Zeide Survived the Holocaust and All I Got Was This Colonial Ethnostate
[Hillel] saw a skull floating on the surface of the water. He said to it: because you drowned others, you were drowned. And in the end, those who drowned you will also be drowned.
—Pirkei Avot 2:6
When I think of my early exposure to Zionism, I think of a man I’ll call Phil. My father’s best friend, whose stern, blocky face and sapphire eyes often filled out the space at our Shabbat dinner table. Later, I would realize he looked startlingly like Anthony Bourdain. Although he was, in his way, kind, I do not remember him as such. Instead, I recall the fire in his gaze when he spoke with my father, and the way my father was, in turn, like an acolyte soaking up with complete credulity everything the man had to say. Never had I seen him affected in this manner. I was the son of a Navy veteran and bodybuilder, an entrepreneur and adventurer. Gentle, as men go, but never one to second himself to another. I’d watch him lean in toward Phil, soaking up each word with a reverence usually reserved for rabbis. It seemed my father wanted to be Phil, to embody his zealous charisma, and this left an impression on me. It made me fear Phil in the same measure my father admired him.
Phil and my father were both ardent Zionists, believers in the Jewish homeland, but Phil argued for his vision with an unflinching passion that my father, a convert to the faith, could not match. Phil spoke of the suffering his own father had experienced during the Shoah before following a circuitous route to America. This, he would say, dropping a leaden fist to the table and destabilizing the wine glasses, is why Israel must exist. Never again will our people be routed and humiliated. In this conception, there was a sense of virility inherent to the Israeli identity, a reinvigoration discovered after the emasculatory wounds inflicted by Hitler. It was not only our lives the dictator had taken, but our vitality. As Phil described this reclamation, I sensed in his language that to be an old-world Jew was to be effete and servile. The Israeli was contrastingly masculine. He took what was rightfully his at the point of a gun. This was why Israel would not succumb to another Hitler. It would not allow itself that same lily-livered weakness, that passive propensity to servitude which European Jewry had for so many centuries allowed to fester.
This tended to offend me, conjuring images of my maternal grandfather, the man I called Zeide. Yes, a survivor of the Shoah. Yes, an effete, soft-spoken European whose German voice never rose above room temperature, whose frilly sensibilities led him to decorate his apartment with doilies and bronze statuettes, who ate his meals with a prim table etiquette, who worked as a jeweler selling pieces as delicate as himself in a rose-pink showroom, and whose most ecstatic moments came during the hour of recorded operas on tape he indulged in before bed. Zeide seemed implicated in Phil’s ire, blamed for his own suffering.
Sometime after 9/11 but prior to my bar mitzvah, Phil recruited my father to give a series of lectures on the threat posed by the Islamic world to the West. At the time, I would have been more readily able to explain the geopolitics of the Lego Bionicle universe than those of Earth, but the thesis, more or less, was that “Islamists” would not be satisfied until the whole world was subject to their barbaric way of life. We would be dragged back into the 10th century, insisted my father. A crescent flag would fly from the White House. Et cetera.
Phil also recruited my father to another righteous cause, though not a political one. His brother had invested heavily in a pyramid scheme selling magnet-lined mattress pads and pillows, several of which Phil sold along to my father, who now swore by them as the cure to his lifelong, chronic back pain.
A man who lived by his convictions, who slept on the same snake-oil mattress pads he sold to my father, Phil moved to Israel just prior to my bar mitzvah. But the core cities like Jerusalem and Tel Aviv would not do, nor would the coastal resort towns of Eilat or Netanya. For a man determined to embody the strength of Israel, only the settlements would suffice. So it was that, in the years to follow, my family came to visit Phil’s in the West Bank town of Efrat.
Traveling to Efrat requires a winding route by car. To avoid being stopped at checkpoints, one must have Israeli plates denoting Jewish citizenship. Still, a checkpoint is passed through, an ID sometimes checked. After that minor inconvenience, another twenty-minute drive through the desert in the direction of the Dead Sea. On one side of the road, a stark cliffside, and on the other, a concrete wall. I do not think, during these drives, to ask what lies beyond the wall. I know there are Palestinians there, and that is answer enough. The danger is contained over there. As the town nears and the wall gives way somewhat, Palestinian men herd donkeys on the road’s shoulder.
