Are Israelis Jews? Returning to Jewish minority life

It is hard to find words for the horrors in Palestine now. I am haunted by images of rubble and crowded hospitals filled with the wounded and maimed, and by all the stories brought to us by heroic journalists in Gaza. I am haunted by videos of parents in Gaza holding their children, refusing to believe that they are dead. A friend said that even watching this from afar feels like your bloodstream is swimming with ashes. That’s how I feel, too. 

Israel is committing genocide in Gaza, assaulting Palestinians in the West Bank, intensifying its torture of Palestinian prisoners, and increasing its harassment and policing of Palestinians inside 1948 Palestine. Over 10,000 Palestinians in Gaza have been killed by relentless Israeli bombardment since October 7, 2023. Entire families have been exterminated; whole neighborhoods obliterated; hospitals, water infrastructure, mosques, and universities damaged or destroyed; and about 1.5 million Gazans displaced from their homes, made into refugees once again. Meanwhile, leaders of the “West” back Israel. The U.S. sent more weapons. President Joe Biden declared himself “a Zionist,” saying there will be “no red lines” for Israel. He is only now hinting that maybe Israel should consider holding back. 

Anyone wishing to understand how the Holocaust was possible, how people who may be warm and kind in their personal lives could support the murder of an entire population deemed subhuman, should examine Israeli society.

Sadly, this is nothing compared to the support for genocide within Israeli society. Anyone wishing to understand how the Holocaust was possible, how people who may be warm and kind in their personal lives could support the murder of an entire population deemed subhuman, should examine Israeli society. Israelis are overwhelmingly calling to destroy Gaza — to turn it into a “parking lot” and bring it “back to the stone age.” Israeli “defense” minister Yoav Gallant, sounding like a Nazi, said Israel is “fighting human animals.” Israeli media shouted that Israel shouldn’t let “even half a spoonful of water” into Gaza. 

Operation Al-Aqsa Flood, which began on October 7, was a rude awakening. Many Israelis seem to have only learned then that Palestinians exist and that they are fed up with being colonized, dispossessed, murdered, and policed. Israeli politicians suddenly acknowledged the Nakba of 1948 by calling for its repeat — after first criminalizing its commemoration.    

Israelis clap for the murder of Palestinians anywhere and everywhere. Pictures of dead Palestinian children and pulverized neighborhoods in Gaza circulate on Israeli social media channels, where they are tagged with smiley and “thumbs up” emojis. Israeli society desires Palestinian death. Yet in late October, Israeli delegates to the United Nations wore yellow stars with the words “Never Again” — is it surprising that much of the world won’t show compassion for Israeli suffering now? And the tiny number of Israelis who express even minor dissent from Israel’s murderous plan are bullied, threatened with death, and sometimes arrested.

None of this is new. Israel’s existence has been premised on genocidal violence against Palestinians, which Israelis are programmed to support from a young age. 

But in seeing the latest catastrophe created by Israel, I’ve been wondering again: Are Israelis Jews? 

I didn’t come up with this question. It has been asked before by others who recognize that the zionist project, culminating in Israel, is profoundly contrary to Jewish traditions and to the historical existence of Jews as minority communities. The creation of Israel has suppressed these Jewish traditions and ways of living while hijacking parts of them when convenient. In Palestine specifically, Israel has basically destroyed the possibilities for Jews to live as non-colonizers in the land where Jews have lived as a minority for ages. 

For all these reasons, the dismantling of Israel and the liberation of Palestine must also be a Jewish struggle — a struggle that should go far beyond Jews showing solidarity for Palestinians or simply not wanting to be oppressors. “Israeli” is a colonial identity that should be renounced, not just because it harms Palestinians but also because it is deeply anti-Jewish. And while Jewish life cannot revolve around anti-zionism, in our times, to be a Jewish institution should mean being anti-zionist. For the sake of Palestinians, but also for the sake of Jews. 

‘No Jewish people here anymore’ 

Zionists have long tried to bury anti-zionist Jewish traditions, like those of the Jewish General Labor Bund (“the Bund”), a major Jewish socialist movement that emerged in Eastern Europe in the late nineteenth century at the same time as the zionist movement. 

