I have a strange memory that until now I never felt able to share. I was around eleven or twelve. Something like that. A kid, but not a small one. I was in the kitchen of our small house in Bluefield, Virginia, and my parents were arguing.
It wasn’t a traumatic argument. It was rather silly and I recall feeling that way at the time. They weren’t arguing about money, infidelity, or addiction. They were arguing about Fiddler on the Roof.
Our kitchen was a small open space with counters and appliances along one side and a table on the other. We were at the table. My father was reading the paper. My mother glanced at the open page.
“Look,” she said, pointing at an advertisement. “They’re doing Fiddler on the Roof in Roanoke.” Roanoke was the closest town of any significance, about an hour-and-forty-minutes away. We went there for the two-story mall, glamorous restaurants like Chi-Chi’s, and various shows and concerts. (My friends and I waited in vain for Michael Jackson to turn up.)
My father grunted.
“I should take the kids,” my mother continued.
“We’re not spending any money on that garbage.”
My mother looked annoyed, although I can’t imagine that she expected her husband to be enthusiastic about theater.
Before she could respond, my father went on a tirade about how he’ll support that Zionist bullshit over his dead body. He rarely did that sort of thing; it’s possible that Palestine was in the news, perhaps in the very paper he had been reading.
“It has nothing to do with Israel,” my mother screamed. “It’s a play.”
So began the routine in which they would bicker like the lead characters in an odd-couple comedy.
“The hell it doesn’t.”
“Are you crazy?
I don’t remember the argument lasting long. My mom eventually relented, probably because it spared her a high culture experience that sounded better in theory than practice. She refused to concede the point to my dad, though: Fiddler on the Roof had nothing to do with Israel and he was just being closed-minded.
I agree with her on both counts: the play takes place in Eastern Europe before 1948 and my dad was certainly being closed-minded. But that doesn’t mean he was wrong. A better formulation would have been “the play shouldn’t have anything to do with Israel,” but as Arabs we had long ago observed that if you play out the string, or let the string play out on its own, then these supposedly apolitical cultural productions always end up justifying Israel, as do their producers.
In other words, despite his crude theoretical approach, my old man saw something that nobody seemed to see except for his enemies: amid Zionism, there is no such thing as a neutral expression of Jewish culture.
*****
My dad somehow embodied the attitude of many Arab Americans I knew in young adulthood and beyond. We were a bit flabbergasted by and sometimes uneasy with the constant references to Jewish customs in U.S. pop culture. Those references seemed to come out of nowhere in movies, TV shows, music videos, and so forth. A mazel tov here. A hora there. The audience’s understanding of Judaism was no doubt superficial, but the idea of Jewish humanity was perfectly legible. And Jewish humanity was inextricably attached to the existence of Israel. This was understood. This was made to be understood. Meanwhile, Arabs and Muslims were showing up in pop culture as bloodthirsty maniacs. At best, we were depicted as incompetent brutes. We noticed the difference. Everyone did. You couldn’t miss it. But the difference actually bothered us. The idea of our humanity was an existential threat to Western civilization.
There was this thing that happened among my Arab American peers. The inevitable Jewish reference or storyline would appear in the TV show or movie we were watching. We would give each other a sideways glance, maybe roll our eyes. Here we go again. Always furtively. We knew what kind of trouble awaited if the reaction were explicit, even when nobody else was around. We knew that merely acknowledging our feelings would make us awful people, exactly what the dominant society said we were. Diverse representation is wonderful in theory, but in practice it often conveys the imperatives of power in multicultural disguise and reinforces the same hierarchies it purports to undermine. The most insidious of these representations are highly politicized in ways that feign banality. (Oh, how sweet! A magical Black sidekick with no interest in structural inequality! Wow, how touching! A servant who’s part of the family!) Pointing out the tacit politics in these feel-good stories is generally considered rude.
Did we hate Jews? Maybe some of us did, though I doubt it. We didn’t speak of hatred. I certainly didn’t hate Jews. I still don’t. I have plenty of hatred in my heart, but it’s balanced by a love which is distributed according to an oppressor/oppressed binary. Identity factors into the equation only to the degree that it clarifies the distribution. Hating or liking Jews has little to do with the moments of tension I describe. We perceived an implicit politics at play even if we didn’t understand the structures of our perception. And we knew that the politics had something to do with Israel.
