The story of my “Birthright” trip to Israel, and what I learned looking at Israeli society from the inside, probably requires a little preface about who I am and how I came to go on the trip. I should also probably warn you that this isn’t a recounting of a fun-packed vacation, but is instead a “carefully programmed propaganda exercise,” in the words of activist Noam Chomsky’s email to me, meant to revitalize Zionism among young adult American Jews, get us to like and support Israel, and ignore the oppression of Palestinians.
To start, I want to acknowledge my privileges and state I am a white, straight cismale and American. Like many white men in the US, I am largely insulated from and ignorant of the harsh realities that most in the Global South cannot escape.
Paraphrasing Noam Chomsky, my privileges confer opportunity and thus responsibility. What I do with this is my choice: to remain silent or call out injustices when I see them. It is especially important for me to speak out because my privileges mean I am not as likely to be thrown in prison for dissenting, Israel is a country associated with my religion and culture, and I am immune to the anti-Semite label as I am Jewish myself. Since there aren’t many Jews and even fewer Jews who are knowledgeable and/or confident enough to speak out I must raise my voice.
Before I get into it, I want to state that I am not only critical of Israel but in fact just about every country. The United States, for example, is far more of a criminal as it is leading our species off a cliff with the global environmental crisis, which is my point of focus as an environmental activist. My current focus on Israel is simply because I have spent 3 months in Israel and 2 weeks in the West Bank, I am Jewish, and because I want to voice my concern as a citizen of the United States, which supplies Israel with 3 billion dollars in military aid annually and is the leading recipient of such aid.
The Trip
You can only go on Birthright if you haven’t gone on other group trips or tours in Israel, so for many Jews this is their only education about Israel. Unfortunately, it’s a very biased education that leaves a lot of information out.
My Birthright trip had 40 reasonably diverse participants all from various parts of the United States ranging from the urban Manhattan to rural Montana, practicing Jews wearing tzitzit to atheist-Jews who love bacon, dreadlocked herbalists to frat boy bro-dudes, and the political left, center, and right. In addition to the 40 of us, there were eight IDF soldiers, two staff leaders around our age who have recently graduated from Birthright to act as basically a laid back RA or camp counselor to help out, an older bus driver in his 50’s or 60’s, and an older guide in his 60’s who was with us the whole ten days.
Our guide Maxi was probably selected for his penchant for rambling and bulldozing anyone else’s thoughts with his words, instituting the banking-model of education that curtails questioning (Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed). When I tried to speak up during a discussion on gender in Judaism he cut me off in front of everyone. When asked a question he doesn’t know the answer to he rambles on long tangents instead of admitting he doesn’t know. Although most of us professed our love for his immense knowledge, I and a few others were less than impressed.
On the second night, Gilad Vital of Israeli band Shotei Hanevua, of the famous track Ein Ani, came to play for us. Apparently the guy is pretty famous in Israel. He made a side comment that all Arabs hate Jews, which I find is generalizing an entire group of people and is thus racist, and a friend of mine called him out on it. This evolved into a debate between him and the musician, with a few other people chiming in. Nobody raised their voice or got mad yet you could cut the tension in the room with a knife. It eventually fizzled out as people got tired of listening to the debate and the music resumed with lots of dancing.
On the third day, we visited the city of Zefat (pronounced Tseh-FAHT) and went to a synagogue for a talk with a rabbi there. The holy books of Judaism, like the Talmud, Kabbalah, and Torah, were displayed on tables in front of us as we sat in rows in rapt attention. As the rabbi talked about the philosophical and ethical questions raised by the books he segued into the story of the IDF soldier Gilad Shalit. Hamas (who I do not support, for the record) kidnapped him outside Gaza on June 25th, 2006 and held him prisoner for five years with the demand that Israel release a thousand Palestinians (many but not all of them terrorists). Whether or not Israel should trade a thousand prisoners for Shalit was sensationalized and debated for five years in the media. Our activity with the rabbi was to apply the ethics of Judaism to this debate.
Jewish ethics was boring me, so I decided to do some research on my own. Who were those involved? Why did they do what they did? And what more did they do? Apparently they weren’t telling us the whole story. The real story is two Palestinians, Osama and Mustafa Muamar, were abducted by the IDF one day before Shalit was, according to the BBC, The Guardian, and Al Jazeera. The Shalit kidnapping was a response to it. Why aren’t we arguing the ethics of this? Chomsky discusses this here and here.