The town itself sits barely southwest of Bethlehem, at nearly the lowest elevation on the globe. Its borders on a map enclose less than two-and-a-half square miles and look vaguely like a circumcised penis connected to a tuft of pubic hair. It has been advertised to Americans as a family-centric community, a place to raise children, and that is what Phil has done. His daughters are fluent in Hebrew, and his grandchild, who is perhaps four on our first visit, does not speak English. We unload our suitcases, and the first thing I notice is how quiet everything is. Birds sing in the distance, and the sinking sun illuminates a grove of olive trees off on a hillside. “It is so peaceful,” my mother remarks. “I could envision a whole life for us here.”
Efrat is beautiful, but haunted, as anything built on occupied land inevitably is, since it cannot completely erase the ghosts left behind by its self-mythologizing revisions of history. Build a new house atop a mass grave, move into it, and you will feel that same, sublime terror. Apartments built with Jerusalem stone, meant to evoke an ancient past, betray their own intended meaning, too new and shiny to convey any actual history. The contrast of all this new development against the miles of ramshackle Palestinian towns is eerie. It’s too quiet up here, as if the people who live nearby fear being heard. A single shout would flood the streets with reverb until it became as loud as an avalanche. A pervasive feeling of unheimlich rattles me. I feel far from civilization and estranged from reality. Left to my own devices, I’d be in Tel Aviv looking for a party, not holed up in this model house of a town. I stuff my earbuds defensively in my ears and bury myself in the latest Jay-Z album.
On Friday evening, I walk to shul with Phil and my father. They’re having a one-sided conversation —Phil explaining the WikiLeaks scandal, my dad in thrall —and I’m wondering when the Oxycontin I snorted in the bathroom before we left is going to hit, which it obligingly does as we file into the pews.
What I notice about the shul are two things. First, it feels even newer than the rest of the town. Everything is done up in a bright pine, freshly varnished, making me feel less like I’ve entered a house of God and more like I’m about to buy an iPod. Second, there are more guns than I’ve ever seen in a house of worship. Each seat back has two holsters: one for a siddur and one for an assault rifle. It is the peak of the Iraq War. Western media is awash in imagery like this, except the people shown praying with their weapons are always in a mosque.
It is Sunday, and my family has a pilgrimage to make. One enters the exhibition wing of the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem through a cafe that serves excellent coffee and which is, given the weight of the place, understandably light on themed décor. Were it called “The Red Eye to Treblinka,” I’d be less inclined to order a latte. Once the caffeine drinkers among us are sufficiently jittery, we enter the main exhibit to have our generational trauma dredged up.
The exhibit traces the horrors of the Shoah from pre-Nazi Europe to the liberation of the camps by the Allied forces. I have grown up with the terror of the Nazi regime firmly embedded in my psyche, heard the stories from Zeide and my mother, seen the pictures in old photo albums and innumerable documentaries. I have met many other survivors and learned their stories, too. And still, nothing prepares me for Yad Vashem. What the museum communicates better than any other medium is the feeling of having one’s identity group targeted for destruction, of going from being a respected citizen of the free world to being rounded up and killed. The implication is clear. It could happen anywhere.
The exhibit is a masterwork of experiential architecture. The long, triangular building is located mostly underground, with a long rail of skylight running its length that shrinks in size as the exhibit moves along, designed so the walls move inward as I progress through the dreadful history of my great-grandparents’ extermination. Too, the floor slopes downward along the narrow length of the building, and the path through is a zig-zagging walkway cut through with bridges placed at abrupt angles across a moat through the long center. The cumulative psychological effect is one of a slowly rising panic that surges in my gut and feels like sediment between my teeth.
By the time the exhibit portrays Jews led in death marches by the retreating Nazis as Allied forces pushed through Europe and liberated the camps, the architecture itself seems to choke me. Then I exit the exhibit, and the true purpose of the museum is revealed. The violent triangle opens up into a wide and welcoming balcony with a sweeping view of the Jerusalem hillsides. I suck in air as if breathing it for the first time, balmy and rich with Mediterranean terroir. From the horrors that rendered us powerless to the welcoming embrace of the homeland which gave us strength: the Zionist narrative reimagined as an immersive experience.
