Gaza and the Undoing of Zionism

From Hagiography to Reckoning, This Jew’s Path Toward Rejection of Zionism

In Perpetual Nakba I was raised on Zionist hagiography. As I have noted in past social media posts and internet essays, my late mother was a Holocaust survivor. To wit, belief in the Zionist project was a key aspect of my family’s coping methods in regard to navigating survivors’ trauma. But, over the years, I resolved to engage the situation on a deeper level. As my perspective deepened, I grasped an innate and tragic flaw in the Zionist projec…

Gaza and the Undoing of Zionism

During a sabbatical I spent in West Jerusalem in the late 1980s, my 7-year-old daughter was enrolled in an Israeli school. One day, she came home and could not find her tricycle anywhere. “Arabs must have stolen it,” she said. We later found the tricycle behind the building, but her immediate assumption gave me pause. Just a few months in, an Israeli school had already planted seeds of anti-Arab prejudice in her young mind. In response, I took h…