Tallie and Nava talk about how we changed our minds about Zionism. Music in this episode is "All Other Things Considered" by Dresden, The Flamingo. Our theme music is by decibelists. (https://www.decibelists.com/)
Tallie and Nava talk about how we changed our minds about Zionism.
Credit for the phrase "hope is a discipline" goes to Mariame Kaba, an organizer, educator and curator who founded Project NIA in Chicago. You can follow her on twitter @prisonculture or at her website (http://mariamekaba.com)
You can (and should!) read "Zionism from the Standpoint of its Jewish Victims" by Ella Shohat here: (https://palestinecollective.files.wordpress.com/2013/10/sephardim-in-israel_-zionism-from-the-standpoint-of-its-jewish-victims.pdf)
Music in this episode is "All Other Things Considered" by Dresden, The Flamingo. Our theme music is by decibelists. (https://www.decibelists.com/)
Tallie: 00:00 Hey everyone, this is Tallie. Just wanted to say that Nava and I recorded this episode right at the beginning of the shelter in place order in the United States, but before the global uprisings for black lives. So you’ll notice we don’t talk about that in this episode. We did listen to this and still think it’s relevant, so we are releasing it now. thanks!
Tallie 00:21 : Do you feel ready to talk about how you changed your mind about Zionism?
Nava: Yeah, just probably a quick chat, right, Tullie?
Tallie: Yeah [laughter]. [music]
Tallie:Welcome to Diaspora Podcast. I'm Tallie Ben Daniel. I'm a political educator with Jewish Voice for Peace, living in Oakland.
Nava: I'm Nava EtShalom. I'm a poet and educator in Philadelphia.
Tallie: 00:52 Nava, during this podcast season, we've looked into how Jewishness and Zionism get tangled up together, and we've shared some of Zionism's history and the impact Zionism has had on Palestinians.
Nava: I think we've been pretty clear, Tallie. Zionism is an ideology that's done harm to Palestinians, intense and ongoing harm. And the State of Israel has killed and stolen from and exiled and restricted Palestinians, and it's doing all those things right now. Listening to the history, it's kind of impossible not to see it.
Tallie: But the thing is, you and I didn't always see it. And a lot of Jewish people who now support the liberation of Palestine didn't always see it.
And there are many reasons. I think the biggest one is for Jewish people, Zionism tells a story about belonging, about who we belong to, and about home.
Nava:01:44 Yeah, Tallie, a really powerful story.
Tallie: So we both had to unlearn things to get to where we are now, and we wanted to share more about ourselves, how we changed our minds.
Nava: A little window into what Zionism used to mean to us and what it means now. This might sound familiar to you, or maybe this story will explain why anyone you know ever believed in this, or maybe it'll just be interesting anthropology.
Tallie: Yeah. So this episode is a chat the two of us had where we finally got to interview each other. [music]
Nava: 02:20 Okay. Tallie, when you were growing up, did you know you were a Zionist? Were you like, "I'm a Zionist," or was it--?
Tallie: No. Well, no. I grew up in United States, in an Israeli family, so I thought of myself as Israeli, living in the United States. And at the time, I didn't think of myself as part of a Zionist movement or part of a-- that was not the identity that really spoke to me. And a lot of things were subsumed under Israeli, right? So the fact that I spoke Hebrew and the fact that I had an Israeli family and that I would go to Israel every year was all part of being Israeli, but also the fact that my family's from Iraq was kind of also subsumed under being Israeli. I think, at the time, the identity that I was told I was and given was Sephardic, that my Jewish customs were different than other people's was also a part of being Israeli. So it was just-- that was the category thing. So no, I didn't really know I was a Zionist.
Nava: Do you remember a moment of being like, "Oh, there's something I don't know here, or"?
Tallie: Yes, it's extremely embarrassing [laughter].
Nava: Tell me your embarrassing moment.
