The earlier me

The famous American blue box of the Jewish National Fund

It is hard to pinpoint exactly when it all started. But somehow–during the years of putting my change in the little light blue box next to my bed to pay for trees planted in Israel, years at Zionist summer camp, years of Israeli folk dancing and activism with Hillel in college, years in Jerusalem studying for my Master’s degree–it happened. 

I can still access the old me now. I close my eyes, and I hear the Mizrachi music in the sherut heading towards Jerusalem from the airport. I have just arrived with a one way ticket and an acceptance letter to graduate school. The windows are open and the air, smelling hot and dry and like home, hits my face as I lean out the window as the chorus of the song hits me, too. The driver turns off the air conditioning as he climbs the hills. The old tanks to my left, hills and the sea far to my right. I feel completely at home in this place that I know now is not my home, was never my home, and am totally unaware of the lack of context that I carry with me. Squeezing my eyes just now, I can feel in my stomach the pull.

It is harder to access the older I get, but when I squeeze my eyes just right and think back to an earlier me, it’s still there. Living in Jerusalem in my early twenties, I remember the grasp it all had on me–the mad dash in the market before Shabbat, the Russian musicians on the streets, the hikes on the weekends, surviving the bombing across the street from my apartment, the overwhelming encouragement I got that said it was OK to be there, it was important to be there, it was a mitzvah to be there. This impenetrable facade of a kind of liberal Zionism was so strong and I, like so many of us American Jews, was a perfect candidate. Now, after working to undo that facade, I can tease myself and reach into my stomach and feel it, like a child who is told not to look at something disturbing and he can’t help himself but look and then is horrified. 

I suppose it’s a good thing to be able to access one’s former Zionist heartstrings. For those of us who could not separate Zionism from Judaism, doing so felt like amputating one’s leg. Indeed, this old self has helped me to speak about this paradigm shift to church groups, to Jewish groups, and most importantly, it has helped me to forge alliances and talk about what it really means to stand in solidarity with Palestinians. Early on in my transformation, I’d make a fool of myself by thinking that my difficult displacement from my Zionist self could ever compare to the pain and pull that Palestinians feel to their land. Of course, what I didn’t know at the time was that the pull I felt was not in my own heart, but was the pull of propaganda, of multi-million dollar lobbying, of lying to children like me, who put our change in the little blue boxes next to our beds, late at night, and fell asleep, our faith in our political leaders, thinking that we were helping to make the world better. 

Perhaps the clutch at my former Zionism serves me best when I encounter Zionist American Jews. I understand their discomfort. I can see their pain. I want them to feel the discomfort that one feels when one is learning, growing, and stretching. In the classroom, I tell my students that it is a good thing when they are starting to shift in their seats uncomfortably, when they feel alarmed and nauseous at learning something new. And that it is going to hurt them. I want American Zionist Jews to question these things about Zionism that we were never to question. Rarely they do, but sometimes they do. I can say to them, “I understand how you feel,” and have true empathy in my eyes when I look at them. I know too, though, that it could be years before they realize that the pull they feel is a lie and the pain they feel isn’t about them.

And the sad thing is that while Jews are undoing their Zionism, while whites are undoing their racism, while students in progressive U.S. classrooms are recognizing their privilege, people are dying–Palestinians are being expelled from their homes, denied access to clean water, freedom of movement, and basic human rights. It isn’t about any of us Jews, this pull we feel; and when we undo it, it becomes a tangled nest of a lying and deceitful beast. And we must undo it. When left to mainstream American Jewish institutions, the beast is fed well. 

Perhaps the most painful part is when I feel the pull like the deepest kind of nausea. Like a lame leg that doesn’t work anymore but is still a part of my body, it has become part of me forever. During my Zionist years I believed that I was helping: contributing to making the desert bloom, building a land for a people for a people without a land, representing with pride a light unto the nations–all the rhetoric we are familiar with. The reality, though, was that I was hurting, oppressing, colonizing, Orientalizing, fetishizing otherness. I was accessing and benefiting from privileges I didn’t know I had. I know now, that all the anti-racist pedagogy and curricula I have written, the speaking I have done on issues of systemic oppression, white privilege, leading diversity groups, joining groups to hone my own leadership skills, developing my career as a teacher activist, and ultimately, thinking and talking about what it means to stand in solidarity with Palestinians, will never take away my Zionist years. My world view is now one in which I see in so many interactions and spaces the dance of the oppressor and oppressed, colonized and colonizer. The lame leg is still there, and often I still limp.

Now, the little blue box is replaced on my nightstand by books on Israel/Palestine and my faith is gone in political leaders. In fact, late at night, when it is quiet and dark, I go inside my stomach and I recognize the pained and broken self that knows now, after so many years, that it doesn’t matter how much it hurts to look back, to sit in that space, indeed to live day to day in a reckless world that is OK with denying human beings the right to movement and equity and freedom and choice. One doesn’t have to work that hard, after all, to access such pain.

Liz Shulman is a teacher living in Chicago.