“If you want to change the world, you have to change your story,” says Michael Margolis, CEO and founder of Storied, a strategic consultancy specializing in disruption storytelling.
As a filmmaker, this quote makes perfect sense to me. Stories provide us with emotional support that can galvanize, comfort and sustain humanity as it faces its most complex and arduous challenges. But stories, unlike mere ideas or arguments, speak to the heart, a space beyond hardened misconceptions that can hinder our ability to relate and connect to our common humanity.
In a controversial new documentary film titled Israelism, two young American Jews raised with an unconditional love of Israel experience a profound and life-changing awakening as they bear witness to the brutality of Israel’s occupation of Palestine. As they join a growing movement of young American Jews fighting against the old guard to redefine Judaism’s relationship with Israel, the protagonists draw us into the battle for the very soul of modern Jewish identity.
The film toured American campuses, where its release during the ongoing genocidal attack on Gaza led to widespread calls for censorship and the cancellation of scheduled screenings by campus authorities. Amid a highly censored public debate surrounding the Israeli occupation, efforts to censor the film are a reflection of the times – even Jewish voices for peace are targets of the machine that has been searching for whether long time to silence Palestinian calls for liberation. .
Israelism tells a story we all need to hear, not least because today the United States is the only force capable of containing Israeli extremism. It offers a small window into how powerful special interest groups in the United States influence young Jews to blindly support Israel, and how some, like its protagonists, manage to escape it.
But for a non-Jew like me, the most compelling element of the film was its frank depiction of the emotional connection that most Jews have been led to develop with Israel, and the difficulties they experience when trying to leave. powerful and unifying power. story that maintains this link.
While its many critics, including myself, view Israel as an ethno-nationalist and racist rogue state, at odds with international law and enforcing a system of apartheid, Jews are taught from an early age that the modern state of Israel is the incarnation of the Jewish religion. self-realization and freedom.
This is not an easy story to unravel because, in part, it is true. After years of persecution and exile, Jews finally have a home. Except it’s not their house. It is that of the Palestinians. The displacement of Palestinians from their land to actualize the Zionist myth of a “land without people for a people with land” is no less unacceptable than the persecution and exile historically imposed on Jews.
As the main characters of Israelism come to realize that their dream of Israel was built on a lie, what was missing from the film was an alternate history.
Scholar Barnett R Rubin poetically describes the Jewish narrative of modern Israel in his article titled “False Messiahs”: “Repeated in every age, this grand narrative – slavery to freedom, exile to redemption – was constant background music, although sometimes barely audible. of the Jewish people’s understanding of their encounter with history.
Rubin paints a poignant picture of Jewish history, filled with the horrors of European anti-Semitic persecution through the centuries, exile, and a deep longing and hope for a place of safety and security. Political Zionism arises not from a vacuum, he explains, but from the inability of European states to guarantee the safety and security of the Jewish people. With the pogroms and ultimately the culmination of European racialized violence in the form of the Holocaust in the mid-20th century, the toxic intersection of colonialism and Zionism sets the stage for our current crisis.
“Israeli Jews are colonialists with a historical memory of indigenous origin,” Rubbin writes. “They developed an ideology and a political “return” movement rather than a purely religious one. But their historical memory was not shared by the inhabitants of the territory. The historical memory of the Jewish people has not created the right or ability to confiscate or occupy a single dunam of land against the wishes of its owners. The historical memory of a people, however tenacious, does not create any right to govern another.
This narrative of dispossession, persecution, and triumph is what sustains support for the current State of Israel. As a growing movement of critics dismantles this situation, the next generation of haunted inhabitants of this contested land desperately need a new story of hope to replace it.
Today, as Ami Dar, Israeli founder and executive director of Idealist.org, writes: “If everyone, everywhere, truly accepted that seven million Jews and seven million Palestinians are going nowhere, and that all possible future must include and encompass in both cases, all the energy around this conflict would change.
For this change to happen, we need new stories. Stories that recognize and honor land claims that, while presented as competing, are not inherently so. After all, indigenous philosophies might push us to consider that the land belongs to no one and that, in fact, the Abrahamic stewards of the land have a common mission: to preserve and protect its sacred nature and to honor all its inhabitants.
Rubbin seems to suggest that a “decolonized” Zionism, divorced from the corrupting supremacy of colonialism, and therefore more a cultural desire for place than a political or territorial claim, should be distinguished from the violent settler ideology currently unleashed. : “The Palestine they (the Jews) aspired to was the embodiment of their hopes, rather than a few provinces of the Ottoman Empire with Muslim and Christian Arab populations. » And it is perhaps from these hopes, married to the aspiration of the Palestinians for a return to their land, to autonomy in their lives and to peace, that the next story could be woven. And while it’s arguably these same elemental dreams that make today’s power struggle so apocalyptic, they also make a story that honors them deeply compelling.
While Israelism focuses on the need for Jews to dismantle the Frankenstein that is Israel’s violent occupation, what is missing is a narrative of hope.
Growing numbers of Jews are joining the ranks of anti-Zionism, and the mass protests of Jewish Voices for Peace and Jewish Elders have proven a powerful counterweight to the otherwise assumed consensus around support for the current Israeli state. But counter-narratives require more than just opposition to endure.
The story being sold to young Jews around the world is profound, moving and utterly compelling. And that means that any struggle to free Jews from this erroneous characterization of the State of Israel as a redemptive embodiment of Jewish self-realization will necessarily require an equally, if not more compelling, counter-narrative. One that honors the Jews’ legitimate fears of seeing history repeat itself, offers the community and communion of a shared dream, of cosmic dimension, but also promises to liberate the Palestinians.
As Rubin also points out: “What is objectionable about colonialism is not the immigration or settlement of a population of a different ethnic or national origin, or of people who are in any way non-native , but the domination of one group over another. It is impossible to go back and redo history. But it is possible, even necessary, to ensure a future in which Palestinians and Israelis have equal rights. »
As Israelis grow increasingly disillusioned with Netanyahu, Jewish voices inside and outside Israel must confront the impact of militarist ideology on their culture, politics and identity. The Israel Democracy Institute survey, a monthly measure of Israeli sentiment on current events, found declining levels of optimism about the country’s future security and democratic character. If nihilistic TikTok videos mocking mutilated Palestinian children weren’t a wake-up call, the telegram groups in which thousands delight in snuff films showing Palestinian civilians being tortured and killed should be. Any denigration of the humanity of others necessarily diminishes our own. This loop of dehumanizing violence should no longer be varnished with propaganda stories.
While honoring the legacy of suffering and exile, opposition to the apartheid state must also give way to the promise of a new dream. Nelson Mandela’s liberation movement was not simply led by opposition to white supremacy: it was guided by a dream of coexistence, equality and justice for all. Contrary to rhetoric about Palestinian annoyance, Palestinian leaders have always and generously made room for the Jewish presence on their land. It is now up to the new generation of Jews to reimagine their history in a way that honors all of God’s children equally – and in this new history lies the true promised land.
The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial position of Tel Aviv Tribune.