Esther Farmer, Wrestling with Zionism director
Photo by Tony Nieves
Wrestling with Zionism cast at the Unitarian Church of All Souls, New York City, 2018
Photo by Bud Koroster
ESTHER FARMER
Since the founding of Israel in 1948, Americans have heard many stories about the hopeful and wonderful things Israel has done. We are inundated with images of the kibbutz and cooperation, of how Israelis reclaimed the land and built a modern democracy. We were told that “Israel was a land without people for a people without a land”—an idea actually invented by nineteenth-century European Christians and appropriated by some Jewish Zionists as a convenient trope. It must also be remembered that the genocide of six million Jews spurred many to welcome a Jewish state as a form of justice and reparation to a persecuted and desperate people.
The problem is, the Israeli narrative erases an entire people! And it’s not just a few people either. It’s as if millions of Palestinian people never existed. And just as the history of the indigenous people of America and their colonial conquest and displacement has been hidden until it was too late to do anything about it, the story of the indigenous people of Palestine has also been hidden. Palestine was not a land without people; there were millions of Palestinians there. Those Palestinians were of Muslim, Christian, and Jewish faiths. After the creation of Israel, 750,000 Palestinians were forced to flee their homes to make room for the European Jews who would take their place and, in many cases, take their very homes. Those that stayed live under impossible apartheid conditions. Many people in the US don’t even realize that the population of Israel is half Israeli and half Palestinian. Or that Palestine and Palestinians were of many faiths. This includes my family, who always identified as Palestinian Jews. My grandmother used to say that Jews had no problem in Palestine until the British got involved. The Balfour Declaration in 1917 and the British bias toward the Jewish settlers paved the way for much of Palestine to be declared a Jewish state. I often imagine her surprise that one day her family got along fine with her Muslim neighbors and then all of a sudden these policies of the colonial British government created resentment, chaos, and war between neighbors.
This is not a pretty story; it is painful and difficult. In fact, it is so difficult that it cannot be normalized. We cannot dialogue our way out of this story by bringing people together to discuss it in ways that pretend that both sides are equal. Israel has been empowered to keep down any semblance of Palestinian autonomy or human rights. The Israeli narrative even denies that there was a country called Palestine! Palestinians cannot show their flag. Their foods, their language, their histories, their towns, their commerce, and their culture have been systematically erased. It is also important to note that the history of Jewish opposition to Zionism and to the creation of Israel was also erased. Before the Jewish holocaust there was substantial opposition among Jews to Zionism. Over seventy years later, at this very moment, the Israeli lobby and the US government are pushing the narrative that being an anti-Zionist is the same as being antisemitic. The stories in this book vividly challenge that dangerous notion. In fact, many of our Jewish storytellers assert that they are anti-Zionist not in spite of their Jewishness but because of their Jewishness.
Rooted in this historical context, we in New York City Jewish Voice for Peace began an exploration of our individual and collective relationships to this history. We began by telling each other what we learned growing up and how we began to see the experiences of the “other.” We wrote our stories down and found that our original, mostly Jewish stories were not only fascinating but also hopeful in their demonstration of the human capacity to “see” in new ways and to look courageously at what has been done in the name of all Jews. These thirteen stories became a small book called Confronting Zionism. As the book began to get wider distribution, it became clear to me that the stories were crying out to be performed and that we had an obligation to look fearlessly at this history, to begin the process of taking responsibility, to commit to the spiritual transformation that Noura Erakat describes in her Foreword and to change the dominant narrative by reclaiming the stories that must be told. Thus, the reader’s theater piece, “Wrestling with Zionism,” was born. Then a wonderful thing happened. Many of our Palestinian friends and partners (both Christian and Muslim) asked if they could tell their stories as part of this theater piece. If it takes courage for Jews to risk being called “self-hating” when they question Zionism, imagine what it takes for Palestinians to come out and say how their lives have been impacted by the State of Israel. Some of them have been threatened, they have been put on blacklists, one of our writer’s children has been threatened. In this context the act of telling your story becomes an act of resistance.
There is something magical that happens in the telling of these stories. Storytelling isn’t a polemic, it’s not an ideological fight, it’s the telling of a real person’s lived experience. And in the performance of that story, the storyteller and the audience are both changed. We have no interest in pretending that this is about equal groups of people who can’t get along. This is about power and the use of power to destroy an entire people. We are proud that we don’t flinch from that. And because of that, each time we have performed the piece, the conversations that ensue build empathy and community—something that is so difficult to accomplish when people argue about the “facts.”
A Land With A People is a project of solidarity. While the contributors to this volume have arrived at a similar place of renouncing Zionist ideology and its consequences for people’s lives, they have done so from diverse backgrounds and perspectives. Among our Jewish authors and poets, some grew up in observant religious households, others in secular and even anti-religious ones. Some are Israeli, some are white Ashkenazi, some have Mizrahi or Sephardi family origins (descending from the Middle East and North Africa or Iberia). My own family origins are both Jewish and Palestinian. Our other Palestinian authors and poets include Muslim, Christian, and secular backgrounds and, like the Jewish authors and poets, are both queer and straight. They trace roots through Palestine, Syria, Jordan, Puerto Rico, Honduras, Ohio, and Brooklyn. Three authors grew up in Gaza, and one is still living and working there. Their stories vividly illustrate how they and their family members struggle to keep close their connection to relatives in the occupied West Bank, Gaza, and Jerusalem and to Palestinian landscapes, life, and culture, despite exile and multiple barriers.
A Land With A People is the progeny of the earlier book, Confronting Zionism, as well as of our reader’s theater. But with Palestinian stories, poems, and photos intertwined with Jewish stories, poems, and photos, it becomes an entirely new and different publication. In addition, we have deliberately intertwined the stories of ordinary people with those of well-known writers as part of illuminating how Zionism has affected their daily lives.
As a Palestinian Jew (whose story is included here), it has been my honor to be a part of this project. I couldn’t be prouder of all that this work has generated and of the writers, storytellers, editors, artists, performers, producers, filmmakers, and the audiences who have allowed themselves to stretch, to explore, to question their biases and to be touched through honoring the stories of “Others.”
In these times, that gives me hope.