Walls Between Us| Their enemy within

I recently encountered this American film called “Israelism” (2023).  It's set up like a typical TV report, all facts and figures, yet it's found its way onto these European streaming platforms. And, let's be honest, in this current moment, with the horrific reality of genocide unfolding before our very eyes, its increased visibility isn't a surprise.

The film follows a group of American youth raised as Zionists. It explores how these young people are recruited from cultural, political, and educational settings deliberately designed to mold children into fervent supporters of a settler-colonial state which they have no inherent connection to, and about which their understanding remains deeply limited.

Yet their divergent trajectories are astonishing. While some are gradually transformed into devoted soldiers of the racist Zionist project, so extreme they become nearly indistinguishable from mercenaries or professional killers, others rebel.

Those who change course, despite having already become almost fully Israeli (including volunteering in the Israeli military), sever ties with the Zionist ideological system halfway through their journey. They break with the “Israelism” that they grew up with. What unites them is one crucial trait: the capacity to ask questions and confront them rather than run away.

At some point, for some reason, they begin to face moral questions about the legitimacy of the state’s very existence. This initiates their journey of complete disassociation from Israel and its project.

Others, disturbed by specific policies towards Palestinians, stop short. They reject the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza but fail to fully recognize the colonial nature of Zionism, a project rooted in ethnic and religious supremacy and built on the eradication of another people.

Despite being a remarkably effective machine for manufacturing allies and accomplices, Israel also, paradoxically, sparks resistance from within its own ranks. This is not some accident; it's an unavoidable consequence for a state whose very foundation presents a profound ethical challenge.

Its existence, as it operates, stands in stark opposition to the core moral principles that human beings have collectively developed over centuries – principles essential for any true and just coexistence to flourish.

Leaving the family behind

Most of us are vaguely aware of such Israelis—those who turn against their own state. I’ve written about some of them before. As I was writing this piece, I happened to come across two more stories. The first is that of Noa Avishag Schnall, a Yemeni-American who renounced her Israeli citizenship and identifies as a “Jewish Arab.” Schnall told her story in an English-language essay, recently translated and published by Raseef22. The second is Arna Mer-Khamis, founder of the Stone Theatre in Jenin refugee camp, whom I knew about through my friend Samah Bsoul, a Palestinian film researcher and critic from the ’48 territories.

Reading Schnall’s extended essay, I was reminded of the insights of Iraqi-Jewish academic Ella Shohat in her seminal book “Taboo Memories, Diasporic Voices”. Shohat documents how Israel obliterated the national and cultural identity of Arab/Mizrahi Jews, enslaving them to serve the glory of the Euro-Zionist capitalist project.

Schnall’s journey differs from Shohat’s. Schnall renounced her citizenship and declared her hostility from the outside, having been spared life inside the occupation state. Shohat, on the other hand, began her opposition from within, launching critical cultural and academic work to expose Israel’s historical lies.

But both women share a background of belonging to marginalized ethnic groups who were oppressed under the false banner of a “state for all Jews”—a state that institutionalized slavery and discrimination in favor of a “superior,” white/European race.

In the case of poor Yemeni Jews, this reached the point of taking their babies to give to European Holocaust survivors. Schnall’s narrative is more focused than Shohat’s on the present and past of her own family, which deeply identified with the state that devastated their lives. She speaks of cousins and relatives and the shame she feels over their service in the Israeli military. Yet both women remain silent about the personal realities of being social outcasts.

Perhaps, one day, they—and others who have broken with Zionism, whether from within or outside the Israeli state—will address the deep familial rejection and social persecution they’ve faced. Much like Michal Schwartz, the daughter of Russian aristocrats, who told me her parents and even her daughters cut ties with her after she rejected Israel and supported the Palestinian resistance.

She became the outcast mother-daughter.

Leaving the promised land

This series of articles took its premise from the situation surrounding the film “No Other Land” by the Palestinian Basel Adra and the Israeli Yuval Abraham. Let me now return to this premise.

I was struck by how Palestinian journalist Hanin Majadli, writing for Haaretz, described Abraham as a “liberal leftist.” It’s a loaded label, often reflecting the  tendency to quickly and easily categorize anyone who begins to distance themselves from Israel.

I don’t know whether Yuval is truly a liberal leftist. What matters to me is his film. What it reveals to viewers about the brutality of Israeli occupation, and how it exposes the close alliance between Israel’s two most powerful institutions—its military and its mass of settlers—against Palestinians in their own land.

What also matters is whether Abraham will move into a deeper phase of anti-Zionist consciousness. Whatever label he ends up with, he cannot be lumped in with Zionist groups like Peace Now for both to be dubbed liberal leftist.

