A Jewish Journey to Anti-Zionism by Suzanne Ross
In any attempt to reach Jews (or others) who are uncertain about Israel, its right to exist and the genocide it is committing, Suzanne Ross’s book is invaluable and courageous. Titled Born Jewish in Nazi Europe, my journey to become Anti-Zionist, it is a deep dive into the conflicts tearing at Jewish minds horrified by the genocide yet deeply fearful of renewed antisemitism and the future of Jews if Israel were to cease to exist as a nation-state.
As she says, Ross is not a historian. Rather, the book is, in her own words “about the changing of my consciousness from accepting many, or even most of the tenets of Zionism in the aftermath of the creation of the state of Israel (when I was 11 years old) to becoming an anti-Zionist.” Born Jewish in Nazi Europe, her family fleeing across the continent, North Africa, Mozambique and Palestine to escape the advancing fascists, this book teaches more about the Jewish experience from the Holocaust on then anything I have read. And I say that as one who has researched the subject deeply, played a key role in getting the Oakland Education Association to adopt a position opposing Israel’s slaughter of Gaza and recognizing the equal right of both Palestinians and Jews to live in Palestine/Israel as early as 2009, and played a very active role in the 2014 picket of an Israeli Zim Line ship in the Port of Oakland/San Francisco that has resulted in over a decade in which Zim has never again tried to bring one of its vessels to the Port.
What makes Suzanne’s book so telling is that she has wrestled with these questions for decades, long before emerging as an important voice in the fight to free Mumia Abu-Jamal, even as she was deeply involved in opposing the war in Vietnam, and particularly in Central American solidarity work. There she aided those locked in mortal combat with violent regimes she characterizes as fascist. Salvadoran death squad leader, “Blowtorch Bob” Roberto D’Aubuisson, the man responsible for the assassination of Bishop Oscar Romero, immediately comes to mind. That a person with such profound anti-imperialist credentials could still, for years and decades, wonder whether Israel was the exception one should make in opposing colonial settler states speaks to the wounds that the Nazi Holocaust seared into the Jewish psyche. That memory is as deeply rooted among Jews as the Nakba1, now renewed in the genocide, is rooted among Palestinians.
Ross says, “Everything I knew about Israel and its creation, though resembling some of the other colonies in the world that I knew about, made it an ‘exception’ for me and so many others. Israel was different. There was the history of centuries of European anti-Semitism and, most importantly, the recent history of the Nazi Holocaust. For me, there was also my direct contact with the Nazi genocide against the Jews.” (page IX)
Raised and educated in complete ignorance of the Nakba, of the violence of the Irgun2 and the slaughter at many places like Deir Yassin; taught and retaught the founding myth of Zionist Israel, “A land without a people for a people without a land;” singing children’s songs about Zionist heroes killing Arab “bad guys” on her family’s “socialist” kibbutz3—the communal aspects of the early kibbutzim were used as part of the propaganda cover created by the Israeli state and its U.S. imperialist sponsors to hide the criminal Nakba central to its creation—Ross walks us through the calculation that went into the creation of the “sabra,” the new Zionist woman and man.
In understanding Israeli Zionist racism, its total dehumanization of Palestinians, the sabra is key and this part of Ross’s book is perhaps its greatest contribution. The Zionist leadership deliberately broke from European Jewish culture, some of it deeply progressive, and its other, religious base rooted in the struggles over millennia of a persecuted, subordinated people to resist and survive. In its place, the Zionists created a new one founded in nationalism and Jewish supremacy. Children were taught to mock the old culture, to harass those who acknowledged it, to shame them into denying their place of birth outside of Israel. Those not born in Israel were considered outsiders—with a heavy dose of racism reserved for Jews of a darker color—with the exception of American Jews who were courted to encourage their emigration to Israel.
And another key exception to the sabra culture which itself was emphatically secular was its opportunist courting of the Orthodox community. Ross’s research revealed that neither David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s first Prime Minister, Chaim Weizmann, its first President, nor any other of the original top leaders of Israel wore a yarmulke.4 The Zionists maligned the old religious shtetl (village) culture—the old culture Shalom Aleichem so famously embraced, with both satire and affection—yet exempted the Orthodox community from military service which was (and is) otherwise universal. Everyone enters military service at 18, males for a mandatory 36 months, females 24. Today’s Zionist leadership has ended that 7-decade old exemption in its determination to expand the IDF, poised as the government is to permanently seize Gaza and the West bank.
Today’s Israeli culture is perhaps best exemplified by the T-shirt that IDF soldiers openly sported during Israel’s attack on Gaza in the last days of 2008. The shirt shows a pregnant Palestinian woman in the crosshairs of a rifle and the slogan “1 Shot 2 Kills. “Ross’s description of the sabra white supremacist, nationalist culture—which prominent Jewish historian Ilan Pappe says took at least a full generation to ingrain—brought to mind my learning experience in the Ku Klux Klan South in the summer of 1963 when I first volunteered for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), and then during the 1964 Mississippi Freedom summer. Southern white children were brought to watch and celebrate the lynching of blacks.
