It’s December 2023 and this trip was almost 9 years ago.
Normally for a travel blog like this, I’d leave it alone as a time capsule, an untouched snapshot of my experience. But looking back, the posts do not acknowledge the politics that made that trip possible, or my thoughts on those politics. Given the state of politics in Israel today, I want to record what I knew then, and what I know now.
Today, Israel is over 60 days into a heinous war on Gaza, the occupied Palestinian territory. My social media feeds are filled with unending images of destruction, and it’s clear to me and many others that Israel is morally wrong in its actions. The actions have been labelled war crimes and genocidal, and I believe the descriptions are accurate. Israel needs to stop.
I want to make sure it’s clear that we separate, but recognize the overlap between, us the Jewish people and the state of Israel. Nominally Israel is a home for the Jewish people, but the state of Israel commits acts of violence against Palestinians that mirror too closely the history of violence against the Jewish people. The displacement of the Palestinian people is not an acceptable byproduct of trying to create a safer world for Jews.
The Land
The reason for my 2015 trip to Israel was land my mom inherited. Briefly, my mom’s grandfather purchased land in Israel, and the land rights fell to my mom (and her sister), who have since sold that land. With the right framing, it almost sounds like our own personal version of The Princess Diaries: some past relative leaves us as heir to something special in a far-off land.
However, as Ashkenazi Jews in the United States, our “right” to land in Israel is a little suspect. The modern state of Israel was founded in 1948, after a 1947 partition plan of British-occupied Palestine that divided the area into Israel and Palestine, and left Jerusalem as special international district. In the years since, the state of Israel has violently expanded into Palestine well beyond the 1947 UN lines with little admonishment from the rest of the international community.
As Jews in the United States, we’re raised to believe this expansion is just, and that Jews belong in Israel as it’s our ancestral homeland. We’re taught that this helps right the wrongs of the Holocaust. There is little attention paid to the Palestinians who have lived continuously there for generations.
Which brings me back to our land, the land my mom inherited. My great-grandfather purchased the land in 1918 or 1919 (during World War I), which predates the Holocaust, the founding of Israel and the UN division. In 2015, I knew that there was a UN line so I thought simply that if our land was on the Israel side of that (which it is, see map below), things were good and we were morally clear.
But looking back in 2023, I recognize that in 1918, all of that area was British Occupied Enemy Territory Administration, which was probably not controlled by local Palestinian citizens. So Grandpa Nathan’s purchase of the land was “legal” but I doubt any local Palestinian families would be happy about it. I want to learn more about who exactly lived near this part of the Sea of Galilee in 1918.
(I marked up a map courtesy of the Wikipedia page on the United Nations Partition Plan for Palestine)
Then and Now
To live is to learn. What I knew about Israel growing up, what I learned on the trip, and what I know now has changed over time.
Birthright
I think I had just missed the age cutoff for a Birthright trip to Israel in 2015. At the time a common sentiment among friends was “how can you say no to a free trip to Israel?” and at the time I knew that birthright was funded by pro-Zionist orgs and full of propaganda, but I didn’t dig too deeply into it. I didn’t know the full scope of the limitations on Palestinian people and the irony of American Jews getting a free trip to Israel while Palestinians did not have the right to return.
I kidded that this trip was my own birthright, in that I was in line to inherit land in Israel. Seeing more recent stories of Palestinians being displaced by Israeli settlement, I wouldn’t make those jokes today.
Zionism
In 2015, I knew Zionism was the movement of Jewish people to get back to the “homeland” of Israel, we were taught about that in Hebrew school. The Tel-Aviv airport is named after famed Zionist David Ben-Gurion. I knew that the revival of the Hebrew language was a part of the Zionist movement, and that the Zionist movement was a response to decades of pogroms and anti-semitic violence in Europe for years before the Holocaust. This violence (including the Holocaust) is what brought the Ashkenazi Jews, and specifically my ancestors, to the United States in the first place.
The “6 million killed” number stands out from Hebrew school about how we remember the violence of the Holocaust. I remember learning about a project, Wings of Witness, to collect 6 million soda can tabs to represent the lives lost. We say “never again” because we want to remember the lives lost to this and make sure it does not reoccur.
But back in 2015, I don’t think I fully internalized how much violence has been “paid forward” in the name of Zionism. I knew that since 1947, Israel had been in wars with various neighboring nations, but I didn’t realize that the Palestinians had the term Nabka for these patterns of violence, and that the same term could be applied today.
What I didn’t know then was how the revival of Hebrew was the “antithesis of Yiddish”. In college for a Linguistics class, I did a report on Yiddish. I don’t think I dug in that far to see how the Zionists moved away from it. I know that my grandparents spoke Yiddish, and so I wanted to try to study it as a way to get in touch with my roots. As soon as it became available in 2021, I’ve been taking Yiddish on Duolingo, and its been a fun daily habit. I am proud to able to connect with this culture in a way that branches away from Zionism, but I wish I’d understood this back then.
