamas – the thread unspools a little further on this story I’d tucked away in a box in my brain along with my bat mitzvah Hebrew for decades. Because as far as I knew, Israel was part of being Jewish, and I wasn’t religious enough to consider independently verifying Judaism. 

II.                

There have been several times I can remember being confronted with information I wasn’t ready to hear and couldn’t process. There was a Facebook argument in 2014. Someone I know left a comment informing me that Israel had created Hamas. This isn’t exactly true but it’s not far off. Israel was supportive of Hamas as a counterweight to the PLO and welcomed its creation as an opportunity to divide and rule. Either way, at the time I knew none of this and I was incensed. I googled “Israel created Hamas” and several articles showed up including one in the Washington Post with the headline, “How Israel Helped Create Hamas”.

Worse, were the early arguments I’d have with my wife who is Palestinian, where I’d very confidently say something only to realize I’d had no real idea where that assertion came from. One day, probably backed into a corner, I said, “well you guys don’t recognize Israel’s right to exist!” She informed me that the PLO had done so during Oslo. Then she asked me, “has Israel ever recognized Palestine’s right to exist?” Of course it had. I mean it must have because I’d never heard anyone ask this question. And there it was. The inescapable truth that beyond not knowing the answer to either question, I had never considered any of this from a Palestinian perspective.

I’ve listened to a number of mainly younger Jews in conversation, online, and on podcasts share what prompted them to seek out more information or feel like what they were taught wasn’t quite right. Often, it’s the nagging question: why did no one ever talk about Palestinians? And why, when they were brought up, were they described as an existential threat, as terrorists, less accomplished, less civilized and therefore less deserving of that land?

One specific memory I have is learning how many Jews had won Nobel Prizes relative to our tiny population. It was a lot. Then the teacher asked, “And now how many Nobels do you think they have?” Whatever it was, it was much fewer, if any. I remember this because it didn’t feel right. At that age I’d been told, several times over, we shouldn’t compare ourselves to others. Today kids are far more sophisticated. They’d probably recognize this as a transparent attempt to justify colonialism. I have to imagine, at least one bat mitzvah-aged girl immediately turning her phone camera on herself to debunk this on Tik Tok: “Obviously a prize established in 1901 in Sweden wasn’t being handed out to anyone in the Global South for a while.” But in my day, I think most of us accepted there was a chance we were exceptional. At that awkward age being Chosen was all some of us had. Whatever humiliation I suffered, I could always remind myself that one day, I would receive my Nobel Prize, as is my birthright.

I see a direct line between that kind of early education, more or less reinforced by the 6pm and 11pm news, to watching Palestinians in Gaza record their suffering in the hope we might make it stop. A direct line to witnessing children hold a press conference in English asking the world to let them live. A direct line to Palestinians constantly needing to prove their humanity in the face of so much dehumanization.

I’m married to a Palestinian and although I was aware of Israel’s war crimes and illegal settlement enterprise, before her I knew almost nothing about the Palestinian experience. Not understanding Palestinians as a distinct people, with a distinct history and rich culture rooted in that land specifically, is necessary to internalizing this powerful sense of unfairness we’re taught. This idea that everyone is against us. That Israel is always singled out and held to a higher standard. The why us of it all. I’ve seen it expressed as a meme, but the first time I internalized this feeling someone with a map pointed at Israel and said “look at this tiny sliver of land. That’s what we’ve been fighting for all this time, just that. They don’t even want us to have that.” And then they circled their finger around the Arab world and said, “now look at everything they have.” If you don’t think about it too much it does feel unfair. When it’s framed as this tiny island, with no natural resources, in a giant sea of undifferentiated Arabs, it does seem a little greedy. But if on the other hand you understand Palestinians as a distinct people worthy of self-determination, just like Egyptians or Jordanians, the map looks very different. Suddenly, they’re the ones with the tiny and ever-shrinking sliver, actually slivers. Slivers that don’t even connect.

III.                

