Grappling with Jewish fears in a just Palestinian struggle
Recognizing Zionism’s settler-colonial nature shouldn’t prevent us from reimagining a collective Jewish existence in this land, or taking seriously the fears that are weaponized to justify Palestinian subjugation.
In her thought-provoking latest book, “Doppelganger,” the author and activist Naomi Klein outlines how the political right has been strengthened by the left’s neglect of certain issues or fields of discourse that directly affect many people’s lives. By simply dismissing those areas of discussion as “right-wing” without offering an alternative ideological approach, the left, Klein argues, allows the right to frame the conversation entirely on its own terms.
The left may well have good answers to some of these questions. But oftentimes, it is timid or silent — perhaps due to concerns of camp purity, fear of being “canceled,” or a hesitancy to venture into unfamiliar territory. But in doing so, we vacate the playing field to right-wing forces, and the people we are trying to mobilize will flock toward our political opponents — as this month’s U.S. election made abundantly clear.
Over the past year, I’ve thought a lot about the ways in which our camp — those who support Palestinian liberation and the end of Israel’s apartheid regime — has surrendered ground to the right, to the detriment of our struggle. And I realized that I myself was guilty of it.
My main, ever-present, tormenting regret of the past year is that although I have been active in trying to stop Israel’s carnage of Palestinians in Gaza and to end apartheid writ large, I am still not doing enough. But I also regret not doing more to address the fears of my own people.
Fear is deeply entrenched in Jewish identity. It stems from millennia of persecution and pogroms, leading up to and including the slaughter of 6 million Jews in the Holocaust, which has created intergenerational trauma that continues to be felt today. In Israel, this trauma is sustained and narrated in the public discourse in ways that aim to justify what we do to Palestinians, preserving it at the center of how we see ourselves and the world around us.
The Hamas-led massacres and kidnappings of October 7 reawakened deep-rooted fears among Jews in Israel and the diaspora, leading many to liken aspects of that attack to the Holocaust or the pogroms of the 19th century. Reinforcing the trauma induced by October 7 itself are the Hezbollah attacks from the north that have rendered an entire area unliveable, killed 48 civilians by the time of writing, and forced tens of thousands — including some of my own relatives — to flee for refuge; and the ever-growing threat of all-out regional war, which has already translated into multiple missile attacks from Iran and Yemen.
Israeli troops prepare to take away bodies from Kfar Aza after it was attacked by Hamas militants, October 10, 2023. (Oren Ziv)
It is true that the worst of this violence has been immediately followed by Israel’s total obliteration of Gaza and killing of over 43,000 Palestinians and 3,000 Lebanese. It is also true that October 7 was preceded by countless nonviolent initiatives for Palestinian liberation that were quashed by Israel and its allies — from diplomacy to BDS to the Great Return March — and occurred at a time when the Palestinian cause seemed to be facing a dead end. But this doesn’t make the fears of Israeli Jews any less real.
These fears have been further reinforced by some of the reactions to October 7. In the months since the attack, particularly online but also within certain protests and movements around the world, there has been no shortage of denial of the atrocities Hamas committed that day as well as outright justification. Concurrently, we’ve seen a rise in calls for harming Israeli Jews or expelling them from the land.
Among other things, this has taken the form of comments overplaying the role of the “Hannibal Directive” (which was indeed implemented on October 7, but on a scale that comes nowhere close to accounting for the vast majority of Israeli casualties), or a refusal to accept the basic facts of that day despite countless survivor testimonies and video recordings by Hamas militants exhibiting their own atrocities against civilians. It has manifested in several people I used to call friends, and colleagues in pro-Palestinian media outlets, going after anyone trying to bring up Israeli grief over the October 7 attack — even when those grieving are devoted activists against the war and apartheid.
Some pro-Palestine protesters in the United States have called, for example, to “strike Tel Aviv” and “burn Tel Aviv to the ground,” and yelled at Israel’s supporters to “go back to Poland.” The student group at the heart of last year’s Gaza solidarity encampment at Columbia University recently praised an attack that killed seven Israeli civilians in Jaffa, and retracted a previous apology issued after one of its leaders had stated that “Zionists don’t deserve to live.”