Bundists generally viewed the colonization of Palestine as an imperialist quest, a betrayal of diasporic Jewish life that would put Jews in a dangerous alliance with European imperial governments. Bernard Goldstein, a member of the Polish Bund who helped organize the Warsaw ghetto resistance, wrote that for Bundists, rejecting zionism and fighting for Jewish communities in Poland was as “natural” as it was for Blacks in the U.S. to engage in struggle “in the United States rather than to accept emigration back to Africa as a solution to the problem of racial inequalities in America.” 

Israelis are not Jews. This startling realization allowed Bundists in Palestine to see Israel for what it was.

After World War II, with Jewish life in Eastern Europe destroyed — turned into what Goldstein called a “sea of emptiness” — some Bundists ended up in Israel, in a society that was antithetical to everything they had fought for. These Bundists found themselves asking: Are these people we now live with, who call themselves “Israelis,” actually Jews? Because we don’t recognize us in them. 

This distinction is captured in Eran Torbiner’s sorrowful 2012 documentary, Bunda’im, about the Bund in Palestine. In the film, one Bundist says, in Hebrew, and with great sadness, that: 

The Jewish people is disappearing. Here [in Palestine] as well. There is no Jewish people here anymore. There is an Israeli people. It’s not the Jewish people that I, my generation, knew. It’s not the same people. It’s not the same people… We’re a completely different people. My people is disappearing. What can you do? It’s a tragedy.

Israelis are not Jews. This startling realization allowed Bundists in Palestine to see Israel for what it was. Already in the 1950s, the Bundists in Palestine were writing in their newspaper that the Nakba made Palestinians into refugees, destroying their worlds, as the Holocaust had done to Jews. 

The Bundists could fiercely critique zionism because they were among its victims. To state the obvious, Palestinians are the primary resistors and victims of zionism, but Jews are targets too. Israel had to be built on the ruins of worlds Jews were part of long before zionism, whether in Europe, North Africa, or the Arab world. The Jewish worlds that the Nazis destroyed in World War II were not worlds that zionists valued much, either. Yiddish language and culture, for example, had to be crushed as part of the zionist program of “the negation of diaspora.” 

This is why there’s no such thing as “Israeli culture,” any more than there is “white culture”; people lose their culture to become white. “Israeli” is a colonial identity, a relation of power against the colonized, just like being “white” is a relation of power against those racialized as non-white and not a meaningful identity (unless you’re a white nationalist). “Israeli culture” is made by fantasizing about what a Euro-American colony in the Middle East should be. To the extent that there is any “Israeli culture,” it is a mix of appropriated local Arab culture (think of the places that sell you “Israeli falafel and hummus”) and remnants of diasporic Jewish cultures that zionists kept. 

Tragically, the survivors of European racist regimes, along with their descendants, adopted European racist ideologies when creating a fake Jewish state. The colonial society that resulted continues to harm Jews.

Israel hates Jews

On November 1, Israeli police attacked the anti-zionist Jewish neighborhood of Mea Shearim in Jerusalem. The police apparently came in to take down Palestinian flags put up by the Jewish residents but were greeted with stones and eggs. 

Today, during a police raid to take down Palestinian flags in the anti-Zionist Jewish neighborhood, Mea Shearim in Jerusalem, the Israeli policemen were recorded attacking residents and knocking residents down on the road, hitting, and punching them in the face.

Police violence… pic.twitter.com/sUNYZg749i

— Torah Judaism (@TorahJudaism) November 1, 2023

The Israeli police’s assault on the Jews of Mea Shearim looks like a scene from anti-Jewish pogroms in 19^th century Eastern Europe. The Israeli police are the Cossacks, beating the Jew up and throwing his kippah to the ground. The only thing missing is for the Israeli policeman to shove a pork sausage down the Jew’s throat. Video footage from that day shows that some of the Jews fought back, pushing the Israeli Cossacks away. 