Just mentioning Peace Now evokes an old illusion. Since its inception in the late 1970s, the group was promoted as Israel’s leftist voice and the ideal interlocutor with the Arabs towards achieving a just settlement during the 1980s and early 1990s. This illusion was tied to another issue: the myth of coexistence that emerged from Sadat’s peace initiative that accepted the legitimacy of the Israeli state.

More profoundly, what truly matters transcends mere labels and superficial affiliations. It is the very core of one's stance that demands our attention—a stance defined by the willingness to break free from the ties of family, the authority of the state, or the seductive myth of a "promised land."

Yet, even as we seek this radical transformation, we must be careful not to impose new forms of ideological constraint. We cannot, and indeed must not, demand that Israeli intellectuals who are just beginning to awaken, just beginning to challenge their state's dominant narratives, offer up loyalty pledges to any particular side, whether Arab or Palestinian. 

Such pledges—of moral conduct, political alignment, or intellectual conformity—represent a humiliating surrender to another dangerous illusion: that of Arab moral superiority mirroring Jewish national supremacy. In addition, pledging allegiance, even to the victim, runs counter to the intellectual independence essential to cultural production.

It crushes creativity.

Breaking taboos

My refusal to demand such pledges may seem like it’s brushing up against a taboo linked to self/other—especially when “the other” is an Israeli citizen. But this isn’t a taboo within Palestinian society itself. Consider the case of Arna Mer-Khamis, as recounted by Samah Bsoul:

“If you look into Arna’s history, you’ll see that she joined a Zionist organization in her youth. But she transformed. She joined the Communist Party, married the Palestinian writer Saliba Khamis, and became a committed anti-occupation activist. She never stopped wearing the keffiyeh and her belief in the justice of the Palestinian cause was firmly rooted. She went to the Jenin refugee camp to work with children and founded the Stone Theatre.

Her son, the late actor Juliano Mer-Khamis, served in the Israeli military (as Israeli law requires if the mother is Jewish). Yet he too chose to oppose the occupation and devoted his artistic experience to founding and managing the Freedom Theater, following his mother's footsteps until his assassination.

Throughout their theater-based activism in Jenin, no one loudly called for boycotting them or demanded they be held accountable for their past. This wasn’t because Palestinians were unaware of that past, but because their present-day actions were sincere. They were present and engaged on a daily basis: Juliano split his time between Haifa and Jenin, while Arna was a true fighter against the occupation.

Today, Israeli anti-occupation activists are present daily in villages like Basel Adra’s village. Others are serving prison sentences for refusing military service. Some are members of Palestinian political parties in the Israeli Knesset. Though small in number, their presence matters—and many pay a price for their stances. We should not burden them with constant demands for loyalty tests.”

Samah Bsoul’s testimony encourages us to break the walls of taboo, as does Edward Said’s famous phrase I quoted in a previous article “We must capture the minds of not only our people but also our oppressors.”

But “encouragement” alone is not enough to dispel the fear surrounding debate of Said’s call to action. There is a plentiful stock of accusations awaiting anyone who dares start a discussion. Still, it remains, an essential conversation.

Mahmoud Darwish was quoted in the first piece of this series saying “The world’s interest in us is born of its interest in the Jewish question.” But that’s no longer true.

After genocide, in a world more cruel than ever, we must examine every question so as to move beyond it and ensure that no defeat is ever permanent.

No one has a magic formula or a comprehensive guide for what could be termed the principles of boycotting the enemy, which we know is essential and hurts the enemy.

Equally, there are no hard-and-fast rules for how to cooperate with or support those inside the enemy’s state who rebel against it. There are no such rules based on simple, concise definitions that the broad masses can grasp and use to distinguish between the Zionist and the non-Zionist.

There are no rigid, universal blueprints—nor should there be. The world is too complex and ever-changing. But Palestinians, and those firmly committed to the Palestinian justice, can find common grounds for engaging with a global shift in how the world views Palestine.

When this happens, the powerful narratives of young people who rebel against “Israelism”, or the narratives of Yuval Abraham and Ella Shohat will no longer be seen as mere anomalies, subject to chance and individual conscience.

The Arabs racing to normalize with Israel inflict real harm upon us by deliberately constructing a false image of Arab public sentiment. Yet, it is precisely the voices within Israel itself—those who dare to challenge and rebel against the very foundations of Zionism—who possess the most profound capacity to shatter this illusion. They are the ones who can, most powerfully, reveal the true, unvarnished reality to the world.