Tallie: 03:51 It was literally my first day of college. Okay, so tiny bit of background is that at that point, I had already kind of figured out some stuff about the United States, that the United States was racist, and that the history of how the United States got founded was one of genocide and colonialism. So I had that knowledge already. And then I went to college and my first day of college, I saw a sticker on a bus stop that said, "Free Palestine." And my thought was, "From what?" I had no context for understanding what that meant--
Nava: Wow.
Tallie: --because [laughter] I didn't know things. I mean, I don't mean it to be self-deprecating. I just genuinely did not know. I just did not know. And so I kind of put that in the corner of my brain, being, "That's confusing. I don't know what that's about." Free Palestine from what, but also why would someone make a sticker about it and then feel the need to put the sticker on a bus stop? All of that felt deeply confusing to me. And then the rest of it, there wasn't a clear moment. It was more of a, like, "I want to know what this is about." I went to UC Santa Cruz. I also went to college four days after 911, so it was a moment in time. So a lot of the professors were trying to explain not just where Afghanistan was and who the Taliban was and why going to war in Afghanistan was not actually a thing about 911, but a thing about an extended colonialism, right, that for them, also meant talking about Palestine and talking about feminist struggles and anti imperial movements .
Nava: And did you--?
Tallie: Yeah.
Nava: --have emotional reactions to being in class and talking about this? Did you feel it in your body, or did you--?
Tallie: 05:58 Oh, totally. I think the longer, more deeper and more emotional process was around being an Iraqi person,
Tallie: when there was a war against Iraq a couple of years after the war in Afghanistan, both of which are still ongoing, that really was the moment that I had a more emotional reaction and understanding that like, "Oh, this is all an anti-Arab colonial project, all of it." And that was really-- that was bigger. That was deeper and bigger, I think, as a realization and learning more about Iraqi history and Iraqi Jewish history, so. I mean, there was a while where, literally, every class was assigning Ella Shohat's "Zionism from the Standpoint of its Jewish victims." And so the first time I read it, I was like, "This is incredible and mind blowing." And then the fifth time I read it, I was like, "Is there any other Iraqi/Jewish writings that I could get into?"
Nava: Is it something that you'll be reading this for the rest of your life?
Tallie: Yeah, am I reading this for the rest of my life? It was both a very fast and simple process where I didn't know anything, and then I knew things. And I was like, "Oh, I thought something was wrong. It was this, and it was exactly a whole other way. Now, that's my new reality." And then there was a much deeper process around what that meant for me as a person and what my identity was, and how I wanted to relate to the world, and how I wanted to-- who I wanted to have affinity with, I guess. Yeah.
Nava: Did you find people felt like fellow travelers as you were going through first the stuff of reconfiguring your understanding of the politics? I feel like, especially-- I wonder, did you find fellow travelers around thinking about your identity and Arabness and how that had become invisibilized?
Tallie: 07:54 Yes and no. I definitely found fellow travelers around the question of what Israel was doing. I mean, 2001, 2002, 2003 is also the second intifada, which we haven't gotten to in the podcast, but that was also a big moment and Students For Justice in Palestine also just started that year. And it was started at Berkeley, which was very close to Santa Cruz, and there was a lot of talk about forming an SJP at Santa Cruz. And there were all these Jewish people who were having big, complicated feelings about it, but who were progressive and wanted to be down, but just had a bunch of big, complicated feelings about it. So me and my friend, Sandi, started a group called Confused Jews [laughter] so that kind of Jewish people could have all their feeling with each other instead of--
Nava: [inaudible]. That's so--
Tallie: --taking up a bunch of space in like, potential SJP meetings [laughter] with all of our feelings.
Nava:08:48 To be honest, I'm not confused about Palestine, but I would have still really joined a group called Confused Jews [laughter].
Tallie: I mean, there's so many confusing things in the world. It's so interesting to reflect on this part of my life because I think your-- I was in my early 20s, I was unlearning a lot and relearning things. And it kind of all got-- all of that energy kind of got really focused on an academic trajectory. I wanted to understand things, right? That was where I put all of those feelings and questions and thoughts.
