Everything I know about Zionism I learned from Jews

A personal intellectual journey

My first encounter with the power of Zionism happened on the University of Texas at San Antonio(UTSA) campus in 1977. I was a sophomore at the time, in every sense of the word, living with my parents and commuting to school to save money. I stayed there, frankly, because that was the same year I just happened to pick classes taught by historical materialist professors, but that is another story.

For some flavor, this is a photo of the Sombrilla from the time, a place where we would eat burgers, drink beer(legal age was 18 then), and solve all the world’s problems.

I was also taking a political science class taught by a self-described post-revisionist, meaning postmodernist claptrap but never mind that for now, when she revealed to her class that a student of hers(whom I had never met) was in an Israeli prison.

Arrested the year before, if memory serves, and sentenced to something like 5 to 10 years for aiding and abetting terrorism in a closed trial. This girl was a Jewish American citizen, and had been arrested for taking photographs of a beach near Tel Aviv, the subjects of which were sold by the Israelis themselves as postcards. You know, pictures like this one of a beach near that city:

Well! My idealistic, sophomoric self thought. Here is a righteous cause! Surely truth, justice and the American Way would demand this innocent girl’s release forthwith!

So we and a couple of profs formed this Human Rights Defense Committee to advocate for the girl’s release. We knew President Carter was negotiating a peace treaty between Israel and Egypt, and hoped to bring this matter to his attention.

We made some noise. Somebody was a guest on KRTU, the Trinity University public radio station. Talked about things like Zionists driving Palestinian Arabs off of their lands by force, and how this girl had fallen in love with the justice of the Palestinian Cause.

How heroic!, thought I. Surely President Carter will hear about this terrible injustice and do something. Some others also had the thought that Jimmy Carter(it was his first year in office) might just possibly do something about it as well, and that might open a can of worms they really didn’t want the American public to know about.

These staunch defenders of Israel, these Zionists(I had never paid much attention to the subject of Israel/Palestine before), took to the airwaves and newspaper editorial pages and decried this new infestation of anti-Semitism in Texas.

I thought I’d better learn more about these people, but Just Cause or not, there were still girls to date, beer to drink, and football games up in Austin to attend, so I didn’t want to spend a lot of time researching the subject. I figured I would just ask Jews about it. Surely, they would know what Zionism was and be able to explain it to me in a few minutes.

And I was correct! They all told me what Zionism was, but they explained it very, very differently. It turned out that there were some Jews who were all in for Israel, and justified the armed conquest of that land by comparing it to the conquest and settlement of America by my own ancestors.

That argument never made any sense to me. After all, my ancestors are dead. I ain’t them. No one has the right to expect me to hold the same attitudes they did because I am my own person and live in a very different time. Zionists, Christian and Jewish, just came out and said that if my people had done it in the past, then Jews had even more of a right to do it now because of the Holocaust. I felt like Norman here.

Nope. That one never made any sense to me either. I said so, with sophomoric zeal. A Jewish history prof(who taught a great course on Russian history), was a Zionist who was horrified by this outbreak of sympathy for Palestinians on campus. She decided it was a good idea to bring in the Israeli Consul from Houston to straighten us out.

He showed up with the TV crews, made a speech, and opened the floor for questions. I asked him what Israel’s plan for the Palestinians really was. He didn’t really answer, as I recall, saying stuff about Israel wanting peace but the Palestinians refusing to negotiate without the right of return.

I didn’t know anything about that at the time, and so he was able to shut me up. Some others in our little group were a lot more vehement to the consul than I, and I remember him saying at one time that he was shocked to see this kind of Jew-hating anti-Semitism in San Antonio.

Within days, the retaliation began. The Jewish Defense League said we were all Nazis. My car was spray-painted with swastikas, and the tires slashed. My parents got death threats by phone. The local police had a car parked in front of our house for days.

Some UTSA students harassed the political science prof, calling her a Nazi. Two years later, she and the other prof who had been in our group were denied tenure and went elsewhere.

The young incarcerated lady herself was released in early 1978, I believe. Jimmy Carter did hear about her plight, and did persuade Menachem Begin into commuting her sentence after a few months more in prison so Israel could save face.

At her welcome home party, she told us that she really was taking photos for the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine because her Palestinian boyfriend was a member. Of course, I thought Bitch, you lied to us the whole time. I don’t know if she really was doing that or not. If she was, it was a wasted effort. All the PFLP had to do was to buy Israeli postcards for the same views.

Even if she was, it was still a closed trial. And what harm did she offer Israel other than intent? There never could have been actual damages.

It was the Jews who were opposed to Zionism who did the most to help me along in my intellectual journey. They told me about this thing called the Torah. They told me about Jewish mysticism, and the Kabballah. I read up on that some, and even had a Kabballah-inspired Tarot deck for awhile in my New Age phase a few years later.

Most importantly, they taught me that Judaism is a wonderful and many-splendored religion, whose basic teaching regarding behavior is to live in peace and with mutual respect from one’s neighbors, that there are multiple paths to God, and that Judaism isn’t for everybody and that’s cool by Jews.

They also emphasized that their slogan about the Holocaust, Never Again, meant never again for everyone. I could dig that then, and I still do.

I had forgotten about those conversations almost half a century ago, but recent videos from Jews like Russell Dobular and Keaton Weiss from

Due Dissidence

and

Norman Finkelstein

brought all of that back.

Neither Judaism nor Zionism have changed. They are still very different things, and those Jews who told me that they considered Zionism an abomination to Judaism have been proven prescient indeed.

Thank you to all the Jews I’ve known who taught me far more than just a passing acquaintance with Judaism and Jewish culture in general, good night, and good luck.