After the main exhibit, visitors are directed to see the Hall of Names, which preserves records of those slain. My mom wonders aloud if her father’s lost family from Berlin are recorded here. She will later find documents and photos in the archives belonging to her great aunt and uncle, their children, and her great-grandparents, all murdered in Auschwitz.
Have we mourned the Shoah properly? Certainly we have learned about it, been told which of our relatives were put into mass graves or ovens, and absorbed historical records, but have we actually processed it?
Trauma, over the past several years, came wildly into vogue and then faced a backlash. It seems we collectively discovered the lasting effect trauma can have on a person, made it the central focus of our narrative media, then decided it was reductive to focus on. We did not want to be defined by our most painful moments, categorized as victims, and treated like broken-winged birds. The “trauma novel” went out of fashion.
But those of us who descend from survivors know that analyzing a person’s trauma is not reductive. Trauma is a force that invades and tears asunder. It alters us at a genetic level, passes itself through bloodlines, and survives like a parasite in subsequent generations.
In Philip Roth’s novel, The Counterlife, the writer Nathan Zuckerman travels to Israel in search of his brother, Henry, who has abandoned his family to live in a West Bank settlement. In Jerusalem, he meets a fan of his named Jimmy, who brings a gun and a grenade onto the flight back to New York. Jimmy is planning to hijack the plane with a demand to the Israeli government that Yad Vashem be shuttered. His demand letter declares, “Never must we utter the name ‘Nazi’ again, but instead strike it from our memory forever. No longer are we a people with an agonizing wound and a hideous scar.” As he explains to Nathan before being arrested by the Mossad, Israel is blamed for its sins because it reminds goyim of their complicity in genocide. “We are torturing ourselves with memories!” Jimmy says. “With masochism! And torturing goyich mankind!”
In trying to reconcile the narrative of Zionism, Jimmy has driven himself to madness. There is no sane way to square the narrative that Jews, after surviving a genocide, deserve an ethnostate in which others are persecuted in turn. That he has singled out Yad Vashem as the object of his ire is understandable. It is an architectural expression of the Zionist logic which has driven him mad.
Every tenth-grade class at my Jewish day school takes a six-week trip to Israel at the end of the fall semester dubbed the Hebrew Immersion Program. Because there are only 16 people in my grade, this is very manageable. The trip is not, on its face, a vacation. We stay at Midreshet Ben Gurion, a desert kibbutz tucked into the wastelands of the Negev, its name given because David Ben Gurion, the founding father and first prime minister of Israel, lived and was buried here. His gravesite sits on the edge of the small town, atop a cliffside overlooking the arid mountains. He is buried alongside his wife, and their headstones look like two large altars, each large enough for a person to lie atop. I am told by high school students here—an exchange program with the high school is the ostensible reason for our visit—that people do just that. It is tradition for students to lose their virginity atop the Ben Gurion headstones under cover of night but, spoiler alert: though the concept intrigues me, fortune does not favor my teenage libido.
Within days, I am given a nickname by the two Israeli boys my friends and I are hanging out with. “Hamudi.” Cutie, or, in this context, shorty. Conjugated in the diminutive, it is equal parts insult and term of endearment. It is strange for me to consider that these boys will be soldiers within two years, but they are already gearing up to play the part. They are rough in the ways that boys, hoping to be seen as men, always are. Casually, they explain the Hebrew slang term for gay sex, “stirring the chocolate,” and fantasize viscerally about the girls they school with.
Our stay at the Midrashah is well timed. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is scheduled to speak at Ben Gurion’s gravesite. He gives his speech on the sandy cliffside overlooking Wadi Zin, which has become a symbol of Israel’s fortitude due to the harsh terrain. As my class files in that direction from the nearby boarding houses where we bunk, I wonder a few things. I wonder how much work it took on the part of the IDF battalion now swarmed across the burial park to clear the native ibex, which are as common here as pigeons. Too, I wonder whether the premier is aware that, just below the dais from which he will deliver his speech, there is a cave carved into the cliffside by monks during the 6th century which has been repurposed by the high school students into a hideaway for smoking weed and having sex.