Nava: So can I ask you one more question?
Tallie: Yeah, and I'll ask you a question.
Nava: Okay. Did something take the place of Zionism for you?
Tallie: 09:32 That's a great question. I mean, for a long time, it was feminism. I know that's a very nerdy answer. For a long time, I did feel strongly about my community and political affinities, and the people I felt most at home with were feminists and other-- yeah, were feminists and other women. And at the same time, identity-based, political communities always fall into a kind of weird, complex messiness around who gets to be inside and who doesn't. And feminism has taken on that question in various ways, some of which I agree with and some of which is really horrible and harmful. so I think that I'm currently curious about how to build a community that has politics that I agree with but doesn't necessarily rely on identity, but it's a really weird and confusing and messy question that I haven't fully answered. You know, I think that there is a -- a friend of mine told me this the other day that I'm sure has a much longer movement history, that hope is a discipline. You have to have hope for a better and different future, even when really horrible, terrible things happen that feel devastating, and the world is ending because you don't really have a choice. And you have to build that discipline in yourself to see the way out and to see the hope. So I've been thinking about that a lot in terms of this question and in terms of when people ask about the future of Israel and Palestine or Israel and United States. That's the thing I return to a lot.
Nava: That's very lovely.
Tallie: 11:37 Do I get to ask you questions now?
Nava: Okay.
Tallie: Well, Nava, one thing I learned through our friendship is that there is and was a Zionist movement that not only existed, that was actively working to recruit people, but you were a part of as a young person. So--
Nava: 11:58 I like how you are sort of asking that as if we're like on a talk show, and it's something cool about me when, actually, it's not something cool about me [laughter].
Tallie: I mean, it's interesting. So I mean, I think what my real question is how did you change your mind about Zionism? But I think my first question is what was Zionism to you as a young person before you changed your mind?
Nava: 12:21 Well, that's such a-- okay. That's a really good question. Unlike you, I grew up with very explicit talk about Zionism, and it came from a bunch of different places on both sides of my family of origin. My family had settled in Palestine on one side, it was in the early 19th century and on the other side, it was slightly later in the 19th century, so wild variation. And then parts of the family had come here, and I was born here in the States. I kind of thought I would obviously live there at some point. There was a house that my great-great-great uncle had built that was the house that you went to when you went to Jerusalem, and it was where the whole family would be.
And I have an aunt and a bunch of cousins and stuff who are all settlers on the West Bank, and I knew that I didn't like the part of religious Zionism that was about settling on the West Bank and in Gaza. And, I grew up in the Labor Zionist Youth Movement. I thought I was part of a revolutionary movement. We were bringing about socialism in the world, and the best way to do it was to support a socialist state in Palestine. So I think, for me, I talked very explicitly about Zionism, and what it meant to me was revolution, meant to me a new, more just global regime.
Tallie: 13:49 So once everyone saw how awesome and socialist and amazing Labor Zionism's future is, they would follow. They would follow the socialist.
Nava: We were feeding a global vision of socialism.
Tallie: Right, So interesting. Okay.
Nava: 14:05 So I think, for me, the thing that felt really threatening about changing my mind about Zionism was that I had grown up already thinking of myself as oppositional and left in relationship to Zionism, because we were progressive. And I knew what right-wing Zionism looked like, and I was like, "No, we talk about Palestinians all the time. We're all very pro Oslo." My version of Zionism, my narrative was-- the reason I'm a Zionist is because I want Israel to be the best version of itself that it can be, and it should be more just. My love for it leads me to try to make it more just, and that's what Zionism is to me. So the idea of then stepping away from the whole project and seeing it all as violent fucked me up emotionally in a pretty intense way because I was like, "Wait, it's not like I wasn't thinking about Palestinians, and it's not like I wasn't thinking about justice, and it's not like I wasn't thinking about power. I was just missing this really key piece where the whole thing is colonialism." And that fucked me up pretty bad. I cried for a year [crosstalk].