We weren’t being paranoid. All those ritual inclusions, those benign interjections of ethnic flavor, helped to reify Zionism whether or not that was their purpose. We weren’t rolling our eyes at an impartial form of cultural representation. We were in awe of the subtle but unmistakable attempt to engineer our own obsolescence. We feel the same way when Zionists accuse us of “antisemitism” simply for refusing to disappear.
Because of a relentless sense of precarity, we inhabited a world of sighs, side-eyes, and half-smiles. We didn’t feel like celebrating Jewish culture. That reluctance wasn’t a visceral symptom of racial hostility; it was a remonstration that could be articulated only through an oblique and coded semiotics. It was also perhaps a lament that we were strangers to pop culture, both as subjects and consumers. We were too foreign, too dangerous, to ever be presented as banal. Our role was to produce spectacular violence. Our oppressors, it seemed to us, were fully realized, and it didn’t escape our notice that their self-realization came at our expense. It was completely obvious and at the same time perplexing and inexplicable.
I don’t want to argue that our reluctance was justifiable. Instead, I want to argue that the reluctance was rational—not only rational, but rational according to a calculus derived without our participation. We were told repeatedly that the very idea of Jewish peoplehood is contingent on Israel’s existence and were nevertheless given the responsibility of separating the two phenomena. We earnestly performed this responsibility but never made much headway because Zionists kept punishing us for daring to suggest that Jewishness could survive decolonization.
Unless one has been subject to it, then I don’t think it’s possible to imagine the relentlessness and intensity of Zionist efforts to eradicate any trace of Palestine in pop culture, politics, arts, and education. These efforts didn’t happen solely through phony accusations of antisemitism. They had an insidious social component, as well. The ability to tell stories or to flood programming with humanizing gestures made it easier to sell the idea of Israel as a spiritual counterpart to the United States. Arabs and Muslims had no such advantage. Our provenance needed to remain foreign for the relationship between Israel and the United States to make any sense. The notion that Jew-hatred is the only explanation for criticism of Israel would have gone nowhere without the cultural capital accumulated through disproportionate visibility. The sad irony of antisemitism is that in the past few decades it has harmed Palestinians more than anyone else.
*****
My strongest connection to Palestine is through my maternal grandmother. She suffered the nakba in a village that would become an artsy, upscale suburb of West Jerusalem. I had a peculiar relationship with my abuelita, as we called her. (She married a Palestinian from Latin America and moved to Nicaragua shortly after 1948.) She was the only grandparent I really knew. My abuelito, her husband, died when I was seven and I never met my paternal grandparents, who died in Madaba, Jordan, around the same time.
Abuelita was known to be difficult. She wasn’t affectionate and could be harsh and impatient. She didn’t like many people. Among the people she didn’t like were Jews, a sentiment she made no effort to hide. With abuelita, there was no distinction among “Jews,” “Israelis,” and “Zionists.” They were all the same oppressor. That was that. Good luck trying to explain to her that the three categories don’t neatly overlap. She wasn’t having it. She knew exactly who stole her country, thank you very much.
I know that abuelita was unamenable to these distinctions because my mother used to introduce them, to no avail. It often felt like another pretense to fight, as is the habit of so many parents and children.
My siblings and I—and, later, our cousins—were a bit scared of abuelita. I don’t actually remember her hitting us, but all she had to do was threaten the faja and we’d quit fucking around. It’s clear now that our real fear wasn’t corporeal; we didn’t want to be made to feel like idiots, a task at which abuelita excelled.
She had her favorites—the oldest and youngest male grandchildren, obviously—and didn’t bother to pretend otherwise. But as I grew into adulthood, we began to develop a special bond. It largely happened because of my interest in Palestine, which stirred her interest in return. We always had trouble communicating because abuelita spoke English poorly and I knew practically no Arabic. Spanish was our compromise, but I wasn’t particularly strong there, either.
“You used to speak Arabic with me when you were little,” she would say, with an undertone of reproach toward my father.
She was delighted when I returned from Palestine one summer with a functional Shami dialect. My new ability to communicate, albeit roughly, deepened our relationship and I got to be an audience for stories she wouldn’t otherwise tell. One day, we were alone in the car while my mom picked up a few things at the grocery store. (Abuelita hated shopping with my mom because in our small town everyone stopped in the aisle to chitchat.) As we idled in the fire lane, abuelita began talking.
