#after all that show has a LOT of zionists...what makes you think the rest aren't zionists too?

[lucyshypemaster]

i can't believe there was a time when I truly loved stranger things and made it my whole life and thought that every single character from that show were my babies. but now, after everything that has happened, I don't even feel excited for any news about season 5

[saucerfulofsins]

Hey, Loon? This is an incredible piece of writing and I'm glad I followed you. I thought about replying in a response to the post itself, or reblogging tomorrow after I've had the chance to look up some concepts/people (it's evening here).

Thank you for taking the time to think and type this out as concise and provocative as you did. And thank you for offering this nuance, and being honest towards the ideas you held and how people from within the community - and with patience and compassion - offered you the space to alter your views. (I also think this goes to show the power of compassion and empathy, which I think everyone should strive towards). It's also an incredible journey you've been on, one that really offers insight into how much work (some? most? all?) non/anti-zionist Jews have had to do to come to their views.

Do not imagine that I excuse, condone, or celebrate Oct 7, but I understand why it happened.

I agree (however much that means) and I would have agreed half a year ago but I do want to say that your blog has actually helped me towards the information to understand the exact why. The infographic on the wars the teenagers of Palestine comes to mind (along with many more nuanced posts either from you directly or posts you've reblogged).

His vision is of an Israel that is always militarized and militant, always on its guard, never to know peace. A people who will send their children to the army generation after generation after generation. Never to rest. Never to be able to lower their guard.

And this quote, just now - I knew Israel has mandatory service, and I know the military will affect someone's thinking, but this post makes it clearer than ever that the two groups (Hamas and Israelis) really aren't that different; at least, until you factor in the measure of political/legal support they enjoy. (And I also realize that much of Israel's formation - and, from there, current actions - are based on a generation deeply traumatized by the Holocaust, the extent of which I cannot and will not ever understand). The horror of Israel creating this situation, and how understandable that perpetuation is (to some extent)... and also how much it has been created by Israel's politics ever since its conception.

Also... this is somewhat off topic but I do want to mention it because I think it's really important actually? Especially because of the circumstances/context. I reblogged/replied to a post you made on bilingualism a while back and actually, considering the fact you've put a lot of work into becoming proficient in Yiddish, as well as the perception of Yiddish among some people, as well as attending a camp where all conversation was exclusively in Yiddish... I think the most radical thing you could (and probably should) do is say you are bilingual. Because you're proud of speaking the language (and should be), and you've immersed yourself in the culture while speaking the language, and, most of all, because bilingualism (or even the definition of what a language is) isn't just about proficiency, it's about politics and pride and identity - and about claiming those things, and especially in the case of minority languages, about being heard. Because they mean something in the grand scheme of things, and if a monolingual speaker did all of those things with the minority language I grew up speaking, I WOULD call them bilingual.

Anyway, once again, thank you - for your openness and honesty and eloquence. I have many more thoughts, so these are only some of them that jumped out as I read the text, and I'm going to take some time to read this again tomorrow and - as I said - look up some of the history/concepts/people you've mentioned.

Hi! I saw your tags on unlearning zionism and I was wondering if you've ever spoken about that/the kind of processing you had to do? I think it's... Interesting (for lack of a better word) how this is a sentiment I've seen reflected on pretty much all explicitly non-zionist Jewish blogs I follow, and how much that reflects both how closely entwined the concept and Jewishness has become and the fierce zionism in some people.

Obviously you're free to not discuss this at all, I also understand it's deeply personal. (I'm also not intending to make anyone change their mind, I believe this is a process Jewish people should be afforded on their own terms; I'm really just trying to understand where they're coming from). ♥️

The tl;dr was through talking to people, breaking my rigidities, and being lucky enough to encounter people who were kind, committed to dialogue, and not dismissive.

Longer version under the cut.

In winter 2019 I started dating a non-zionist, so a lot of the early stuff was through conversations with them.

