How I am surviving the genocide against my people
Smoke rises following an Israeli air strike in the central Gaza Strip. 16 March 2024. Source
It was the evening of Oct. 10, 2023. My family and I were sitting in our home in the Al-Tawam neighborhood of north Gaza. That night, we were trying to find peace of mind, worried about what the future had in store for us.
All of a sudden, bombs started raining from the sky. The windows of our home all shattered as glass, rocks, and concrete went flying everywhere. We lost electricity as smoke and debris filled our home, reducing visibility to zero. We ran to the basement, fearing the next bomb was for us.
That’s when I realized our lives would never be the same again. As we sat in the basement, we looked at each other in silence. My whole family was trembling in fear. Little did we know, a genocide was awaiting us.
If only I had known to plan for a genocide, I would have cherished those last moments at home, my last night in a bed, my last morning coffee, my last kibbe dipped in hummus, my last day at work, my last laugh, my last birthday celebration, my last everything. If only I had known, I would have packed up a few of those memories with me.
But I didn’t have a chance to do that, because we decided to evacuate immediately. That’s one of the horrible things we have to do all the time: Try to guess the least worst option among terrible options.
But we decided to evacuate. My family of 10 squeezed into our car, kids on top of adults. Within a few seconds, there was another massive explosion in front of us.
The next thing I can remember, blood was everywhere in the car. I grabbed my 9 year old brother, Adam, who is handicapped, and I held him tightly.
I still remember the sound of my mom’s voice at that moment. “Adam is dead Heba, I can’t feel him!” she said. I looked at Adam, and told her that he was okay, that he was just in shock. We were all shocked. Somehow, we survived.
I held Adam as we got out of the car and started running back home. My dad was in front of me, the rest of my family was behind me. Who was I supposed to look after?
Adam was too scared to be left alone even for a few seconds, and so I couldn’t leave him. I could feel my hands going numb from holding him so tight. “Dad,” I said. “Help me, I can’t hold Adam anymore.”
My Dad shouted: “My finger is cut Heba, I can’t.” I realized my dad’s hand sliced open and blood was gushing everywhere.
Debris littered the streets, almost looking like an earthquake. But it was not an earthquake. It was a bomb sent to kill us. Maybe it was a dumb bomb, an imprecise bomb, that can land 100 feet away from its target. Half the bombs Israel sends to kill us are dumb bombs.
Israel exports sophisticated military technology to the world, but when it comes to us Palestinians in Gaza, the latest technology is not needed, since Israel’s “focus is on (creating) damage, not on precision.” That’s what an Israeli army spokesperson said on Oct. 10th, 2023, the same day Israel bombed our home.
We rushed to our neighbors house hoping and praying they were home. Their son is a nurse and treated my dad while we waited for an ambulance. Hours passed with no ambulance. We later found out that two of the ambulances that tried to reach us were bombed. Eventually, an ambulance arrived, al-hamdullilah.
We sheltered at al-Shifa hospital while my family was being treated. My 1-year old niece, Sarah, needed stitches in her head and hand. She was in so much shock she couldn’t even cry. My brother Mohammed had a splint in his head, and needed surgery, which we were eventually able to get for him 76 days later. My dad’s hand was so badly wounded the doctors thought they might have to amputate it. But thank god, we cared for it, and cleaned it every day, and he still has his hand.
We took refuge in al-Shifa hospital for a month. We barely had anywhere to sleep and we did not have access to clean water. Every day, hundreds of people would arrive at the hospital, some severely injured, some already dead. The agony of the families of the victims was too much too bare. The only thing I can remember now from al-Shifa was the never ending screams of pain that filled the hallways of the hospital.
Then, we were forced to move to the south, to Khan Younis. We made the dangerous journey on foot. For the first time, I felt what my grandparents must have felt during the Nakba in 1948. I understood why they kept the keys to their homes. Those keys were filled with memories.
We stayed in Khan Younes for 24 days, where we had almost nothing. We had no gas for cooking, no electricity, no means of transportation and no safe place to shelter in. We were among the lucky ones just to be able to take a shower. Then, we were ordered by the Israeli military to leave. We moved again, this time to Rafah.
As I walk through the streets of Rafah today, all I see is fear. The fear of life and the fear of death. We are living in fear every moment of the day. We now also fear that we will never have our lives back.
In this war, who am I? To the world, it seems I am just a number. A person who is counted on a list of people displaced, people injured or people hungry and thirsty. And if the next bomb is for me, I will be another number to add to the number of people killed in the genocide, and then I will be forgotten.
