Finally Talking About It- Why I'm No Longer Jewish
On growing up and realizing I was lied to about everything, and Jewish cognitive dissonance.
SINCE October 7th of last year I have been vocal about my disgust for the Zionist apartheid state of Israel and the Jewish occupation of Palestine, but it’s taken me over a year to finally sit down and write this article. The truth is… I couldn’t even begin to imagine where to start.
For over 75 years, the Palestinians had been living in an open air prison up until the American-Israeli war, which is still going on. But the tragic truth is that there is no Gaza anymore. The air smells like corpses. Everything is gone, and it will take decades just to clear the rubble. Over 300,000 innocent civilians have been brutally massacred by the IDF with weapons of war supplied by the US government. The few remaining survivors have lost everything and everyone, their hope for humanity has been shattered, their limbs have been blown off, and their futures are uncertain, many believe their only means of hope at this point is to be freed by death.
The dream of peace in the middle east is nothing new to me. I remember growing up and listening to the song by Subliminal with my friends in Hebrew school, many of whom went on to join the IDF. I have since lost contact with them but what I can say is that I don’t believe they knew what they were doing. Would it be a stretch to say Judaism is a cult?
I grew up in a typical Jewish family plagued with generational trauma and narcissism. I come from Long Island where we get High Holy Days from school off, atypical for the rest of America but common in predominately Jewish areas. My parents, Zionist war whores as well as my grandparents, cousins, aunts, uncles and so on, have always been extremely pro-Israel. The temple I grew up in was a reform Jewish synogogue, where liberal upper-middle class Jews gathered to worship. To be fair, I think the reason the propaganda works so well is largely because unlike most other abrahamic congregations in the US we had no idea what we were saying or reading. Everything was in Hebrew, and although we learned to write it and a few basic words, most of us couldn’t speak it fluently let alone understand almost any of it. Judaism is unique in that sense.
We knew all the songs by heart and even enjoyed singing them, but we had no clue what any of it meant. When we recited our bat mitzvah prayers we were memorizing what they sounded like, at least me and my cousins were. I enjoyed Hebrew school and getting together with my family and friends during the holidays. I enjoyed going to Jewish summer camp upstate and BBYO youth group and the youth group at my temple. I loved singing Rick Recht and Dispatch and Israeli rap. But there were some things that always felt a little off…
I didn’t learn about the Nakba until this year, in fact I’d never even heard of it before. The way the story was told to us was that Israel belonged to the Jews, and always had, and that Arabs (not just Palestinians but Arabs and Muslims in general) were horrible people who wanted to kill us. Many of my peers called them disgusting racial slurs and the few of us who questioned anything were told we didn’t understand. I remember being shown a video in hebrew school of Tomorrows Pioneers, a television show with a Palestinian Mickey mouse character called Farfour saying the Jews were bad. What they didn’t show us was why they (rightfully) hated the Jews. We were constantly inundated with Zionist propaganda.
American Jews born after WW2 (boomers and beyond) grew up with Hasbara propaganda, which is essentially how Israel whitewashes its war crimes and humanitarian atrocities. Hasbara is the term for the public diplomacy of Israel. Their public relations smear campaign of Palestine is well-funded, and accomplished through NGO’s like Hillel, Birthright trips, fellowships, scholarships, grants, lobbying, university research and more. The Ministry of Strategic Affairs is largely responsible for manipulating Israels public image through Zionist bullshit in a multitude of ways. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ministry_of_Strategic_Affairs#:~:text=The%20Ministry%20of%20Strategic%20Affairs,ties%20on%20White%20House%20matters.)
At the time that Hasbara came to be, Europe was still rife with antisemitism. This is a large reason why most Jews living today don’t know anything about this topic. They are told that Palestinians use their children as “human shields” as opposed to the truth- that dehumanizing and slaughtering Arabs is an integral part of Jewish brainwashing and as much a part of Israeli culture as apple pie is to American.
The attacks on Palestine are nothing new. They have been happening since the Nakba, when nearly a million Palestinians were displaced, massacred and had their homes violently destroyed during the Arab- Israeli war of 1948. Not only did we never learn about this, it’s illegal to even mention it in the apartheid ethnostate of Israel (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nakba_Law.)
The politics of denial around the Nakba is so pervasive that growing up we were regularly told there was “no such thing as Palestine/ Palestinians”, which was first quoted from former Israeli PM Golda Meir. We were told in Hebrew school that when Israel was founded as a Jewish Homeland, no one was living there. It was all lies, every bit of it.
Going to Israel
I have been to the apartheid ethnostate of Israel 3 times in my life. The first was in grade 10, for one month. I don’t remember it that well, but I do recall going to the borders of Syria, Lebanon, Jordan and Egypt. I remember being on the other side of the West Bank and Gaza strip, separated only by wire fences. We were prepared in advance by our tour guides. “You’ll hear bombs going off, but you won’t be in any danger. The IDF are keeping us safe.”
