Wrestling with Zion by Tony Kushner and Alisa Solomon

Rating: 4/5, good

I found this book in 2015 at the Grove Press booth at the Bay Area Book Festival. It appealed to me because I had seen a lot of pro-Palestinian articles online around the time of Operation Defensive Shield in 2014. My Hebrew school education on the conflict was about as balanced as I think my young teacher could make it without parents getting upset. I never had that rah-rah pro-Israel Hebrew school education that a lot of older generations grew up with. We covered modern Israel in seventh-grade Hebrew school, about the age we were having our Bar and Bat Mitzvahs. This was in 2003, during the Second Intifada, also the year Wrestling with Zion was published.

We learned about Zionist figures like Theodor Herzl and the early debates about where the Jewish state should be (Guyana and Uganda were in the running), how the Arab countries attacked the moment the state of Israel was declared, and how they exploited a Jewish holiday to launch a sneak attack during the Yom Kippur War. We also briefly covered modern Palestinian terrorism. However, we were also taught about the Nakba and Sabra and Shatila. Learning about how Palestinians saw us left me feeling conflicted about Israel. Whatever justifications we had—mainly the Holocaust pushing us out of Europe—from their perspective, we came and took control of their land.

We Jews have been the underdog many times throughout history, but in resuming control of our ancient land, we’ve created a new underdog. Some people persist in seeing Israel as the underdog, but that illusion becomes more difficult to maintain as Israel grows more powerful militarily. Israel is a small country with little in the way of natural resources, but it has the backing of America and a steady supply of modern weaponry. It hasn’t faced war with an Arab coalition since the 1973 Yom Kippur War. Since then, it’s been smaller conflicts with anti-Israel terrorist organizations like Hamas and Hezbollah. These organizations use very cheap weapons and wage war from civilian areas, leading to high numbers of civilian casualties when Israel retaliates. It is hard to continue to view Israel as an underdog in this state of affairs.

Many of the writers in Wrestling with Zion are struggling with how to view Israel through a diasporic lens that understands the plight of the underdog. After living through the devastation of “might is right” fascism in Nazi Germany, it is painfully ironic to see “might is right” become the general attitude of the Jewish state.

On the other hand, the paradigm that the underdog is always right is worth questioning. People with little power can still use what power they do have to do highly unethical things. Palestinian terrorist attacks against Israeli civilians are a clear example of that.

During the 2021 Israel-Palestine crisis, Hamas fired 4,360 rockets from Gaza into Israel. 90% of them were intercepted by Israel’s Iron Dome missile defense system, but about 436 got through, killing 12 Israeli civilians. Hamas’ rocket attacks were intended to get Israel to withdraw security forces from protests in Sheikh Jarrah and on the Temple Mount, but instead they provoked Israel to retaliate with airstrikes against Gaza that killed about 140 militants and 130 civilians.

Hamas’ problem was with the Israeli government; it was wrong for them to take it out on innocent Israeli citizens. Israel at least focused on military targets, though using air strikes on crowded cities like those in Gaza ended up killing a lot of civilians. Many political commentators will compare numbers of Israeli civilian deaths to Palestinian civilian deaths (about 1 to 10 in the 2021 crisis), and these numbers make Israel look bad internationally. I don’t know if there’s anything Israel could do to kill fewer Palestinian civilians, but the almost 1:1 ratio of civilian to militant deaths seems high.

I think that going forward Israel should focus on wielding power with grace. I would love to see it develop an ethos of kindness, tolerance, and restraint. The reality of Israel as underdog is dead and the ideology of “might is right” is morally abhorrent. Israel needs to find a balance between rolling over and steamrolling. I know that’s easier said than done and there are a lot of complications, but that’s my general opinion.

I think both Israel and Palestine should acknowledge that Israel has more power and do what’s best for their own people with that knowledge. Israel seems to believe it’s weaker than it is, which causes it to crack down harder than it probably needs to. Palestine seems to believe it’s stronger than it is, which leads Palestine to keep fighting to retake the whole land when the result of every flareup is more destruction and deprivation on its side.

I used to think all Palestinians wanted was to be equal under a secular democratic government, but after reading Israeli history from A History of Israel by Howard Sachar (how Palestinians boycotted negotiations in 1948 because it gave them less than 100%, refused to allow Jews fleeing the Holocaust to immigrate, and allied with the Nazis during WWII), reading the Hamas charter (which calls for an Islamic-run state (with equal rights for Jews, but isn’t that what Israel is except with a Jewish state? Jews have a long history of being discriminated against under the rule of other religions, including Islam, so why should they trust Muslims to rule them?) and quotes a prophecy where the Jews are killed (supposedly Jews who have left their faith and are following a false god, but still ethnic Jews)), reading studies (60% of Palestinians say they want to “work toward reclaiming all of historic Palestine”), and watching Palestinians explicitly express their desire for an Arab Islamic Palestine on The Ask Project, on Tiktok, and on Twitter, I think their end goal is to retake the entirety of Palestine and create an Islamic state.