The rooftop snipers, I think, are meant to be seen. Otherwise, I would not see them. But it’s hard to imagine their necessity here, in the middle of the desert, even more so in light of the hundreds of soldiers who have set up a perimeter around the event. In an Israeli stronghold surrounded on all sides by desert, there is no danger of an attack unless the ibex return to reclaim their home. This is not the security for a democratically elected leader. This is an event designed not to inspire, but to demonstrate military dominion over a conquered land.
I regret that I do not recall a single word of Netanyahu’s speech. It was in Hebrew, and I was getting consistent B-minuses in that subject. Deeply lodged in my memory, though, is the thought that I’d better not get up to go to the bathroom, lest an overzealous soldier think I’m planning to rush the stage.
We are holding a night lecture, sometime later, on Israeli film. The film being shown is Noodle, which follows an Israeli flight attendant who must reunite a Chinese boy with his mother after she gets deported from the Jewish homeland for not having her papers in order. It’s an overly sentimental work, dripping with a desperate liberalism that loses my attention the moment the premise clicks into focus, and we are having a round table discussion about it when a commotion breaks out near the classroom door. There are shouts and pounding, then the door busts open and figures in army fatigues swarm the room, their faces shrouded with keffiyehs. They are holding guns, and after they line us up against the wall, one of them yells, “Turn around.”
We oblige, and the would-be terrorists strip off their scarves to reveal the grinning faces of our Israeli student hosts. These guns, thankfully, are plastic. The teacher resumes her place at the head of the classroom. She tells us all to have a seat. She explains that what we have just experienced —some of us are still shaking—could happen at any moment to children at any Israeli school. This, we all agree, is an important lesson, and then we get dismissed. Within a few minutes we have moved on from the experience and back to what really matters: pursuing our crushes, pizza, or some weed.
Pretty fuckin’ weird, though, now that I think about it. Pretty. Fuckin’. Weird.
Slightly Northwest of Midreshet Ben Gurion and Sde Boker lies a Gadna camp, a military training facility built to prepare Israeli high school children for mandatory conscription after they graduate. Part of our immersive experience on this trip involves going through the same process they do. So, we file out of the kibbutz and make the short hike to the military camp. For the next week, we will sleep in tent barracks, eat in the mess hall, and spend our days running drills.
Colored balls replace live grenades in combat exercises. Israelis have cute names for everything horrifying. “Grenade” is “rimon”—pomegranate, the word yelled every time a colored ball is tossed into our midst and we duck for cover. We crawl the obstacle course, many of us making mistakes that would prove fatal in a real battle, and I feel the distinct sense that some of our Israeli commanding officers are going easy on us. The sense dissipates after we wake at 4:40 the next morning to shouts from the front. We are doing a threat preparedness drill; for all intents and purposes, the base is under attack from Iran/Hamas/the Purple People Eater. The line between theater and reality exists only when the actors know they are immersed in a fiction. We run to strategic positions and mime our defense.
Truthfully, I was a bit out of it the first time I visited Yad Vashem. So, when my class makes that pilgrimage, I’m ready to take it in from a more mature point of view —that of a 17-year-old. The first thing I do to display my newfound sense of gravity is order a drip roast, a good, austere coffee order.
The experientially evocative elements of the exhibit’s structure are more evident this time. Descending under the earth beneath 200 meters of reinforced concrete, the literal weight of this place is all I can feel. As we progress into the exhibit, I find myself focusing more on the light at the end of the tunnel, where the balcony over the hills offers a literal refuge from that weight. It’s all so on the nose, but then again, so was the Holocaust.
Swept into that light, thrust out onto the balcony, my eyes adjusting to the gleam of a low winter sun. Apartments litter the hillsides. Nothing bad could possibly happen here. And though I’ve seen the walls and checkpoints, the endless rifles and burned-out Palestinian villages, none of that could hope to interfere with the tranquility of Israeli Jerusalem.