We had met many soldiers in the IDF during that first trip I took in high school. Some of them were American, and many of my peers had planned on joining after high school. I know of two girls from Jewish summer camp who enlisted, and haven’t spoken to them in years.
The second trip I went on was Birthright. This trip was much more propagandized, we even stayed in Beduin tents one night. For most young Jews around the world, going on a birthright trip is a rite of passage. These trips are free for all Jews, and for a good reason: they’re an extremely effective marketing tool. If my peers werent planning on joining the IDF, they were planning on taking a gap year in Israel, attending university there, and so on. Everyone had fun, and everyone wanted to come to back. Many of us even came to visit each other within the tri-state area and kept in touch after we had returned.
It’s important to understand that the primary purpose of Birthright, beyond indoctrination, is to find a Jewish person (preferably an Israeli Jew) to marry and create more Jewish children. Obviously this didn’t work on me, as I’m gay, but I did end up dating a girl from the first trip who was also American and who’s parents were Mizrahi Jews.
The last time I went to Israel was with my former friend, Yasmin. Her mother is a Moroccan Jew and this was a few years ago, and we stayed with her aunt. Being Mizrahi Jews meant Yasmin and my ex girlfriend looked middle eastern, because they are. I, however, am the descendant of Russian, Polish and Hungarian ancestors, I know this because I traced my family history back to the early 1800s.
Growing up Jewish, however, we (me and the majority white kids in Hebrew school) were always told that we were originally from the “Jewish homeland” of milk and honey. (I also thought Adam Sandler and the lead singer of Counting Crows hailed from that same imaginary middle eastern place I had supposedly come from... )
Non- Jewish people looked at me like I was either retarded or adopted when I would tell them that. I was just as perplexed as they were, and I imagine the current genocide against Palestinians has many Jews I grew up with spiraling into an identity crisis. That’s probably the reason for their cognitive dissonance.
Zionism is an integral part of modern day Judaism, regardless of whatever bullshit Jews want to tell themselves. There are a handful of sects which stand in total opposition to the occupation of Palestine, but the overwhelming majority and general consensus among Jewish people, be it reform, orthodox, modern orthodox, conservative and so on- is that Israel is our homeland. Before she passed away, my grandmother visited Israel with my mom and she was so excited to go, she said it was the best trip of her life. My gma was an amazing person, and I think when Jews see the destruction of Palestine and all the people being killed, there are a few things going on in their minds.
The first thing is that since a young age we’ve been lied to, indoctrinated and propagandized. We were told horrific lies about Arabs to justify the illegal occupation of white Zionist settler colonialism, and we were told these things by people we loved, knew and ultimately, trusted. Not to mention the confusion of everything we were supposed to recite and sing being in a totally different language, which only added to more confusion. And then of course, Judaism is their foundation like any religion. They’re all cults, it just so happens that the one I grew up in has the most extensive propaganda campaign in world history.
And although my father was raised in a kosher household, my uncle Steve lost his mind years ago and became an orthodox Jew. This meant that much of my time was spent in the Five Towns, Zionist propaganda was almost impossible to escape. But unlike my peers and cousins, Judaism was not important to me. Everyone in my family married Jewish, they all met in very Jewish ways, and passed their generational trauma onto me and my cousins.
It was easy for me to turn my back on the Jewish religion. Judaism is different from Christianity in many ways, but one of the biggest ones being if you don’t believe in God or follow the ten commandments etc no one really gives a shit. Unless you’re orthodox, most reform Jews are atheists or agnostic. Beleiving in god is not important in the Jewish religion. Believing in Israel, however, is a non negotiable deal breaker. Speaking out against Israel or its war crimes is not something you want to bring up during a shabbat dinner or Passover Seder, or at all really.
But I’ve never been the type of person who will turn a blind eye to the suffering in the world, no matter what. Palestinians are not expendable. They are beautiful, incredibly kind people who have endured IMMENSE suffering, exploitation, genocide, starvation and have lived in a state of constant fear and terror the last 75 plus years. Their voices have been silenced. Generations are being slaughtered en masse daily. Their life expectancies are so short. And for the brief time they are born into this world, to the moment theyre brutally murdered their lives are nothing but sheer, unimaginable horror.
It can be hard for people to reconcile with the fact that everything they were told was a lie. The older I get the more I start to believe that most people not only aren’t interested in the truth (especially about themselves) but that they actively avoid it. Most people aren’t comfortable with ambiguity either, they want answers, but not if these answers challenge their beliefs about themselves or make them uncomfortable in any other way.
Cross Cultural Examination of Humanity
A lot of Jews argue that if the Zionist apartheid ethnostate of Israel was returned to the Palestinians, they would slaughter all the Jews the same way the Jews have been brutally massacring the Palestinians the past 75 plus years. Perhaps they would, and I would argue it would be more than justified.