It’s hard for Israel to pursue a merciful policy towards the Palestinians when they don’t seem like they would be satisfied with just part of the country. If Palestinians won’t be satisfied with sharing, it gives Jews the choice between ruling and being ruled, which is an easy choice though not an ideal one. Palestinians have gambled and lost time and time again and they blame the consequences of these gambles on Israel when perhaps they should accept defeat and either be satisfied with the West Bank and Gaza (two-state solution) or integrate into Israel (one-state solution). I think leftists and Arabs are doing Palestinians a disservice by encouraging them to persist in their self-destructive struggle to retake Israel.

The reasons they persist are that they believe they are entitled to the whole land and they want to protect the al-Aqsa mosque compound. The al-Aqsa mosque compound is also known as the Temple Mount to Jews. The Islamic Dome of the Rock was built on the site of the Second Jewish Temple. Palestinians are worried about Jews demolishing the Dome of the Rock and rebuilding the temple, but the Israeli government has been trying to preserve the status quo. Yehuda Etzion, a member of the Jewish Underground, plotted to blow it up in 1984, but was arrested by the Israeli authorities before he could put his plan into action.

The status quo is that Jews are allowed to visit briefly but not to pray there. Recently there have been more Jewish right-wing extremists going to pray at the mount. Currently Jordan is in charge of administrating the compound and Israel is in charge of security. The al-Aqsa mosque compound being in the same place as Judaism’s holiest site is at the heart of why both sides are so attached to this small bit of land. That’s why even though it might be in Palestinians’ best practical interest to stop fighting and move on, their will to fight endures.

Fighting for one’s homeland and protecting one’s places of worship are understandable, but one can’t expect to pursue those goals using violence and then turn around and play the innocent victim to the world. Pro-Palestinian news outlets like Al Jazeera and Vice frequently emphasize the harm that Palestinian civilians suffer while minimizing the threat that Palestinian violence poses to Israeli civilians. If Palestinians want to utilize violence to achieve their goals, they should be prepared to accept the consequences of that violence. To use violence toward your neighbors while portraying yourself as an innocent victim to the world is deceitful.

This goes for Israel as well: Israel overpolices the Palestinian population, encourages settlements in East Jerusalem and the West Bank, and then plays the innocent victim when Hamas shoots rockets.

It’s really hard to tell who’s the aggressor and who’s the victim in any individual incident in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Each side omits facts that make them look bad and emphasizes facts that make the other side look bad. Reading the news from either side, you can come away thinking the other side did something bad out of nowhere, but the more research you do the more likely you are to uncover a previous incident that precipitated the incident in question. From abroad, we tend to only see the big events that make international news, but there have been smaller incidents going back and forth ever since the 1880s.

The issue of Israel demolishing Palestinian homes is similarly inscrutable. Israel usually claims that the homes were not built to code or were being used to organize terrorism, but human rights organizations say that Palestinians are being discriminated against and denied housing in order to force them to leave Israel. It’s probably a little A, little B, really varies with the individual situation. I tried to find out if it was more one or the other, but didn’t have much luck.

I often see anti-Zionists apply the terms genocide or ethnic cleansing to the Nakba or to Israel’s appropriation of Palestinian land. After reading A History of Israel by Howard M. Sachar, I don’t think those terms really apply, at least not to the 1948 war. To summarize Sachar’s version of events, Israel negotiated with the West, Palestinians boycotted negotiations because they didn’t want to cede any part of the land, Israel declared statehood, the Arab countries declared war and told the Palestinians to leave so they wouldn’t get hurt, the Arab press sensationalized the Deir Yassin massacre which caused more Palestinians to run, and then there was a war which the Arabs lost because their separate armies were poorly coordinated and the Israelis used some creative tactics which made them look stronger than they were.

Using the terms genocide or ethnic cleansing to refer to the 1948 war flattens out a lot of the complexity of events as they happened. It ignores that it was a two-sided war that was between two different ethnicities but the fight was really over land and not ethnicity. It glosses over crimes the Palestinians committed against Jews prior to the war such as the 1929 Palestine riots and the Hebron massacre. It also omits the fact that Palestinians did everything they could to limit Jewish immigration to Israel during the Holocaust, which meant Jews had to fight so their people could immigrate to avoid being killed by the Nazis. There were other places to run to, but many countries closed their borders to Jews, who they perceived to be poor and a drain on social systems, so there weren’t that many options.

I can’t fully comment on the application of the terms genocide or ethnic cleansing to the modern situation since I’ve only read history up to the 50s and from only one book so far (though Sachar seems pretty thorough and even-handed). I’ve been recommended The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine by Ilan Pappé often, but it seems to have an agenda and some of the reviews say it’s not historically accurate. I might read it just to see what people are talking about, though. I would like to hold off commenting on Israel entirely until I finish A History of Israel, but it’s taken me a year to read almost halfway and I would like to get Wrestling with Zion out the door.