The Zionist sabra culture is as deeply rooted as was the KKK culture of the formerly slave owning South—and there is a lesson to be learned in that which we in the U.S. should be able to see. If temporarily rolled back by the Civil Rights movement and even the election of Obama, and more powerfully so by the enormous street demonstrations to protest George Floyd’s murder, Amerikkkan racism is resilient and powerful; so too, the vicious, murderous culture Zionism has deliberately created.
Silent about Genocide
In sad contrast to the mass Israeli protests against the invasion of Lebanon in 1982 and the massacres of Palestinian refugees at Sabra and Shatila (conservatively estimated at 100,000 by the Israeli media, 300k-400k by the Soviet Union’s media), the post Oct. 7 demonstrations in Israel have been for a ceasefire, for the release of the hostages and against Netanyahu but sickeningly silent about the genocide. The culture has grown more depraved, more racist. That is not to say there is not opposition and that there are no refuseniks; but the left has grown qualitatively weaker with four more decades of ever greater and incessant Zionist indoctrination. Again, the continued prevalence of white supremacy particularly in the U.S. South and manifested nationwide now in the savage anti-immigrant persecution—and on the U.S. Supreme Court—are fearsomely germane.
In shedding light on the Zionist sabra culture, Ross focuses on the forces used to develop it. From the very beginning, the U.S. was directly involved as the nation most centrally responsible for Israel’s creation. Continually playing on the trauma of the Nazi Holocaust, the Zionist propaganda machine, aided and guided by the CIA, falsified the history of violence surrounding Israel’s establishment. Jews who had never previously identified as Zionists saw the establishment of Israel “…as just compensation for the Nazi Holocaust in the aftermath of WW II…. Given the long history of European anti-Semitism, the easy explanation for the Arab resentment toward Israel upon its creation was ‘anti-Semitism.’ It was the only explanation that made sense to us, having never heard of the existence, let alone the perspective, of the Arabs.” (Page 31)
In the U.S., this propaganda line was pushed by the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) and, beginning in 1963, by American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). The immediate courageous public denunciation of the April 9, 1948, massacre in Deir Yasmin published as an ad in the New York Times by Albert Einstein, Hannah Arendt and 19 other prominent U.S. and European intellectuals, was buried in the avalanche of pro-Israel disinformation. And the 1953 public lynching by electrocution of the “commie Jews,” Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, blamed for the Soviet Union developing nuclear weapons, along with the witch-hunting of the Jew, Robert Oppenheimer, undoubtedly caused fearful Jews in the U.S. to huddle more closely around “their” state, Israel.
The sharp repression of pro-Palestinian forces currently underway at full throttle in the U.S., the U.K. and elsewhere is the linear expression of policies carried out to defend the Zionist entity since 1948. Speech getting you fired or deported, institutions of learning being stripped of tens-of-millions of government grants unless they kowtow and become enforcers themselves, Zionist thugs plus police attacking encampments, a court issuing an injunction to break the 17-day UC Santa Cruz UAW educational workers strike to defend the protestors’ rights (an injunction against which liberal Democratic governor Newsom never said a word and against which UAW International President Shawn Fain put up only the most token, legalistic resistance)—all this demonstrates how central Israel is to the imperialist project of controlling the strategic oil reserves and shipping lanes of the Middle East.
As Ross stresses, Israel has from the first been an imperialist project and neither its creation nor its continued existence could have been accomplished or sustained if the U.S. in particular and its European subordinates did not see it as critical to their continued domination of the global economy. Shortly after the genocide began, I wrote that in Biden green-lighting the genocide by shipping endless tons of weaponry to the IDF, the U.S. Empire was saying to the world: “cross us, and this will be your fate too. We will destroy you.”
It is critical to understand that the genocide in Palestine is U.S. imperialism’s project—a point with which Ross stresses emphatically—its bloody reminder that if economic/financial sanctions fail to bring a nation to its knees, the weapons of mass destruction will be promptly brought into place. The only solution to the problem is a socialist one, the overturn of the capitalist system, in Israel-Palestine, the U.S. and globally.
1 The Nakba, or “Catastrophe” in Arabic, refers to the 1948 displacement, killing, and dispossession of Palestinians during the establishment of Israel, leading to the destruction of Palestinian society and the permanent loss of homeland for the majority of the Palestinian people.
2 The Irgun was a Zionist paramilitary terrorist violent organization that operated in Mandatory Palestine between 1931 and 1948, ideologically linked to the right-wing Revisionist Zionist movement.
3 A kibbutz (plural kibbutzim) is a communal settlement in Israel, traditionally based on agriculture, characterized by shared ownership of property, collective decision-making, and a socialist ideal of cooperation and egalitarianism.
4 A skullcap worn in public by Orthodox Jewish men or during prayer by other Jewish men.