Israeli society tries to be “secular” in a Euro-American sense, which is why it despises traditional Jewish communities. Israel talks about these Jews the same way it talks about Palestinians, which is the same way the German Nazis talked about Jews. Israel sees these Jewish communities as a demographic threat: it tracks their birth rates, worries that they have too many children, and views them as “parasites” who don’t contribute to economic productivity and, even worse, do not serve in the Israeli Occupation Forces. Their men study Torah all day when they could be killing Palestinians. 

Yet Israel also needs some of these traditional elements to maintain the spectacle of a “Jewish state.” If all traditional Jewish elements were stripped away, Israel’s racism would be completely naked. Israel also needs the religious zionist settlers, who help the state acquire lands and displace Palestinians under the guise of a holy “Jewish” war. But Israel’s fundamental disdain for traditional Jewish life remains.

We see manifestations of this anti-Jewish racism in every part of the zionist project — notably, in the application of eugenics and racial hierarchies.

The zionist regime had always preferred Jews from Europe. Western European Jews were seen as superior to Eastern European Jews, and even within European groups, there was a ranking. Jews lower down on the hierarchy would be used as human shields, strategically settled to protect the core of the colony. This was the fate of many Arab and North African Jews, people that Israel didn’t even want originally, but the shortage of European Jews who could be settled in Palestine after the Holocaust left the zionists little choice.

These Jews, whom zionists labeled “Oriental Jews,” were humiliated and abused. Israel placed them in tent cities upon arrival, sometimes spraying them with the pesticide DDT and forcing them to shave their heads to “disinfect.” They were violated in similar ways to how Canadian and U.S. settler societies violate indigenous peoples. Yemeni Jews had their children kidnapped from them and put into foster Jewish families of European origin. In an episode reminiscent of the experiments of Dr. Josef Mengele, zionist medical institutions took samples from Yemeni Jewish children to test whether they had “Negro blood.” In more recent decades, Ethiopian Jewish women were coerced into getting long-lasting birth control shots in order to be admitted into Israel. Zionism is based on white supremacy, an ideology that will always end up harming Jews.

All this makes more sense when we look at the roots of zionism, which go back to imperial Christianity. 

I once saw a segment on Israeli television where a man walked around a shopping mall and read quotes to people, asking them to guess the author. Almost everyone guessed Adolf Hitler, but all the quotes were by Theodor Herzl, the “founding father” of zionism. 

Like other zionists, Herzl viewed Jews as a kind of “degenerate race.” He thought that Jewish communities “produce an abundance of mediocre intellects who find no outlet,” Jewish agitators that are “rapidly becoming Socialists” and create trouble for governments. Prior to adopting the idea of colonizing Palestine, Herzl thought the best plan for Jews would be mass conversion to Christianity. 

Herzl later justified the “Jewish” state in Palestine by arguing it will serve imperial Christian interests. The Jewish state, he wrote, would “form a portion of a rampart of Europe against Asia, an outpost of civilization as opposed to barbarism.” This state would depend on Europe in order “to guarantee our existence” and, in exchange, protect “the sanctuaries of Christendom.” Nowadays, when activists say that Israel is a satellite colony that enforces Western interests, it is often condemned as “anti-semitism,” but this is precisely what zionist leaders thought. 

Herzl also justified zionism by arguing that reactionary European regimes would benefit by sending away troublemaking Jewish socialists. That is what Herzl promised Count von Plehve, who endorsed anti-Jewish pogroms and brutally repressed Jewish socialists (including members of the Bund, who later attempted to assassinate him). Von Plehve told Herzl in response that “the Jews have been joining the revolutionary parties,” and that he will support “your Zionist movement as long as it worked toward emigration. You don’t have to justify the movement to me. You are preaching to a convert.” 

Herzl and Chaim Weizmann, who would become Israel’s first president, similarly promised the Russian Tsar’s regime that zionism would get rid of Russia’s “noxious and subversive Anarcho-Bolshevik Jews.” Is this not a similar sentiment to the one Hitler expressed in a January 1939 speech, when he said that the “Jewish watchword” is “Workers of the world unite” – and that Jews must be eliminated from Europe before they bring about “the Bolshevization of the earth”? 