I can say that the population in the West Bank and Gaza is steadily rising and Israeli Arabs (which includes Palestinians living in Israel) currently make up about 20% of the Israeli population and have a 2% growth rate, which means there’s not a Nazi-style systematic mass killing happening (the Jewish population in Europe dropped by 60% from 1939 to 1945).

I do believe displacement happened and is continuing to happen and that any displacement on the basis of ethnicity alone is unjust and should be stopped. Israelis have massacred Palestinians, but Palestinians have also committed massacres against Jews (for example the 1929 Hebron massacre). Displacements and massacres have to be on a very large scale to be considered ethnic cleansing and genocide. Looking at the numbers I don’t think Israel’s actions measure up to the scale that most would consider to be genocide.

Palestinians killed by Israel in 2021: 313

Palestinian population in 2020: 5,101,414

Percentage of Palestinians killed in 2021: 0.00613%

Palestinians killed in 1948 war (taking the average of high and low estimates): ~5,000

Palestinian population in 1947: 1,324,000

Percentage of Palestinians killed in 1948 war (using 1947 number as baseline): 0.37%

Israelis killed by Palestinians in 2021: 17

Israeli population: 7,453,600

Percentage of Israelis killed in 2021: 0.000228%

Israelis killed in 1948 war: 6,373

Israeli population in 1947: 630,000

Percentage of Israelis killed in 1948 war: 1.01%

Most of the decrease in Palestinian population in 1948 was due to displacement rather than death. Note that more Jews were killed both in number and percentage in the 1948 war than Palestinians. Also note the effect of Israel using air strikes rather than ground attacks on Israeli military deaths (only one soldier was killed on the Israeli side in 2021).

The terms ethnic cleansing and genocide also imply that Israel’s actions are being done primarily for ethnic reasons. While Jews and Arabs are different ethnicities and religions, the conflict isn’t just about ethnicity or religion. Land is a big part of it, with Israel needing the land for refugees from the Holocaust and Arab expulsions of Mizrahi Jews and Palestinians wanting to keep their land. Security and perceived threat to the Israeli state and civilians by Palestinian terrorist groups is also contributes heavily to the conflict. Labeling the conflict as ethnic cleansing or genocide erases the mutuality of violence: genocide is a crime with a victim and a perpetrator, so that label doesn’t apply to wars where both sides engage in violence.

It’s hard for me living in America to tell what Israel’s general attitude towards the conflict is right now. It seems like it’s been put on the back burner as Netanyahu’s new right-wing government is taking over. I have a feeling that means increasing pressure on the Palestinians, from housing to policing to war to holy places. I’m not sure how it’s going to play out: whether increasing pressure will eventually cause Palestinians to submit, whether they’ll continue to struggle, or whether the cycle of flareups and ceasefires will continue indefinitely in a situation that’s tense but relatively stable.

The essays in Wrestling with Zion made me think a lot and work through my own relationship to Judaism and Israel.

Unlike many Jews, I grew up feeling safe as a Jew in America. I’m fairly assimilated, upper-middle-class, and I haven’t experienced antisemitism directly. I’ve always thought I looked Jewish when I look in the mirror but I’ve never had anyone comment on it. I’m ¾ Eastern European Jewish and ¼ Scotch-Irish from my paternal grandfather. I’ve been called white by people around me since elementary school, so I identify my race as white and my ethnicity as Jewish.

My dad warned me about neo-Nazis, but fortunately I’ve never meet one in person. I first learned about the Holocaust when I was a child and I was told not to ask about a family friend who was a survivor’s number tattoos because he didn’t like talking about it. My parents explained the basics of the Holocaust to me, but I don’t remember reading any books or seeing any movies about the Holocaust at home growing up. We did watch The Sound of Music and The Producers, but we didn’t watch anything serious or historical.

I feel like there are two attitudes towards the Holocaust prevalent in American Jewish society: talk about it a lot to prevent it from happening again, or try to put it behind us so that it doesn’t come to define Jews or Judaism. Both of these approaches have their advantages and disadvantages. I think my parents and grandparents were more of the second type. I think they wanted their children to associate Judaism with positive things and not focus on the negative. I think it’s good to not live in fear or be paranoid, but as a result I may fall on the side of being too unaware of antisemitism.

I wore my Star of David necklace all through middle school without incident. I was really proud of being Jewish around the time I was studying for my Bat Mitzvah, so I wore the necklace 2-3 times a week. I had Muslim, Hindu, and Christian friends I would sit with at lunch and they never commented about it, though we did talk about religion occasionally, but it was mostly light discussion of holiday plans. I remember my friends having a long debate over whether paradise exists, though it wasn’t a subject of much interest to me since Judaism places more emphasis on living an ethical present life.

In high school, I stopped wearing the Star of David because I stopped being religious after my uncle passed away suddenly from a heart attack. He had four kids and it seemed so unfair. I didn’t believe that was something a benevolent G-d could do. It made me think G-d must be either evil or absent. I have a little bit more belief now emotionally, but intellectually I don’t really believe. I feel G-d more strongly while being in natural places or writing than I do praying in temple.

