hatikvah
I went to a Jewish elementary school. Every morning, before we went into our classrooms, we gathered on the playground, lined up by grade, and recited the pledge of allegiance. Then we sang the Israeli national anthem: Hatikvah. The hope.
It didn’t strike me as odd, at the time, that we were expected to act like we were citizens of a foreign country. But then, I didn’t really think of Israel as a foreign country. Instead, I was absorbing the implicit lesson that the Jewish relationship to Israel went beyond secular statehood. I learned Hatikvah the same way I learned the prayers we recited during services: as part and parcel of being Jewish. To sing that song was just another way to talk to God.
—
That school taught me many things, but it never did get around to the historic and political circumstances of Israel’s founding. Or not all of them, anyway. I learned a mythic version: that Israel had been empty, and the land unproductive, until the Jews arrived to love it and tend to it. To bring it to life and put it to use.
It took decades before I first heard the word nakba. Before I began to understand that there had been cities, neighborhoods, and communities there long before we arrived. That the reason that Palestinians were so mad at the Jews was not because we were Jewish. It was because we had moved into their literal houses, and insisted they had always been our homes.
Now I see with painful clarity how that original sin colors Jewish thinking around Israel and what happens to it. Because the erasure of nakba allows— insists, in fact — that we experience Israel in an ahistorical vacuum. From which it follows that we exempt it from the normal cause-and-effect of life as a state, and a political actor. It makes it not just possible but necessary to believe that Iran isn’t attacking Israel because of its clear aggression in the region. It’s attacking Israel because of anti-Semitism.
—
The temple stayed my temple. It is my home and my family. I have gone there for high holy days services every year that I have been in LA.
But not this year. I couldn’t bring myself to do it. I could not sit in silence while someone preached about the “complexity” of the situation in Gaza. I could not count myself as a member of a congregation that hears about children starving, families being wiped off the map, polio making a comeback, fucking polio! And thinks anything other than: this is a horror. This must stop.
And yet. I do understand what those people are clinging to, because I used to cling to it too. The myth of Israel is not just about how it came to be, but about what it could mean for us.
It’s hard to convey how deep the Holocaust trauma runs, and how insistently they rehearsed it with us. If you stayed in religious school past b’nai mitzvah year, into eight grade, that was the entire school year’s curriculum. The traumatized compulsion towards repetition is built directly into our institutional bones.
And I was an excellent student, so I learned my lessons. I learned to have paralyzing nightmares. I learned to be vividly afraid. And then I learned the hope, which was that Israel could provide the most mythic thing of all: eternal, perfect Jewish safety.
Which, to use the parlance of my generation, is not and has never been a thing.
But also, I understand— I promise, I understand!— why it feels like dying to be asked to give it up, that hope. Hativkah.
—
Writing this feels pointless. Writing this feels cruel. Writing this feels mean, and it feels scary. I have never been in this kind of conflict with my community before. I don’t know how to say: I think you are deeply and morally wrong about something without being hurtful, and I guess that’s in part because there is no way.
But I also don’t know how to keep myself from saying all of this any longer. Especially because I keep seeing anti-Israel and anti-Zionist arguments dismissed as being made by people who are insufficiently invested in Jewishness to begin with.
When in fact, the opposite is true. This is a situation that uniquely requires Jewish people to speak to each other in the language and about the stories we were raised with. When a non-Jew says, Israel is a threat, it’s too easy for Jewish people to respond, no, you are a threat to me.
Sometimes I feel like all we as a people ever say is: you don’t understand how afraid I am. Which is real. And also, we have to start looking past the borders of our own fear.
Because if we keep holding onto it, we have no future. It’s long past time to stop clinging to boogeyman bedtime stories about how the rest of the world has always been out to get us. Because that fear has turned us into boogeymen, armed with imperial power and weapons, terrorizing others in the name of a “safety” that does not exist. That will never exist. Certainly not with this kind of blood on our hands.
See, even now— I say we, us, our. Israel is a foreign state. I do not vote there. This is not my government. (I have my own problems with my government!) And yet, it calls itself Jewish state, and it insists its violence is being done in my name and on my behalf. It binds me into that violence.
Untying those ropes feels like the worst kind of betrayal. A shanda fur die goyim, a taking of their side against my own. There’s a reason it’s taken me a whole year to write this.
There’s also a reason I finally had to do it.
The hope I feel now comes from gathering with other Jews to mourn the unimaginable, genocidal violence being committed in our names, and insist on peace and tolerance as core Jewish values. If you’re looking for the same, IfNotNow has organized memorials across the country tonight.
And if you are interested in reading and thinking more about how modern Judaism as weaponized the Holocaust, and how that informs Israeli violence and oppression, I cannot recommend Naomi Klein’s Doppelganger enough. I have been arguing against the way the Holocaust is taught in Jewish school since I was a student in them, and reading it was a physical relief to me. Like, finally: oh, I wasn’t crazy. Someone else sees this too.
I also recommend her wrenching but necessary piece How Israel Has Made Trauma a Weapon of War.
Never again is right now.