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Jewish anti-Zionism: From the mainstream to fringe, 1950s-2000s
The annihilation of Europe’s Jews led American Jews to flip on the idea of a Jewish State in Palestine, while the mass migration of Jews from Arab and Muslim majority countries into Israel after 1948 led them to flip as well. In the span of a decade, world Jewry shed their non- and anti-Zionist roots and embraced Zionism.
Although Zionism blossomed in the decades after Israel’s establishment, a minority of Jews learned not a chauvinist, but a universalist lesson from the Holocaust. They said “never again” meant never again for anyone. They believed that the genocide of the Jews of Europe was not ahistorical or inimical, but rather than genocides happen all the time, and stem from ideologies that demonize or dehumanize a people, mark them as an inherent danger to the nation and a threat to its ethnic, religious or racial purity.
This view existed in 1942 at the peak of the annihilation of European Jewry, when Reform Jews in the United States including Morris Lazaron founded the anti-Zionist organization, the American Council for Judaism. They called for the transformation of Palestine into neither Arab nor Jewish state, but a democratic state wherein Jews and Arabs would be equal citizens. They believed a free and democratic society would provide the best guarantee for the well-being of Jews wherever they lived. Incidentally, this is the most popular belief among Jews in every country in the world today — save for Israel.
Prominent British Jews also founded the Jewish Fellowship in Britain in 1942 to “revive the Jewish religious spirit among Jews and to place the Torah, the Synagogue and the ethics of Judaism at the heart of Jewish life,” spurning Zionism altogether. Many British Jews also continued to support the non-Zionist Anglo-Jewish Association into the 1950s.
No doubt, anti-Zionism persisted at the margins after 1948. In Israel, the Young Hebrew or “Canaanite” movement sprung up in the 1950s calling for “full political, civil, and social rights and obligations to all citizens of the state, regardless of religion, faith-community, or origin.” Matzpen, a socialist anti-Zionist party founded in 1962 in Israel attracting 100 followers, also advocated for “De-Zionization of Israel and its integration into a socialist Middle Eastern union.”
Although they were a rare breed, it was possible to find anti-Zionist Israeli Jews. In 1975, the Jewish Israeli anti-Zionist Vitold Yadlitzky, a former Nazi prisoner of Polish descent, said antisemites believed “‘the Jew understands only the language of money,’ or ‘the Jew understands only the language of force,’ or ‘the Jew is the fellow you cannot trust.’ All these things I hear again and again in this country [Israel], with the exception that this is not in Polish, but in Hebrew and instead of the word "Jew," the word "Arab" appears.”
Dr. Israel Shahak, also a Holocaust survivor, also believed that racism was wrong whether or not it benefited Jews. In 1975, he said:
You can define Israeli society as a society in which there are no Israelis, but only Jews and non-Jews. You have separate tables for dying Jewish infants and dying non-Jewish infants and so on. This is Nazification of Jewish society and this can well bring the same calamity it brought in Europe, only a calamity to Arabs. If one can learn anything from the Nazi experience, it is that one should be against Nazism. And I am against Nazism, whether German, Jewish or Arab.
It’s often forgotten that multiple US Jewish institutions kept Israel at arm’s length until 1967. In 1949, the Reconstructionist movement objected to Israel’s blue and white flag with a Star of David because that would clearly discriminate against Palestinian Arab. “The Israeli flag is to represent the common national aspiration of all the citizens of Israel,” the movement stated. The American Jewish Committee, which represented many mainstream, elite and secular US Jews, was non-Zionist for assimilationist reasons until 1967.
A number of US Jewish intellectuals also spoke out against Zionism. Alfred M. Lilienthal attacked Israel shortly after its establishment, arguing that “a Palestine which guarded ‘the rights and interests of Moslems, Jews and Christians alike,” to quote the Committee [the 1946 Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry on Palestine], was never acceptable to Zionists.” He also warned against charges of dual loyalty that American Jews might receive as a result of Zionism. The writer Moshe Menuhin, the journalists William Zukerman, Henry Hurwitz, and Morris Schappes, the scholar Noam Chomsky, Rabbi Elmer Berger and the businessman Lessing Rosenwald also called for equal rights for all in Israel/Palestine, citing Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians as their main objection to Zionism. Many of Israel’s Jewish critics in the US in the 1960s and 1970s were inspired by the liberationist, civil rights and anti-war movements of the time, seeing the Palestinian struggle in a similar light.
