On Pro-Palestine Jews

or, sorry if this random intra-jewish discussion is not why you signed up for this newsletter

In certain segments of the Jewish institutional world, each pro-Palestine Jew is considered a failure of Jewish education. If that were true, it would mean that Jewish education is churning out failures right and left, because there are quite a lot of us. Luckily for Jewish educational institutions, I don’t think that’s the case. I am not pro-Palestine in spite of  my Jewish education. I am pro-Palestine because of it. I believe that pro-Palestine Jews, more often than not, are people for whom the lessons actually stuck.

How can I say this, when these institutions had me singing Israel’s national anthem, when they worked to instill in me feelings of warmth toward the IDF, when they taught me that Israel was a land without a people for a people without a land, and that the early Zionists made the desert bloom? When they taught me that the diaspora where I lived, and where generations of my ancestors had lived, was of less meaning to me than a country in the Middle East where I’d never set foot? When they told me that safety in that diaspora, the only place I’d ever lived, was too much to ask—but that security in a hypermilitarized, constantly-attacked country, at the expense of millions of Palestinian lives, was somehow the realistic solution? How can I claim that they succeeded in teaching me, when I have so many disagreements with the teachings?

I make this claim because those lessons in Zionist parochialism were exceptions—actually, not exceptions, but total contradictions—to the other nine-tenths of what I was taught as a Jewish child. This experience of contradiction is one that many, many other Jews have articulated to me as well. And for us, being pro-Palestine simply means choosing the 90% of what we learned over that incompatible 10%.

After all, my Jewish education was obsessed with critical thinking. Intellectual debate was not tolerated or encouraged: it was the norm, and to shy from debate was to show disrespect for your teachers and peers. My Jewish education taught me that internal disagreement is a thing of value, that you should push back at the teacher and question the rabbi, satirize and poke fun, never take something so seriously that you can’t tell a joke or ask a question. 

I was taught to read the absolute shit out of a text, and to rigorously defend my interpretation. I was told: you ask two Jews, you get three opinions. I was taught that it is a mitzvah to stay up all night long at the Passover seder, debating the story of the liberation from Egypt. I was taught that it’s patently absurd—like asking for the diameter of a dream—to say that “Jews believe X,” or to ask “what do Jews believe about this thing?”¹

I was taught about the Holocaust, about centuries of pogroms and expulsions and killings. I was taught that ethnonationalism is not merely dangerous but also, frankly, goyish. 

I was taught that antisemitism is cyclical: society cannot effectively scapegoat Jews or spread myths of Jewish power unless Jews have genuinely been afforded some temporary measure of assimilation and success. And thus, I was taught, we Jews should be very fucking wary about striking a deal with the devil, trying to to align ourselves with power— out of crass self-preservation, as much as anything else— because power will throw you under the bus. That’s why you’re there in the first place.

All of these lessons struck me as basically applicable and in line with the broader liberal secular world I lived in. Critical thinking, good. Sense of humor, good. Solidarity, good. Staying alive, good. But there’s another lesson that seemed archaic, totally irrelevant to me as a twenty-first century American Jew. This was the prohibition against idol worship. What did that have to do with me? Only later did I understand the centrality of this idea. A repulsion towards idol-worship was in fact at the very core of everything else I was being taught, because critical thought is anathema to the worshiping of idols. And blind support for anything, including a nation-state, is a kind of idol-worship.

There’s a famous story from the talmud that I’ve thought about regularly ever since I first heard about it. In it, a bunch of rabbis are debating whether a particular type of oven is Kosher. They conclude that the oven isn’t kosher, except for one guy, Rabbi Eliezer, who is totally sure that it is (I am shamelessly poaching this from Wikipedia, fyi). Rabbi Eliezer is so sure that he hops up and goes, in so many words, “If I’m right, this carob tree will prove it.” Lo and behold, the carob tree hops up out of the ground and moves to another spot. The other rabbis are unimpressed. They point out that the carob tree has nothing to do with the question of the oven. Rabbi Eliezer, undeterred, now declares, “If I’m right, the stream will prove it.” The stream immediately starts flowing backwards. The other rabbis do not care. You can practically see them rolling their eyes, sipping the ancient Middle Eastern equivalent of an iced coffee. Finally, Rabbi Eliezer says, “If I’m right, the walls will prove it.” The very walls around them begin to collapse. At this point one of the other rabbis actually scolds the walls for interrupting their debate. Finally, poor Rabbi Eliezer calls out, “If I’m right, Heaven will prove it." And duly the voice of God himself descends from the heavens (cue trumpets, blaze of light, etc) and declares that Rabbi Eliezer is right: the oven is indeed kosher. To which one of the other rabbis retorts “לֹ֥א בַשָּׁמַ֖יִם הִ֑וא”— “the Torah is not in heaven.” In other words: this is none of your business, actually. In other words: who do you think you are, coming down to earth after the debate is over, telling us what to believe?

This tale distills the Jewish culture I was raised in. It exemplifies the aversion to idol worship, the prickly, practically perverse irreverence. It exemplifies what was drilled into me above all else in Jewish educational spaces— namely, that you should never let anybody tell you what to think. A common rallying cry among progressive Jews is “Not in my name.” This means, in the context of Palestine, I do not give you, the Israeli government, permission to commit atrocities and pretend it’s for my benefit. But, regardless of context, not in my name is one of the most Jewish turns of phrase I can imagine. It’s extremely Jewish to be infuriated by the idea of somebody daring to tell you what’s best for you. Fuck you, asshole! Who do you think you are—God? And actually, who the fuck is God to tell me what’s best for me—I don’t even know that guy! 

Jewish people made me pro-Palestine. This happened in my home community, which was not, compared to some, all that Zionist. But also, even from within deeply Zionist organizations and structures, certain individuals pushed against the institution. The instance I remember most vividly happened on a summer trip to Israel for teenagers. It was an alarmingly dogmatic setting. One evening a counselor, probably in her early twenties, took a group of us aside. She threw away the Hebrew lesson she was supposed to be giving and explained with quiet fury that we’d been tricked— that the official curriculum, with its rosy depiction of Bedouin village life, was a lie. She talked to us about displacement, unrecognized villages, medical discrimination. It was a small thing, really, just one facet of a much bigger problem. Yet I remember her speaking softly, leaning close in the August dusk, looking over her shoulder as if she thought she might get in trouble with the higher-ups. That counselor knocked another crack in the wall. The information she smuggled to us was depressing, and yet, to be honest, my primary feeling was one of enormous relief. For so long, I’d been told to maintain an impossible cognitive dissonance—to question, all the time, except when it came to Israel. But cognitive dissonance is hard to maintain. Once you have been trained to think critically, it takes real mental exertion to turn that impulse off. For a second, that cognitive dissonance dissipated, and I felt sane, and I felt human, and I felt very, very Jewish.

1. My childhood best friend, a deeply intellectually curious person, once asked my family’s rabbi whether or not Jews believe in the devil. In the years since I’ve often thought about this exchange, because what followed was a kind of stalemate of intercultural communication. The rabbi was simply unable to satisfyingly answer her question. My friend was unable to understand why he couldn’t answer it. The premise didn’t make any sense.