The most quickly disproven myth lies at the heart of the Zionist pitch: Israel was a land without a people for a people without a land. From there you might learn about the Nakba, the catastrophe of 1948, the everyday humiliations and oppressions under the system of occupation imposed in 1967, the State-backed settler terrorism and illegal expansionism in contravention of international law, the various discriminatory laws which on their face or in practice create second class citizenship for Palestinians within Israel, the ways in which non-violent resistance has been criminalized, punished or otherwise violently suppressed. Whatever the starting point, once you see it, you can’t unsee it. And once this happens, at least in my case, it became impossible to remain silent about it. And once I wasn’t silent about what I was seeing and reading, I began to understand how pervasively Zionism had attached itself to everything that is, was, my Jewish world.

As I unwound Zionism from Judaism, I started to become untethered from family, from community and from my synagogue. Judaism, and especially the ritual of the holidays, is how I connect to my history and to my family. When I sit in synagogue, admittedly only a couple of days a year, the experience for me is less about reinforcing my relationship to God than it is sitting in the place where my grandmother sat. It’s about practicing continuity. I love the formality of the old sanctuary and the beauty of the choir. My relationship to Judaism I’ve realized is very people and site-specific. Which complicates things. In retrospect, maybe I should have centered God a little more. It would have made it easier to simply join a new shul that shares my values, what I believe are Jewish values. I live in Brooklyn. It wouldn’t be hard to find a progressive synagogue that doesn’t end services with Hatikvah and ask the congregation to pray for the IDF.

Over the years, I’ve learned many upsetting things about Israel. I’ve battled the cognitive dissonance. I’ve had my related disappointments and falling outs with people. Still, none of it prepared me for how overwhelmingly disorienting this moment would be. Growing up in the diaspora, I had regular nightmares about Nazis. I was one of only a few Jewish kids in my grade and I’d prepared myself to be given up immediately should the Nazis ever walk through the doors. We are so young when we learn about the Holocaust. It feels like I learnt about it at the same time I came to understand I was Jewish, around 8 or 9. I was vaguely aware I was Jewish before that, but it was learning about the Holocaust that made me understand this was a significant thing about me that some people really hated and it couldn’t be hidden or changed. It was astoundingly bad news. No Christmas, and now this.

I went to Holocaust museums and saw the piles of children’s shoes. In university, I visited survivors at their homes and recorded their testimonies for an oral history project. I went to law school and focused on human rights law and international humanitarian law. And then for a few years, I worked as a war crimes lawyer in The Hague at a tribunal dealing specifically with the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda. So when Israeli leaders cut off food, fuel, electricity and water to a trapped and desperate civilian population in Gaza, and used dehumanizing language, while ordering the evacuation of 1.1 million people from Northern Gaza, I immediately knew what this was. I thought everyone did. It was October 13^th. By November 2^nd, according to some estimates, the equivalent of two nuclear bombs had been dropped on Gaza. Surely this was the moment we’d been training for. We could finally, for once, put never again into practice. But when I turned around to see who was with me, no one was there.

In the seven months since, I’ve seen my Jewish world remain silent or supportive of what the International Court of Justice affirmed in January, is plausibly a genocide. In the many emails and video sermons I’ve received from my synagogue there’s been no mention of Palestinians at all. I’ve seen no statement issued by any Holocaust museum despite mandates that include the prevention of genocide everywhere. The same museums that seek to educate the public on the complicity of silence and the capacity we all have to turn away in the face of evil, have become an example of this themselves.

What we have seen is a loud and widespread campaign by Israel advocates, mainstream Jewish institutions, antisemitism organizations and paid influencers, to silence, shutdown, slander, and blacklist people who call for a ceasefire and advocate for Palestinian liberation. Jews who have joined these voices have been compared to Nazis and had their Jewishness denied by the ADL and the editor-in-chief of the Jerusalem Post, to give just two prominent examples. This while groups like the ADL, AIPAC, and the March for Israel, share a platform and align themselves with actual white nationalists.

IV.

