Palestine/Israel

I was asked to give various talks in Andalucía, Spain, my adopted home, about what caused me to wake up to what zionism truly is after years of indoctrination. The short answer is: I met Palestinians. What follows is the long answer, from one of the talks I gave. 

Is Your Dream Someone Else’s Nightmare?

Learning the Truth About Zionism

Some of you may have heard me speak before. If so, I hope that though the story and some of the information that you hear may be familiar, something new will reach you through the repetition.

For those who have not heard me speak before, let me give you a brief introduction about my background. I am originally from Turtle Island, which is one of the indigenous names for the colonized land currently called the United States. It’s a country built on top of a genocide, built by slave labor, and maintained via the same systemic injustices that created it. I earned a bachelor’s degree in History and a minor in Hebrew and Judaic studies. I was an English teacher for more than 20 years. From 2005-2009 I taught in Madrid, and since then, I’ve returned to Spain many times, in particular, Andalucía.

I’ve been asked to speak at various events in Andalucía, to share my experience about how and why I went from being a supremely religious Jew whose lifelong plan was to settle down in Israel, to being an anti-zionist supporting Palestine. For this event, I was told I could speak about whatever I’d like. Nevertheless, I found myself preparing a talk, once again, about something that I don’t like talking about, which was my extremely slow and painful process of discovering what zionism really is.

So why tell this story? Why not leave me out of it, and give you a bunch of facts and figures? First, because I am not a historian, even though I have studied a lot of history. Second, because I have heard that personal stories reach people in a way that facts and figures don’t. And third, because the savagery committed by the state of Israel has not abated, and I am very aware that decades’ of Israel’s lies are part of the reason that their injustices have continued. No one knows the lies of zionism better than Palestinians. Perhaps, those who know it second-best, are Jews indoctrinated into zionism who have then left it.

After I tell you this part of my story and give you some more information about zionism, I would then like to share with you some words from two people very dear to me in Gaza.

But first, a brief description of the difference between Judaism and zionism.

Many years ago, Judaism and zionism were two completely separate things. Judaism is a religion, just like any other. It dates back approximately 4,000 years, and some of its major religious texts include the Torah—also known as the Old Testament of the Bible—the Mishnah, and the Talmud. The Judaism that my grandparents and great-grandparents learned, a Judaism without zionism, was quite different than what I learned.

Zionism is a nationalist, political, and ethnocultural movement that emerged in the 19th century advocating for the creation of a Jewish homeland, proposed by Jews who neither practiced nor believed in their religion. Even before Jewish thinkers put forward this idea, it had its origins in what would later be known as Christian zionism, and in the belief that the Jewish people must establish a Jewish state in order for Jesus Christ to return. And to truly understand zionism, it is essential to recognize that it was not an isolated phenomenon, but rather emerged from the white supremacist, nationalist, imperialist, and colonial beliefs of the time.

Zionism was initially rejected by most Jewish communities for a variety of reasons—ranging from political to moral and religious. But it gradually gained support in response to anti-Judaism in Europe. Initially, several territories were proposed as a “Jewish homeland,” but Palestine was ultimately chosen because of its biblical connection. Of course, the Palestinian population had been living in Palestine for centuries. Therefore, the nationalist movement would be a racist and colonialist movement from the outset, one that could only create a “Jewish state” by displacing or killing the indigenous Palestinian population.

In 1917, the Balfour Declaration committed Great Britain to “the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people,” on the condition that the rights of “non-Jewish” communities be respected. Of course, Balfour had no right to declare any part of Palestine a national home for the Jewish people. And the rights of the indigenous Palestinian communities were not respected. Just the opposite.

Violence against the Palestinian population continued and intensified over the years, as did Britain’s support for the Jewish state, due to Britain’s own interests in the region. In 1948, at the end of the war in which the state of Israel was “founded,” zionists had destroyed approximately 530 Palestinian villages, murdered at least 13,000 Palestinians, and expelled about 800,000 Palestinians from their homes and land. The word Nakba, or catastrophe, refers to this displacement. The zionist state of Israel, from its “founding” to the present day, has been an illegal apartheid state that has inflicted endless violence on the Palestinian people, separating families, torturing and humiliating Palestinians, dehumanizing them, and branding them as terrorists for wanting to live on their own land. They have stolen Palestinian land and property, and all peaceful attempts by Palestinians to protest and return to their homes have been met with violent repression.