Tallie: Yeah, did you have a moment? Was there a moment where it all--?
Nava: 15:13 I had a couple moments. So I started college in the fall of 2000, and three weeks into college, the second intifada started. But that was a moment, just the intifada was a moment. But then I went to the conference in Berkeley that was the launch of the student divestment movement. And there was this moment where we went outside, and there were all these counter-protesters, and a lot of them were waving Israeli flags. And I was standing in between people who were reacting to the Israeli flag in a really intense way and experiencing it. There was people being angry, and there were people being really sort of devastated to be faced with that symbol. And that was a real moment for me. And my first reaction was to feel like they were being antisemitic because there was a Jewish star on the flag, and I was like, "Why are they so mad to see a Jewish star?" It sat with me for a while, and I was like, "Holy fuck. I have to think about all of this."I was like, "Oh, my God. That flag means something. The whole thing means something. This is fundamentally about theft and violence." Over that weekend, had this pretty deep, emotional shift that informed an intellectual shift. And then I flew back, and my friend, Ben, picked me up from the airport. And I got in the car, and I was like, "We have to start Students For a Free Palestine here on campus.
Tallie: Nava, what took the place of Zionism? So you had this moment, and I'm sure it was a long process to transform your orientation to the world.
Nava: 17:06 Yeah. Well, I think for me, becoming anti-Zionist, part of what it meant was there are friends I grew apart from, people I couldn't talk to about it because it would just always be a fight, or people just didn't want to hear about it or people who were actively involved in the movement that I didn't know how to stay connected to and a whole institution that I had identified with, my youth movement that I had to separate myself from. So I think, for me, what took the place of it is a bunch of different questions. There's what took the place-- I think my first impulse was to be like, "Okay, my new identity is I'm part of a Palestine solidarity movement where I used to be a Zionist." I just wanted to flip it, so that I would have something that would still complete my sense of who I was. And that didn't work because that's a set of politics, but I had sort of already been burned by letting those be my sense of self. And so that didn't stick.
18:00 So I think, politically, what took the place is-- I think, for me, maybe in the same way that feminism did for you, for me, I think, settler-colonial analysis-- the stuff you'd already been thinking about but thinking about the relationship between US and Israel and settler-colonialism and my part in it took that place. But socially, I had to rebuild my sense of who I belonged to, and that's hard and also very beautiful. I ended up with-- I mean, luckily, a bunch of my Jewish friends in college also-- we all kind of went through the process together. And so we used to have seders every year at this really beautiful building on campus because we couldn't go the Hillel seders because everyone in Hillel hated us, and the Rabbi called us "not Jews" And we started a really beautiful tradition, and we did it for 15 years where we got together for seders. So that took the place. That's one of the things. Sometimes I think about-- I have these moments. I had it really strongly when my grandmother died, and I had it really strongly when my grandfather died just last year where I feel like a deep sadness that my political work in the world feels to them like such a betrayal because I feel like, actually, I learned a lot of my values from them. And they didn't like what I was doing, and they would like it less and less as time goes by, but I kind of feel like my family wasn't so Zionist and if the United States didn't use the cover of Jews to support Israel, this would not be my political work. It could be, but it wouldn't feel inevitable in the way that it does. And so I sort of feel like all the more so, I want my ancestors to be proud because they left me with this work to do. That's why it's my job, you know what I mean?
Tallie: 20:05 Yeah. Yeah. [music]
Tallie: 20:18 Nava, that was fun.
Nava: Yeah, Tallie. I loved interviewing you. Listening back to our conversation, I'm thinking about how we really didn't have any models for what rejecting Zionism could look like.
Tallie: Yeah, we've talked about this. When we were learning all of this about Zionism in the late '90s/early '00s, we were pretty alone.
Nava: Yeah, we were really kind of trying to make something out of nothing.
