Unlearning Zionism and Palestinian History

Chag Sameach, Happy New Year. What am I doing for the

next year? That's such a great question.

I am continuing to be a hot Jewish girl who supports Palestine,

who was raised in a Zionist household by the son of a Holocaust survivor and my

grandfather, who was a Holocaust survivor, and still unlearn

Zionism, and I'm gonna tell you how.

I had to go to college. I had to leave my town and my

Chabad and my family system to have access to

textbooks that showed me pictures of things like a bustling

Palestinian city in the year nineteen ten, even though I was

told that Israel was a land without a people for a people without a land,

and Jews were so wonderful. We learned how to farm the Negev as though

no

Palestinians had existed there beforehand.

I had to see the pictures to realize, oh,

oh, I've been propagandized much of my life.

And then I took coursework in political science and in the history department

about Middle East politics and Arab-Israeli conflict and, and

Palestinian indigeneity, which again

countered everything I had learned from that point about

the history of the State of Israel.

I had to understand the context of colonial

efforts and the race for Africa and how that colonization project

moved north into the Levant and how at the end of World War

II, there were a hundred thousand Jewish

refugees to be resettled somewhere,

and the US didn't want them, and Britain didn't want them,

and France didn't

want them. And so they got together and said, "Hey,

we already have the Balfour

Declaration. We've been trying to colonize this plot of

land.

What if we took those hundred thousand Jewish refugees that none of us want

because

we're still antisemitic as fuck, and we put them on this plot of land,

and we tell them, 'Hey, it would be really smart

if you also had conscripted

military service,' and then we had them engage in a Western

military

project where we rape and pillage this land

and displace all of the indigenous

folks who already live here?" I learned that in college.