Reflections on A Jewish Journey to Anti-Zionism
Given the overwhelming support of the Israeli population for the genocide, what road forward is there? While opposition within the imperialist heartland is critical, and organizations like Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP) have played a key role—framed by the eye-opening, wrenching daily scenes of slaughter and starvation shown on U.S. TV and social media—in bringing Jewish youth and some elders along with a majority of the U.S. population to oppose the genocide, Joseph Daher in his article “Which Way Forward for Palestinian Liberation?”1 provides a strategic key.
Reviewing the failure of the so-called Axis of Resistance2 to defend the Palestinians, capitalist nation-states pursuing their own national, regional and class interests, he says:
“Thus, the region’s popular classes are collectively oppressed by the state system, their interests in challenging that system are tied together, and they possess tremendous power to shut their economies down including the oil industry—a power that can undermine the entire world economy. This is more than potential. Over the last century, the dialectical relationship between Palestinian liberation and regional popular struggle has been repeatedly demonstrated.”
For those of us in the U.S., and for me personally in my efforts to contribute to the effort to build an effective resistance to Zionism’s systemic racist violence, the intellectual-emotional struggles that Suzanne Ross lays before us resonate because they reflect experience learned in struggle.
Decades after Israel’s founding, my mother wrote that she supported the founding of Israel, “hoping at first for a joint Jewish-Arab state. In 1967 and 1974 I was very disturbed at the attitude of the majority of U.S. Jews toward Palestinians and the idea of a Palestinian state.... I became involved in campaigns on behalf of the Palestinians and a Palestinian state.” Earlier, in 1956, my parents, and I at age 12, supported Nasser and the nationalization of the Suez Canal and opposed the British/French/Israeli military attack against Egypt.
My mother’s last public political act at age 82 in 1999 was to write a letter published in the San Francisco Chronicle saying that she (so debilitated by the ravishes of age) “was sitting at home, heart-broken and in tears, because I am no longer able to participate in the Women in Black demonstrations for a free Palestine.”
In my union organizing, the ignorance of the real history of the pre-Israel Palestine that Ross documents has often raised its head. I co-authored a resolution in the Oakland Education Association (OEA) condemning the barbaric Israeli attack on Gaza in the three weeks beginning December 27, 2008. The resolution was the first of its kind adopted by any teacher union (and maybe any union), calling for the Right to Return (for Palestinians expelled from their homes and villages in 1947-48 to return to their land), the equal right of Jews and Palestinians to live in Palestine-Israel, an end to Israeli apartheid and for a binational secular state. And for workers to refuse to handle any military cargo bound for Israel. It caused an Anti-Defamation League uproar. They denounced the OEA, called our union President demanding a retraction, getting mainstream media coverage. The resolution had passed the Representative Council3 by about 64-8.
My co-author and I realized during discussions among the union members, including the union President, that most people didn’t understand the “Right to Return” and some other parts of the resolution, but fully supported the condemnation of Israeli barbarism and the right of both peoples to live in Palestine-Israel. So, to ensure that the union would stand strong in light of the media-amplified ADL attack, at the next Representative Council meeting we moved to reconsider and substituted “simply” the condemnation and right of both to live in Palestine/Israel. The union stood strong.
In late January of 2024, three months after the outbreak of the genocide, I coaxed a resolution through my tiny Adult Education union, addressing the fears of several Jewish teachers. But when a Jewish teacher said to me “Then you don’t support the right of the State of Israel to exist,” I said “No, I don’t. It cannot exist because it is Zionist, it is for Jews only. At minimum, a completely new, bi-national secular state must replace it.” She voted against the resolution.
After decades of some times more, sometimes less, active organizing against Zionist apartheid, another side of which included being the lead organizer of a thousand strong union mobilization that physically stopped the American Nazi Party marching in San Francisco in April, 1980, and fighting for real-life union boycotts of Israeli arms shipments like the 11-day boycott against South African apartheid cargo undertaken by International Longshore Workers Union, Local 10 in 1984, a new journey began for me October 7, 2023. For the first time, instead of simply dismissing pro-Israeli Jews, I learned to listen and talk to them.
In the 48-hours preceding a vote at the Richmond City Council (October, 2023) on a resolution which condemned the Israeli attack on Gaza, opposed Israeli apartheid and acknowledged that the root cause of the problem was seven decades of Zionist abuse of the Palestinians, I, as a teacher in Richmond Adult Education, and, much more importantly, a group of rabbis and a number of other recognized Jewish community leaders wrote or called the Council to say that not acknowledging the loss of life on both sides would assure that even normally a-political non-Zionist Jews would see and hear the resolution as simply antiSemitic. The Council amended the resolution to acknowledge that dual loss. Even so, eight to ten non-Zionist Jews rose to speak against the resolution. They expressed what seemed to be an honest fear that such a resolution would bring them into personal danger, that they, their family, homes or small businesses would be attacked.
That made me start thinking more personally about the Holocaust where my family had lost hundreds. More specifically, it made me consider what it was like for two of my uncles and a cousin to have seen combat in World War II against the Nazis when they were required to wear dog tags identifying themselves as Jews and when President Roosevelt, had, in 1939, infamously turned away the MS St. Louis ship, sending many of the 937 Jewish passengers to their deaths at the hands of the Nazis. It made me bridle at what I considered the simplistic characterization of Israel as a colonial-settler state, a characterization that I felt dismissed the devastating impact of the Holocaust both on Jewish lives and on the survivors’ consciousness.
Suzanne Ross convinced me that I was wrong. Her work reminded me of the history I had studied in the 1970s, original scrupulous research authored by a small group of Israeli Trotskyists with access to original sources, documenting that Israel is indeed a colonial-settler state. However, I believe that using that terminology must be done with care. To many Jews, it dismisses the inherited and deeply rooted fear of another Holocaust, a fear carefully stoked by the Zionist governments and their American mouthpieces and sponsors. In my experience it actually reflects a lack of understanding among a fair number of young people of various ethnicities, including Palestinians, that the memory of the Holocaust is as deeply rooted in the Jewish population as that of the Nakba is among Palestinians.
JVP and others have been extremely successful in speaking to and overcoming that fear while making it clear that the genocide must be fought tooth and nail. Success in communicating, along with Suzanne Ross, and along with the courageous student encampments, that anti-Zionism is not anti-Semitism and, indeed, that the distinction must be carefully maintained between Zionism and Judaism with its humane values and historical identification with progressive causes.
Ross sums it up thusly: “The Jewish people’s disproportionate participation in the Russian Revolution, in the movements for socialism and communism, in the U.S. Civil Rights movement and antiwar movements, in the anti-Apartheid struggle in South Africa must be recognized as the other side of what Judaism has given the world.” (Page 58)
1 https://www.socialistviewpoint.org/mayjun_25/mayjun_14.html
2 A loose Iran-led network in the Middle East opposing the U.S. and Israel, consisting of Iran, Hezbollah (Lebanon), Houthi Movement (Yemen), Shite militias in Iraq, Hamas, and Palestinian Islamic Jihad.
3 The Representative Council is composed of members elected by each school, the number of which is based on the size of the school’s faculty.