Note:
Twenty years ago I wrote an
article for the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs entitled, “
Alone Among My Peers at My Yeshiva University High School Reunion,” outlining my
political evolution from Zionism to anti-Zionism. The good news and the bad news
is that the main theme seems as relevant as ever.
I’ve since made a number of
mostly minor edits, annotated a couple of historical references and I’ve added a
paragraph defining Zionism.
**
***
1992,
2012
Alone Among My
Peers at My Yeshiva University High School Reunion
From Zionism to
Anti-Zionism: A Personal Journey
by Ronald
Bleier
In the spring of 1990 I was one
of some forty men and a handful of spouses who attended a reunion on the
occasion of the 30th anniversary of the graduation of 75 young men in 1960 from
Yeshiva University High School of Brooklyn. In the congratulatory atmosphere of
renewed camaraderie that suffused those few hours on a blustery Sunday afternoon
in April, not a word of politics was spoken. Nevertheless I found myself deeply
isolated because, from the many references to Israel by my former classmates, I
suspected I was alone among my peers in my support for self-determination and
justice for the Palestinian people.
At Crown Heights Yeshiva, my
elementary school in Brooklyn, we were all, as a matter of course, indoctrinated
in Zionist ideology. As was usual among yeshivas in those days, we all received
pale blue and white Jewish National Fund coin solicitation boxes to raise money
in support of Israel. I remember the day one of my fourth grade classmates, a
tough little guy named Martin, broke into tears because our rabbi insisted that
he take a new coin box and turn in the already heavy old one before Martin could
fill it to the top.
I recall my confusion by the
assertion of one of my rabbis in elementary school that Israel was not an
expansionist state, and had no designs on the territory of the surrounding Arab
countries. Until then I had no idea that anyone had charged Israel with
aggression against its neighbors; nor did I understand how Israel could change
its borders. At the same time, I was surprised, when for the first time I saw on
a map the tiny size of Israel compared to its neighbors and especially when
compared to the vastness of the United States. I was also pained at the way the
Jordanian-controlled West Bank jutted out into Israeli territory, taking away so
much of "our land."
I didn't question my belief in
Zionism for almost a decade after my yeshiva training. After I graduated
Brooklyn College in 1964, I joined the Peace Corps and served for two years as
an English teacher in Iran. I came to know individual Iranians in ways that I
knew my friends and family back home. No longer could I dismiss Iranians and
others as faceless third world people irrelevant to me and my
concerns.
My Peace Corps experience,
however, did not immediately alter my Zionist views. During the 1967 war I
recall my joy and exultation at what I considered a wonderful victory for Israel
and for the Jewish people. I was spending an academic year at Reading
University, not far from London, when, shortly after the war, in a blaze of
enthusiasm and naiveté, which still mortifies me, I approached two Egyptian
students and asked them if they didn't agree that the Israeli victory
established the basis for a lasting peace. "Never," they responded with the
greatest passion. "We will never give up. We will continue to
fight."
A few weeks later I had my
first political discussion about Israel with someone with strong anti- Zionist
views. Lunching with a lecturer in the English Department, I was shocked to hear
that she felt the Israeli victory was a disaster for Middle East peace. She went
on to explain that in her view the very establishment of the Jewish state was
profoundly unjust. I disagreed with her very strongly. I couldn't understand how
a progressive person could attack the state of Israel on
principle.
Nevertheless, the views of my
British interlocutor may have set the stage for the cognitive dissonance I
experienced following the 1967 war. During the 1969-70 "war of attrition" I was
amazed and dismayed to read in the New York Times that Israeli planes
were dropping bombs ten miles outside of Cairo! The Times printed a map
with Cairo at the center of a bull's eye. The circles around the area showed how
close to the city center the bombs were falling. As I read of the destruction of
schools and factories and the loss of life I found my pro-Israeli views
stretched to the limit.
Fear
of Menachem Begin
As a committed Zionist, I put
doubts about Israeli policy as far from the center of my consciousness as I
could until the June 1977 elections in Israel approached. I remember asking a
friend at the time: "Is it possible that Menachem Begin will actually become
prime minister?"
Begin was the charismatic
founder and leader of the right wing Likud party. I regarded him with the kind
of fear and loathing that I felt for Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan. I was
particularly distressed when, in the aftermath of Begin's election victory, the
powerful American Jewish community didn't rise up in protest against the
redoubling of Israeli settlement and land annexation policies. Menachem Begin
helped me to understand, perhaps for the first time, that there was a government
in Israel that was not interested in a peaceful solution to the conflict with
the Arabs.
At the time I attributed
Menachem Begin's belligerent attitude to his annexationist, greater Israel world
view. So I was surprised to read an op-ed article in the Times which
argued that even if the Labor party were to take back power in the upcoming 1981
elections, there would be no significant change in the basic policy of an
indefinite military occupation of Palestinian territory. I began to understand
that there was no fundamental difference between the Likud and the Labor parties
because the policies of both were rooted in a huge injustice that was done to
the Palestinians when Israel was established.