Tallie: 20:42 I mean, right now, there's a national student movement for Palestinian rights with chapters and campaigns and ideas about what a better future could look like. When we were in our 20s, there was no US solidarity movement to join, really, and there were definitely no US/Jewish anti-Zionist organizations.
Nava: Yeah, I think that's part of what made this transition so hard for us, right? Zionism was important to both of us because it offered us a sense of who we are and where we belong, and then we needed to invent new ways of thinking about home. And I think for both of us, that's diaspora. We've been talking about it for a few months now. So Tallie, tell me. These months later, what does diaspora mean to you?
Tallie: 21:26 It's a good question, and I think it means different things to me in different moments in time. Right now, what I'm thinking about is that when I was in my 20s, I really thought that if I could just get enough information and enough history and enough analysis, that I would figure out a way to kind of get to a better place and a better future for Israelis and Palestinians. And now, I still think that in some ways, but part of what diaspora does for me as a concept is it makes me think about feelings and home and trauma, that it's not just going to be about our understanding of history or understanding of power and politics. It's about recognizing that people have fear, and people need community to feel safe and that we need to build that community in order to get to that future that we want where everybody has the things they need to thrive. So that's one piece of it. The other piece of it for me is my background is Iraqi. The Iraq of my grandparents doesn't exist anymore. It's gone forever. I'm never going to be able to understand or visit that place where my grandfather had a textile factory and where my grandmother went to market. That world is gone for various reasons. There's been many wars since that time, but I'm still Iraqi, so what kind of Iraqiness is available to me? I don't speak Arabic. I was born in the United States, right? So it's part of my heritage, and it's part of who I am, but it's never going to look like my mother's or my grandmother's Iraqi identity. And so part of what diaspora means to me is about-- we can't go back in time. We're not trying to go back and say, "These things never happened." We're trying to imagine a different future. And so what kind of future can I imagine that isn't just based on being the most authentic Iraqi person, right? But an Iraqi in the diaspora, a Jewish/Iraqi person in the diaspora, a Jewish/Iraqi person in the United States. Part of what diaspora allows for is that these things change. There isn't some kind of pure, nationalist understanding of any kind of identity, but that identities are permeable, and they shift over time and that's okay, and that there's a new thing that's going to come out of that change and shift and permeability. And that's the best I can do for now [laughter].
Nava: That's great, Tallie.
Tallie: 24:10 Well, what about you, Nava? What does diaspora mean to you?
Nava: I'm thinking about how your relationship to diaspora is really informed by the idea that you have to think about what your Iraqiness means now and what you want to imagine for that part of your identity and culture and sense of home in the future. And I have noticed that for a lot of Ashkenazi Jews in the United States who reject Zionism, that connection to diaspora does come through a connection to the past. There's a real nostalgic factor to it and that I've always been a little bit allergic to. I think diaspora's about hereness, which is a Yiddish concept I really like, doikayt. 24:59 I think diaspora really grounds me in a sense that we are here and now, that where we live is home, and that we're making something here that we want to live in, which means that we have to make something that is sustainable now, and we have to be building it in order to create the conditions for the kind of change we want in the future.
Tallie: Nava, I'm so glad we found each other and this way of understanding home.
Nava: Yeah, it's been a journey.
Tallie: 25:27 Thank you for listening to Diaspora.
Nava: We want to hear what you think. What does the word diaspora mean to you? Do you think of yourself as living in diaspora?
Tallie: Record your answer. You can use the voice memos on your phone, and email your recording to podcast@jvp.org. And we might include it in a future episode.
Nava: Diaspora Podcast is produced by Tallie Ben Daniel. It's written and hosted by me, Nava EtShalom, and Tallie Ben Daniel, and it's edited by Jenny Asarnow. Our theme music is the song, For Our Stories, by the Desibelists off their self-titled debut album.
Tallie: If you like this podcast, please spread the word, and rate and review us wherever you listen to podcasts. And you can follow us on Twitter@DiasporaPodcast or email us at podcast@jvp.org. Thanks. [music]