My First Long-Term Relationship
As a kid I spent 8 to 10 weeks every summer happily shipped off to Habonim Dror’s Camp Na’aleh, kibbutz-themed bliss. We sang folk songs around the campfire, everyone was assigned a daily work group, and the oldest, coolest person I could imagine–the head of the camp–was some senior at Wesleyan, Oberlin, or a SUNY.
Sometimes my relationship with Habonim was fraught. Sometimes I hated it and wasn’t involved at all. Other years it was the center and it was everything. Looking back, it’s probably most accurate to say it was the longest non-family relationship in my life. How lucky I was to have had such a meaningful entanglement with the group of ideas, stories & people that make up “the movement” (as we called it).
Beyond my personal trajectory, Habonim has always been something bigger too. Habos have long been struggling with the most challenging questions facing the Jewish community. And where the classroom shields kids from consequence, the movement exists in the real world. We built kibbutzim, we marched with civil rights activists, and we sculpted a new Jewish education fit for the modern world. We moved with passion.
A Breaking Point
There are more than enough challenges for Habonim in the 21st century: assimilation, the alignment of many in the Jewish community with wealth and privilege, increasing inequality and racism within the Jewish community to name a few. And these are the moments the movement should shine. These are the moments when a group of kids, looking at the truth of the matter without pretension, will surprise and amaze you. Blink and they’re creating new forms of Jewish expression, philosophy and life. The forms we didn’t even know we needed but now cannot live without.
And yet as of late the dialogue and the conversation in Habo have taken on a muted tone. As the years drag on it feels like there’s less and less to say. And while some have questioned whether an organization like this wasn’t meant to last this long, I think there’s something else worth saying: Zionism died and no one held a funeral.
Since the beginning, Zionism has been at the center of the movement. Some Habos built kibbutzim while others chose to actively disengage from any of that crap. Some created American protest movements against the occupation, others created American Jewish spaces in spite of Israel. Whether you agreed or disagreed, Jewish nationalism was the conversation. And its energy reverberated outwards, animating everything else.
But here in 2023, this is no longer the case. And while it will be a herculean task to pinpoint the exact time of death, one I will leave to future historians, the obvious can no longer be ignored: Zionism is dead. There’s no more going back to ‘48, ‘67, or ‘95. We’ve reached the end of the road and whether or not you like what you see, you can no longer deny that it’s complete.
In Habonim we were taught to be dreamers, to be the ones thinking outside the box and demanding more. But at some point dreaming looks a lot like blindness. Willful ignorance is not a virtue. And while those left at the altar of Habonim are trying to pretend everything is OK, the silence has grown deafening.
It’s Only Personal
I remember, a few years ago, sitting in my partner’s backyard during a Rosh Hashanah seder. It was the early days of the pandemic and we had to sit outside to be together. On a warm, Southern California evening I remember giggling as my partner’s dad translated the prayers said during the seder from biblical Hebrew into English for us. We pray that … you will make our haters go away. We pray that … you will vanquish our haters. We pray that … hmm … also that you will make our haters go away.
My partner’s dad was born in Jerusalem to Holocaust survivors. Not long after the war, his parents - my partner’s grandparents - decided to leave Hungary for Israel. I’m not sure if they considered themselves to be Zionists, or even cared to think in such terms. Regardless, they performed the most sacred actualization of Zionism - aliyah (moving, or ascending, to the land of Israel). In doing so they moved to a land where they could teach their kids the same prayers they had learned before the Shoah, to a neighborhood where countless other families were finding ways to be renewed. And 70 years later, having lived in Southern California for almost 40 years, my partner’s dad still says that their house in the Rehavia neighborhood of Jerusalem is the only place that will ever truly feel like home to him.
There’s a common narrative in some circles of young Jews today. It says that Zionism is simply racism. Sometimes it goes so far as to say there is no such thing as Israelis, their food or their culture. It says that everything that ever happened under the banner of Zionism should be sent back to wherever it came from. When I hear these sentiments I think of my partner’s dad. While I hesitate to use the word extreme, I’m not sure what else to call such breezy denials of existence. Zionism, the movement that birthed a nation and has become a daily nightmare of violence and authoritarianism, deserves a more nuanced telling.
Last Will and Testament
For many decades, a history of colonial practices, massacres and oppression, towards both Palestinians and Arab Jews, was intentionally written out of the Zionist history books. There was a cancer at the heart of the Zionist movement and it was hidden from us. In response, many young people have spent their familial and social capital attempting to write those truths back into the historical record.
