WATCHING IN HORROR as events unfold in Gaza, it is easy to despair. If people can’t change, then there is no way out. Yet people can change, they can learn from experience, develop their own way of thinking and act in concert with others. Personal and collective transformations may then ensue, awareness, anger, action all of which had lain beneath the surface of daily life, may then burst forth, the unacceptable no longer accepted, the intolerable no longer tolerable. And in that process lies a glimmer of hope, no matter how faint it may seem at the moment.
The documentary Israelism, shown at the New Deal Cafe in Greenbelt on June 17, gives a picture of such transformations, focusing on the lives of two individuals – Simone Zimmerman and “Eitan” (who did not want to be fully identified). They each grew up in a somewhat cloistered environment of Jewish schools and camps in which they were taught to identify Judaism with Israel and in which uncritical support for Israel was not so much taught as just assumed to be an integral part of who they are. Part of the way that was transmitted was by simply ignoring Palestinians – their lives, history, culture – treating them as if they didn’t exist. Their upbringing put forward a narrative that posits a uniform Jewish experience that necessarily culminated in the creation of the state of Israel, which therefore can’t be substantively questioned. Mythology replaces history – at the expense of truth and justice.
Yet when experience leads someone with the courage to ask questions, the edifice collapses. Simone describes her awakening to a different way of seeing after attending a campus event arguing against a student body resolution critical of Israel. She found herself unable to answer the arguments of Palestinian students who spoke of how it felt to live under occupation, who spoke of their families’ history of loss, of their own sense of marginalization. She goes back to her Hillel group (a campus-based Jewish organization) and found no answers there. Her personal journey leads her to visit the West Bank, to meet Palestinians who are not the dangerous terrorists she had been told she would find, but human beings like any other. That should not be a surprise except when people are enveloped in a Manichean view of humanity; with a threatening “other” ever-present, it becomes impossible to see people as who they are. Individuality of those feared is rendered invisible, a community is reduced to a type, judged by association and not understood as existing in its diversity – all hallmarks of anti-Semitism turned into a dismissal of the humanity of Palestinians.
Once Simone’s eyes are open, one question leads to another and another, until she challenges the entire edifice of the beliefs with which she was raised. She goes on to help found IfNotNow, which – along with numerous other peace and social justice organizations – is challenging the dominant view of mainstream Jewish organizations that refuse to acknowledge the genuine diversity of political, social, and religious views within the Jewish community. In a sense, the racism directed toward Palestinians is also an attempt to impose a rigid orthodoxy amongst American Jews, thus the claim that those willing to challenge Israel’s fundamental policies are “self-hating,” or not really Jewish.
Eitan’s awakening took a different path. As the documentary makes clear, celebration of war and militarism is central to the ideology of those who seek to inculcate uncritical support for Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, for Israel is presented as a society under siege, always under threat of attack from its neighbors. Serving in the Israeli Defense Force (IDF) is promoted as an honor and almost a rite of passage. Eitan was one of many who signed up and, American citizen though he is, served in the IDF.
Doing so, he came to see the contradiction between what he was told and what he experienced. The IDF is not an army whose main job is protecting its borders from neighbors, it is an army whose main job is controlling the Palestinian population. That is to say, it is an army acting as a police force over a local population that is perceived as foreign and unwanted, a population necessarily hostile when every aspect of its daily life is controlled, when freedom, in the most basic sense of freedom of movement, is denied. Brutality and dehumanization is the inevitable result – for how else can an Israeli soldier justify breaking into someone’s home without a warrant and without even the figleaf of pretense that those in that home have done anything wrong. It is only possible, when the people being occupied are not seen as people. Eitan witnesses his fellow soldiers act out that brutality; because he does nothing (for, in truth, there was nothing he could do), his first impulse is shame. Back in the United States, Eitian finds the strength to confront his ingrained beliefs, and publicly speaks out the truth of what he knows and has experienced with a courage far beyond what those who rely on weapons to control a civilian population could possibly know.
Going beyond the confines of the film, for the moment, it is important for us to challenge another myth, the ahistorical “historical” narrative that attributes Jewish oppression in Europe as having gathered strength because of Jewish weakness, as if the Holocaust was facilitated by the Jewish community having forgotten how to fight. It is a world view that implicitly denigrates the reality – and strength – of people within the Jewish community, within the Jewish working class, who built institutions and engaged in popular struggles for justice for themselves and all oppressed. Instead, we see an outlook that echoes that of fascism itself with its worship of war, that safety lies in the bullet and the gun, holding in contempt those who seek peace and understanding.