But since the Nakba and inception of the white settler colonialist state of Israel, the Palestinians have done nothing but live peacefully despite being tortured, raped, killed, threatened, harassed and stolen from by the IDF. How fucked is it that I, an American former Jew legally have the right of return to somewhere I have zero ethnic ties to but Palestinians can’t even visit their own occupied land, let alone get a passport?
And even when they had finally had enough on October 7th and decided to fight back against their morally corrupt murderous, heartless, incessantly cruel oppressors, they didn’t retaliate anywhere near as horrifically as they have always been treated. They held some Israelis hostage, they killed some Israelis. But did they rape children? Did they murder families, babies, blow off the limbs of children, starve an entire population, bomb their hospitals, invade their homes, wear the clothing of children they raped and killed as if they were badges of honor, humiliate and endlessly torture innocent civilians who have known nothing but utter HELL for their entire lives?
I guess what I’m trying to say is that humanity means something different to Palestinians. They have immense compassion for human suffering, their hearts are pure, because they know what it feels like firsthand to be victims of the worst human rights violations known to mankind. They have seen shit you and I cannot even imagine right before their eyes. They are all starving, terrified, exhausted, cold, their endless suffering knows no bounds. The things they have witnessed and endured are incomprehensible to Israelis and Jews. All they want is to live in peace. All they want is for their children to make it to their 5th birthday, and hopefully not to be orphans.
All they want is a roof over their head to shield them from bombs, water that hasn’t been polluted with poison, air that doesn’t smell like corpses and carcinogens, limbs to run from the weapons of war coming at them in all different directions. All they want is a safe place to lay their heads and food in their bellies. They don’t have it in them to do what their oppressors are doing back to them. They’ve experienced the devastating tragedies of genocide for as long as they’ve been alive, and most are now dead.
There’s so much more to say about this topic and the victims of this war. My heart breaks for the people of Gaza, there are no words to express how fucking sad and unfair their circumstances are. They deserve so much better than this shit, their lives are worth so much more and I hope Israel is destroyed and returned to the innocent Palestinians by any means necessary. Thanks for reading.
Thanks so much for reading Diana. I dream of a day when basic human decency is no longer considered radical, and I hope more Jews will choose to stop looking away and start speaking out against Israeli terrorism. Palestinians have endured so much pain and suffering, it’s unbelievable. The fact that Jews can continue to defend this shit is so sick
I applaud your ethics. It's not an easy thing to do, and yet, in some ways, I imagine it's been somewhat liberating.
In many ways, I believe that the atrocities committed by zionists toward ashkenazim (and later non-white jews) with the lie of zionism and the conflation of its racist tenets with the abrahamic religion of judaism itself is a crime.
As a Palestinian-American, I knew that religion was secondary to place, to origin, to shared culture. My Palestinian elders were christian and muslim, and their Palestinian neighbors were also jewish--Palestinian jewish. It made no difference, and that's how I grew up.
I also grew up around white jewish american people. Some would preach the usual zionist rhetoric about how they made our land bloom and that my people ate babies all the way to I don't exist (and some who were violent), and others (admittedly far fewer) who would become friends of my parents and we would be invited to celebrate jewish holidays with them.
That photo you posted of Golda Meir... I used to have nightmares about her. My Dad had one of her books, and I remember as a ten-year-old reading some of it, seeing the vitriolic racist hatred with which she wove her heinous lies, and I asked my Dad why he had the book. He said it's important to know how people think and what they stand for, and to observe--and critique--my own reaction, because it will help me, after examining it as objectively as possible, what is true and what is not.
I grew up being told not to conflate judaism with zionism. I believe that zionism is anti-jewish. I find it very difficult, however, to relate to white/ashkenazi jews. Mizrahi have a shared culture, place, and skin. Their judaism is different, if that makes any sense. Even those who've assimilated (or were forced through propaganda and manipulation) and have a history of being "tricked" into moving to Israel (I take this from eyewitness accounts of those still alive to tell their story, from mizrahi historians who lived this, and who can describe how this exodus was forced by israel), leaving their culture and people and arriving in a white-dominated place (and the rude awakening once they arrived, including being hosed down like animals before they were even allowed to enter), they have a different perspective. But, like many second-class citizens in an oppressive atmosphere, most assimilated with a vengeance, showing just how much they wanted to be ashkenazim.
Zionism wasn't constructed for people of color. It was constructed by white secular jews for white secular jews (or "religious" jews who were all too willing to pervert doctrine to meet the needs of the constructed narrative). Which means, when you take off the religious layer, it's just one more white settler-colonial project. Unlike white settler-colonialists who decimated north america under the pretext of seeking a safe haven from religious persecution, they didn't make up a convincing enough lie. Ah, progress!