Israel’s ‘anti-Zionists’ brave police beatings, smears to demand end to war
An antiwar protest in Tel Aviv during municipal elections [Mat Nashed/Al Jazeera]
9 Mar 2024
Tel Aviv/West Jerusalem – In 2015, Maya, a Jewish Israeli, travelled to Greece to help Syrian refugees. At the time, she was an exchange student in Germany and she had been deeply moved by the pictures she saw of desperate people arriving there in small boats.
That was where she met Palestinians who had been born in Syria after their parents and grandparents fled there during the founding of her own country in 1948.
They told her about the Nakba – or “catastrophe” – in which 750,000 Palestinians were expelled from their homes to make way for the newly established Israel. Maya, 33, who had been taught that her country was born through “an independence war” against hostile Arab neighbours, decided that she needed to “unlearn” what she had learned.
“I never heard about the right of return, or Palestinian refugees,” she told Al Jazeera.
“I had to get out of Israel to start learning about Israel. It was the only way I could puncture holes in what I was taught.”
Maya, who asked that her full name not be used for fear of reprisals, is one of a small number of Israeli Jewish activists who identify as “anti-Zionists” or “non-Zionists”.
According to the Anti-Defamation League, a pro-Israeli group with a stated mission of fighting anti-Semitism and other forms of racism in the United States, Zionism means supporting a Jewish state established for the protection of Jews worldwide.
However, many anti-Zionists like Maya and the people she works with view Zionism as a Jewish supremacist movement which has ethnically cleansed most of historic Palestine and systematically discriminates against the Palestinians who remain, either as citizens of Israel or residents of the occupied territories.
But since Hamas’s deadly attack on Israeli civilians and military outposts on October 7, in which 1,139 people were killed and nearly 250 taken captive, Israeli anti-Zionists have been accused of treason for speaking about Palestinian human rights.
Many have called for a permanent ceasefire in Gaza to stop what they view as collective punishment and genocide of the Palestinian people.