Here are the specific things I recall through them:

They validated my experience of having felt traumatized by a negative experience I had at a protest. I felt very on the defense, and dismissed, as a zionist who wanted to be in leftist spaces and they validated that. I don't know if they were faking it or not, but it felt real, and being heard and not dismissed was super important to building trust and safety. Ultimately, building trust and safety was the most important thing.

They would sometimes patiently poke holes in things I said. Matter of factly, not confrontationally. For example, once I said I didn't like the separation wall dividing Israel proper from the West Bank but that it was necessary to prevent terrorist attacks, and they were like "no, that wasn't the wall, it was a change in PA policy." Another time I was like "I don't understand [West Bank] settlers, if they want to be pioneers and settle more land they should settle the Negev, where they're not encroaching on Palestinians!" and they explained to me more about the situation between Israel and Bedouins and how that actually still would involve encroaching/displacement.

They're very religious, and so they had the tools to poke into my "but just open a siddur! you can see all the references to returning to Jerusalem!" and discuss how that differed from and predated zionism the political ideology. They were able to break through my dismissiveness/derision of Chareidi antizionism and help me understand that it has legitimate religious underpinnings. (They're not Chareidi though.) They affirmed for me that they do feel connected to Eretz Yisrael and they love Eretz Yisrael.

They also explained that indigenous doesn't mean "from a place" but rather describes a relationship to colonialism. It still didn't totally click for me, and they and I have both since come to understand that there are a lot of definitions of indigenous, but what it did help me understand was that when people push back against "Jews are indigenous to EY" they're not always trying to say we're not from there.

In general it helped me break down what I thought an antizionist was. I thought that an antizionist was someone who didn't think Jews had a meaningful spiritual and communal connection to EY, thought we weren't from there, didn't give a shit if all Israeli Jews ended up pushed into the sea, hadn't opened a siddur to see references to return to Jerusalem, etc. I was also pretty rigid in my thinking and had collected a bunch of talking points, mostly that I'd co-created with other members of Jewbook (Jewish facebook). They helped me break out of that rigidity and once I'd done that I was open to learning more.

Then, what happened next, in fall 2019 is I did a fellowship, that while unrelated to the topic, put me in contact with other Jewish antizionists.

There was one person whose project we visited during an outing on the fellowship, who had discussed their project's antizionism. I was bothered by it and asked them one question: Did they feel Jews were connected to Eretz Yisrael? Did they feel connected to Eretz Yisrael? They responded yes of course.

Another person was my roommate on the fellowship, a leftist antizionist Syrian Jew. For a while one of my sticking points had been Mizrahi support of Zionism -- my thought process here had a few pieces. One, it seemed like white privileged to go against what most Israeli Jews of color believed and wanted. Another was that I felt that a lot of antizionists were dismissive of and racist towards Mizrahim and don't understand or care to understand their needs, history, or motivations (I do still think that's true). I also saw the expulsions from SWANA and the fact that Israel took in the SWANA Jewish refugees as proof of the necessity of Zionism.

So, I think that interacting with a Mizrahi antizionist both taught me expanded perspectives on the issue, and taught me that it's possible to be antizionist and still in solidarity with Mizrahim. I learned more nuance, for example around Israel's taking in of the refugees; I knew they had been mistreated, but I think it helped me connect the dots about what that meant about the entire Zionist project. That was also the year A-WA's album Bayti fi Rasi came out, and when I listened to Hana Mash Hu Al Yaman, I think that's when it clicked for me that Israel taking them in was not some sort of miracle or blessing in disguise but rather a last resort for people who did not want to go but had no choice. The main characters in that song wanted to stay in Yemen which is I think something that hadn't clicked for me before. That may not be the majority Mizrahi perspective but it is a perspective and one I hadn't previously considered.