Apart from the cruelty that zionism has inflicted on the Palestinian people, zionism has also destroyed Jewish communities around the world, especially in Arab countries, where Jewish communities had coexisted for centuries with Muslim and Christian Arabs as part of those communities, without suffering the anti-Judaism they endured in Europe. But how could people who had lived in a particular place for generations be persuaded to leave it and settle in Palestine? Various strategies were employed. And once the Mizrahim—that is, the “Easterners,” as Jews from Arab and African countries are called—were resettled in Israel, they faced horrific racism.

There has always been a certain percentage of anti-zionist Jews, both secular and religious. In addition to supporting Palestine, some groups also seek to combat zionism within Judaism. There is also a small percentage of Israelis who are dissidents and try to bring the truth about zionism to light through various methods, ranging from the writings of Ilan Pappe to young people who choose to go to prison rather than join the military.

By the time I was born in 1977, zionism was already a cancer in Judaism, Palestine, and the world. But I didn’t grow up believing that zionism was a cancer, or learning or understanding what zionism truly is, and what it truly does.

I grew up in a conservative Jewish home, so my parents were somewhere in the middle in terms of religiosity, though I was even more religious than my parents for a couple of years. I loved my religion dearly for a very long time. By the time I was 8, I had decided I wanted to be a rabbi, a spiritual leader in the Jewish community. That dream lasted 10 years. And even after I started to question my faith and then lose my religion, my dream of settling down in Israel stood firm.

The synagogues I studied in were zionist synagogues. So that means that in addition to learning about my religion, I learned to love the state of Israel unconditionally. When you learn zionism from the inside, you learn it very differently than from the outside. I did not learn the word Palestinian until I was 18 years old. I’ll share with you just a few of lies that I learned about the state of Israel: I learned that Israel was “a land without a people for a people without a land.” I learned that the UN gave Israel to the Jews as reparations for the Holocaust, and that without it, the Jews would never again be safe from another Holocaust. I learned that Israel was founded by zionist heroes and that it is attacked because of anti-Semitism in the Arab world. I grew up hearing about anti-semitism almost on a daily basis and being told never to tell anyone I was Jewish because it wasn’t safe. I learned that the Jews went like “sheep to the slaughter” during the Holocaust. That they were weak and should have defended themselves. And that the Israeli soldier is the antithesis of the weak Jew. I learned that May 14, 1948 was Israel’s Independence Day. I learned that Israel was the biblical home of the Jews, and that as a Jew, I had “the right” to “return home.” Every week, I donated charity to an organization called the Jewish National Fund that plants trees in Israel. At the time, I believed I was doing something good. Years later, I learned that that organization plants non-indigenous trees in Israel to cover up the remains of the Palestinian villages that Israel destroyed.

There is a document, available online, called Hasbara Handbook: Defending Israel on Campus. Hasbara is a Hebrew word that literally means explanation, but that definition does not come even close to describing what hasbara is. Hasbara are the zionist lies and manipulation that try to control the narrative of Israel and Palestine. In this document, among other information, tactics are shared to teach people how to defend Israel, how to manipulate the conversation, how to influence people’s opinion to support Israel, and how to conflate anti-Judaism or anti-semitism with anti-zionism. This document is one horrific example of how controlled the narrative of Israel and Palestine is.  

It is difficult to fathom the number of lies I learned about the state of Israel, unless you compare it to the lies I learned about the United States. In some ways, both countries are mirror images of each other. I think it’s fair to say that most Americans do not know the real history of the land they live on. History is written by the colonizers, not the colonized. The American public school that I went to taught a history of Israel that was just as whitewashed and full of lies as the American history they taught. I questioned a great deal growing up. I questioned the American history I was taught. I questioned the American dream. But it was easy for me to question these things. I never fit in to American culture. I didn’t love America. From the time I was a teenager, I didn’t want to live there.

It’s much harder, however, to question who and what you love. To look at your dreams, and ask, not, “how can I fulfill them?”, but, “do I even have the right to? Is my dream a good dream? Or is my dream someone else’s nightmare?”

Before 18, there was no way on earth I could have even fathomed that question. I lived in a Jewish and zionist bubble, and had no input from anyone with any other ideas or experiences about what Israel was.

At age 18, I met the first person who did not love Israel. He was my Hebrew professor, an Iraqi Jew, who talked about the horrific racism he had experienced in Israel as an Arabic Jew, and the horrific racism Palestinians had experienced. His class was the first time I heard the word Palestinian. But at the time, I was still much more concerned with being a “good Jew” and supporting “my people”, than I was with learning about anyone or anything else. His criticisms of Israel did not make me question 15 years of indoctrination. But neither did the experience of a friend who visited Israel and told me it was not the paradise we had been told it was in our Hebrew schools. And neither did my own experience. I visited Israel for the first time at age 16. It felt nothing like home. But I told myself it was my home, and one day, I would return to live there, like a good Jew.

