Israel Has Not Lost Its Way

The past 21 months have been transformative for Palestinians and Israelis, but also, notably, for many Americans.

Some have become entrenched in their polarized views of the Palestinian occupation and conflict. Others have had a rude awakening, discovering how immediate and urgent the question of Palestine has always been in relation to every aspect of civic and religious life in the U.S.

Many others have gradually shifted their thinking after reading information not typically presented in the U.S., as well as through personal interactions with Palestinians and anti-Zionist Jews. This is what Anti-Defamation League CEO Jonathan Greenblatt called Israel’s “TikTok problem.”

The younger, non-Jewish, and non-Palestinian American cohort has undergone the most profound transformation, given their access to nontraditional streams of information. They often get images and videos directly from the disproportionately young and highly educated population in Gaza.

Before the genocide, Gaza had one of the youngest and most educated populations globally. The literacy rate in Gaza was 98%, and the median age in 2020 was 18. These young, extremely literate Palestinians, isolated from the world by the Israeli occupation, viewed education as resistance.

Thus, when I read my friend Mitch Randall’s article on June 20, “Israel Lost Its Way,” it warmed my heart to see how that gradual and aching change has occurred in a mind that is open and receptive and in a heart that maintains a core of empathy. Mitch’s prayer and genuine desire are for peace among Abraham’s children. 

I have no substantive disagreement with anything he wrote. At the same time, it was also painful to see how we hold on to ideas we are still uncomfortable letting go of.

To say, for example, that Israel has “lost its way,” which is a reasonable assessment, may suggest that Israel was, at some point, on a righteous—or at least non-malevolent or non-settler-colonial—path.

As an immigrant, a freshly minted American, and a queer Muslim, I have noticed the mist of the almost mythical origin story of the modern state of Israel in some Western Christian discourse. The myth goes that Israel was forged in the pain and suffering of the Holocaust, as a city of rest and redemption on the hills of Zion for a persecuted people.

I do not know whether it evokes the imagery of Moses and the Israelites or that of persecuted European settlers on the shores of the New World, but that vision is not one shared by most of the rest of the world. From its very inception and design, Israel has been a settler-colonial enterprise. 

It has not lost its way. It is firmly on the path it was meant to be on. 

It is just more glaring now in an environment less tolerant of the vestiges of colonialism. Early Zionist leaders were refreshingly frank about it.

“Zionism is a colonizing adventure and therefore it stands or falls by the question of armed force. It is important to build, it is important to speak Hebrew, but, unfortunately, it is even more important to be able to shoot,” Ze’ev Jabotinsky wrote. The early leader of the Zionist movement died before seeing the Jewish state. However, his vision of settler colonialism requiring ethnic cleansing of the indigenous population remained clear, consistent and centered.

Ben Gurion, the first prime minister of Israel, wrote, “In many parts of the country, new settlements will not be possible without transferring the Palestinians… Jewish power, which grows steadily, will also increase our possibilities to carry out the transfer on a large scale.”

The ethnic cleansing of Palestinians was not accidental or forced upon the Zionist settlers. It was a well-planned and efficiently executed endeavor.

“It must be clear that there is no room in the country for both peoples… The only solution is a Land of Israel… without Arabs… Not one village must be left, not one tribe.” These were the words of Yosef Weitz, director of the Jewish National Fund Land Settlement Committee (JNF) (1932–1948).

This is the same organization that would distribute blue boxes across the U.S. to collect funds for planting trees in depopulated villages to prevent Palestinians from coming back. (These trees were, incidentally, non-native European pine trees that, in towering infernos of irony, recently burned in the Middle East heat.) It’s the same JNF that Kamala Harris fondly recalled raising money for as a child in the San Francisco Bay Area.

The knowledge that the very existence of Israel required a catastrophe—a “Nakba”—one that resonates even today in every key to a home still hanging around the neck of those expelled from their lands, did not make it across the seas to the U.S.

In Israel, though, the self-awareness of ethnic cleansing as the foundation of the state was embraced at every level of government.

After the events of 1967, Moshe Dayan, chief of staff of the Israeli military and minister of defense, said: “What cause have we to complain about the Palestinians’ fierce hatred to us. For eight years now, they sit in their refugee camps in Gaza, and before their eyes we turn into our homestead the land and villages in which they and their forefathers have lived. We are a generation of settlers, and without the steel helmet and gun barrel, we shall not be able to plant a tree or build a house.”

There has not been an Israeli leader who has not accepted, embraced or celebrated the nature of this settler-colonial experiment.

Ariel Sharon, prime minister of Israel from 2001 to 2006, said: “It is the duty of Israeli leaders to explain to public opinion, clearly and courageously, a certain number of facts that are forgotten with time. The first of these is that there is no Zionism, colonization or Jewish state without the eviction of the Arabs and the expropriation of their lands.”

Of course, it would be ideal if there were a great national awakening in Israeli society where it rejected codified apartheid and suddenly decided to give equality to all Palestinians under Israeli control. But a recent survey conducted by Penn State University and published by “Haaretz” found 82% of Israeli Jews support the “forced expulsion” of Palestinians from the Gaza Strip.

Meanwhile, almost half (47%) of Israeli Jews answered “yes” to the question of whether the Israeli army should act in a manner similar to the biblical Israelites in conquering Jericho. In that story, all of Jericho’s inhabitants were killed.

This support for the expulsion of Palestinians does not stop at the borders of Gaza. According to the poll, 56% of Israeli Jews support the expulsion of Palestinian citizens of Israel itself.

Israel has not lost its way. It is firmly on the path it carved out for itself.

In its current form, it will continue on this path until it has achieved what Jewish American writer Peter Beinart called the “American and Australian solution.” This will include devastatingly reducing the numbers of the indigenous population through murder, forced displacement, disease and starvation.

Palestinians may still be around, put away in reservations or concentration camps. But they will no longer pose a threat to the very idea of the colonial state.

I see echoes of what Israel is doing in the history of my own adopted country, the United States. When America is being made “great again” or even when my progressive friends pine for a more “civilized” America, I often want to ask, “Who was it great and civilized for?” Certainly not for the Native population, the young Black man, the trans woman or the non-fluent immigrant.

Whose perspective are we keeping centered when we say Israel needs to regain its moral compass? Because for millions of occupied souls, it never had one.

Israel has not lost its way. We are just seeing its chosen path more clearly.