Every few years, we have to remind ourselves of this anti-Jewish foundation of zionism. Palestinians have seen zionism’s anti-Jewish character very clearly. Edward Said explained that the British lords who supported the zionist project in the 19^th and early 20^th centuries did so largely out of their wish to get rid of Jews, which sometimes came along with the idea that “returning” Jews to Palestine is necessary for the second coming of Jesus (at which point Jews can either accept Christ or burn in hell). 

In the U.S. today, such Christian zionists outnumber Jewish zionists, and their anti-Jewish racism is stunning. Pastor John Hagee, founder of the major zionist group Christians United for Israel, said that the “Antichrist” was “a half-Jew homosexual.” He also said the Nazi Holocaust was God’s way of sending Jews to Israel, and that supporting Israel is “God’s foreign policy.” 

What does Israel say? Prime Minister Netanyahu has declared that “Israel has no better friend” than Pastor Hagee.  

And so I wonder again: Are Israelis Jews? 

This question isn’t based on some notion of Jewish superiority or the idea that Jews can’t be oppressors (remember Henry Kissinger). Nor is it based on the assumption of a unifying “essence” to the great diversity of Jewish communities and traditions. 

But for me and so many others, if being Jewish is to mean anything, it must include that all people are made in the same image, and the principle that to save a life is to save a whole world, to destroy a life is to destroy a whole world. The creation of Israel is antithetical to these views. 

Israel is also antithetical to historical Jewish existence. Jews have lived around the world as anarchistic minority communities; they were not at the helm of imperial governments. Pirkei Avot, a foundational book of oral Torah dating to the third century, says: “Watch out for the government: They befriend a person to meet their own needs, appearing friendly when it is to their benefit; but they do not stand by a person when that person is in distress.” The opposite of Pirkei Avot’s wisdom would be to run a colony that serves Euro-American imperial interests, subjugating indigenous people. 

A return to Jewish minority life

My family has roots in Palestine going back to the late eighteenth century (and possibly earlier) — a good one hundred years before the zionist movement took off. I don’t see myself as a “Palestinian Jew” — the label feels inauthentic in my case — but if it weren’t for Israel, that’s what I would have been. Instead, I see myself as belonging to a Jewish minority in two senses. First, the devastating success of zionism made us anti-zionist Jews into a minority among Jews. Second, and more importantly, Jews have long lived as a minority in Palestine. 

In 1918, the year after the Balfour Declaration, in which Britain endorsed the zionist colonization of Palestine, Jews were still only 8% of the population in Palestine. Unfortunately, the zionist project, eventually, even made the Jews who were already in Palestine before zionism into “Israelis” — that is, settlers. 

It’s urgent to reconnect with a non-colonial Jewish existence in Palestine that predates zionism. Sadly, Jews know very little about the centuries of pre-European colonial Jewish life in Palestine, and historians often mislead us by projecting zionist ideology (and ludicrous readings of the Hebrew Bible) backwards in time. What did this pre-zionist Jewish world look like? What can we draw from its traditions and ways of living? 

Perhaps the closest Jews we have to non-colonial Jewish existence in Palestine now are the anti-zionist orthodox Jews living in Jerusalem today — the ones getting beat up by Israeli police. Those Jewish communities have a familiar way of living as non-colonizers. They refuse Israel with their bodies just by continuing to be. Many have no problem throwing stones at Israeli forces alongside Palestinian comrades.

What might Jewish life in Palestine look like after decolonization? 

Decolonization requires the destruction of settler colonial structures, leading to the creation of entirely different living arrangements. Land and wealth will have to be returned and redistributed. Enormous efforts will have to be made to repair the harms of over a century of Euro-American colonization, including making it possible for refugees, displaced internally or in the diaspora, to return. Trauma and grief will have to be addressed, and new institutions will have to be built. Each piece of the land has its own stories to tell, stories of worlds and cultures that once thrived, and stories of misery and loss, of lives destroyed by colonialism — a Palestinian past, but also a minority Jewish past. How could we repair these worlds and bring them back to life while properly mourning that which is forever gone? Decolonization asks for all this and more. 

