Discomfort is My Comfort Zone, But Anti-Zionism?

It was excruciatingly painful for me to confront and process the idea that Israel adopted and implemented a policy of genocide in Gaza. After processing and feeling compelled to acknowledge it, I had to discard my idealization of the image of a collective I wanted to belong to. Crisis mode. Then, I wrote about it.

Last week, a colleague shared her personal crisis immediately after October 7, 2023. As a Jewish Israeli who lost her brother in a war, she couldn’t believe the stories were true. It just couldn’t be that in one day 1200 Israelis were killed, burned, raped, mutilated, and hundreds were taken hostage, beaten and threatened by thousands of Hamas terrorists. It challenged her leftist belief in the good of human beings to understand that this had happened. But forced to come to terms with that, she is challenged to partner with self-defined peacebuilding Palestinians who deny that other Palestinians, Hamas militants, did these things.

That’s the setting. Connected to where I fit in. Coping with irresoluteness of complexity. Realizing my comfort zone is where discomfort thrives, where truth rejects absolutes. Three years ago, I wrote about being betrayed by Zionism. Reactions ranged from understanding what I wrote as a rhetorical question with me remaining a critical Zionist to reassuring me that Zionism had not really betrayed me. But it has.

Allow me to generalize: Older Kibbutz members who witnessed, or implemented, Israeli deportation of Arabs to Gaza in the early years of the state avoid confronting the core implications of this chapter in Zionist history. They can argue for the narrative of defense and other considerations in the historical context.

As part of their Zionist ideology, later, perhaps patronizingly, they advocated for equality and led educational programs to promote Jewish-Arab coexistence. They largely, stereotypically, opposed occupation, had amicable personal and working relationships with Gazans until Israel’s withdrawal upon the disengagement in 2006 when Jewish settlements were demolished for that purpose. The changed geopolitical circumstances had implications for relationships between Israeli Jews and Palestinians in the occupied territories. The state never addressed the implications for Jewish identity, much less for the identity of Palestinian citizens of the State of Israel. The latter never warranted the attention of the state educational system.

Suffice it to say, while generalizing, kibbutz educational programs, like most individuals, similarly avoided confronting conflicting values inherent in events along the timeline, complicity, accountability. A disturbing realization. Certainly not a concern of the education ministry to teach irresolute matters that won’t improve Israel’s ranking on international scholastic tests.

Connect the dots with Zionist ideology relinquishing ownership to religious Zionists. Zionism in a new context, rearranged. Reinterpreted by extremists justifying their lawless behaviors. Makes it easier now for me to reject Zionism. I love the Israel this state could be. I believe in the right of the Jewish people to the State of Israel. I have some qualms about the future of the idea of the nation-state, but that is the paradigm for the moment.

Like categorizing Israeli actions as genocide during this war, my journey defining my identity in relation to Zionism dodged a hardball recently. An Egyptian woman, I met 15 years ago in Europe professionally is my friend on Facebook. We share certain values, although I don’t know if today, she has room on the spectrum of complexities to include Israel having the right to exist. Regardless, she understands I object to occupation and believe in a two-state solution (because the world still operates by nation states). In an exchange of Facebook comments, she alluded to me, saying more voices of Jewish anti-Zionists need to be heard, adding something about media programming our minds. Me, an anti-Zionist? I was almost enraged. Shocked. Bordering on afraid.

Then I processed: Just because I can say I’m not a Zionist doesn’t necessarily qualify me as anti-Zionist, and without Zionism there would be no Israel, so even if I take exception Zionist behaviors that may have been inevitable in the struggle to establish the State of Israel, and even if I criticize Zionist reflection and processing, I do not categorically condemn Zionism. Yet, looking at the Zionism of Jewish settlers conducting pogroms on the West Bank – in the name of Zionism – I know, loathing their practices and convictions, they led me to becoming anti-Zionist. Still an Israeli committed to making a better society for Jews and Palestinians.

Harriet Gimpel, January 23, 2025