“Your mother, she gets mad at me. About the Jews.”
I don’t know where her need of self-defense came from. She and my mother must have had another argument that morning. I could have recited the argument with near-perfect accuracy. Abuelita had said something considered off-putting in polite American society and mom had told abuelita that the comment was inappropriate. Abuelita said she didn’t care. Mom declared that it was abuelita’s business if she wanted to be hateful, but she wouldn’t be having any of it. Abuelita doubled down, ensuring that mom would in fact be having some of it.
“I know,” I said.
I expected abuelita to go on a mini-diatribe about my mother and then we would return to silence. She had no problem sharing her opinions, but never expected me to validate them. Instead, her voice became soft and reflective.
“Let me tell you, son of my daughter. It was hard. We suffered. Yes. You don’t know how we suffered. They made our lives a living hell.”
“I know.”
“So that’s why. I’m not an animal.”
I didn’t say “I know” because I knew, just as she knew, that she was indeed an animal. I was, too, along with my open-minded mother chatting about high school football with a random lady in the cereal aisle at Food City. We were made to be animals simply for recording normal emotions, despite having done so in deliberate silence, because it would have been way too cumbersome for the oppressor to perceive those emotions as human.
*****
Because we were so effectively sidelined from our own experience, all our pushback could be treated as hostile or conspiratorial. Whether valid or not, the fact remains: pop culture philosemitism felt to us less a celebration of Jewishness than a reminder of Palestinian dispossession. The feeling couldn’t be subjected to public scrutiny. It was mere bigotry, not worth anyone’s attention. We would be deracinated before being correct.
The problem isn’t that we were ignored. Being ignored isn’t pleasant—sometimes it can feel brutal—but it’s mostly tolerable. The main problem is that an entire system of upward mobility came to exist based on Palestinian misery. For the past five decades, there has been no better career move for the aspiring politician or thought-leader than undisguised malice. Get Palestinians fired, arrested, or deported; justify their murder; portray them as subhuman—whatever it takes, just make it known that you’re eager to punch down and the most important qualification will have been satisfied. The next most important qualification is the ability to wreck lives and celebrate war crimes with a veneer of civilizational rectitude.
What else could possibly explain the career trajectory of a generational nitwit like Bari Weiss? Or Bret Stephens? Or Jeffrey Goldberg? Or…? (Think about how long it would take to complete even ten percent of this list.) This kind of demented social climbing doesn’t have to be grandiose. It happens in a million smaller ways, as well. Grants, professorships, book contracts, and podcast invites have much more to do with obeisance than with merit.
Our sense of dispossession, then, isn’t simply material; it is existential. It’s an awful thing to be mistreated and then watch the offender collect money and fame. Sure, we can console ourselves by saying “they’re unhappy on the inside,” but that line of thinking rarely offers relief. It’s hard to picture inner unhappiness in others and even where possible it does nothing to change anyone’s material circumstances. It’s horrible to exist as raw material for an enemy’s sinister ambitions. To begin with, it untethers us from the possibility of a meaningful civic life in the United States. I’m not suggesting that people are obliged to agree with any subsequent behavior. I’m saying that it’s something most people who lament our supposed bigotry have never bothered to understand.
Only now, three years into the Zionist genocide, have these issues come into the open. Discursive norms changed. Old sensitivities collapsed. Feelings that once were kept politely tacit are now aired with shocking candor. The biggest of these changes has been a reluctance among many Palestinians to entertain lectures about using the proper approach and tone in discussing the relationship between Jewishness and Zionism. Although begrudgingly, we were more amenable to these suggestions—injunctions, if we’re being honest—when it still appeared that some kind of accommodation with Israelis was still viable. Such optimism, if that’s what you want to call it, is all but dead.
As we see our relations being collected in garbage bags, we also see the earnest arbiters of acceptable discourse holding forth about the unfortunate crudeness (or worse) with which some Palestinians are choosing to express themselves. Our prior reticence to speak has again been validated in retrospect. As horrors beyond description continue unabated, we are still unable to articulate a politics that can satisfy both our own exigencies and the rhetorical demands of the Anglophone left.