By the mid-late 1970s, the seeds of a new generation of Jewish anti-Zionists were planted in Australia, the US and the UK. Small anti-Zionist groups emerged, such as the Australian Jews Against Zionism and Anti-Semitism (JAZA), formed by a small group of Jewish Marxists in 1979 who saw Zionism as an attempt to turn Jews into a race or a nation, similar to what Nazism tried to do to the Germans; or the British Anti-Zionist Organization (BAZO), formed by George Mitchell in 1975, or the Jewish Alliance Against Zionism (JAAZ), formed by anti-Zionist Jewish activists in the San Francisco Bay Area from the late 1970s to the early 1980s.
The State of Israel squashed some of these movements, silencing Zionism’s critics at home and abroad through smear campaigns, censorship and police brutality (1, 2). Zionists now had a state, a diplomatic core and an army, which they used to crush anti-Zionist Jews wherever they sprung up.
Meanwhile, Jewish institutions outside of Israel abandoned Judaism in favor of Israelism, a philosophy that singles out Israel’s Jewish character as sacred above all other Jewish laws, principles and practices. By the 1970s, American Jewish organizations such as the Anti-Defamation League and the American Jewish Committee redefined their missions from a struggle to fight antisemitism to defending the State of Israel. Israel became more sacred than God, the Torah, the Talmud or Jewish principles like monotheism, ‘saving a life’ or ‘fixing the world.’ Israel replaced Judaism as the essential, defining or unifying principle of the community.
Today, the Board of Deputies of British Jews would not dream of ejecting a member of their Board for professing atheism, for example, but they did just eject two members for signing an open letter criticizing Israel's conduct in Gaza. Imagine if they ejected a member for having professed their atheism? If that were to happen, they might have to eject their own President, Philip Rosenberg, who has confessed his atheism to me personally on countless occasions.
Of course, there were Jews who took the foundational texts of the religion more seriously than The Board of Deputies of British Jews. The majority of ultra-Orthodox Jews in Israel continued to veer more towards non-Zionism than Zionism long after 1948, while the overwhelming majority of ultra-Orthodox Jews more generally reject the authority of Israeli state institutions to this day, according to a 2020 poll.
The Satmar Hasidim, the K'hal Adath Jeshurun (Breuer Community), the Neturei Karta and others continued to oppose Zionism on religious grounds. The founder of the Satmar sect, Joel Teitelbaum, was adamant that the first oath of the Three Oaths in Jewish theology, that Jews were sworn not to "ascend as a wall" to reclaim Land of Israel, was an explicit refutation of Zionism. This oath calls for divine, not human, prerogative, to trigger the return to the Land of Israel. Rabbi Amram Blau, the Neturei Karta founder, was also a virulent anti-Zionist activist who refused to recognize Israel, pay taxes or even handle Israeli currency. This made and still makes Zionism a grave sin for at least 120,000 religious Jews today.
The Revival of Jewish Anti-Zionism
Secular Jewish Anti-Zionism Re-born
While Jewish institutions in the UK, the US and elsewhere embraced Israelism, Jewish individuals began to drift away from it. If the Nazi annihilation of the Jews strengthened support for Zionism, Israel’s deteriorating treatment of the Palestinians weakened it.
And, to make a long story short, Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians has been deteriorating for decades, especially since the 1980s. Uri Davis, for example, identified Israel's policies towards Palestinians, including Palestinian citizens of Israel, as comparable to South Africa's apartheid policies in the 1980s; Gayle Markow was triggered by Israel’s 1978 invasion of Lebanon to start the anti-Zionist group, JAAZ; Ilan Pappe attributes the invasion of Lebanon to his awakening; Norman Finklestein references the First Intifada in his development. As the anti-Zionist scholar Daniel Boyarin put it, “when I heard Yitzhaq Rabin say that the breaking of the arms and legs of children throwing stones was necessary to preserve the state, I repented of my erstwhile Zionism completely.”
In other words, Israel’s belligerent military occupation of Gaza and the West Bank, its invasion of Lebanon in 1978 and 1982, the massacres it facilitated in Sabra and Shatila, and its violent crackdown during the First Intifada (1987-1993) gave rise to a new generation of Jews hostile to Zionism.
The 1980s and 1990s also saw the rise of “post-Zionism.” People like Tom Segev, Gershon Shafir, Baruch Kimmerling and Hillel Cohen made foundational criticisms of Zionism even though they embraced the label Zionist. [Incidentally, at least one of them, Segev, recently said Zionism was probably “a mistake.”]
Then came the Oslo Process. To many Jews, it appeared to promise a resolution to the Israel-Palestine question. These hopes dimmed in the late 1990s as the right-wing leader Benjamin Netanyahu rose to power. These hopes were shattered in 2000 with the failure of Camp David and the outbreak of the Second Intifada, during which time 1,038 Israelis were killed and 3,189 Palestinians were killed from 2000-2005.