Regarding the latter example, it is important to remember that Zionism means vastly different things to different people, and plenty of those who subscribe to that label would say they are committed to justice and liberation for Palestinians; we can argue with them about what that actually looks like, but they clearly don’t deserve to die. And given that most Israelis and a great many Jews around the world see themselves as Zionists, hearing statements against their right to live evokes dark connotations.
The proliferation of this kind of rhetoric appears symbolic of developments in anti-colonial discourse, centering on a misinterpretation of the writings of Frantz Fanon not as a warning of the dangers of colonialism and armed struggle against it — dangers that, in the long run, mainly harm the colonized population, long after liberation — but as an uncritical call for revolutionary violence.
Compared to the murderous war that Israel is currently waging against 2 million Palestinians in Gaza, such issues may feel insignificant. But it is nevertheless crucial that our camp takes these matters seriously, and doesn’t seek to ignore or minimize them.
These examples are by no means characteristic of our camp as a whole. It is clear to me, from a deep and longstanding acquaintance with the Palestine solidarity movement, that the vast majority of activists are motivated by a commitment to liberation, justice, and equality for all people.
Protesters take to the streets in Paris, France, to demonstrate against a massacre committed by the Israeli army in a tent camp in the southern Gaza city of Rafah, May 28, 2024. (Anne Paq/Activestills)
The fact that they recognize that it is Palestinians who are being systematically denied those rights by Israel, since long before October 7, does not reflect disregard for the future of Jews in this land. Moreover, supporters of Israel regularly wield allegations of antisemitism as a cudgel against pro-Palestine activists in order to silence legitimate and essential criticism of Israeli policies, Zionism, the occupation, and the army’s myriad war crimes.
It should also be made clear that supporting Palestinians’ right to resist their oppression, including through armed struggle, is not the same as justifying the horrors of October 7. In fact, it is the opposite: the right to resist occupation is enshrined in international law, and it is those same legal principles that forbid the targeting of civilians.
Still, and without losing sight of the vastly greater suffering to which Israel has subjected Palestinians over the past year — and since the state’s foundation, for that matter — we are obligated to deal with the very real and deeply-rooted fears of Jews and Israelis, which are grounded in a concrete reality.
We must do this, first of all, for the sake of ideological consistency: left-wing politics necessitates concern for the safety of all peoples, and a commitment to international law across the board — which includes challenging threats to the collective existence of Jews in this land. But we must also do this because these fears are a central driver of support not only for the current war, but also for the perpetuation of occupation and apartheid. So long as our movement dismisses Jewish fear, the Israeli and global right (and their centrist accomplices) will keep weaponizing it to reject our demands and justify the subjugation and mass killing of Palestinians.
These kinds of conversations are by no means new or exclusive to Israel-Palestine; similar conversations took place among the white South African left, where white existential fears played a significant role in upholding support for apartheid. Nor is talking about these issues a distraction from the urgent need to end the war and dismantle apartheid.
As one Palestinian friend and colleague recently emphasized to me: “The question is not just about the future of Jews in this country. It’s also about defining the current struggle: what are its strategic goals, what are its limits and red lines, and who can be partners to advance it? We need to create buy-in among Jewish Israelis in order to break the consensus behind the regime, and to generate the necessary shifts and transformations in Israeli society that will lead to justice and safety for all.”
Palestinians at the site of an Israeli airstrike in Khan Younis, southern Gaza Strip, November 23, 2024. (Abed Rahim Khatib/Flash90)
New horizons, new threats
Why, then, have I and others on the left ceded this territory to the right? It is clearer than ever that the right’s strategy of “managing the conflict,” and its belief that Palestinian nationalism and aspirations for freedom can be defeated, has led us to disaster, condemning us to live forever by the sword. And when it comes to Jewish safety, the past year has proven definitively what Israel’s anti-occupation left has long chanted at protests: “The right wing in government will not bring us security” (which rhymes in Hebrew).
