Where Do We Begin?

Abstract

As someone who works to organize Jews into the movement for Palestinian rights, this is the question I hear most often from those just encountering the injustice Palestinians face and have faced because of Israeli policies. I think most people mean something along the lines of “What concrete action can I take to help?” But I think it’s also a deeper and truly vital question.Where do we begin?As we try to answer the question of what we can do now to end the unjust status quo, it matters where in history we start to tell the story. Just as this is not an intractable religious conflict dating back centuries, neither did it begin 50 years ago. So let’s try looking for a beginning.What if we looked at the Occupation, by which we usually mean the military rule established over the territories Israel seized during the 1967 war, not as the starting place, but as a particular violence that grows out of a deeper racist logic behind the founding of the State of Israel itself in 1948? What if we face the idea that the Occupation is a direct outcome of the Zionist vision of the state, not an unfortunate mistake that can be remedied to save it? We start, then, not with the map, but with the cartographer.There are few topics so fraught among Jews than looking not just at Israel, or even the Occupation, but at the ideology and violence behind the founding of the state: at the 750,000 Palestinians displaced and dispossessed, at the 400 villages depopulated and destroyed, at the brutality toward Mizrahi and Sephardi Jews and cultures, at the upheaval and trauma and devastation that Palestinians call the Nakba, or catastrophe.If we are really seeking justice, as Jews, as humans, we must begin to face that catastrophe as our own. Slavery is not only African American history, it is American history. The catastrophe of the Nakba—from 1948 to today—is not only Palestinian history, it is for and on all of us. To really face the trauma concomitant with the founding of the state, and the violence that has unfolded in furtherance of Zionist goals ever since, we have to understand it as the story, one that is still occurring. The Nakba is history and it’s present for each of us. It’s all of ours.Of course we work to end the Occupation, as swiftly as we are able, but we can’t uproot the policies of Occupation if we don’t understand them as a manifestation of a broader dehumanizing logic that predicates Jewish (most particularly white Ashkenazi Jewish) safety on the domination over, and disappearing of, another people. From the beginning, the Zionist movement ignored or sought to displace the indigenous population of Palestine, and the state it established is predicated on that erasure. We can’t simply redraw the map if we don’t understand what and whom it is drawn over.If we start from the beginning, we unfold a whole new kind of map. One that charts the course toward real justice, lasting peace. When we confront the Nakba as part of our own history, we reconnect to our shared humanity. We move past our communal mythologies and falsely divided histories, and can begin to truly see where justice and healing must enter. By taking on the truth of Zionism, we reconnect to possibility in our organizing. We allow ourselves the chance to participate in fighting for true liberation, for all people.