Inside the exhibit, European Jewry is slaughtered like cattle. Outside, it is Israeli Jewry empowered to do the killing. In transforming Jews from their feminized, European form to their masculinized, Israeli form, Zionism follows the logic of sexual violence inherent in that hierarchical binary. For if to be feminine is to be dominated, to be penetrated and taken from—to have taken from you by force either sex or land,—and if to be masculine is to dominate, to penetrate and take—as these Israeli boys fantasize about the women they intend to have while preparing to patrol the stolen land on which they were raised—then Israel must dominate as a means of demonstrating its newfound Jewish masculinity.
Herein is contained the chauvinistic logic of settler colonialism. The colonizer draws his rifle against the native, who, by cowering before it, demonstrates femininity. By demonstrating femininity, the native demonstrates his place beneath the colonizer, thus justifying his subjugation and reproducing the colonizer’s masculine nature. It is no accident that colonizers have throughout history imported a rigid and hierarchical binary of gender as frequently as they exported cinnamon and oil, and nor is Israel’s case any different.
Indeed, bridges between feminist and colonial studies have identified the same link. In a paper published in the International Journal of Historical Archaeology, Suzanne M. Spencer-Wood traces the complex lines of power that double in form from patriarchal to colonial violence, concluding, “Feminist theories reveal how patriarchal power dynamics permeated all aspects of European colonialism and especially how these dynamics were enacted through colonial institutions.” By fashioning itself as a European colonial entity, and in its collective fear of being revictimized, Israel has reified these same dynamics.Philip Roth, whose reputation as a misogynist has always threatened to outshine his brilliance as a novelist, understood these dynamics innately and folded them into his fiction. In The Counterlife, Henry’s reason for absconding to Israel is that he has developed erectile dysfunction from a heart medication, thereby preventing him from cheating on his wife with his dental assistant. Never one to let a sexual subtext go denuded, Roth surmises via Zuckerman that Henry suffered a midlife crisis due to his emasculation, then ran to Israel, where he could playact at reclaiming a lost masculinity by strapping a gun to his belt:
Though maybe the key to understanding his pistol was simpler than that. Of all he’d said over lunch, the only word that sounded to me with any real conviction was “Wendy.” It was the second time in the few hours we’d been together that he’d alluded to his dental assistant, and in the same tone of disbelief, outraged that it was she for whom he’d risked his life. Maybe, I thought, he’s doing penance. To be sure, learning Hebrew at an ulpan in the desert hills of Judea constituted a rather novel form of absolution from the sin of adultery, but then hadn’t he also chosen to undergo the most hazardous surgery in order to keep Wendy in his life half an hour a day?
At an earlier point in the novel, Zuckerman muses, “[T]he state created by Jews in the aftermath of the Holocaust had become for them the belated answer to the Holocaust, not only the embodiment of intrepid Jewish strength but the instrument of justifiable wrath and swift reprisal.” In connecting the humiliations of the immigrant experience with the injured desire for Jewish vengeance after the Shoah, Roth slyly punctures through to the center of a libidinous frustration at the center of Zionism, tinged with the kind of religious zealotry that expresses primarily in sexually repressed and patriarchally conditioned men.
But, No, says Yad Vashem. These are not equivocal, and Jewish colonialism is a virtue. Jews were scattered into the wilderness of foreign lands. They were shipped around, chased down, murdered, and nearly exterminated. Now they are home, and there is no price that should not be paid to keep them safe. Look out at these hills if you doubt that all is in its rightful place. Is God not in his heaven?
Allow the Zionists to speak for themselves. Max Nordau, a progenitor of Zionist philosophy and a man so deeply mired in supremacist thinking that he helped to originate the concept of “degenerate art” which the Nazis would later rally around, summed this thinking up neatly, saying of the diasporic Jew in a speech to the Zionist Congress in 1897, “He becomes an inner cripple, and externally unreal, and thereby always ridiculous and hateful to all higher feeling men, as is everything that is unreal.” Brooklyn-born, Israeli tech entrepreneur Hillel Fuld dispensed with the academics and made the going throughline of Zionism chillingly clear. “The weak Jew who was led to the gas chambers? That Jew was left behind and now there’s a new Jew,” he posted to his 118,000 Twitter followers. “This new Jew has F16 fighter jets and Merkava Tanks. This Jew ain’t gonna take your crap.” Only through bloodthirstiness toward the Palestinians does Fuld see a way to escape the “unreal” ghetto Jew of Nordau’s conception. Only through the continued emasculation of the Palestinians does Fuld see a way to reclaim Jewish masculinity.