I have been accused of spreading hate and contributing to an uptick in antisemitism many times over. And yet, my inbox is filled with messages of hope and peace from Arab Muslims reaffirming the brotherhood of our religions and their love for Jewish people. Many of these messages express a profound desire to return to a time before Zionism arrived and disrupted religious co-existence in the Arab world. They express respect for the Jewish religion, which is part of Islam, and sadness at it being used to further an exclusionist ideology that has led to so much violence. I’ve interacted online with a few hundred Arabs since October 7^th. Many of these interactions led to conversations that have built bridges and understanding. In some cases people share videos with me that tend towards conspiracy and I’ll explain why a certain theory is in fact antisemitic or borders on it. Generally people are happy to be corrected because they don’t want to fall for misinformation, they aren’t antisemitic and they certainly don’t want to hurt their cause. People send photos showing off the beauty of their country. Many have invited me and my wife to their homes in the Middle East and North Africa. In this terrible moment, this little corner of the internet where we engage in organic micro-diplomacy (a great band name if someone wants it) has been a rare source of light.

In the eyes of many Zionists though, I am a Jew acting as a Kapo, a Nazi collaborator, a person who cozies up to the enemy to save herself. If they’re younger they’ll call me a pick-me, accusing me of speaking up for Palestinians to be liked or to fit in. They all warn me, that like the Kapo, in the end I won’t be spared. This is the zero-sum, us or them, thinking that Zionism requires. That if Israel puts down its weapons it would cease to exist. That Palestinian liberation from the river to the sea means wiping out Jews. That because of Oct 7^th Israel has no choice but to commit genocide in self-defense. This is currently the central argument even if they wouldn’t put it quite like this. It is what allows Israel’s loyalists to accept the mass starvation of a civilian population not only as self-defense but as the only option. It’s the same exceptionalist conditioning that allows people to equate the term “ceasefire” with loss of life and as being somehow anti-hostage. What allows them without any hint of irony, to emphatically denounce those who believe in the justness of resistance by any means necessary, as they defend Israel, the national embodiment of “by whatever means necessary”.

Every time I’m accused of making Jews less safe, I want to scream-type “I am trying to save you! You people are going to get us all killed!” We, the anti-Zionist Jews, are the example people point to, to say Jewish people and Israel are not one and the same. Because as photos emerge of children dying of enforced thirst and starvation, of people targeted by tanks while desperately trying to reach aid, as IDF soldiers upload videos of themselves humiliating and torturing Palestinians, looting homes and posing in the women’s underwear they find, as they celebrate the destruction of entire neighborhoods while spray painting the Star of David on burnt-out buildings, I’d suggest that this is what’s probably driving the uptick.

More dangerous is the unwavering and unquestioned support given to Israel’s assault by the mainstream Jewish diaspora, further collapsing the distinction between Israel’s actions and Jewish people. All of which only reinforces what many of us had already come to understand: Israel is not the guarantor of our Jewish safety. That this isn’t about faith, but about ideological loyalty. The truth is every Zionist, at least the ones I know, would be outraged were it not a Jewish state committing these atrocities. Fundamentally this isn’t about Israel being Jewish for anyone but them. The vast majority of people who are critical of Israel aren’t singling Israel out because it’s Jewish or because they believe only Jews should be denied the right to self-determination. What they are challenging is the idea that Jewish self-determination includes a right to ethnically cleanse an existing population to achieve a demographic majority and that a Jewish right to self-determination supersedes the right of Palestinians to the same.

People all over the world are watching the worst things they have seen in their life, images seared into our brains, every day on our phones for months and months. Indescribable horrors committed by Jews in the name of Jews, with the full backing of the American government despite a significant majority of Americans opposing the continued sale of weapons to Israel. Many Americans are also justifiably questioning why their government appears to have been taken over by a foreign state as they see the President’s words ignored and the influence AIPAC exercises in various congressional races. In what possible sense could any of this, as we often ask, be good for the Jews?

