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I am a Jew Who Won’t Visit Israel [1]

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Date: 2025-02-16

I did not post about Israel and its actions in Gaza for over a month, hoping that the three-step ceasefire agreement would lead to a permanent peace in the region and create a path for formation of a Palestinian state. With the Trump administration’s proposals for a U.S. take-over of Gaza, its open-ended pledge of support for Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu, and its assault on academic freedom and freedom of speech in the United State, I decided to start posting about Israel and Gaza again. This is the second in a series of posts.

Most of the world breathed a deep sigh of relief when negotiators announced that Israel and Hamas agreed on a fragile 3-stage temporary cease-fire, the partial withdrawal of Israeli troops, the return of Israeli hostages held by Hamas, the release of Palestinian prisoners held by Israel, and the distribution of food and medical relief in the Gaza Strip. It remains to be seen whether Israel or Hamas will abide by the agreements or if negotiations will continue in good faith. Donald Trump’s proposal that the United States take ownership over Gaza and that Palestinians be forcibly removed from their homes there has made the situation more complicated, probably reenforcing intransigence on both sides.

The day after the initial agreement was announced, but before the ceasefire was scheduled to start, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu continued the bombing of Gaza Strip cities and put the process on hold and claiming that Hamas had backtracked on some of the agreements, something Hamas vigorously denied. Some of the rightwing and religious members of Netanyahu’s governing coalition finally agreed to support the temporary cease-fire but with the expectation that fighting would resume after the six weeklong first stage. At least one of the minority parties announced it would withdraw support from the Prime Minister because of the cease-fire agreement. While the ceasefire, although shaky, seemed to be holding in Gaza despite Israeli provocations, Israel stepped up attacks on Palestinian communities on the West Bank and violated its ceasefire agreement with Hezbollah in Lebanon, keeping troops in areas it had previously agreed to leave.

Growing up in the 1950s in the shadow of the European Holocaust, my friends and I were taught by our parents and in Hebrew school to revere Israel as the Jewish homeland, a place that would ensure a Holocaust could never happen again. We felt empowered by Israeli victories because they showed that Jews would no longer be the world’s victims. My favorite book (1958) and movie (1960) was Exodus which proclaimed that God gave this land to us, and I dreamed of being an Israeli freedom fighter. In Hebrew school we learned Israeli songs and about our Biblical heritage. We collected money to plant trees in what was supposedly an empty desert before the Jews arrived. We absorbed all of the myths that justified creation of a Jewish state on Palestinian lands.

One of the myths was that Palestinians left their lands and villages voluntarily because their leaders promised that they would be able to return after the Jews were defeated. Evidence that this is not true was covered up by the Israeli military and successive governments. Despite the fact that documents were hidden or destroyed, prominent Israeli historians have pieced together the story about how Israeli soldiers massacred Palestinian villagers to terrify people into fleeing during the Israeli war for independence, months before its war with neighboring Arab countries. By one estimate, almost three-quarters of the Arab families that fled, left because of Jewish military actions. The Nakba, the Palestinian catastrophe, was real.

My stepmother’s brother was a ranking Israeli military officer, an American World War II veteran who went to Palestine to fight for independence and a Jewish homeland. He visited his American family periodically and we took great pride in his and Israel’s achievements. My stepmother was in Israel at the outbreak of the 1967 war. My family spent hours at Kennedy airport waiting for planes evacuating Americans. Her name was not on any flight manifest but eventually she landed and was safe.

I was a senior in high school in June 1967. I went with friends to the Jewish Agency office in Manhattan to sign up to go to Israel to support the war effort in any way that we were needed. Because the war ended in six days, to our disappointment, we never went. My initial reaction was to celebrate Israel’s great victory and expansion into Gaza, Sinai, and the West Bank. Later, I welcomed Israel’s response to the 1972 Munich Olympic massacre and the 1976 attack on the Entebbe airport following the hijacking of an Air France plane traveling from Tel Aviv to Paris.

However, my ideas began to change in college as I studied history and became an anti-Vietnam war activist. I couldn’t square my opposition to American imperialism in Southeast Asia with support for continuing Israeli occupation of territory seized during the 1967 war. While I still believe in Israel’s right to exist, I accept that it originated as a settler colony much as the United States did in the 18th century. I actively oppose the occupations of territory seized in 1967, endorse a two-state solution with the boundaries of a Palestinian state and Israel based on pre-1967 borders, and I have refused to visit Israel despite my family connections.

American Jews have not always felt safe. There was a Nazi movement in this country in the 1930s. After World War II, the prosecution and execution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg as Soviet spies frightened many American Jews, including my parents, into silence. The 2017 neo-Nazi march in Charlottesville, Virginia and the 2018 murder of congregants at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh were terrifying. But I refuse to brand pro-Palestinian protests on college campuses as antisemitic while Israel is murdering tens of thousands of Palestinians in Gaza. Sometimes the protesters cross the line between challenging Israeli actions and making antisemitic statements, but I do not see the protests as a threat to Jews in the United States. I believe Israel bears some responsibility for this because it insists that any challenge to Israel, the Jewish State, is an attack on Jews and is therefore antisemitic.

I think the real threat to American Jewry comes from a far right with ties to neo-Nazism and Christian Nationalists who perceive Israel as a fulfillment of Biblical prophecy signaling the second coming of Jesus. I fear that when Jesus fails to appear, they will turn against Jews and Israel as false prophets.

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