I’m participating in an exchange with a few Substack writers. It focuses on Zionism and Judaism, digging into how we grew up and how it shaped us into who we are. I’ll be sharing this space with Behind the Narrative 📣 Ido Singer and Melissa Brodsky. They are amazing authors and I am honored to be amongst them.
I’m fifteen, maybe sixteen, getting tattooed in a garage by a punk guy I barely know, and I’m drinking Heineken. He tells me to knock it off. Alcohol thins the blood, he says, and he can tell I’m bleeding too much. He had his shirt off because it was muggy in that garage. He’s being professional about the blood. It takes me a little while but eventually I glance at the tats covering his torso. Swastikas. Sig runes.
The man holding the needle to my skin isn’t a punk guy.
He’s a neo-Nazi, and I’m a teenager in his garage, bleeding.
I was raised in a small town north of San Diego, one of two kids of divorced parents, in a family that broke early and kept breaking. The town was unserious, an eternal summer where history only happened to others. Next door lived a boy whose father was Israeli and whose mother was South African.
My friends and I ate free meals with the Hare Krishnas, who shave their heads and leave a ponytail, because an energy exits through that part of the skull. Down the street stood the Self-Realization Fellowship, a monastery founded by a guru who claimed he cured his own cholera by staring at a photograph. We joked about becoming monks but then thought of the celibacy.
There were hardly any Jewish families around, but the jokes circulated. Don’t Jew me. Don’t be such a Jew about it. And in the punk and hardcore scenes there were more like my tattoo artist. The one’s open about it, mentioning the ZOG and using Protocols of the Elders of Zion imagery. A hidden hand that controlled banks and wars.
Mostly it confused me why Jews were made fun of. I had no answer. I viewed it like any other racism.
At Boston University I absorbed the theories that now supply half the educated West with its opinions about Israel. Postcolonial literature, settler-colonial theory, decolonial critique, and Marxist class-analysis. Khalidi and Sayegh, Bhabha and Fanon. I even met Noam Chomsky, who kept a CNN crew waiting thirty minutes so he could talk to an acolyte. We spent the time laughing about how little either of us cared for Sam Harris.
Nobody in those classes had Sig rune tattoos or quoted the Protocols. My teachers were academics, some were Jewish antizionists. Israel appeared as a Western implant pressed into an Arab region. A country whose founding was an offense, and whose continual survival compounded the desecration.
There was an insinuation nobody spoke and everybody understood, that the survivors of the Holocaust had become like their murderers. It was Holocaust inversion on a syllabus educating the future thought-leaders of the country.
The history was different. At its center stood the Nakba. Nobody mentioned that five Arab armies invaded in 1948 with the goal of destroying the state. The nine hundred thousand Jews expelled from Arab countries went unspoken, a dispossession larger than the one mourned over. Three thousand years of continuous presence in the land wasn’t mentioned alongside the immigrant colonizers from Europe.
In all those years of graduate study I never heard a slur. Not once. The crude Jew-baiting of the punk shows was despised as barbaric, the kind of thing rednecks and rural people said. The word was Zionist and the object was a state, and somehow it didn’t connect to actual Jews. I carried my conviction out of Boston, certain I stood with the oppressed.
October 7 didn’t change my mind instantly. However, its coverage was an important catalyst. After the massacre of 1,200 Jews, I read the BBC, NYT, and the rest of my liberal outlets, and the depiction of Israel was something close to metaphysical evil. No grieving father, no rescued child, nothing ordinary, nothing innocent, just genuinely monstrous horrors, week after week.
Then it touched someone I respect. A close friend of mine is Jewish, a Zionist in the modest sense that nearly all Jews are, holding the position that his people’s homeland should exist. The wild idea that an entire country shouldn’t be destroyed. In the days after the 7th he posted about the sexual violence of that morning: the gang rapes, tortures, sadistic cruelty, and the replies said they never happened. Exaggerated. Propaganda.
These were people who had spent the #MeToo years insisting that every woman be believed, feminists and liberal academics, and the rule held for every woman on earth except Jewish ones.
They pressured him to denounce Israel to prove his decency. He refused, and I watched the refusal cost him, and that finished it for me.
So I did what academia trained me to do: research. The founding, the wars, the expulsions, the Jewish presence in the land. My views went up against the record and lost, and I let them. I’m no longer an antizionist. I believe Israel has the right to exist as the ancestral home of the Jewish people, and I now spend my time exposing the language and incarnations of antizionism. The entity. Settler-colonialism. Globalize the intifada. From the river to the sea.
There was a price I had to pay. I’ve lost friends, some by silence, others by argument, with a few who decided Israel must be paying me.
Melissa writes that October 7 broke her timeline open. Mine came apart from the opposite shore.
I’m not Jewish, but I stand with Jewish people. Those who used to say they would punch a Nazi, who shared Inglourious Basterds memes, now think I’m Hasbara. They don’t see the irony.
The Nazi in that garage had Jew-hatred where I could see it. You can’t physically see the hatred of those in the seminars. But it’s there, and right now in the world, it’s everywhere.
I followed my reason and conscience where they took me, and the world can be damned if it has a problem with that. I’ve bled in a neo-Nazi’s garage, I think I’ll be alright.
The Inverted World is reader-supported and self-funded. Free subscriptions help the work spread; paid subscriptions help keep it going.
Comments
Nothing yet. Say the first thing.
Sign in to join the conversation.