Recently, while cleaning out my basement, I came across a picture of myself from 1983. The photo was taken at my Reform Movement Jewish summer camp, located on several acres of bucolic rolling hills along a clear lake in southeastern Wisconsin. That summer was easily one of the best and most formative of my childhood. I was 15.
But seeing the photograph again was unexpectedly jarring. The picture was our official group portrait: roughly 50 young teenagers of varying heights, some piled around a wooden tower, a sort of mini-Midwestern ziggurat. In the center of the tower hung an Israeli flag, taller than any of us. The flag is the only one in the picture and such a vivid reminder of the fact that the nation of Israel was front and center in our Jewishness.
The following summer, I traveled to Israel for two months. This, too, was quite a formative experience. My group consisted of 20 Jewish teenagers from the Chicago area and 20 Israeli teenagers from Jerusalem. I also found those photos during my basement cleaning: of us smiling and laughing as we toured Arab villages in Gaza; of me climbing around an abandoned Syrian bunker in the Golan Heights; of our tired faces after two exhausting days of mock basic training at the Galilee’s Tzalmon Gadna, an Israeli military training camp for youth. We learned that after years of expulsion and oppression, Jews were finally in charge of these lands. They were ours to celebrate and explore.
The concept of Israel as a nation-state was so deeply ingrained in my Jewish education and imagination that, for decades, it seldom occurred to me to ever question it. Growing up in the 1970s and ’80s, my formal Jewish education essentially centered on two themes: persecution and Israel. The themes were intertwined, since Jews had been persecuted throughout the ages and therefore deserved a homeland, and that homeland was Israel. The Jewish state, born out of a grave injustice — the Holocaust — was the rightful result of generations of oppression.
In religious school, I learned that all of the countries surrounding Israel were Israel’s enemy, and that was because of antisemitism — never mind that the people in the surrounding countries were also Semites, an antiquated term for speakers of Semitic languages, who are mostly Arab. I learned that Lebanese, Syrian, Jordanian (and, to a lesser extent, Egyptian) people were terrorists, who wanted nothing more than to abolish Israel simply because they hated Jews.
Another commonly accepted account was that Israel was a “tiny” piece of land that Jews were historically entitled to, that the land was there just waiting for us to return to it. That story was part biblical promise and part political solution. Nobody ever explicitly said it was uninhabited, but as a young child that is how it was crafted for me to picture it. It was a place where Holocaust refugees were entitled to be able to go — a place where they could collectively defend themselves against the uniquely abhorrent evils of antisemitism.
Of all the values I learned as a child, one of the strongest was to question things. But the themes of persecution and the need for a Jewish homeland were deeply embedded in me. These themes allowed me to dismiss any criticism of Israel as antisemitic, which is what my community had long modeled for me. Particularly on the point of Israeli Zionism, a questioning Jew was a self-hating Jew. It never quite made sense to me, but I knew a red line when I saw one, and I dared not cross it.
I am ashamed to admit that it wasn’t until quite recently, in the weeks after Oct. 7, that I began to understand that there was something deeply wrong with my understanding of how and why Israel became a state. I liken it to a crisis of faith. It took Hamas’ horrifying attack for me to open my mind to the possibility that there was another narrative to Israel’s founding.
During this questioning period, my son recommended I read the work of Rashid Khalidi. Khalidi, a professor of modern Arab studies at Columbia University, has deep familial Palestinian roots. Among the many things I learned from his writing, what really stands out was that long before Israel’s founding in 1948, there was an indigenous population in the area whose territory came under British control after World War I. From that point onward, a systematic dismantling of Palestinian society began as Zionism gained ground, with wave after wave of Jewish immigration to the land.
By the end of 1948, nearly 750,000 Palestinians had been expelled and displaced, much the same way that Jews have historically been expelled and displaced for millennia. People were forced from their homes so that Jews could come in and settle. That’s the historical reality of the Nakba — an Arabic word often translated as “catastrophe,” and one I’d never heard until last year, even though I am 56 years old. How is it possible that none of my Jewish educators ever mentioned this history of dispossession?
I can and do blame myself for not knowing or understanding the Palestinian people’s reality until 40 years after my formal Jewish education ended. I have spent my whole life aghast at the idea that people would be expelled from their homes, their countries, simply because of who they were, where they were born, because of a religion or creed or race. And yet, it had happened at the hands of my own people.
The context and circumstances of how Israel became a state bear many painful but crucial truths that my Jewish education too conveniently elided. Jews — themselves persecuted through the ages simply for being Jewish — displaced an entire people, simply for not being Jewish. Hamas’ violent uprising of Oct. 7 and the wider Palestinian resistance need to be understood from that starting point.
The great scholar and sage Hillel the Elder once said that “what is hateful to you, do not do to your fellow: This is the whole Torah; the rest is the explanation; go and learn.” This basic moral insight, sometimes called the Golden Rule, is found in nearly every world religion. And yet, many in the Jewish community are supportive of Israel’s assault on Gaza and have rationalized it as legitimate self-defense. How? How can my fellow Jews go on about how Israel has a right to defend itself, as if one atrocity plus another atrocity isn’t doubly morally reprehensible?
My own life suggests a possible answer: the intentional and systematic miseducation of Jews in America. For anyone who has been as miseducated as I have been, maybe it’s time for you to start questioning, as Judaism teaches us so well. You might start with the institutions responsible for shaping the messages our community learns. Or you might start, as I did, in the basement.
Either way, it’s time to start.
Jill Gurvey is a health policy analyst in Philadelphia. She wrote this column for the Chicago Tribune.
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