It’s hard to imagine a more effective strategy to drive antisemitism and yet groups who are ostensibly concerned with antisemitism like the ADL are cheering it on. Their focus has been on extinguishing support for Palestinian liberation and fanning the flames of fear so that many Jews in North America are so worried about their own safety they need to protect Israel more than ever. All of it is so perfectly self-reinforcing. When a I see a rich celebrity hop on Instagram to tell us how they are bravely wearing their Star of David necklace on the Upper East Side after I’ve just watched a little girl shaking uncontrollably as she’s told her entire family was killed, I feel hate. Not because they’re Jewish but because of their total lack of self-awareness. I don’t know if everyone makes that distinction. One day, it might actually be brave to display a Star of David in the streets of New York and I am filled with rage at the prospect that these same people will turn around and say, “you see we told you, Kapo!”

V.

When organizing, fundraising, protesting and posting haven’t been enough to stop the slaughter, all we have left to offer is our witness. We bear witness not just to the flattening of Gaza, the people pulled from the rubble, the little girl’s body shredded from a blast hanging from a building, the mother holding the dead bodies of the twin babies it took her ten years of IVF to conceive, but also to words and deeds of the Zionists, the leaders, the IDF, the government spokespeople, the weapons manufacturers, the criminals. We bear witness to the lies, the dehumanization, to their rote talking points, to their monstrosity. We watch as they call everyone who criticizes them antisemitic, a terrorist, a Hamas supporter, until there is almost no one – no humanitarian organization or institution of international law left.

There is a rule I am often reminded of by other diasporic Jews. The rule is, I can criticize Israel “but do you have to be so loud about it?”. It would sound undemocratic to suggest I can’t criticize the actions of a state so, I am told, it’s allowed as long as non-Jews can’t hear me. The reason: it could increase antisemitism. If Jewish people point out what Israel is doing is wrong, is apartheid, is illegal under international law, this might alert people who hadn’t heard about this and now that they know, they could use this against Israel and/or against Jews. Furthermore, if they hear a Jew saying this stuff, it will give them permission to say it. This is incoherent not only because everyone has heard the news and because silence begets further extremism, but because this is what we constantly demand of Muslims and Arabs. A Palestinian appearing on any mainstream news program will inevitably be asked to denounce Hamas before they’re permitted to say anything more: “Thank you for joining us, we’re so sorry to hear your entire blood line has been wiped out and your leg was amputated without anesthetic, tell us, do you denounce Hamas?”

This intra-community silencing is one of the clearest examples of how Zionism damages Jewish communities themselves. The idea that people will quietly express their opposition to the settlements yet never say it out loud, never mind work to stop a clearly illegal and delegitimizing Israeli policy, is one of the least Jewish things I can think of. Non-Jews will self-censor around Israel for fear of being called antisemitic. Within Jewish communities people will self-censor for fear contributing to rising antisemitism or being told they are doing so. I was once told I was personally putting my nephews lives in danger in Toronto because they attended a Jewish school. In both cases antisemitism is wielded to protect Zionism and the consequence of not complying is often some form of community or societal ostracization. It is highly effective. If a hallmark of the liberal Zionist is the championing of a two-state solution why then has no consequence ever been imposed, no dollar taken away, no measure of support withdrawn from Israel because of the settlements? The expansion of settlements has never abated, not under any Israeli Prime Minister. They are a clear violation of international law, they are terrible from a security standpoint, and they have created conditions on the ground that render a two-state solution impracticable. For the liberal Zionist this is the solution, the only path to a sustainable secure Jewish state. Sill, nothing is said. Nothing is done.

Beyond the self-censoring is the policing of speech by others. People in the community who take it upon themselves to report social media posts written by people they know, to their parents. The Jewish Currents podcast, “On The Nose” has an episode where people called in and left messages, all on the subject of family and community rupture since Oct 7^th.  One caller observed that this kind of informing only serves no other purpose than to upset your parents. The idea, I assume, is that you’ll stop posting critically about Israel to spare your parents the grief. In these cases, the people who report never come to me (or others) directly. They aren’t interested in debate and discussion, only ideological enforcement. All of this, the caller notes, is an indicator of an unhealthy society.