By the same token, my partner at the time (the one I talked about at the beginning of the post) was raised as a Yiddish speaker, and we talked about Yiddish suppression during the early days of the state, as well as Ben Yehuda's disdain for Yiddish, and the general early Zionist disdain for Eastern European Jewry and "old world" Jewish culture. I was already aware of the New Jew concept (the idea that the old Jew was studious and unathletic, but we should put that behind us to become strong and agricultural). They helped me frame this in terms of antisemitism, connecting it to the vitriol Chassidim receive from other Jews, antisemitism directed towards Jewish men and the ways it's about gender and goyish and Jewish constructions of masculinity, anti-circ rhetoric that depends on the Hellenistic idea of the body as perfection, and Naomi Klein's analysis of the dislike of Yiddish by Ben Yehuda et al as sexist due to their association of it as "feminine" and therefore lesser.

We also talked about the ways the Zionism devalues diaspora culture. I definitely see this in the ways that eg Jewbook zionists used to see the Ashkenazi past in Eastern Europe as simply a time of progroms and violence with nothing generative or valuable. It seems that zionism posits Israel and Israeli culture as the "right" or "completed" version of Judaism, and discourages us from mourning the loss of culture we experienced during the Holocaust and our subsequent exodus.

I think there is nuance here; there are Israeli Yiddishists, there are people practicing all kinds of diaspora Jewish cultures in Israel, etc. I think this is a case where antizionists take something real and over emphasize it to sound bigger and more harmful than it is. It's not Israel's fault that European Jewry got destroyed and it's not Israel's fault that A-WA's family had to leave Yemen. Sometimes it feels like antizionist project those harms onto Israel and Zionism.

At the same time though, there is a kernel of truth in the way at least that many North American zionists view Ashkenazi culture, thought I can't say how much of that is their Zionism and how much is the legacy of American assimilationism (even among religious Jews).

In any case, 2020 is when I started on my journey to deepen my understanding of old world Ashkenazi culture and history. I started with a day spend in the kids' section of the Yiddish Book Center using the beginner education resources there to start teaching myself Yiddish (I had a lot of familiarity because my extended family speaks it, but I didn't yet). About half a second later the pandemic started, and the chaos from that took all my attention for a while, but by the end of the summer I did a deep dive on my genealogy and spent two weeks tracking down documents and names and towns. At that point my family history was no longer abstract, and I started wondering more about what their lives were like in the old country.

I started watching Yiddish plays on zoom, including a production of the Dybbuk that I fell in love with. I got involved in the shtetlcore movement, which was a social media aesthetic fad that was basically the shtetl version of cottagecore. That spring the duolingo Yiddish course came out and I did a six month streak. The following winter I went to a virtual Yiddish conference. I went again two more times in person, and last summer I went to a week-long retreat where we were only allowed to speak Yiddish. I also do Yiddish drag and burlesque.

With this emphasis and knowledge it's hard for me to accept any framing that the only "right" place for Jews to live is Israel, or that diaspora cultures are lesser-than. At some point I encountered a belief among some zionists (though I don't think most believe this) that the Jewish people's differentiation into a myriad of different cultures was a bad thing, and constituted negatively picking up pieces of non-Jewish culture, and that it's good we're back together in Israel so we can become just one culture again. I obviously strongly disagree and I while I wish we had not had to experience the trauma of Khorban Beis Hamikdash and the ensuing displacement, I think the variety of different cultures we split into is beautiful.

Ironically, Israel is actually a place of great cultural exchange between those cultures. And yes, I do worry there will be cultural loss if everything blends together melting pot style, but that's more of a function of how societies work as opposed to official state policy. And I also think the Jewish subcultures will endure. Also the cultural loss is the fault of the Holocaust, the Soviet Union, and nationalist SWANA countries way way more than it is Israel's.

At this point I've come to view the idea that Zionism is detrimental to Jewish culture as weak, but I still am not a Zionist, and that's because the issue with Zionism is not that it harms Jews but that it harms Palestinians.