And it is not a coincidence that such an outlook is embraced by the neo-fascist right, by the armed militias, who form the solid MAGA core in support of Donald Trump. Those organizations are profoundly anti-Semitic – made vivid in a clip in Israelism of torch-bearing marchers in Charlottesville chanting “Jews Will Not Replace Us.” And therein lies the supreme irony, the dangerous irony, of those who conflate disagreement with Israel’s occupation and militarism with anti-Semitism, for it means that the real anti-Semitic dangers in our country and around the world, are left unaddressed. The cheers and standup applause for Trump at an AIPAC conference when he declares his unqualified support for Israel, makes that abundantly clear.
Two Palestinians also receive screentime in the film. The first comments that when he came to the United States, people would tell him that they liked him, but did not like Palestinians – which he said bothered him until he realized that people talking that way simply didn’t know Palestinian life. The other, who introduces Simone to life in the West Bank, mentions that having visited Auschwitz enabled him to better understand Israel’s roots, which he raises in the context of wanting to help all Israelis and Jewish Americans understand the impact of the Nakba (“the catastrophe”) on Palestinians who were forced to abandon their homes, never to return, becoming strangers in their own land. The fact that someone like Simone or Eitan’ who were born and raised in the United States, could come to Israel and have more rights than Palestinians born and raised there; the fact that Israelis live under civilian law, occupied Palestinians under military law, are realities that need to be understood if the conflict is to be understood. Watching the film, the roots of Hamas’s attack on October 7, Israel's ongoing genocidal war in Gaza (developments that took place before the documentary was made) become clear, or at least clear to those willing to look beneath the headlines.
The difficulty many have breaking through preconceived notions became clear during the post-film discussion, led by Shelley Cohen Fudge, founder of the DC Metro Chapter of Jewish Voice for Peace, and Jamal Najjab, a Palestinian-American who worked as a journalist in Jerusalem in the early 1980s. Although the audience was clearly appreciative of the film, the questions and comments soon turned away from the subject – the nature of Israel’s policies toward Palestinians and responses to those actions within the Jewish community and more widely within US society. One questioner was hostile, ill-informed, and spoke only to provoke. The others, however, were clearly honest, open, searching – though also, sadly, ill-informed. Or rather, the difficulty lay in the perspective of those asking questions, which was the very point the film was trying to make. Both speakers did an excellent job in responding and while no one response to a question can ever change minds, no one breaks from preconceived notions until they allow themselves to be challenged.
One speaker asked how can Jews be safe – and received the clear response that Jews are less safe in Israel than in the United States. What that really boils down to is that safety for any of us requires social justice and equal rights for all; absent that, we all are living on the knife’s edge. Perhaps one clear way of looking at this is the question of voting rights. Millions of people who live under Israeli occupation have no right to vote in Israeli elections; the occupied have no say over the policies and practices of those whose force of arms govern them. Equal voting rights for all was a central demand of the civil rights movement in Northern Ireland, so too in apartheid South Africa and in the Jim Crow South. And it remains a critical issue for us in the US today with the right to vote again under threat.
No one knows how peace and justice will be finally established for all who live today between the proverbial “river and the sea.” What is clear is that the struggle today for Palestinian rights and liberation, the struggle today against anti-Semitism, will only be won as part of a broader movement against racism and social injustice, a movement of solidarity for peace and equality.
What we do know from Israelism is that change is possible. Simone could have remained in Hillel, never questioning the assumptions with which she was raised. Her change was only possible when a movement erupted that presented her with a perspective she never considered before. Eitan could have come home with his feeling of shame and disillusionment; the movement for peace gave him a framework in which he could share with others what he had experienced. What those of us do who organize, protest, demonstrate, resist in the multiple shapes and forms resistance takes place may sometimes seem futile. Yet it never is: “each one, teach one,” is the truth of all organizing and is the basis from which what seems impossible becomes realized as ones and twos grow into thousands and millions. As so many of us watch in horror and despair viewing the suffering now taking place in Gaza it is a truth we need to hold onto all the more.