My developing understanding led
me to explore the meaning of Zionism. I understood that proponents defined it as
the national movement for a Jewish “homeland.” But that definition omitted
consideration of the political and civil rights of the non- Jewish residents. I
came to understand that the ideology that a Jewish state should replace the
former Palestine – my own definition of Zionism -- meant in practice and also in
theory, the expulsion of the bulk of the non-Jewish residents and the
restriction to second class citizenship and military occupation for those who
remained.
By 1982, like many concerned
Israelis and Americans, I could see war coming again. The absence of a
legitimate casus belli did not hinder the Begin government's defense
minister, Ariel Sharon, from invading an essentially defenseless Lebanon that
June.
The Palestinian
Refugees
The media spotlight on the 1982
attack on Lebanon illuminated the terrible cost in lost and devastated
Palestinian and Lebanese lives and helped me to focus on the effects of Israeli
policy, in particular, on the Palestinian refugees. In my yeshivas, the
Palestinian refugees were never humanized as people with legitimate rights to
self-determination. As a result, I started out with the vaguest of notions of
who they were and how they came to be where they were.
From time to time as I was
growing up, I would notice media references to Palestinian doctors or diplomats
or lawyers. I couldn't understand how they managed to become members of the
professional classes. I had imagined them as poor and miserable denizens of
awful refugee camps, out of whose ranks arose the terrorists who stubbornly
refused to allow the people of Israel to live in peace.
Media reports that 20,000
Palestinian and Lebanese were killed and that many more thousands were made
refugees by Israel's war against Lebanon led me to reconsider the original
Palestinian refugees of 1948. I realized that some of the Palestinian refugees
so recently uprooted in Lebanon must be the same people the Israeli military
forced out of their homes and lands in Northern Palestine in the 1948 war -- --
termed the “War of Independence” by Israelis, and the “Nakba,” “the great
catastrophe” by Palestinians.
That was the first time I
recognized the phenomena of refugees expelled from their homes multiple times by
the Israelis. I began to realize that just as there were many thousands of
Palestinian refugees in Lebanon, there were hundreds of thousands of Palestinian
refugees in Jordan, Syria and the Gaza Strip who were forced out in 1948 and
1967. And, contrary to my previous notion that the Arab countries had stabbed
the Palestinians in the back, I realized that neighboring Arab countries were
forced to expend limited resources on the Palestinian refugees ever since Israel
expelled them.
In 1987, when I read Simcha
Flapan's The Birth of Israel: Myths and Realities, I was so confused that
it took me a second reading to come to terms with what he wrote at the outset:
that the 1948 war was as needless and unnecessary for the "security" of Israel
as was the Israeli invasion of Lebanon of 1982. Flapan argues that the Arabs
were unprepared for war and would have eagerly reached an accommodation with the
new Jewish state if only the Israelis would have been willing to reach an
agreement on territory and the Palestinian refugees.
I learned that, according to
this so-called revisionist view, the 1948 war was not defensive, but an
opportunistic, proactive war waged by the Israelis to gain more territory than
the U.N. had allotted for the Jewish state and to "cleanse" the area of
Palestinians. I learned that even before the May 15, 1948 declaration of the
State of Israel, Jewish forces had succeeded in expelling some 300,000
Palestinians from their homes. Yet another 400,000 Palestinians remained in
areas that the Jews coveted. Since the Jewish population of Palestine in 1948
was about 600,000, the Israeli leadership decided on war in order to rid the new
state of most of its Arab population.
It took me twenty years, but I
finally decided that my British lunch companion was right.
By demonizing Palestinians we
were essentially blaming the victims of expulsion and land acquisition policies
followed by Ben-Gurion's and every successive Israeli regime. Such policies
demanded endless belligerence and war, and explain why Israel's leaders were
determined to build a nuclear arsenal. The Israelis understood from the
beginning that they required the military power to prevail against the
supporters of those who wished to regain their
territory.
I returned home from my class
reunion convinced that I would find no understanding there for my defense of
Palestinian rights. I understood that many of my former classmates championed
the state of Israel, and blinded themselves to the crimes committed in its name,
because they too were seared by the Holocaust that traumatized their parents'
generation. But couldn't they see that by politically and financially supporting
persecution and oppression, they were perpetuating that which they professed to
abhor?
At my reunion I found no
opportunity to talk politics. If there had been, I doubt that I would have found
others ready to question with me why there should be an exclusively Jewish state
in Palestine rather than a sharing of the land by all of its people. Perhaps
this article will be my way of challenging my classmates and others to take a
similar journey. I would invite them to join me on a path that substitutes
friendship and peace for the arrogance of power and the yoke of
oppression.
***
