As a mid-century Jewish American child, I was enrolled in the Zionist project without my knowledge or acquiescence. I was born in 1950, five years after the liberation of the Nazi concentration camps. In light of the expanding knowledge of the Holocaust, no Jew could argue against the concept of a homeland where Jews could be safe from the blood-soaked antisemitism of the West. Though I personally experienced little of it growing up in Pasadena, my mother's conflicted feelings about being Jewish in an earlier generation -- part fear, part pride, part culturally-induced inferiority complex -- filtered into me by osmosis.
I didn't give my Jewish ancestry much thought growing up, but I knew it was there, and when, in college, I underwent the obligatory identity crisis, I glommed onto Jewishness (and possibly even Judaism) as an alternative to what my generation--we were hippies back then --deemed the soulless pursuit of power and money. During my sophomore year at UC Santa Cruz, I spent five months learning Hebrew and working on Kibbutz Mizra in the Jezreel Valley below Nazareth. The year was 1969, two years after the Six Day War had definitively secured Israel's borders and foisted upon this still-young nation the poisoned spoils of Sinai, the West Bank, and the Golan Heights. The Arabs within Israel's new borders were depressed and flattened. Rockets and attacks there were aplenty, but their origins were from the Arab neighbors -- Syria, Lebanon, Egypt. The first Intifada was 20 years in the future.
I gave little thought to the plight of the Palestinians, dazzled as I was by the physical presence of The Holy Land and the redeeming narrative of an Israel Resurgent. The Jewish state was incomparably more advanced than its Arab neighbors. Through guts, skill, and imperiled valor, the tiny beleaguered nation had survived, triumphed, expanded. The Arabs had fled in terror before the Israeli army, leaving their shoes in the desert as witness to their flight. The Sinai was embraced, Jerusalem reunited. Israeli paratroopers had battled their way through blood and fire to kiss the Wailing Wall with tears of thanksgiving in their eyes.
I ultimately decided that Judaism -- or any religion for that matter -- had nothing to offer me, and my sojourn in the heart of the Zionist state left me pretty much where I was before I went. I was a Zionist but only reflexively. That unexamined state of affairs began to crumble in the late 1980s. The Intifada had begun, and I could hardly ignore the mistreatment of the Palestinians under the rule of the Jewish state. I came to the horrific realization that the people who had suffered the greatest organized, technologically enabled genocide in history had in the space of two generations become oppressors in their turn.
Furthermore, as I pursued graduate studies and teaching in the elite universities where liberal-to-progressive ideologies held sway, I was exposed to the view that Israel was a colonizing power, putting it in the same category as the vilified French, Portuguese, and American empires. In 1975, the United Nations passed a resolution stating that Zionism was a form of racism and racial discrimination, and that put Israel on par with apartheid South Africa. Sure enough, Israel became one of Pretoria's closest allies, providing money, arms, and military aide to South Africa's multi-front war against the African frontline states.
I was no longer a Zionist. Furthermore, I simply shut the ongoing Arab-Israeli conflict out of my analytical abilities. I knew the history; I knew the wrongs that had been visited on all sides; I knew the egregious mistakes and catastrophic miscalculations of the various leaders. The only constant was that the hoi polloi, the Arabs and Israelis without power, would suffer and die.
The following decades saw the Yom Kippur War, the first and second Intifadas, the era of suicide bombers, the rise of radicalized Arab militant groups, the quiet strangulation of the two-state solution, and the increasing retrograde influence of right-wing and religious Jews. All of that I consigned to "the news" -- events that occurred in a hopeless land that I would never step foot in again.
But this, the terrorist attacks on Israeli civilians by Hamas militants and the predictably savage destruction of the Israeli riposte? Thousands of lives lost, maimed, uprooted; Israel shocked out of its certainty that its continuing depredations against the Palestinians could be "managed" and that the Palestinians themselves would have to accept the permanent limbo of refugee status; the inhumanity of slaughtering Israeli kids at an outdoor rave; the fear and rage of the Gazans ordered to move to the southern part of their open-air prison, a repeat of the Nakba ("the catastrophe") of the Israeli War of Independence in 1948 that drove half the Palestinian Arabs out of the country in what they thought would be a temporary flight but which turned into permanent exile. "Never again!" both sides say, and are they not justified in their fear?
As a Jew, I feel helplessly and unwillingly connected to this ongoing mess. It's too big to ignore, and it's roiling the American waters as well. Antisemitism is on the rise; progressive Jews are shocked that their political bedfellows blame Israel for Hamas' atrocities with hardly a tear shed for the 1400 slaughtered Israeli civilians. Many Jews feel abandoned and beleaguered, but hasn't that always been the case in our long and difficult history?
Are there really only two mutually exclusive, ultimately dead-end choices? "I stand with the Palestinians." "I stand with Israel." I am a Jew who is neither a Zionist nor an anti-Zionist. I don't like the fact that Israel is an apartheid state in the making (or already made, depending upon your viewpoint), but I don't want to see it eradicated. Personally, I would never move to Israel in case America turns fascist, even though, as a Jew, I have the right to obtain Israeli citizenship. If I have to build a house with a "safe room," doesn't that say something about my choice of residence? I'm not jumping out of the frying pan into that fire, thank you.
And thanks for reading. I hope you feel as conflicted and unresolved as I do.
-Robert Philipson
Read about the professorial foray that prompted this autobiographical essay, The Grand Alliance Falls Apart
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