In early summer 2020, I, along with many other white people were called to reckon with the realities of white supremacy in the US, and our part in it, far more deeply than we had before. I learned to understand how racism functions as a pillar of the US's underpinnings, how white supremacy morphs to sustain itself, how I as an individual and Jews as a group where being used to maintain white supremacy. It fundamentally shifting how I view these topics and how I understand the way that states function.

It was impossible not to apply these concepts to Israel-Palestine. While it is obviously not a one to one comparison and I am frustrated with folks who seem to think it is, the concepts and analyses I learned in June 2020 are very elucidating in understanding Israel as a state, and how white supremacy and Jewish supremacy operate in Israel-Palestine.

One of those concepts is a deeper understanding of power dynamics and the oppressed-oppressor relationship. While that is not the be-all end-all, and it is still possible for an oppressed group to do harm and commit war crimes (as they did on Oct 7), it helped me understand the ways it makes no sense to view Palestinians and Israelis as equal parties or to view Palestinians as "the aggressor" as many zionists do. Riots are the language of the unheard and, yes, so is violence. Do not imagine that I excuse, condone, or celebrate Oct 7, but I understand why it happened.

These past seven months have forced a magnifying glass on Israel-Palestine and I have spent a lot of time thinking and talking about it. I have had many experiences and interactions that have illuminated different things to me, but I'll leave you with this one.

In 1956, a young man named Ro'i Rothberg was killed in Kibbutz Nahal Oz by Palestinians who lived in Gaza. Moshe Dayan came to give a eulogy and in it, he said:

Why should we declare their burning hatred for us? For eight years they have been sitting in the refugee camps in Gaza, and before their eyes we have been transforming the lands and the villages, where they and their fathers dwelt, into our estate.

Which is to say, he is stating point blank that the Nakba happened, and that Nahal Oz -- and in fact Israel -- is built on land that had been farmed and inhabited by Palestinians. The hasbarist canard of "we didn't steal their land" falls away when Moshe Dayan himself admits it, doesn't it?

He is acknowledging, also, that he understands why the people of Gaza are enraged, and why some of them express this rage as violence. He gives his solution: That the Israeli people, and especially the people of Nahal Oz, must always be on their guard. Must never become peaceniks and forget the rage or the people of Gaza. He says "we are a generation that settles the land and without the steel helmet and the cannon's maw, we will not be able to plant a tree and build a home."

His vision is of an Israel that is always militarized and militant, always on its guard, never to know peace. A people who will send their children to the army generation after generation after generation. Never to rest. Never to be able to lower their guard.

And that is awful! Not just for Palestinians, but for Israelis! Dayan lays out here that if the Nakba is not redressed, this will continue forever. He wants it to continue forever; I want the Nakba redressed.

He knew Nahal Oz would be attacked again. And he was right. On the morning of Simchat Torah of this year, 5784, twelve residents of the kibbutz were brutally murdered. A family that my family knows hid there in their bomb shelter for ten hours with their small children until they were rescued. The kibbutz was destroyed.

And Moshe Dayan knew it would happen, all the way back in 1956. And yet did nothing to change our trajectory. I cannot forgive him that.

In the months since the destruction of Nahal Oz, we have seen Gaza pummeled with a terrifying vengeance. For years I have encountered, albeit few and far between, people who have clammored for Gaza to be "turned into a parking lot." I was horrified by them, but did not take them seriously. Yet now, their genocidal flowers have borne fruit. Gaza lies in ruins. 60% of the roads and infrastructure are destroyed. The descendants of refugees are refugees again, chased from their homes by the descendants of refugees. The live in tents, they scrabble for water and food. They live under threat of bombing, or being shot, or dying of illness and malnutrition.

And still Nahal Oz remains destroyed. The Jewish dead of Europe remain dead. The synagogues of Tunis and Algiers remain empty of their Jews. Nothing is fixed, only more and more broken.

Is it to continue this way? Is this the world we want?

I say no. I say another world is possible. And on a quiet day, I can hear her breathing.