Her observation reminded me of an interview I read with Shaul Magid in which he says, "David Ben-Gurion was right when he said the biggest threat to Zionism was a healthy Diaspora." So much of this feels as though it is all by design. That what Israel requires, what sustains Zionism, is the continuous sowing of our existential fears. It’s easy to do. In a very safe community in Canada, there I was at school quietly preparing to be taken by Nazis. The groundwork is laid early. The trauma of the Holocaust followed by the lesson that Israel is the only thing that can save us from another one. In this way, criticism of Israel is an attack on Jewish existence and the person that does it is putting us all in danger.

VI.

The two Jewish existential fears are: antisemitism and assimilation. In both cases, Israel is presented as the answer. I’ve spoken about the first but with respect to the second, the emphasis placed on connecting Jews to Israel to maintain their connection to Jewishness, rather than to their own communities also serves to make those communities less unified, less strong, and less healthy. Imagine if even half of the resources devoted to strengthening the Diaspora-Israel relationship were put into building connection, community and safety in the places where we live? Many places in the world are far less safe for Jews than North America. Why not invest in strengthening the refugee system to help Jews (and others) escape persecution where it exists and help them settle where they want? Why not push back against fascist regimes and isolate prominent white supremacists rather than embrace them? Why not focus on rooting out actual antisemitism rather than villainizing those seeking liberation?

As Israel moves further and further right, as its demographics and poll numbers indicate it will continue to do, the diaspora will be forced to justify more unjustifiable acts. It will have to do so in opposition to public opinion which is increasingly turning against Israel. At the same time, within the Jewish diaspora there is a significant generational divide moving in the opposite direction of Israel. Younger Jews are far more likely to oppose Israel’s current assault on Gaza. They have grown up post Oslo, after the signing of a “peace agreement” that made life untenable for Palestinians, largely under Netanyahu’s tenure. They have more access to information and are less likely to simply accept the Zionist narrative without question. The idea that Zionism and support for Israel will remain and continue to be seen by elected officials as the consensus diaspora Jewish opinion is unlikely. The ruptures that currently exist are only going to get worse, not just in our personal relationships but between Jews and the Jewish institutions for whom Zionism, or at least the promise to not engage in criticism of Israel, is a requirement for participation.

What happens to the integrity of our institutions that so publicly supported what much of the world recognizes as genocide? What happens to the Holocaust museums and the synagogues that remained silent or supportive as Israel laid waste to Gaza? I’m just one person, but I don’t know how I will ever step foot in these places again. It seems to me that there are two options going forward: Either the mainstream diaspora Jewish world lets go of Zionism as a condition for participation in Jewish life, or we have two separate Jewish worlds in the diaspora. A growing number of Jews are seeking to take Judaism back from Zionism. These people are organizing, building community if not their own institutions, and aligning with other progressive groups and causes as they continue to build their political voice. At the same time, demographics indicate participation in mainstream Zionist institutions will continue to decline.

The Jewish diaspora, especially outside a few major cities, is tiny. Wouldn’t it make sense recognize how unsustainable and harmful this situation is? To disentangle Zionism from Judaism as a collective. To take an honest look at what it is Zionism requires us to defend. To seriously consider the self-reinforcing relationship between Zionism and antisemitism, and to imagine what real safety, unity and Jewishness looks like free from this ideology.

In 2005, before I was untethered, I walked into the room I’d be sharing with another young lawyer in the President’s Office of the UN International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in The Hague. She was a little older than me, had a PhD from Oxford, was Belgian and also Jewish. She came from a family of Holocaust survivors. As it happens, it took five minutes for the subject of Israel to come up. She looked at me and in the most matter of fact way, said “Israel is the worst thing that ever happened to the Jews.” I couldn’t argue with her: her family had actually been through the Holocaust and she had a PhD from Oxford. I was in too much shock to say anything. But I never forgot it. It would be years before I’d even realize there was a box in my brain with dusty ideas to unravel. But little by little, every day since, I have come to understand exactly what she meant.