By the time I did return in 2009 at age 32, I knew a little about Palestinians – very little. By that point, I believed it was a religious conflict with equal atrocities committed by both sides. My plan was to volunteer in a women’s and children’s shelter, then begin the process of settling down permanently there, with the intention of finding work in one of the peace organizations. I had carefully searched for a shelter that welcomed both Israeli Jews and Palestinians equally, because I had no prejudices and didn’t want to be in a place that discriminated against anyone.

My housing fell through on the second day, and I arrived at the shelter just as I was: a woman seeking refuge from the storms of life and the storms inside her. The first staff member who greeted me was a Jewish Israeli woman. When I told her I had nowhere to stay, she said, “That’s too bad,” and walked away. The second staff member I met was a Palestinian Christian woman named Wafa. She immediately called her brother, who had an apartment to rent, and he offered it to me.

And then came the brainwashing and the racism I didn’t think was in me: Arabs hate Jews. And that’s also when the “moral” dilemma arose—wanting to be a good Jew, and a good Jew supports “her people,” not others’. So I turned Wafa down. I looked for a place to stay for three days. And when I couldn’t find one, and I returned to Wafa in tears, asking for forgiveness, asking for help—without her giving me a single unkind look, without a single word of reproach—she called her brother, who offered me the apartment again. Wafa had every right to turn me down. But that’s not what she did. I had been taught fear, hatred, and lies. Wafa had learned unconditional love. What a difference that makes.

That night I had dinner with Wafa’s niece, who also lived in the same building as me. The following weekend I went to Wafa’s village, where I met her family and friends. One of Wafa’s daughters gave me her bed so I could spend the night talking for hours with her sister Yara, who loved English and was thrilled to be able to speak with a native speaker. During my stay at their home, I heard “the other side” of the story. And the Story—with a capital S—that I had heard for years—the one about the good Jews being persecuted by the bad Palestinians—crumbled completely. Being in the home of a Palestinian family and learning that it had been their home before Israel was founded and seized their land was an experience I cannot adequately express in words.

At the end of the month, I left Israel vowing never to set foot on that land again until it was returned to Palestinians. There is a documentary released in 2023 titled Israelism, about the brainwashing that takes place in zionist Jewish communities regarding Israel. In this film, a phrase is quoted that some Jews use to describe their experience: “I arrived in Israel and left from Palestine.” I suppose that sums up my experience quite succinctly—and, in fact, the experience of other Jews who are also anti-Zionists today.

After leaving Palestine, I went to a Sufi community in the mountains of Granada. I stayed there for a week and a half before returning to the United States, where I immediately suffered a nervous breakdown. At the time, I didn’t understand what was happening to me or why. But little by little, I began to learn the true history of Palestine and the atrocities that the state of Israel had committed against the Palestinian people from the creation of Israel to the present day. I spoke with various people, one on one, about what I had learned and my experience in Palestine, but I never spoke about it publicly until the current genocide in Gaza began in October 2023, when something inside me broke forever. And it had to break.

I titled this talk Is Your Dream Someone Else’s Nightmare?, instead of Is My Dream Someone Else’s Nightmare?, because if at the end of what I’m sharing, I’ve caused you to think differently about zionism and its lies, but about nothing else, I don’t think I will have succeeded in what I am hoping to communicate.

We are all born into a particular time and place and, in the beginning, we all experience our reality as the only version of reality that exists. There is a certain version of “the truth” and “normal” that reaches us as though it were without context or history. Many of our “truths” and concepts of “normal” cause profound pain and injustice to others as well as ourselves. But, especially coming from a “modern”, “western culture”, unless we question everything, including that which is easy, that which is comfortable, and that which we love, we are likely to perpetuate a way of life that leaves animals at the service of humans, that considers the earth a resource instead of a sacred, living being, and that leaves many of us leading lives determined by a violent, racist, patriarchal, consumerist, capitalist system instead of being able to make choices that reflect connection, respect, love and the deepest needs of all life.