And at the same time, Zionism meant and did so much for so many. It would be easier if any proposed good was just lies masking inter-generational trauma. But Zionism saved lives as it took them, and it built the physical and social infrastructure of a new Jewish existence.
Instead of telling both sides of this story, my Jewish community has moved into a cycle of mutual denial. Those striving for moral clarity actively deny any virtue to our failed liberation movement. And those on the other side, at a loss for words in the face of the daily nightmare of fascism and apartheid, plug their ears, crying NO.
In the face of this cycle, some groups have attempted to reframe the debate. To search for common ground in the facts of occupation and apartheid rather than continue to fight over ideological framings. And they have made a real dent, opening hearts and minds throughout our community, standing firm and demanding change.
But even these efforts have their limits. Because beyond the increasingly vapid utopias of Habonim summer camp, the Jewish left is asleep at the wheel and to many, Judaism itself feels increasingly empty. Eventually we have to face what remains: there’s no more dancing around Zionism. We can’t ignore our broken hearts any more - it is time for the funeral.
Funerals are not meant to pass judgment; rather, they are the shared space for our grief - and we all had our own relationships with Zionism. Those who were hurt, those who were maimed and stolen from, or those who were saved and given a second chance. I want to hear an honest accounting of Zionism, our shared vessel.
A Life Lived in Denial
Over the past months, unimaginably large portions of Israeli society and the Jewish community in America have been in upheaval and unrest. They are fighting against a proposed change to the legal infrastructure of Israel, brought forward by the furthest right government in Israeli history. Many claim it will be the end of Israeli democracy. As I write this now, thousands are settling into a newly constructed protest encampment outside of parliament in the same city my partner’s dad still calls home.
To many progressives, the split screen nature of reality in this moment can only be described as maddening. The protestors, giving their everything to the moment, are ablaze in an attempt to save what is already dead. Instead of looking at the Israeli army invading Palestinian cities with helicopters, or the wave of murders and violence facing Palestinian citizens of Israel, they cling to the barricades for this?!
Yet through the flames, the protestors, a screen unto themselves, march on. Like the Habos of my youth, so many are blind to the futility of their mission. They are teachers, doctors, friends, and fathers who translate prayers in funny ways to make their daughters laugh. And the persistence of their movement is a testament to the depths of their hope; that Zionism could have, and can still, somehow bring peace and justice to the people between the river and the sea.
Builders and Dreamers
My partner’s dad’s passport says he was born in Jerusalem. He was born in 1951, during the years when Jerusalem was divided between Jordanian and Israeli control, and as such, his passport lists no country of origin. From the day he was born he has lived in contestation.
I should be honest and lay my cards on the table. It is my personal opinion that Zionism was as predestined to destroy Israeli democracy as it was to try and conquer Palestine. And still, as my heart aches at the decades long deluge of violence facing Palestinians I, not more than or less than but also, feel for the Zionists who have only known lives within this contestation, and for whom Zionism has maybe both saved and condemned them at once.
In many ways I fear these intersecting truths are heavier than IfNotNow, Habonim, JVP, or any group on the Jewish left is willing and prepared to hold. As much as some sacrificed by calling out #younevertoldme, as clear eyed as others were drawing connections between racist policing in Palestine and America, as much as the Habos struggled dreaming of a progressive, socialist, labor, justice, whatever else Zionism, I don’t know if we are prepared for what must come next.
There are millions of American and Israeli Jews who invested themselves and were born into in a Zionism they believed could save us all. Many of them built good and real things amongst the horror that was sown. And now we have to tear down the hulking monster seething in the space where their dreams once lived.
As Zionism comes to an end, we must make space for a new type of person willing to fight for freedom and dignity for Israelis and Palestinians wherever they call home. It will be hard but we need to imagine, make space for, wrestle with, and hold their grief. These people, trapped and in love with Zionism, are partners we cannot afford to move forwards without.
There are two things I am sure about in this conflict: that Palestinians will continue to fight for and defend themselves and that Israel, the obscene husk of Zionism, will continue its descent into madness. In the face of this reality, we, the left, are a question mark. So to those brave and big-hearted among us, our community needs us now more than ever. To address the dead elephant in the room. Only then will we learn to build and dream once more.