A lot of my peers are choosing the exigencies. They don’t want to hear about the anxieties of a community they already consider overindulged. The idea of coexistence is equally unattractive. Whatever trust anti-Zionist Jews could once take for granted now needs to be earned. I wouldn’t classify this turn as nihilistic or retrograde. I would call it inevitable: it’s the same transformation every national or ethnic group undergoes when faced with genocide. It makes no sense in this instance only because in the West, Palestinians couldn’t narrate a politics beyond what liberal Zionists were willing to authorize.
When I reflect on so many years of repression and resentment, I can’t say I’m surprised by this development. I’m not particularly happy about the development, to be honest. But in the end, I cannot condemn my peers for using vocabularies of suffering and trauma. Not in this moment. Not when so many unarticulated memories suddenly fit into the world. Nor can I rescue Judaism from Zionism. I was cast out of the moderate spaces of my own movement with clear instructions never to return.
*****
A few weeks ago, my son read Elie Wiesel’s Night for eighth-grade social studies. It was the centerpiece of a unit on the Nazi Holocaust. Like any sentient being, he was disturbed by the barbarity depicted in the book and was eager to discuss his feelings.
One evening, he asked, “Was the author a Zionist?”
The question came out of nowhere. We had never discussed Wiesel’s politics, hadn’t discussed Wiesel at all, actually. Like any decent English teacher, I ask my son to transform feelings into interpretation, but I let him choose the subject-matter.
“Yes, he was,” I said. (I wasn’t going to lie to the kid—not about this, anyway.)
“I thought so.”
“Why? Did somebody mention it?”
“No, I could just tell.”
“How could you tell?”
“I don’t know. I got like a vibe from him.”
How did the child sense that Wiesel was a Zionist? Night doesn’t focus on Israel. I guess he could have searched up the author, but my son wasn’t that diligent. He uses me as his personal Google, instead. No, he figured it out on his own. I was baffled. It seemed almost magical. Did he inherit some recursive gene from his grandfather? Or is there an observable structure in written and visual texts wherein an extant but unarticulated Zionism can be detected?
Maybe his recognition didn’t come from the text itself, but from the conditions that allowed the text to make its way into his curriculum. For starters, it probably seemed curious that his class was studying the Nazi Holocaust when there is an ongoing genocide in a neighboring country. Not to mention that his school is located in a city hosting many thousands of refugees from the genocide in question. It possibly seemed curious as well that nobody was discussing the various genocides that have occurred on the African continent. Why this genocide? Why this genocide whose descendants are busy committing a genocide of their own? Why this genocide whose descendants are busy committing a genocide of their own using the prior genocide as a justification?
Acts of memorialization have ideological components which are hard to discuss because of their propensity to offend. Only a ghoul would suggest that the Nazi Holocaust should be ignored. But it requires a comparable ghoulishness to make it so that other genocides are minimized in order to sanctify the Nazi Holocaust. This kind of ghoulishness, however, gets validated by cultural and educational institutions throughout the West. Those who suffer oppression in the present take notice. We don’t want to read books about the horrors of racial violence promoted by the liberal elite because they studiously omit Palestine.
This omission, more than anything, is how we can detect Zionist sensibilities in supposedly neutral or universal environments: do the ruling classes mourn and memorialize an occupied nation or do the ruling classes treat engagement with an occupied nation as cause for punishment? Do victims of state violence become a cultural phenomenon or do they exist in perpetual disrepute? Only after decades of nonstop organizing at great cost to countless individuals and three years of real-time atrocities has it become possible to speak about how Palestinian suffering upends the chauvinistic paradigms into which generations of media consumers were inculcated, and still we risk destitution for demanding the right to name our oppressor. When we say “Israeli,” they hear “Jew.” When we say “Zionist,” they also hear “Jew.” But if we say “Jew,” then we are making bigoted conflations. We didn’t choose to eschew representations of Jewishness and Jewish culture. Zionists deliberately made them off-limits to us.
*****
In the end, it was my mother, ever the voice of reason, who upheld the old man’s sentiment. She was chatting with my son on WhatsApp and asked, “What are you learning about in school?” When my son explained that he was reading Night, she didn’t inquire about the book or the author.
“Well, honey,” she told him, perhaps considering the village downwind of Yad Vashem that she never got to visit, “it’s important to remember what’s happening in Palestine.”