There are many painful ironies to my story, but as someone told me recently, it’s not just my story. Anyone indoctrinated into zionism and who left it has a similar story to tell. I obsessively studied the Holocaust when I was a teenager, completely unaware that at the same time, I was lovingly supporting a state that was founded on and maintained by the same dehumanizing, racist beliefs that allowed the Holocaust in Germany to happen, and that is once again allowing another Holocaust, the one in Gaza, to happen. As a young woman, I was moved to tears and speechlessness when I heard the Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel speak about what he survived, never knowing that Elie Wiesel’s humanity did not extend to Palestinians. I wanted to know the truth about the U.S.A. But for years, I could not bear to hear the truth about Israel, or look at certain things that lived in me that needed to change. I was born a settler on the land currently called the U.S.A. I understood that the land in the U.S. was indigenous land long before the United States existed. Yet my dream of Israel, of “making aliyah” as it’s called, meaning: ascending, was just another version of settler-colonialism.

I’d like to speak a little more about the U.S./Israel connection, and to make it very clear that the state of Israel could not commit this genocide against Palestinians without the support of Europe and especially without the support of the United States. Since October 2023, the U.S. has given more than $21 billion to the state of Israel. In addition to Jewish zionists, there are zionists of other religions. In the U.S. alone, CUFI, Christians United for Israel, claims a membership of over 10 million Christian zionists, more than either the number of Jews in Israel or the number of Jews in the U.S. Christian Evangelicals have given between $50 million and $65 million to West Bank settlement projects in the past 10 years alone. Since the early 2000s, thousands of U.S. police officers, sheriffs, border patrol agents, immigration officers, and FBI agents have trained with Israeli military and police forces. What they learn is used in attacks against black Americans, immigrants, and refugees, and, “serves to reinforce, circulate, and promote the discriminatory and brutal policing practices that already exist in both countries, including practices of mass surveillance, deadly force, the use of military technology, and racial profiling.”

The BDS movement, calling for boycotts, divestments, and sanctions against Israel, is one crucial way to support Palestinians. If only America were also brought to account for its crimes against Palestinians and against humanity as a whole, including its own citizens.

The genocide may be out of the mainstream news, but the savagery against Palestinians continues. Since 2024, I’ve been working online with young people in Gaza in various capacities. I told two of them about this talk and asked if there is anything they would like to share with you. This first message is from a very dear young man named Mohand. We have English classes online. He said:

“Before I start with the details, we are among the few people who did not leave northern Gaza for the south.

We faced all forms of violence and bombardment.

The first shocking event we endured was the bombing of my mother’s family’s home.

We received this news three days after the start of the war.

I remember that we moved between many houses to escape the bombardment. During these moves, we carried many belongings because there were no markets to buy new things. After three months, food began to run out significantly, and there was nothing in the markets to buy. This was the first famine, and it was a very difficult period. During the first famine, Israeli soldiers besieged us in the neighborhood where we lived, and there was no way to escape. The siege lasted for 10 days. There was no drinking water in the building where we were staying, so we had to drink water that was not safe to drink.

One of the hardest things we experienced was hearing the news of the killing of my mother’s family members, including my grandmother, my uncle, and his children. After that, we entered the second famine, which was even harder than the first because there was no food to buy and no money left, as all our money had been used up during the first famine.

I am trying to get a scholarship to study abroad—maybe someone can help if they have contacts. I want to continue my master's in my field communication engineering.

People in Gaza are very strong. They haven’t lost hope for a better life. They always try to build a better future.”

And for those of us outside of Gaza, Mohand requests: “Participate in a lot of demonstrations. It makes a difference. And give scholarships to students in Gaza so they can get out of Gaza and make a better future. This is one of the best things you can do.”

And from a young writer in Gaza with whom I have been privileged to work, her request is that I share this link  https://chuffed.org/project/158372-help-my-family . She has also published a poetry book, which has been translated into Spanish, and a blog, which has also been translated into Spanish, to share updates about what life is currently like in Gaza. I believe that the entire world should read her writing to understand, not only the magnitude of the injustice and savagery committed against Palestinians, but also the depth of humanity that exists in Gaza and the love that no act of barbarity will ever be able to destroy.  Donya’s book: https://www.kobo.com/us/en/ebook/pieces-62

and substack: https://donyaingaza.substack.com/

As with a previous talk I gave, I do not want zionism or savagery to have the last word. I would like to share with you a little bit more about the young people in Gaza I’ve been privileged to work with, get to know, and love. They are giants. They are the pinnacle of what humanity has the potential to be. Despite the bombs falling all around them, despite people being burned alive, despite their relatives being wounded or killed, despite their own traumas, despite having lived their entire lives in an open-air prison—and that was before the genocide began—they have all participated in humanitarian aid. They have all cared for others while trying to survive the genocide themselves. In the midst of surviving a genocide, they would text me to inquire about my parents’ health and to find out how I was doing. How do you put humanity like that into words? And what actions can we take, both individually and collectively, to show them that we are as loving and caring as they are?