Another reason I stopped wearing my Star of David is because I was worried my nerdy friends would think I was stupid or bigoted if I wore religious jewelry. When I was in high school, gay marriage was a big political issue, and the “no” side was very religious (mostly Christian, but traditionally Judaism did not allow same-sex marriage either). Atheism, paganism, parody religions like the Flying Spaghetti Monster, and alternative cosmogonies like the Lovecraft mythos were popular in nerdy circles. It also didn’t fit with the cool, rebellious persona I was trying to adopt, so the necklace mostly sat in the drawer through high school (I did wear it a couple times, but nowhere near as often as in middle school).

I never quite fit in with other Jews in summer camp or Hebrew school, though I didn’t fit in well in regular school either. I feel like I had a harder time in Hebrew school than regular school because the friend groups are more established and harder to break into. We moved a lot so we didn’t have a history in the congregation like most of my peers. Religious settings tend to lean conformist with people shunning those who are different. I didn’t share many interests in common with my middle and high school Hebrew school classmates, who seemed interested in pop and hiphop music, smartphones, fashion, and gossip while I was more interested in books, video games, anime, and alternative rock/metal. In Jewish camp, the ruach cheers set my teeth on edge because I’m a quiet, modest person and they were very loud and boastful. Now I can understand the importance of being loudly Jewish, but at the time I just wondered why we had to always be screaming. I think a large part of why I personally wouldn’t want to move to Israel is because I expect it to be a lonely, dull experience similar to the experience I had in Hebrew school and Jewish summer camp.

I went to Hillel once in college. I was talking with a bunch of students in a circle after services and one girl was gushing about wanting to join the Israeli military after college. The zealous way she was talking really put me off. I tried to catch the other people’s eyes as if to ask “This is weird, right?” but they wouldn’t make eye contact, so I didn’t come back except yearly for Yom Kippur.

I’m agnostic, reform, not very active in synagogue, and married out with no children. I’m not the most Jewish person even though I feel (maybe too) confident speaking on behalf of Jews. I’ve been in many situations where I’m the only Jew and I’m asked questions about Judaism. Often I don’t know the answer but I try my best to explain.

I haven’t felt threatened as a Jew in the United States until recently with Charlottesville, the Poway synagogue shooting, the hostage situation in Texas, and Kanye’s antisemitic tweets. Synagogues have been taking extra security measures to mitigate attacks from antisemites for a long time. Many Jews are getting more nervous about the level of antisemitism in the United States which seems to be on the rise.

On the other hand, America is relatively safe for Jews compared to other countries. The ADL surveyed 100 countries and the United States ranked as #7 least antisemitic (though that study was done in 2014, so things may have changed).

Palestine (the West Bank and Gaza) ranked #1 for most antisemitic. The ADL left Israel out of the survey, which seems a little suspicious (did Israelis agree with the stereotypes about Jews that comprised most of the questions?). I always thought it was strange how Israel is marketed to American Jews as a place to escape antisemitism when the Middle East in general is pretty antisemitic.

While I felt pretty safe in America, I also grew up during a time when the fear of Islamic terrorism was very pervasive in American society. 9/11 happened when I was ten and the Second Intifada happened when I was thirteen. I remember my grandmother returning from having one of her stained glass windows installed in a synagogue in Israel around that time saying she was afraid because they made her go everywhere with an armed guard. I’m still worried that if I go to Israel I’m going to get blown up by a terrorist, even though at this point I know many people who have visited and returned whole.

This might be unusual for a Jewish person to say, but I think I would feel less safe in Israel than I do in America. America’s not perfect, it has its antisemites, but because I’ve never personally been targeted I’ve never felt afraid of living here while being Jewish. There are a lot of Christian supremacists in America, but I feel fortunate to live in a country with a government guided by the principle of separation of church and state (the execution isn’t perfect, but at least the intention is there). As an agnostic Jew, I would much prefer a secular government to a Jewish government. Freedom from religion is as important to me as freedom of religion.

Israel as a place to escape antisemitism is probably the most common pro-Israel argument in American Jewish communities. After the devastation of the Holocaust, Jews felt the need to create their own government as a way to protect themselves from persecution by non-Jewish governments. Since the Holocaust, Jews are afraid that non-Jewish governments could turn on us at any time, and hasbara (pro-Israel propaganda) leverages this fear to get American Jews to donate to Israel.

However, the idea that Israel is a solution to the threat of genocide is flawed for a couple of reasons. First, Arab antisemitism. Second, collecting in one small place leaves us vulnerable to being wiped out with weapons of mass destruction. Spreading out seems like a better strategy for group survival and preservation of traditions. Third, space is limited. Tel Aviv is currently the most expensive city in the world to live in and scarcity of resources like land and water is a problem even with Israel’s current population. I don’t know that Israel would be able to support all of America’s Jews if the worst were to happen here.