It is also not difficult to make the case that we, as Jews in the Middle East, have a deep interest in ending Israel’s oppressive structures of control over the Palestinians. As Jordan’s foreign minister recently reminded us, such a scenario would lead to peace agreements and security arrangements that could help to significantly increase our safety for the long term.
So why did we neglect talking about the fear and violence that drive so much of Israeli politics? For my part, I find that I sidelined them under the assumption that we have to deal first and foremost with the greater injustice of the apartheid regime and its derivatives, such as the current assaults on Gaza and Lebanon. And given that it is my own society committing this injustice, it is all the more my responsibility to resist it; my main role as an Israeli within the Palestine solidarity movement is to struggle to transform the state from within.
Another reason is that the security discourse in Israel — a central part of Israeli psychology and identity — is entirely the terrain of the right and center right. Even so-called “left-wing” security heads like Yair Golan, the leader of the new merger of the Labor and Meretz parties called The Democrats, have much in common with their right-wing counterparts.
During his time as a brigadier general in the army, Golan authorized Israeli soldiers to use Palestinian civilians as human shields; more recently, he has endorsed starvation as a form of collective punishment in Gaza, and called for Israel to occupy a “security zone” in southern Lebanon. Given the dominance of such views, it was easier to simply ignore the security discourse altogether than to formulate a serious left-wing approach to it.
An additional reason why I wasn’t particularly vocal about these issues is that they felt obvious. I oppose attacks on civilians by Hamas or Hezbollah, I long for the return of the hostages, and I hope that the tens of thousands of Israelis displaced from the north and the south can go home as soon as possible. These positions are self-evident to me both as a leftist and as an Israeli — as my immediate family, my friends, and I are also affected by this reality and living through missile and drone attacks.
The damage caused to vehicles and buildings from a missile fired by Hezbollah in Lebanon that landed in the northern Israeli city of Haifa, November 17, 2024. (Yonatan Sindel/Flash90)
Then there are the changes in local and global power structures. My formative political years were the 1990s — a decade in which, parallel to the PLO’s decision to recognize Israel and negotiate for peace, Israelis also experienced a spate of terror attacks by Hamas, some of which hit my immediate surroundings. But at the macro level, these years were characterized by the feeling that I live in a strong and stable country that does not face any existential threats. Globally, that decade also witnessed the transition to unipolar hegemony of Israel’s closest ally, the United States, after the fall of the Soviet Union.
Growing up on the left in those years, it was obvious who our main adversaries were: capitalism, which tramples humanity and the planet in pursuit of profit; and the American empire, with its ever-expanding military-industrial complex. And in Israel, nothing posed a greater threat than the continuation of the military occupation and the resistance it would naturally provoke from Palestinians; that was part of the reason I refused compulsory military service, spending two years in prison for my beliefs. To this day, these remain among the main threats to humanity and to my personal future.
Yet those contexts have changed. The decline of the United States has opened the way for new global powers, such as Russia and China, to challenge American hegemony in the Middle East. Iran has pursued the same, developing the “Axis of Resistance” through significant backing to Hamas, Hezbollah, and now the Houthis. With Benjamin Netanyahu’s blessing— driven, ironically, by his ambition to fragment and weaken the Palestinian national movement — Hamas grew stronger in Gaza in the lead-up to October 7, all while Israel continued to suppress any popular Palestinian leadership or nonviolent resistance.
Taken together, these developments have created a new geopolitical reality, in which the long-term collective existence of Jews in this land is no longer as self-evident as it was 30 years ago. Until now, with the military, financial, and diplomatic backing of the United States, this existence has gone hand-in-hand with the denial of Palestinians’ right to exist in the land. But in the name of the latter, we risk throwing out the former, like the proverbial baby with the bath water.
What is needed instead is to reimagine a collective Jewish existence in Israel-Palestine that is not based on relations of supremacy over Palestinians. Accepting that Israeli Jews will stay in this land in the long run is essential, and has actually been a central part of the platform of the Palestinian liberation movement for decades.