Pinkwashing
During the trip back in 2015, my 3rd cousin, a gay Israeli, introduced me to the term Pinkwashing, specifically to reference how the state of Israel markets themselves as a gay paradise in the middle of an anti-LGBT Arab bubble.
It’s relevant because of its hypocrisy: the right-wing Hasidic movement in Israel is still very anti-LGBT. As recently as 2015, an ultra-Orthodox Jew stabbed 6 people at a Pride parade. That same man had done nearly the same thing 10 years prior. LGTBQ+ freedom is a token gesture at best in Israel.
The term stuck with me. I remember watching the gay romance film Out in the Dark (2012) on Amazon Prime a little after my trip. The movie features a Palestinian student who “escapes” Palestine and falls in love with an Israeli lawyer. In the end, together they sail off into the sunset in love. I was wondering about the film so I searched online to learn more about it, and I came across a blog post that pointed out that the production of the movie was funded by the Israeli government, it’s propaganda. I think this is the blog post (it’s been a few years) and it does a more thorough job outlining how this movie fits into the bigger picture of a disseminating negative image, specifically of Palestinians, I strongly recommend giving it a read.
Pinkwashing is still absolutely a relevant term in 2023. I saw people posting about how the bad treatment of LGBTQ+ in Palestine justified the Israeli violence. I don’t know how else to say it, but no, it does not justify the violence at all.
“Border Scuffles”
In 2015 we skipped visiting the Golan Heights for what I described at the time as a “border scuffle”. I believe that was referencing an incident in January 2015 where rockets attributed to Hezbollah killed Israelis, and the Israelis retaliated against the Syrians. Using the critical media reading skills of today, I’m not sure how much of what was reported is attributed correctly. However, the pattern of immediately reciprocating violence was there, and it was so close to where we visited. What a privilege to just choose to skip that area and laugh about it.
One more thing that I didn’t realize then, is that the entire Golan Heights area is another region that Israel had occupied illegally, this time from Syria.
The BDS Movement
I am not sure if I was aware of the BDS (Boycott, Divest, Sanction) Movement back in 2015.
In the years since visiting, I learned more about, and am in support of this movement that aims to rectify treatment of Palestinians, by reflecting an approach that worked to end apartheid in South Africa.
Politics in the United States are such that BDS, a nonviolent protest, has been met with anti-BDS laws that I believe border on infringing on protected free speech in the US.
All this to say, in support of the BDS movement, I would not travel to Israel today.
Hanukkah
Tonight is the first night of Hanukkah. Growing up, I remembered the story of Hanukkah the “holiday of lights”, as the Maccabees retaking the Temple in Jerusalem, it was a simple story with clear heroes (the Maccabees!) and villains (the Greeks). It checks 3 out of 4 boxes of the Jewish Holiday They Tried to Kill Us/We’re Alive/Let’s eat!/Trees! matrix.
Since then, I’ve started following Rabbi Dunya Ruttenberg on Twitter (and on Bluesky). She does a great job at talking about Judaism in the context of modern issues. If I had to give her a trite summary, I’d call her the “woke Twitter Rabbi” (with an earnest usage of “woke”).
This year, she posted about a newsletter issue Hanukkah and hard truths, and I’d strongly recommend folks give it a read. Her post goes on into more detail than I’ve ever seen on the historical context surrounding the story of Hanukkah: yes the Maccabees fought to retake the Jewish Temple, but at what cost? They forced Judaism onto non-Jews in the area, replicating the harms that the Greeks who had conquered the Temple in the first place had brought. It really detracts from the narrative that the Maccabees are the unimpeachable heroes of the story. The post wraps up with what I think is a key message:
Maybe this year, the radical act of bravery and valor can include undoing some of the Maccabees’ binary thinking, remembering that we must know who we are—but that when we hold ourselves in too brittle a way, we splinter—and/or hurt others.
The Rabbi points out the violence today against the Palestinians is an extremely clear parallel to the violence the Maccabees in their time perpetuated against the non-believers. In both cases, we have a case of “hurt people hurt people”, and I want us, the Jewish people to be able to help break this cycle.
A Call to Action
Right now, I’m doing probably the bare minimum to make a difference. Through the handy-dandy 5 Calls site, I’ve called and left a voicemail for Nancy Pelosi, my congressional representative, in favor of HR 786 calling for a de-escalation and ceasefire in Gaza.
I’ve donated $1000 to Doctors Without Borders, who are providing aid in Gaza as much as they can. The org does great work, but at most, it’s a band-aid.
I hope that in posting this, others can reflect on how they feel about this situation and join the call to end this violence.