I think for hasbara to be successful with the younger generation it’s going to have to find a new reason for American Jews to support Israel. Religious reasons are valid, but not everyone is religious. Stressing unity of peoplehood may work, but it would take some effort. American and Israeli Jews are culturally different and those differences can cause friction. If there were more of an effort to recognize and understand the cultural differences instead of simply stressing the importance of American Jews supporting Israel, I think that would help improve the relationship between Israeli and American Jews.

The phrase “anti-Zionism is antisemitism” always makes me cringe. Those beliefs can coexist within the same person, but they don’t always. Zionism means different things to different people at different times. Zionism usually means a Jewish state physically in the land of Israel, but early Cultural Zionists were opposed to a governmental state and wanted only a cultural and spiritual center in Israel.

Ahad Ha’am, Judah L. Magnes, Martin Buber, Hannah Arendt, Albert Einstein, and Isaac Deutscher, whose articles appear at the beginning of Wrestling with Zion, saw inherent contradictions between Jewish values and the violence required for the establishment and maintenance of a Jewish state:

• The violence that Ahad Ha’am describes Israeli settlers enacting on Palestinians in 1891 reads like it was ripped from the headlines of Ha’Aretz today.
• Judah Magnes speaks more of state violence, like the possibility the Israeli government might have to deny Palestinians citizenship in order to keep a Jewish majority.
• Martin Buber condemned the Zionism of the Irgun which carried out terrorist attacks in support of Israel.
• Hannah Arendt decried nationalism and warned that Israel’s reliance on large foreign powers for military aid would become the basis for a new wave of antisemitism that would harm Jewish communities in diaspora.
• Albert Einstein spoke out against Zionist extremists and reminded readers that the average Palestinian and average Israeli is more concerned with making a living than making a political statement.
• Isaac Deutscher was not a Zionist or an anti-Zionist. He said: “The state of Israel has had explosives—the grievances of hundreds of thousands of displaced Arabs—built into its very foundations.” He suggested that Israel become part of a Middle East Federation.

To say that these great Jewish thinkers are antisemitic because they opposed a Jewish state is absurd. The slogan “anti-Zionism is antisemitism” is totalitarian because it suppresses criticism of Israel. Zionists will say that all anti-Zionists want to see Israel violently destroyed and the Jews exiled, but that is not the position of all anti-Zionists. There are many Palestinian nationalist anti-Zionists who do want that, but there is also a strong tradition of anti-Zionism within the Jewish community. There have been Jews that disagreed with the very concept of a Jewish state since the early days of the Zionist movement. Wrestling with Zion contains essays by prominent Jewish intellectuals who, whether they self-identify as Zionist or anti-Zionist or neither, express dissent against the state of Israel.

Anti-Zionism can mean opposition to the existence of the state of Israel, but it can also mean opposition to Zionism. Zionism is a dynamic movement that changes over time, so the meaning of anti-Zionism changes with it. If mainstream Zionism is pro state violence, then anti-Zionism becomes anti state violence. If mainstream Zionism is racist, then anti-Zionism becomes anti-racist. If mainstream Zionism is right-wing, anti-Zionism becomes left-wing. Anti-Zionism is a countermovement that allows a space for dissenters against mainstream Zionism to find like-minded people and organize.

One could argue that dissenters should stay within the Zionist movement and fight to bring it further left, but that is hard to do in practice. It is particularly hard to criticize Israel in Jewish environments because many Jewish Zionists have strong emotional reactions to criticism of the state of Israel so critics are frequently outnumbered and silenced. That’s not to say that critics of Israel don’t get emotional at people defending Israel—they certainly do. The emotional nature of the conflict is precisely what makes it hard for both Zionists and critics of Israel to find space for dialogue within the same movement.

My point is, anti-Zionism is a lot broader than Palestinian nationalism. It includes people who are opposed to a Jewish state in theory but not necessarily in practice, people who are opposed to governments that prioritize one ethnicity or religion, anarchists who are opposed to any government, and some ultra-Orthodox Jewish sects who believe it’s too early to return to Israel because the messiah has not yet arrived. Within anti-Zionism, there are certainly antisemites who don’t want to see Jews living in the region at all, but to brand everyone who comes under the anti-Zionist umbrella as antisemitic is inaccurate and censors healthy checks on pro-Israel jingoism.

It’s particularly hurtful to Jewish dissenters because it assumes that they hate themselves, their families, and their community. It also implies that their communities hate them back (Jews abhor antisemites), which pushes them further away from Judaism, towards anti-Zionist groups that validate both their Jewishness and their political beliefs.

Many anti-Zionists (Jewish and non-Jewish) are simply concerned about the Palestinians’ situation. They may not know much about Israeli history, but they see the horrors depicted on pro-Palestinian social media and feel bad for the Palestinians. Assuming their motivation is Jew-hatred is failing to see the bigger picture and recognize how Palestine is winning the online culture war (and also how influential pro-Palestinian ideas are in leftist spaces and academia). One would get a lot more out of educating these folks (with facts and reliable, unbiased sources because it’s hard to take anyone at their word on this issue) than shaming them, which pushes them towards anti-Zionist groups that welcome and further indoctrinate them.

