I Can’t Remember When I First Became a Zionist. But I Remember When I Stopped.

Photo by Emad El Byed on Unsplash

If you were born during the 1960s in North America, Zionism was an ideological default setting everyone was required to possess or face accusations of antisemitism.

At the time, Israel was portrayed in popular culture as a democratic flower in a desert of Arab potentates. Zionism was presented to us at school, in movies, books, and the news media as modern, innovative, and even “socialist.” It played in the background of our lives like an advertising jingle, convincing us of Israel’s benevolence and ever-thusness.

My indoctrination into Zionism was more my mother’s doing than external forces. She came from a generation of Germans who were too young to commit crimes under Hitler but old enough to witness their parents’ generation doing them.

My mother’s guilt over being a child and teenager during the era of Hitler was as hefty as a dressmaker’s bolt of fabric. From it, she fashioned many of her post-war political beliefs.

Often, my brothers and I joked that our mother took unearned helpings of remorse over Germany’s 1930s plunge into racist totalitarianism, as if she were a child scoffing Quality Streets.

It’s probably why, when I was seven, she taught me about the Holocaust. For much of that year, her graphic bedtime depictions of the war left me terrified and despondent.

Every morning afterwards, when I joined the queue to be marched into school by impatient teachers, I thought of children led into the gas chambers.

We are all victims of our history. Like us all, my mum’s unique and often beautiful personality was made from a recipe of flaws, virtues, and experiences.

However, as I grew, I learned my mother’s political dogma regarding Israel was nuanced. In the 1970s, I mentioned how my Grade 10 History class taught Israel’s founding as an act of anti-colonialism akin to the independence of India and Pakistan. She shook her head and began to talk about Leon Uris’s book Exodus, a historical saga about the founding of Israel.

Mum said he didn’t write characters but constructed coat racks to hang his prejudices and ideologies on.

Mum concluded by saying, “That seems like what your history teacher is doing to you.”

In 1978, I didn’t know this. I was still well cloaked in the privilege of being male, white, and an adolescent of middle-class parents. I was far from war or want, and although I had been told about those things by my parents, they all seemed as foreign to me as the world described in the novel Dune.

So, like most everyone else from my generation, I never questioned too deeply the high school history I was being asked to memorise.

Mum, however, began asking questions, especially after the massacre at Sabra and Shatila in 1982. It was a massacre of Palestinian refugees who lived in refugee camps in Lebanon. It was orchestrated by Israel’s military and executed by Lebanese Christian militias at their behest.

Those killings ended what remained of any idealised illusions Mum had about Israel.

“Reading about it gave me the same sickening feeling I had when I watched newsreel footage in 1944 of Nazi troops shooting at Polish paratroopers during Operation Market Garden, like it was a turkey shoot.”

She didn’t vocalise this epiphany outside of the family because Mum didn’t want to draw criticism towards herself. But it stuck with me as I began to politically mature. However, it was a long time coming, and I regret that.

For decades, no matter Israel’s transgressions, human rights abuses, and war crimes, I clung to my belief in a two-state solution. It wasn’t faith in Israel’s essential goodness. It was moral cowardice and a reluctance to offend people whose sense of entitlement needed to be disturbed.

I no longer believe that Israel is an honest or reliable broker intent on a two-state solution. Two years of genocide against Palestinians in Gaza, along with a determined de facto policy of ethnic cleansing in the West Bank, is enough evidence that Israel as a society is irredeemable, like Nazi Germany was.

All those who embraced its inherent exceptionalism and racism, including the West, which joined in this genocide, are tarnished by this infamy. There is no coming back from it. Many lament all of this as a horrendous tragedy.

However, unlike a Greek tragedy, there wasn’t nobility in either Israel’s or neoliberalism’s character to make their downfall regrettable—because this is a downfall, even if it lasts a hundred more years. But the corpses of the innocent, replaced nightly, lying on a darkened stage will still be dead.

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