Decolonization is a monumental collective project, and no one can tell how it will unfold.

I used to think that imagining decolonization in any detail isn’t pressing. There is always an immediate crisis to deal with, a fight against further zionist colonization and dispossession. Why think about what liberation “From the River to the Sea” means when it usually feels so far away? 

But now, I think this kind of collective imagining is necessary. I wish we had ten thousand plans, novels, short stories, films, maps, and enactments about the decolonization of Palestine, or “Bilad al-Sham,” or whatever the least colonial name for that magical place is. Every drop of human ingenuity will be needed for decolonization to succeed.

The project of decolonizing Palestine must also be a Jewish liberation project.

The project of decolonizing Palestine must also be a Jewish liberation project. Jews should be part of the struggle for decolonization because Jews have always been part of Palestine, as a minority community — even while the effort to liberate the land is clearly and rightly led by Palestinians. 

Decolonization means a return to Jewish minority life in Palestine. A return to minority life, for me, isn’t about numbers — although even if every Jew now living in Palestine stayed after the Israeli state was dismantled, Jews will still be a minority when Palestinian refugees in the diaspora are included. Rather, it is about reviving a non-colonial way to relate to the land and to others, one that builds on pre-zionist modes of living. 

This will require not only material changes to life on the land, but also changes to culture and language. It will mean unlearning the colonial “Israeli” identity — that is, refusing “to be an ‘Israeli,’ to think like an Israeli, to identify as an Israeli, or to be recognized as an Israeli,” as Ariella Aïsha Azoulay urges, “because being an Israeli means being entitled to stolen lands and the property of others.” Rejecting Israeli identity should include reclaiming Hebrew as a diasporic language, moving past the lie that Hebrew was a “dead” liturgical language prior to the zionist movement. The end of the Israeli state could liberate Jews everywhere to revive non-zionist Jewish culture. 

Yet, given the unspeakable crimes of the zionist state, I find it increasingly difficult to envision Jewish life in Palestine. Let’s be honest. If the Israeli regime were dismantled, then how and why would Palestinians want to live with a population that has cheered for their death and expulsion? And how could we imagine non-colonial Jewish life in Palestine when nearly every organized Jewish institution is currently some flavor of zionist? 

A chain of tragedies, armed resistance

Right now, Israel wants the world to focus only on the Israeli suffering resulting from Al-Aqsa Flood. Zionists distort this suffering by insidiously planting lies about what happened during Al-Aqsa Flood, knowing that these lies will be repeated by mainstream media and serve as pretexts for Israel’s genocidal attacks. 

Nonetheless, Israeli suffering is real. And within each story of Israeli suffering, we can see the endless chain of tragedies created by the zionist project.

The chain of tragedies flashed through my mind after watching a video made by one of the resistance fighters during Al-Aqsa flood, which shows an Israeli family held by the fighters. The video was taken in “Nahal Oz,” a militarized settlement close to the Israeli wall that encloses Gaza. The father appears to have been shot in the leg, and the mother is trying to protect three terrified children. One of the kids, 17 years old, was led by a resistance fighter outside, apparently to draw other residents out of their homes. 

This Israeli family was experiencing some of the horror that countless Palestinians have experienced. As the resistance soldier takes the teenager outside, he asks him: “Where are you from? Where were you born?” “Here, I am from here,” the kid replies. They spoke to each other in English because the zionist project has made it so that basically all settlers, even if they are Arab Jews, don’t know Arabic. It has been reported that the bodies of the teenage son and parents were found after Israeli military retook the settlement and that the two young daughters are now held hostage in Gaza.   

It is tragic that the zionist project has created the so-called “Gaza envelope,” settlements and military outposts that use families as human shields for the Israeli state. It is tragic that there are generations of Israelis raised to be foreign transplants on the land. It is also tragic that young people are enlisted in the IOF to die in the name of colonizing and terrorizing another people. Life is brittle, pushed around by the cruel winds of history. Each day, I remember that I was blessed to get out of serving in the IOF (if forced to serve, I might have been driven to suicide) and feel the pain of those who wanted to get out but weren’t so lucky. 