Birthright is probably the most ingenious idea anyone in the business of promoting a national agenda has ever come up with. Take a group of young people on a free trip to an exotic country, load them with booze and just enough free time to fuck, and they are guaranteed to leave singing “Hatikvah.” Perhaps they will even immigrate to Israel, a process that the state calls aliyah, ascension. The implication of the term is that a Jew living in Israel is on a higher spiritual plane than those who live in diaspora.
My group departs in December, 2016. By this point, my views on Israel have soured, though not enough for me to turn down a free trip, which I rationalize as taking the dinner meeting without intentions to make the deal. I still love the people, the landscapes, the food (especially the food. It is impossible to get decent shawarma in America, and once you’ve had the real deal, you’re ruined back home). But the elements of Israeli culture which gave me pause when I was younger are now crystalizing into something approaching an actual critique. There are too many guns for even an American to process, and there is too much chest pounding bound up in the Israeli sense of national identity. These things, I suppose, could be taken in stride were it not for the elephant in the room: apartheid. Israelis seem far too comfortable with the state of things, and that unsettles me. When pressed on the issue, they inevitably fall into a line of logic that frames Israel as having no choice in the matter.
It’s like this. I once asked my father, born in 1947 and raised a gentile in Chicago, how it was to live during Jim Crow. “Well,” he’d said, and then sputtered a bit before assuring me he was unequivocally not racist and had played basketball with Black kids in town. That anecdote is not in the service of pillorying my father, but rather to illustrate how easily people leave the systems that benefit them unexamined. How was it for a white boy to live during Jim Crow? It was to breathe air and go to school and play outside. It was life. To accept a racist regime of segregation is, in retrospect, despicable, so to be asked about why you did not question it is to be implicated in it, especially when it was, at the time, widely denounced by vast swaths of the country.
What I mean to say is that, on Birthright, I am wary. I understand quite well that free trips overseas don’t happen because Israel is generous, but because it wants to sell itself to young Jews, to ply them with food, drink, sightseeing, and romance, converting them to lifelong Zionists. Just because they bought me dinner doesn’t mean I’ll put out for a foreign government. Hell, I wouldn’t even put out for my own. And Birthright feels directly related to Palestinian apartheid since, were it not the reason Israel became a lightning rod, the country would not need to spend so much money convincing young, dumb, American kids to be its cheerleaders and future breeding stock.
On Birthright, everything is structured around a breakneck schedule. You are either doing an activity, getting drunk, or waking up to do it all again. There is no personal time or downtime, which I begin to interpret as a stopgap to prevent any real reflection. Moreover, as this is far from my first trip to Israel, everything is too familiar now. The Red Sea has stung my open wounds several times before, and so, too, has the open-air shuk in Haifa has drained my wallet for trinkets and the hike up Masada left me winded.
There’s a term coined on the Internet for the way a movie or TV show can cover up a plot hole by rushing past it: refrigerator logic. These are the issues with a piece of media that go unnoticed until you turn off the TV and head to the kitchen for a snack. Then, considering the events of the episode as you zone out in the light of your open refrigerator, you think, “Wait a minute.” Birthright is the same way. By the time you’re back in your college apartment getting over the virus you picked up on the flight home, it’s too late to question the narrative you were fed. Maybe I’d have been more receptive to that narrative, just like I had been on previous trips, had it all not felt like a rerun.
On my third trip to Yad Vashem, I try a different coffee order before the exhibit. There’s a frozen coffee drink ubiquitous in Israel, the closest analogue to which in the States might be a Starbucks Frappuccino. Except the Israeli version is sweeter, richer. It’s more like a coffee milkshake, and some cafes serve it with a scoop of ice cream. Over my many visits, I have begun to associate Israeli culture with this beverage. There’s a bitter undercurrent everywhere, but it is smoothed out with overly processed sugar.
