Reluctant Dialogue Part 2

For context on what follows, please see Part One.

III.
The writer shares that Oct 7 is part of a much larger narrative that is often erased.

I wrote: This for me is one of the major inflection points, and frankly I may lean too hard on filling in those gaps that we find in all facets and stages of Jewish education.

A friend recently wrote to me that she couldn’t believe she’d gotten to graduate school without having learned that people were living in Palestine prior to 1948. I share that sentiment. I now see my extensive Jewish education as carefully curated, selected packages of content meant to support a narrative, even if the individual executors of the plan didn’t actively realize they were enacting one. It’s a pretty darn extensive plan, and it’s been in the works (here in the US) for a pretty long time, so much so that it posits itself as being the only narrative American Jews ever had about Israel, which of course isn’t true. There was a pretty robust anti-Zionist contingent on the Jewish left at one time, 80-100 years ago.

Now, so much money (SO MUCH MONEY) and effort has been poured into establishing a decidedly Zionist stance amongst young American Jews. I was a child/product of Hadassah/Young Judaea in the 1980s and 90s where this project was fully in operation. So much so that there was a thinly veiled directive for older Judaeas to encourage the younger ones to have sex with each other in camp, so that they would marry, move to Israel and bolster the Jewish population there. This was in fact explicitly stated to me at one point.

The aspect of this that I lean on heavily is a reading of the primary source material surrounding the establishment of the political state of Israel. The record is filled with Orientalist, outright racist, Jewish supremacist sentiment on the part of Israel’s most famed leaders: Ben Gurion, Jabotinsky, Weitzmann, Joseph Weitz, et al. The language often rises to the level of outright advocacy of (and strategizing for) ethnic cleansing. This is to say nothing of the rhetoric you hear from Israeli MKs and cabinet members that is downright revolting. My point is, it follows a pattern, a paradigm, set up over 120 years ago, that posits one of two contradictory assertions:

1) Palestine is a land without a people, etc etc

OR

2) Palestine has people in it who are innately inferior, barbaric, uneducable, bloodthirsty (because of their religious fervor) and we therefore have the right to remove them so we can live there.

All this, of course, in addition to ’48, the Nakba and the concerted effort to reframe ’48, etc etc. Again the evidence is overwhelming (even now uber-Right-wing historian Benny Morris still stands by his own research about the ethnic cleansing of ’48). Bring together the founders ideology and biases, the horrors of ’48, the abject illegality of ’67 in the eyes of international law, the treatment of Palestinians between then and 2023, especially after the first intifada began, and the denouement being post-Oct 7 military activity and massive public relations campaign and for me, what emerges is a very clear plan, carried out over several decades, based on a political imperative regarding land and population. I have taken a lot of hits for saying that it’s a settler colonialist enterprise, but the truth is that’s how the founders categorized it themselves.

IV.
The writer notes that what I wrote initially doesn’t really take into account Jewish/Israeli suffering, and that the fear is real, though it doesn’t serve as excuse.

I wrote: You’re absolutely right and I think it might be more of the all-or-nothing thing, but I think it’s also a function of the fact that my education, formal, informal, communal, experiential, went in hard on the Holocaust. It loomed so large as to obfuscate everything else. I’ve been inundated my entire life with Jewish suffering. My teachers, my rabbis, my family members - they all felt this pressing need to remind me over and over and over how hard it is to be a Jew, how deeply Jews have suffered, and how it’s never over and we should be on alert at all times for more hatred and violence. My parents and grandmother were adamant that another Holocaust was lurking around the corner.

So the psychological/pathological answer to the question: ‘do I hold space for Jewish suffering? (Because it’s just as real as Palestinian suffering)?’ I have to admit, this is hard for me. Again, all-or-nothing - it doesn’t reflect reality, I know. I see how successful Jews have become and how influential they’ve become, especially when it comes to certain political avenues and I know that just because in 2025 there are rich, powerful Jews doesn’t mean that there aren’t 1200 dead ones at the hands of cold-blooded murderers. But I also see how all that power and money and influence have weighed the scales, have made for an unfair playing field for those who would seek justice—a complete justice that includes Palestinians and Israelis.

The Israel lobby is such a massive monster, one that cries wolf and cries foul on a 24/7 basis - it tends to drown out real instances of antisemitism. So perhaps my imbalanced response is, I see so much corruption, so much MONEY, spent on things like intimidating lawmakers and academics and maintaining websites like Canary Mission and doxxing STUDENTS and influencing powerful people to take illicit extralegal action against the Mahmoud Khalils and the Rumeysa Ozturks of this world and I think - is that the best use of that money and power? To destroy the life of someone because they wrote an op-ed that says Palestinians should be treated fairly? Which leads me to one more point along these lines - the vigor and venom with which anyone remotely critical of Israel is pursued and sometimes outright attacked boggles the mind. Why such reactivity? Why go to battle stations so fast? It hints at a deeper truth here, which is, I think, many of these individuals and institutions inherently understand their campaign is nefarious and their morals inverted. They KNOW they are subverting justice, and they can’t admit it to themselves and wouldn’t be able to articulate the sentiment if pressed. All this makes it very hard for me to center Jewish suffering. The way antisemitism has become a weapon to preempt any honest conversation about Palestinian identity or justice (because admitting they have identity and deserve justice is, somehow, to undermine the Zionist project) is reprehensible to me. That is my unadorned answer. I am trying to own my internal ambivalence here, and admit to the alluvial anger I wrestle with all the time.

(Continued in Part Three)