The Great Divergence
Reality continued to drive perception, at least among US Jews. Israel’s image floundered as the occupation continued to rear its ugly head. Israel tightened the noose around Gaza in 2005, 2006, and 2007, imposing a cruel and murderous blockade on 1.8 million Palestinians. After the 2008-9 War in which Israel’s primary goal was to "punish, humiliate and terrorize a civilian population" in Gaza, as the UN fact-finding mission known as the Goldstone Report concluded, the plan for the Palestinians of Gaza became increasingly clear: lock them up, put them on a diet, throw away the key and punish them every few years in campaigns of terror and mass murder, or “mowing the lawn,” as Israeli officials say, likening Palestinians to overgrown weeds.
But most US Jews identify as liberal or progressive, values inconsistent with medieval blockades, collective punishment, the wholesale slaughter of hundreds of innocent people with the goal of terrorizing millions more, the genocidal rhetoric coming from Israeli political and religious leaders or the growing consensus by the early 2020s that Israel was an apartheid state. The result was that US Jews began to abandon Zionism in larger numbers. The Jewish establishment asked Jews to check their liberalism at Zionism’s door, as Peter Beinart said in 2010, “and now, to their horror, they are finding that many young Jews have checked their Zionism instead.”
While US Jews turned away from Zionism, Israeli Jews doubled down on it. By the mid-late 2000s and 2010s, Israeli Jewish society became more and more chauvinist: 68% of Israeli Jews refused to live in the same building as an Arab; 46% of Jews would refuse to allow an Arab to visit their home; 50% of Israeli teens don’t want Arabs in their class; 63% of Israeli Jews said Arabs are security and demographic threat to the state; 50% of Israeli Jews believed Israel should encourage its Arab citizens to emigrate.
Chauvinistic Zionism flourished among Jews nearly everywhere from the River to the Sea. Israeli Jews continued to colonize the West Bank, moving on to destinations inside Israel as well, seeking to replace Arabs with Jews in the Negev, the Galilee, Jerusalem, Jaffa, Acre and Lydd. They continued to march through the streets of Jerusalem every year on apartheid day — aka Jerusalem Day — chanting death to the Arabs. The Zionist right dominated Israeli politics while the Zionist left disintegrated. Most Israeli leaders from the 2010s onwards advocated for a Greater Israel, or Jewish domination from the River to the Sea.
Anti-Zionist Israeli Jews became a rare breed. Many left Israel, like Atalia Omer, Ilan Pappe and others. The founder of Zochrot, which calls for the recognition of the Nakba and the Palestinian refugees' right of return by Israeli Jewish society, found refuge in Europe. Those who stayed and spoke out faced dire consequences and were shunned by the state, military, media and professional classes. Those who took action, like Jonathan Pollak, Jeff Halper, Ofer Cassif or Andrey X, faced suspension, intimidation, physical violence or imprisonment. Nevermind calling into question the core tenets of Zionism, since October 7, 2023, those who so much as shared innocuous social media posts in solidarity with Gaza’s limbless children have been dismissed from their jobs, detained and imprisoned.
The Rise of Anti-Zionism in the United States
Israel may have silenced most of its critics at home, but it failed to squash its critics abroad, particularly in the United States, where Zionism has been in decline over the past two decades.
Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP) represents the largest block of anti-Zionist Jews today. They did not take a stand on Zionism when founded in 1996, but officially declared their rejection of Zionism in 2015. By that time, JVP activists had ignited a public debate over Israel, that, as measured by its intensity and visibility, “is a conflict unlike any other the American Jewish community has ever had,” as one prominent historian put it in 2016.
JVP has been the fastest growing Jewish organization for over a decade, claiming some 500 dues-paying members in 2011, 9,000 in 2015 and more than 32,000 by August 2024. From October 2023 to February 2024, JVP increased its email subscriber count from 43,000 to 343,000 and seems to be the largest anti-Zionist political organization in the US, as measured by the number of full-time staff. American Jewish anti-Zionism is experiencing hockey-stick like growth. Jewish anti-Zionism is going mainstream.
The polling data tells a similar story. In 2021, a poll found that 25% of US Jews believe Israel is an apartheid state, a figure that rose to 38% among Jews under 40. This was the first in a series of polls that came out in the 2020s highlighting Zionism’s fragility among US Jews, especially among millennials and Gen Z.