The exhibit this time is not as impactful, and I begin to panic at my jadedness. I am no longer seeing the historical record of atrocities. Instead, I am thinking about how they have been presented to me.
From the start of the exhibit, I see the beacon of light at the other end, that place where the confined space opens up to reveal the glory of the promised land.
When we get there, gasping for breath as we stumble out onto that halcyon view, the group leaders take our photos. When we scroll through our phones to revisit this trip, we will have no pictures of the exhibit, but we will have ourselves, set against the immaculate blue skies and verdant hills of Jerusalem. None of the pain and all the glory of redemption.
Perhaps, I think, Yad Vashem is not a museum after all. Perhaps it is a warning, like the jagged metal spikes erected around atomic waste sites. “These Jews were weak,” it admonishes. “Do not be like them, or you will suffer their fate.” The lesson Zionism gleaned from the Shoah was not that genocide is wrong, but that it is wrong to be the victim of genocide.
As my photo is taken, as I plaster a big, unreal smile on for the camera and stare toward the Hall of Remembrance, I feel myself being drawn into that same web of madness felt by Roth and so many other Jews over the past three quarters of a century. In that Hall, the records of my zeide’s murdered family, along with those of so many others, are kept alive in service of a narrative I can no longer abide. Their paper-bound souls beg for freedom, to be laid truly to rest, but their cries are trapped beneath endless concrete. The tranquil hills rise around me like accusations, and beneath their verdant grasses simmers a sublime, magmatic violence.
What must now be said are the current facts, unvarnished by prose or the careful, overly coy façade of the essayist. As I write, over 30,000 Palestinians have been murdered in Gaza. With every word I add to the page, another falls to Israeli bombardment; my keystrokes sound like gunshots. This is the cost of revising history, of the fantasy of Israeli strength. It is the same cost paid by every nation that has tried to live out a past that does not exist. The only way to silence the screaming ghosts of those you have built your house upon is to slaughter more, with no end in sight.
To tie a brutal campaign of genocide to the Holocaust—there is no more odious a thing, no surer way to defile the memory of those who were killed. And Israel has shown consistently what it really thinks of survivors. Within Israel, one-third live below the poverty line. As a group, their voice holds little sway over Israeli politics.
Yad Vashem, too, seems less interested in survivors themselves than in how they can be leveraged in service of whitewashing Israel’s own crimes. One might expect that a Holocaust memorial would, at the least, remain neutral on the current slaughter of innocents, so as not to be seen laundering that monstrous chapter in the service of an ethically abhorrent cause. Instead, since October, the Yad Vashem YouTube channel has produced such puerile, intellectually bankrupt propaganda videos as “Contemporary Left Antisemitism,” which claims that anti-imperialism is akin to antisemitism, and four consecutive videos that barely contain their Islamophobia with titles including “Contemporary Holocaust Denial and Distortion in the Islamic World” and “From the Muslim Brotherhood to Contemporary Antisemitism in the Islamic World.”
The titles are almost quaint in their thinking, not so far off from the speeches my own father gave during the waning years of the Bush administration, yet deployed by Yad Vashem with such confidence that they almost seem sincere. It is easy to imagine those who work to produce this propaganda waiting impatiently for the last of the survivors to die out, dreaming of a time when none will remain to correct the many Zionist manipulations of the history they lived through.
Having already determined that victims of the Shoah were inferior to Israeli Zionists, having treated the remnants of those who survive as nuisances in the bread line, the only regard Israel can claim to hold for the memory of the Holocaust is as a rhetorical cudgel with which to browbeat its critics. But those of us who have studied the way fascism still carries its cruel echoes into the present day through the trauma enacted on our bloodlines intuitively feel its contours when they appear. We understand that an ultranationalism based on blood and soil is not magically made moral when taken up by a historically marginalized group of murderers. And when that tumorous ideology manifests anew, there is nothing more Jewish, more exonerating of one’s own humanity, than to oppose it.