Recognizing the settler-colonial nature of Zionism, the ethnic cleansing of the Nakba and ever since, and the Palestinian right of return: none of these basic tenants of the movement should negate the recognition that Israeli Jews do constitute a distinct people, with no less of a right to self-determination as any other nation in the world — so long as that right does not come at the expense of the same right of Palestinians.
Israeli soldiers take over the top of a building during a Palestinian demonstration in the occupied West Bank town of Beita, August 9, 2024. (Wahaj Bani Moufleh/Activestills)
Like other settler-colonial projects, we are indeed a nation of immigrants. Some came from afar; some, like many Palestinians, came from nearby lands that were once all part of a single Ottoman Empire; and some have been here throughout centuries of continued Jewish presence. But we have become a nation, with our unique language, culture, art, communal bonds, history, and a deep sense of belonging to this place. That connection might be religious, grounded in millennia of Jewish longing for return to the biblical Land of Israel; or it might be secular, based on the simple reality that we know no other home but this.
And even if one were to contemplate banishing the roughly 7 million Jews who now live here — where would we go? My heritage, for example, is one-quarter Ukrainian, one-quarter Lithuanian, one-quarter Belarusian, and one-quarter Turkish. I speak none of those languages, and none of these countries would be prepared to take in Jewish immigrants en masse. My wife is Moroccan on both sides, but her parents, like mine, were born here. Our two children are a mix of these backgrounds, which cannot be untangled, and are both distinctly Israeli just like we are. The same is true of most Jews in Israel.
We have already seen how the attempt to right the wrong done to Jews in Europe by wronging Palestinians has led to a catastrophe. We must not think that righting that wrong can be achieved by wronging Jews once again. The answer has to be decolonizing this land with all its inhabitants having the right to stay here along with returning Palestinian refugees — as two nations with equal individual and collective rights.
Condemning today’s horrors to the past
As I write this, I am overcome with the familiar anxiety that in trying to inject complexity and nuance into this conversation, I may end up serving the right and distracting from the ethnic cleansing and mass killing in Gaza and Lebanon. There is no symmetry between certain troubling discourses online or on campus lawns on the one hand, and the military, economic, and diplomatic might of a global superpower that facilitates Israel’s crimes on the other.
Still, I want to learn from powerful voices on the left who take it upon themselves to speak out against these dangerous trends — not to sabotage our movement, but to strengthen it. Back in November, Rashid Khalidi, one of the most prominent Palestinian intellectuals alive today, wrote that we must speak out morally, legally, and politically against the targeting of civilians, and that “women, children, the aged, and all unarmed noncombatants should unquestionably be protected in wartime.” Naomi Klein, one of the intellectual heavyweights of the international left, wrotesimilarly in the aftermath of October 7 that we must always “side with the child over the gun.”
Those are just two examples among many others. And with that, we must also think seriously and practically about security solutions for Jewish Israelis as part of our struggle.
We shouldn’t be afraid of saying, for example, that the day after the Israeli army withdraws from Gaza and southern Lebanon, it will need to stand on the border to protect Israeli communities in the north and south during negotiations for the end of the occupation and apartheid — unlike what actually happened in October 2023, when the army was invested more in facilitating settler attacks on Palestinians in the West Bank.
Nor should we be afraid to say that within the framework of multilateral peace agreements, there will also be a chapter on Israeli-Palestinian security cooperation based on true mutual security — not like the arrangements stipulated in the Oslo Accords, which have in practice enabled the entrenchment of Israeli oppression for three decades with Palestinian security forces serving as their subcontractors.
When this wretched war ends, we will need to work urgently to promote real peace, be it in the form of two states, one state, or a confederation. That peace must be based on the principles put forward over the years by the UN, the PLO, the Arab League, and the BDS movement, without neglecting the security of Israeli Jews. It is precisely this attentiveness to the fears of all parties that can move us closer to making sure the horrors of today will be condemned to the past, and remedied for the future.
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