Then, in 2022, the political scientist Mira Sucharov conducted a survey of American Jewish views on Zionism, indicating that 58% of American Jews identify as Zionist, while 22% identified as either anti-Zionist (10%) or non-Zionist (12%), and another 12% said “it’s complicated,” with 7% answering “unsure.” Said differently, well before October 7, 2023, 42% of American Jews chose not to identify as “Zionist.”
But Sucharov revealed a deeper discomfort with Zionism. She presented respondents with a definition of Zionism, and then asked if they supported it. Expectedly, when presented with innocuous or aspirational definitions of Zionism, support for Zionism rose. But when presented with the lived experience of Zionism for its victims, Jews were repulsed by the ideology. When respondents were told that Zionism “means the belief in privileging Jewish rights over non-Jewish rights in Israel,” Sucharov reported “respondents’ support for "Zionism" plummeted: only 10 percent of respondents said they were “definitely” (3 percent) or “probably” (7 percent) Zionist. A full 69 percent said they were “probably not” or “definitely not” a Zionist according to this definition.”
Alarmed by the polling data, the Israel Lobby is now trying to manufacture and obfuscate polling data to mask Zionism’s collapse. The Jewish Majority, founded in 2024 by the longtime AIPAC staffer Jonathan Schulman, just released a poll, selling the media not the results of the poll but a distortion of it. In their summary of the data, the Jewish Majority points out that “70% of American Jews believe anti-Zionism is antisemitic by definition,” yet fail to mention another data point of the survey, that “50% of respondents said anti-Zionist movements are not antisemitic by definition.” They intentionally obscured their own results to inflate support for Zionism.
The numbers don’t tell the full story, though. Jewish non- or anti-Zionism conferences have popped up at Brown University and in Vienna, Austria. Non- or anti-Zionist minyans have sprung up in New York and New Jersey (1, 2). At least two new anti-Zionist Jews groups formed in Mexico City as a result of the genocide, AMJI and JPL. In the US, Making Mensches facilitates radical Jewish educational experiences and connects and supports anti-Zionist Jewish communal development. Jewish actors and playwrights are now putting on anti-Zionist plays. The Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism hosted its first workshop in October 2023. anti-Zionist Jews in the US have also launched Undoing Zionism, an 8-session series focused on Jewish politics beyond Zionism that centers the safety, liberation, and wellness for Palestinians and Jews alike.
We are also witnessing a Cambrian explosion of Jewish anti-Zionist content creation. More and more Jewish anti-Zionists are speaking out about their anti-Zionism on podcasts, TikTok, Instagram, Youtube, Substack and elsewhere, including Katie Halper, Max Blumenthal, Katherine Wela Bogen, Raven Schwam-Curtis, Hadar Cohen, Alon Mizrahi, Jasper Diamond Nathaniel, Daniel Maté, Aaron Maté, Mira Sern, Simone Zimmerman, Jacob Berger, Jessie Sander, Elana Lipkin, Nora Barrows-Friedman, David Sheen, Rabbi Andrue Kahn, Rafael Shimunov, Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg, Michael Schirtzer, Miko Peled, Matt Lieb, Jen Perelman, Lily Greenberg Call, Peter Beinart, Alice Rothchild, Marjorie N. Feld, Alissa Wise, Benjamin Moser, Rebecca Alpert, Max Weiss, Maura Finklestein, Eli Valley, Tony Greenstein, Antony Loewenstein, Sim Kern, Michael Schirtzer, Yaakov Shapiro, Brant Rosen, Anna Baltzer, Norman Solomon, Liz Rose Shulman, Jamie Stern-Weiner, Medea Benjamin, Naomi Klein, Jesse James Rose, Brace Belden, Hilton Obenzinger, Ofer Neiman, Rotem Levin, Noam Shuster-Eliassi, Alon Nissan-Cohen, Avi Shlaim, Molly Crabapple, Shir Hever, Elik Harpaz, Yahav Erez, Becca Strober, as well the handles kvetcher, noneisntoff, jewpinolove, tumblemaiadryer, realitywithali, clios_world, judeshimer, imthebalaban and mikaelaswildlife, to name just a few. All of this content will inspire a new generation of Jews who believe all people should be treated equally, in every country, including Israel. It’s likely a matter of years, not decades, when a majority of US Jews will once again become hostile to Zionism.
And that’s because Israel’s genocide of the Palestinians of Gaza has ripped the mask off the underlying logic of Zionism. As Patrick Wolfe famously put it in his classic essay on the topic, settler-colonial movements, “without exception,” lead to a logic of the “elimination of the native.” And in the case of Palestine, the logic of the elimination of the native does not need to be theorized by an academic, it has been available on live-stream every day for the past 583 days, and counting.
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