On the most fundamental level, “anti-Zionism is antisemitism” means that Jews displaced Palestinians and are now denying them the right to complain about it. Palestinians as a group have a legitimate reason to be angry about the existence of the state of Israel in a way that’s not really connected to religion or ethnicity. It’s widely agreed upon in American society that antisemitism should be censored in order to prevent another genocide against the Jews, so anything placed in the category of antisemitism effectively becomes able to be censored (whether it is actually censored or not depends on the forum). It’s wrong on top of wrong for us to displace another people and then attempt to deny them the right to vent their frustration.  

That slogan also furthers the antisemitic trope of dual loyalty, the belief that Jews are more loyal to Israel than to their own country. It conflates Jews with Israel, which means that when Israel takes unpopular actions, Jewish diaspora communities find themselves the targets of misplaced retaliation. This is not to excuse antisemitism, just to recognize cause and effect. The more allied diaspora Jews are perceived to be with Israel, the more their acceptance in their home countries will be tied to the rise and fall of Israel’s international appeal. This is dangerous for diaspora communities and unfair because diaspora Jews have little influence on Israeli policy.

This is one way that the interests of Jews in Israel and the interests of Jews in diaspora are not always aligned. Heightened security in Israel benefits Israeli Jews, but international disapproval puts diaspora Jews at higher physical risk from antisemites. For diaspora Jews, criticizing Israel allows them to distance themselves from Israel’s bad reputation, but it puts Israeli Jews at risk because they may not receive as much international support, which they have needed for defense (whether they still need it is a topic of debate).

I think that’s most of the general stuff I wanted to get off my chest. I’m trying to give a bird’s eye view and not get too caught up in details. I tried to write this essay quite a few times already, with one of the previous iterations being over 100 pages. There are so many research topics, questions, and ideas worth exploring in Wrestling with Zion that attempting to comment on all of them is a fool’s errand.

There were some interesting facts that I learned while reading and researching Wrestling with Zion:

I was surprised to learn from “Israel and the Media: An Acquired Taste” by Seth Ackerman that supporting Israel used to be a far-left thing among American Jews. It used to be considered politically extreme, not something that respectable conservative (religiously and politically) Jews supported. Many of the Jews who first settled in Israel in the late 1800s were communists. He says conservative Jews were worried that supporting Israel would make them seem disloyal to the United States. It seems like Israel lost the left around the time of the Lebanese civil war and Sabra and Shatila in 1982 (though it may also have had something to do with privatization in the 80s and Israel moving away from its communist roots or the rise of the Likud party in 1977).

“Sabra and Chatila” by Signoles Aude is a good summary of that incident. A History of Modern Lebanon by Fawwaz Traboulsi also goes into detail about it (I haven’t read it yet but I see it cited frequently). Essentially what happened is Israel was working with the Lebanese Forces (a Lebanese Christian right-wing militia) and told them to “clean up” the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps in Lebanon. The Lebanese Forces committed a horrific massacre of Palestinians with the IDF standing outside the camps.

Israel did an internal investigation called the Kahan Report, which said that the Israelis didn’t tell the Lebanese Forces to do it or not to do it, but they should have known to tell them not to do it. The Lebanese Forces were likely taking revenge for the Damour massacre in 1976, in which the PLO massacred Maronite Christians, including family members of Elie Hobeika, the Lebanese Forces intelligence chief at the time of the massacre.

Ariel Sharon was Israel’s Minister of Defense at the time. He was “blamed for ignoring the signs that revenge killings are likely to take place” but did not resign from office. He continued to have a long career in Israeli government and was Prime Minister from 2001-2006 during the Second Intifada.

Elie Hobeika, the Lebanese Forces intelligence chief, went on to serve twelve years in Lebanese parliament. Hobeika was assassinated by car bomb in 2002 right before he was going to testify about Sabra and Shatila in a Belgian court. A group called Lebanese for a Free and Independent Lebanon issued a statement taking responsibility for his death, calling him a “Syrian agent.” Robert Hatem’s book, From Israel to Damascus is a biography of Hobeika written by his former bodyguard that tells of Hobeika’s rise and how he switched allegiances from Lebanon to Syria.

I see a lot of people blaming Israel alone for the incident and either downplaying or omitting the role the Lebanese Forces played in physically carrying out the massacre. I think this shows anti-Israel bias and furthers a Palestinian nationalist narrative. “Israel bad, Palestinians good” is the theme of a lot of coverage of this incident and the conflict in general. In this case, that leaves out the role the PLO played in committing the Damour massacre, which the Lebanese Forces were taking revenge for. Of course, Israel holds responsibility for allowing it to happen and it severely damaged Israel’s ability to claim moral high ground. There were huge protests within Israel around the time of the Lebanese war, and many of the writers in Wrestling with Zion speak of it as the moment when they stopped supporting Israel.