The Palestinian resistance knows that most settlers are raised to hate and want to kill them. Armed resistance is born out of these conditions and has been a component of all anti-colonial struggles. And though colonizers do not want to hear this, their own violence is much greater than that of the colonized. As CLR James wrote in his account of the Haitian revolution, the uprising of enslaved Africans who kicked out their European enslavers: “The cruelties of property and privilege are always more ferocious than the revenges of poverty and oppression.” 

Palestinian resistance groups, such as the Lions’ Den in the West Bank, are bravely fighting to defend their communities against all odds. Lions’ Den has managed to derail IOF incursions into Nablus. The strength of such resistance is rooted in the unbreakable spirit of Palestinians. 

In a Lions’ Den statement, I read these lines: “May your faces become worse, O sons of Judaism. May your Sabbath and holidays be bad, O descendants of monkeys and pigs…Our message to you, O children of Zion, is that there is no place for you on our land, no temple, not even a place to bury your dead. Go back where you came from, each to his original homeland.” 

I know that this specifically doesn’t represent the broader Palestinian liberation movement, but it pained me to read it. I blame the zionist project — for hopelessly confounding Jews with zionists, for creating antagonisms between Muslims and Jews that did not exist before, and for plastering the Star of David on Israel’s weapons and army uniforms. When it has been shoved down the world’s throat for decades that Israel is Jewish, that it represents all Jews, and that everything Jewish is necessarily zionist, how can we be surprised? 

It’s been said a million times but worth repeating: zionism is a major threat to Jewish life. 

Solidarity is not enough

Here in the big settler colony called the United States, there are fortunately many people organizing against the genocide in Gaza. There are also people seeking to exact a cost on the U.S.-Israeli war machine. For instance, the Palestine Action group is working to shut down Israeli weapons companies operating in the U.S.

But I worry about the lack of humility and lack of respect for the Palestinian resistance, among many other U.S. groups — especially those that claim to resist Israel as Jews. 

Many American Jews grant that armed resistance was necessary to end chattel slavery during the U.S. Civil War, for example, but apparently think that in the case of Israel, petitions, demonstrations, and vigils will do.

It is so easy to sit in homes and offices that are not under constant bombardment and military dictatorship and hand out grades to the Palestinian resistance. It is so easy to play into the activist playbook of the non-profit industrial complex and engage in performative campaigns that are designed to pacify and misdirect liberation struggles. 

Lots of Jewish groups seem to have been infected with the program of “nonviolence” crafted by American Cold Warrior intellectuals. Many American Jews grant that armed resistance was necessary to end chattel slavery during the U.S. Civil War, for example, but apparently think that in the case of Israel, petitions, demonstrations, and vigils will do. Since October 7, some Jewish groups engaging in civil disobedience have rushed to boast about the effectiveness of their own “nonviolent discipline” – declaring that they “know violence won’t work” – seemingly unaware that they are riding the coattails of the Palestinian resistance. Some Jewish groups that claim to be anti-zionist explicitly say that they “cannot promote anything that has to do with armed resistance.” 

Much of this discourse ultimately echoes the U.S. government’s posture of imperial neutrality, meaning a refusal to take positions on decolonization, instead saying that “Israelis” and Palestinians will just have to work it out together – as if the two are equally legitimate, and as if Israel’s existence is permanent. (These limitations are related, I think, to the fact that many Jews in the US continue to see themselves as “American,” another colonial identity.)

The underlying problem is that the framework of solidarity that many Jews have embraced is insufficient. There is a difference between showing solidarity and fighting for something you need to be free. 

Jews will not engage in a radical struggle to liberate Palestine if they see themselves as fighting someone else’s war. I hope we can move from “not in our name” and the weak reactive claim that “anti-zionism is not antisemitism” to we need to dismantle Israel for our own liberation, and zionism is anti-Jewish. We struggle with Palestinians, but this liberation struggle should be ours, too.