I am told that my grandfather was grateful to the state of Israel, and that although he never visited, he did at times point to it as a silver lining of life after the Shoah. Having never exchanged a single political word with him before his passing, I cannot confirm those as his beliefs, and in that, I take some solace. I would like to hold space in my memory for a man who perhaps held a gentle sadness in his chest when the subject of Israel arose, the same as one might feel for a child who grew up to be handsome and brilliant, yet unrelentingly cruel. But when I occasionally break free of my romantic tendencies, I am sure he understood the Zionist state in the same light many from his generation and circumstance did: a win for the Jews after so many losses, and in our original home court, no less. The Jews had a seat at the table now. Even so, did he sense that it was not a seat for him? That he was the old model of Jew, considered outdated and faulty, and that a new one was here to replace him? Of that, I am less convinced.
I will never know what he thought, and it does not matter. I do know this: if every Holocaust survivor, to a person, were to support the genocide of Palestinians, it would not factor into the moral calculus. To the contrary, many have already spoken out against it, and in return they have been called kapos, the term for prisoners made to supervise other prisoners in German concentration camps.
On February 29, 2024, in Gaza, Israeli soldiers massacred 118 Palestinian refugees who were crowded around an aid truck to receive flour. I can’t even think of the bodies, only of all that flour coating the ground and clumping in all the places where it mixed with blood. And I’m thinking of Phil, because I know he’s sitting in his Jerusalem stone apartment and grinning like a motherfucker, with that same gleaming look in his eyes that left me quaking in my Shabbat shoes all those years ago.
And it’s enticing, isn’t it, that gleam? It has all the answers, all of which are uncomplicated. It knows who the enemies are and how to punish them. It tells you to take control of your own destiny with the point of a gun. It wants to build for you a mighty nation. But at its center is a kernel of fear that says, Either you hold a gun and grip tightly to it, or the world will point it at you once more. Stripped of your rifle, you will become the pathetic, easily preyed upon creature you fear your grandparents became in Europe. So, unless you want to prove that Jews are ghetto-minded and weak, you’d better start shooting. Only as long as the world fears you will it let you live.
It is understandable that this way of thinking took root in the Jewish community in the wake of the Holocaust. Hurt and scared people will take the most visible path to safety, and that is what the Zionist project seemed to promise. Instead, it unleashed unto a people even less fortunate than ourselves a wounded and traumatized Jewry. But understanding the Zionist mindset does not exonerate it, and it is long past time for a sober reassessment of our collective values.
In the millennia since our diaspora began, Jews have invented for ourselves innumerable ways of being. As the joke goes: two Jews, three opinions, and yet Israel has robbed us of the other two, forbidding us from envisioning alternatives to its all-consuming place at the center of our contemporary identity. When threatened, it evokes the Shoah. Without me, it says, you would be nothing. I saved you. You owe me. But a Zionist state was never the dream of the Jewish people in exile, no matter how forcefully Israel insists otherwise. This is the illusion of the abuser, the threat of the colonizer, the iron hand revealed from under the white-and-blue glove. To leave behind the familiar warmth of that grip is no easy thing, but the state, Israel, must be consigned to history so that those living on the land it occupies can be saved in the present.
Until recently, I did not understand why so many American Jews kowtow to the Israeli line so dogmatically—why people I’d considered friends since childhood blocked me on social media without saying a word when I dared question the response to October 7. Now, I understand that they do not see an alternative to a Jewish existence centered around Israel. One has never been presented to them. It is tempting to condemn those who cannot see beyond Israel’s “iron wall” (to borrow a term from Revisionist Zionist leader Ze’ev Jabotinsky), but those of us who wish to restore the full tapestry of color to the Jewish experience by tearing down that wall must meet our Zionist comrades with a radical empathy. Only by acknowledging the wounds Israel has refused to let scab over can we begin to heal as a people.
When the iron wall falls and what lies beyond it is visible once more, we will imagine new and better collective futures. I do not know what they will be, and in that unknown, there is an electric feeling of potential. Our possible futures will be strange, wonderful, and messy in the most Jewish of ways. We will invent them together. But first, we must persuade those who still believe the wall protects them to stand up and look beyond it.
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