I also learned that of Israel’s Jewish population, 45% is Mizrahi, or of Middle Eastern Jewish origin. I often see Israel categorized as a “white” nation in an Arab region, but this fact shows its more complicated than that. Israel’s Jewish population also comprises 32% Ashkenazi, 8% mixed, 12% USSR, and 3% Ethiopian Jews. It seems like Ashkenazi Jews have disproportionate power and visibility in Israel, but in terms of ethnicity Israel is more diverse than what you would expect from how its portrayed in the media. Israel is also more brown than America, which is 75% white.

“Dislocated Identities: Reflections of an Arab-Jew” by Ella Habiba Shohat sent me down a rabbit hole about Jewish expulsion from Arab countries. When Israel was founded, Jews were seen as traitors by the Arab governments, so they were forced to leave and most immigrated to Israel. Shohat expresses some complicated feelings about Israel as both the reason her family had to leave Iraq and a new home where they’re discriminated against not for being Jewish but for being Arab.

“My Patriarch Problem—and Ours” by Richard Goldstein brings attention to how gay Palestinians immigrate to Tel Aviv illegally because homosexuality is criminalized in Palestine. Goldstein criticizes Israel for not doing more to help them. He also gives some analysis about LGBT rights in the Middle East. Before colonization, the sex-segregated nature of Islamic societies meant that engaging in homosexual acts wasn’t considered a big deal (though people wouldn’t have thought of themselves as gay for doing it). It was only after contact with the West that homosexuality became stigmatized. Now the West is gay-friendly and the East is homophobic. Strange how it flipped… definitely worth learning more about.

I learned from “The Chosen: Ideological Roots of the U.S.-Israeli Special Relationship” by Daniel Lazare that Evangelical Christians donate a lot of money and volunteer hours to settlements in the West Bank. Many Christians support Israel because they believe a prophecy that the Jews will return to Israel, fight armies at Har Megiddo (Armageddon), and most of them will die but those remaining will convert to Christianity. This is terrible because it undercuts the peace process by helping Israel expand into territory that was set aside for a Palestinian state and it’s fake-supportive of Jews while actually expecting them to die or convert.

The most egregious instance of Israeli history being misrepresented to bolster a pro-Palestinian perspective that I stumbled upon was in 1982 when Zuhdi Labib Terzi, the representative of the PLO, said before the UN “Are they [“Judeo-Nazis”, his term] not the criminals who sank the Patria carrying survivors from the Nazi extermination camps?” The Haganah, an Israeli underground paramilitary group, was attempting to disable the SS Patria from deporting the Holocaust refugees to Mauritius, but the bomb accidentally sunk the ship, killing 267 of the 1800 refugees. There’s no reason that Israelis would want to kill Jews fleeing the Holocaust, so implying it was intentional makes absolutely no sense. To suggest that Jews would kill their own people out of meaningless bloodlust is antisemitic in the extreme.

Reading that was a turning point for me in how I viewed the Palestinian side and the UN because it was such blatant defamation and the transcript doesn’t show anybody in the UN objecting. I used to hear people say that Palestinians lie, exaggerate, or misrepresent things and thought they were just being racist, so it was something I had to experience for myself to believe. Of course, one person misrepresenting history forty years ago doesn’t mean that Palestinians are always lying, but I find this is emblematic of the methods and lengths some people on the pro-Palestinian side will go to in order to smear Israel. It’s important to keep a sense of healthy skepticism and do your own research so you don’t accept things at face value and go on to spread misinformation.

I learned about the Cave of the Patriarchs massacre, where a Jewish-American Kahanist extremist named Baruch Goldstein opened fire on 800 Palestinian Muslim worshippers praying during the month of Ramadan, killing 29 and wounding 125. I had never heard of that before. It blew my mind to think that I was four at the time and didn’t learn about it until I was thirty.

The massacre on the beach in Tantura is another massacre of Palestinians by Israelis that many people not be familiar with.

I think it’s important not to turn away from the dark, ugly, embarrassing parts of Jewish history. On Passover, we put drops of wine on the seder plate to symbolize the blood of the Egyptians because even though they were our enemies, they were human.

The author I agreed the most with in Wrestling with Zion was Isaac Deutscher. As another agnostic Jew who’s somewhat in the middle of this issue, his positions seemed the closest to mine and I really enjoyed his writing. I’ll have to look into his other books!

Of all the essays in Wrestling with Zion, I think Marc Ellis’s was the most inflammatory. I do think he goes a little too far, but I admire his fiery passion. If you’re looking for something cathartic and anti-Zionist “Jew vs. Jew: On the Jewish Civil War and the New Prophetic” will give you that emotional release.

I really related to “Rally ‘Round the Flag” by Douglas Rushkoff at first and it has some good points, but the more I think about it the less I agree with it. His books look kind of interesting, though.

“The Charge of Anti-Semitism: Jews, Israel, and the Risks of Public Critique” by Judith Butler gives voice to some of the same concerns I have about calling anti-Zionism antisemitism.

Israel/Palestine Book List:

• A History of Israel by Howard M. Sachar – this one is really good so far and I highly recommend it! My father-in-law recommended it saying this is the book that got him into history. I think this would actually be a better book to start with than Wrestling with Zion. It’s extremely detailed and seems pretty unbiased because it discusses mistakes made by both Israel and Palestine without saying one side is to blame for the whole thing as many sources do.
• What Every American Should Know About the Middle East by Melissa Rossi – this one seems okay, but I feel like there might be something better out there. The way it’s formatted is a little weird (it has those boxes that break up the page like some textbooks) and some of the writing feels too blithe about serious topics. If anyone has recommendations for books about the whole region, let me know.
• This is Not a Border by Ahdaf Soueif & Omar Robert Hamilton – I actually got this from a Goodreads giveaway. So far it seems too self-congratulatory leftist, but it might get better later.
• The Secret Life of Saeed the Pessoptimist by Emile Habiby – this is a satirical novel and it looks really fun! I’m kind of saving this as a reward for getting through some of the other material.
• The Non-Jewish Jew by Isaac Deutscher – I found myself agreeing with his essays in WwZ a lot, so I think I should check out his other work. Plus his works on Stalin and Marxism look interesting.
• Nothing Sacred by Douglas Rushkoff – I connected to his essay in WwZ and a humanist take on Judaism sounds interesting.
• After Jews and Arabs by Ammiel Alcalay – a survey of literature of the Levant
• Israel: Is it Good for the Jews? by Richard Cohen – an American reporter’s journey from anti-Zionist to Zionist
• How to Understand Israel in 60 Days or Less by Sarah Glidden – graphic novel (it actually mentions Wrestling with Zion in it!)
• A History of Modern Lebanon by Fawwaz Traboulsi – this was cited a lot in readings about the 1982 Lebanon war
• Mahmoud Darwish – regarded as the Palestinian national poet
• Orientalism and Out of Place by Edward Said – Orientalism is a widely cited classic and Out of Place is a memoir about his childhood in Palestine
• To the End of the Land by David Grossman – anti-war literary novel by a left-leaning Israeli writer
• Jewish Self-Hate by Theodor Lessing – originally defined Jewish self-hatred
• Maybe Benny Morris and Ilan Pappé, though I’m not sure how accurate they are
• I Saw Ramallah by Mourid Barghouti – autobiography written by a Palestinian poet who was barred from re-entering Israel after the 1967 war
• The Lemon Tree by Sandy Tolan – about the friendship of a Palestinian man and an Israeli woman who lives in his family’s old house
• My Promised Land: The Triumph and Tragedy of Israel by Ari Shavit – left-leaning Israeli perspective on growing up in Israel and the conflict
• A History of Palestine: From the Ottoman Conquest to the Founding of the State of Israel by Gudrun Kramer – Kramer is a German professor of Islamic studies
• The 188th Crybaby Brigade and Israel 201 by Joel Chasnoff – the first is a humorous memoir about his time as a young American Jew in the IDF and the second is a guide to Israeli culture for Americans.
• Enemies and Neighbors by Ian Black – claims to be unbiased, sounds like it leans pro-Palestinian, but reviews say it explains the Hebrew and Arabic terms used to describe the conflict really well and highlights some of the most popular Israeli and Palestinian cultural works.
• Mornings in Jenin by Susan Abulhawa – historical fiction novel about a woman and her family living in the Jenin refugee camp from 1948 to the early 2000s. The author lives in America and her parents were refugees of the 1967 war.
• Muneera and the Moon: Stories Inspired by Palestinian Folklore by Sonia Sulaiman – newly published (02/23) short stories based on Palestinian folklore
• Minor Detail by Adania Shibli – this novel about a modern-day Palestinian woman researching the 1949 rape and murder of a Bedouin girl at the hands of Israeli soldiers was selected to receive a prestigious German literary award, but the award was rescinded after the start of the 2023 Israel-Hamas War for portraying Israel too negatively.

Let me know if you have any book recommendations… I’d really like to find a comprehensive history book from the Palestinian perspective. I looked into Rashid Khalidi’s The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine and some of the reviews said it’s a little unbalanced but I think it might be a good complement to Sachar’s A History of Israel.

I would have liked to have waited to post on Israel until after I finished A History of Israel, but it’s taking me so long and I really need Wrestling with Zion off my to-review list so I can get to other books to review that have been piling up. I’m sorry it’s such a mess (it was supposed to be “brief” but it’s already 13 pages long). It came out more pro-Israel than I would have expected before I started researching, especially back when I started reading Wrestling with Zion in 2020. It took me about a year to read and a little more than a year to review, so it’s been a journey. I might end up regretting some of the things I said here, but I’m still learning, researching, and figuring things out, so I hope you’ll have patience with me as I try to catch up.