This brought me to the conclusion that Israel distracted people with the Shalit story and held a thousand prisoners without trial for five years, during which Operation Cast Lead -Israel’s war against Gaza December 2008 to January 2009- led to the deaths of over a thousand Palestinians, almost a thousand of those were civilians, thousands more injured, and tens of thousands more displaced from their homes. Compare this with the thirteen Israelis, three of them civilians, that died and less than a thousand injured. According to the vague definitions of terrorism Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu gives, Israel participates in terrorism itself and more terrorism comes from Israel than Palestinians. This pattern repeats itself over and over again throughout every “war” Israel faces against Palestine. It is not a war, as that word blurs the conflict into a supposed fight between two equal forces, but it is, in fact, an outright massacre by the Israeli oppressors against the oppressed Palestinians.
On the fourth day, we were in Tel Aviv and we went to the original home and now museum of Theodore Herzl, the founder of modern Zionism who posed the idea of a Jewish nation in the 1895 book Der Judenstaat. We were given a video lecture then a live lecture with the same information, effectively ensuring that it’s drilled into our minds.
While I had many questions, they gave us no time for questions and rushed us out the door. Nobody else seemed bothered by this.
With regard to the content fed to us, it ignored the vibrant Jewish and Israeli anarchism (No government and no capitalism, a classless society with no bosses and no one in power) and coexistence with Palestinians in late 19th and early 20th century, remnants of which today exist as kibbutzim, slowly dying away as capitalism takes over.
Of course, the trip had so far also ignored any reference to Palestinians unless in reference to their fighting against Israel.
On the fifth day, we were touring the hills on the outskirts of the city, our guide pointed to an Arab village without any walls around it to claim that Arabs and Muslims can live free in Israeli democracy. This, however, ignores the Palestinian bantustans in the West Bank and the occupation of Gaza, which Israel controlled everything that goes in and out down to the calorie amount per person to restrict access to food.
The sixth day was the Sabbath, which meant we stayed in our Jerusalem hotel. During this time, I was able to convince one of our group leaders (not the older guide but the leaders our age) for us to have a political discussion during one of our many get-togethers.
I presented my views, citing the Gilad Shalit propaganda as my leading example for my argument that Israel was responsible for the most terrorism. Instead of people asking me further questions, they instead told me their views (as if I’m wrong and don’t know better) and agreed with each other without critically thinking. A prime example of this is when an IDF soldier casually mentioned that Hamas uses human shields when firing at Israel. I was alone to interject and ask if she was sure this was true to which she flatly rebutted that it was. Subsequently I cited this NYTimes article that claims it isn’t true, corroborated by the BBC’s Middle East editor, The Guardian, and The Independent. Reuters even claims that if anyone is using human shields: it is in fact Israel.
Another IDF soldier said Israel warns Gazans of incoming attacks by dropping papers over the area ahead of time that say to leave the area. However,Israeli journalist Amira Hass says this practice is “sadism” as the “recorded message demanding hundreds of thousands of people leave their already targeted homes, for another place, equally dangerous, 10 kilometers away.”
One of the few dissenters among us brought up an Amnesty International report that accused Israel of war crimes. However, one of our group leaders pointed out that the author of one of the Amnesty International reports has been repeatedly accused of anti-Semitism. I found this Israel Today article that calls out Amnesty International’s anti-Semitism, although much of it is conflating anti-Israel with anti-Jew and it doesn’t point to one author. It does bring up some serious points however that I can accept as anti-Semitism if verifiable. Regardless, that article does not deny that Israel is responsible for war crimes and the accusers are only anti-Semitic because they don’t like Israel, which is absurd. And many other organizations like Human Rights Watch also accuse Israel of war crimes.
Returning to the group discussion, when someone pointed out that Israel receives billions of dollars in military aid our peer group leader countered that millions of United States dollars go to aid Palestine as well. To their credit, this is true, but the amount of aid has declined over the past couple decades and corruption was “encouraged by Israel,” according to the USIP and Electronic Intifada.
That night the Israeli Historian Iftah Burman of Middle East Learning Academy came to visit us.
One obvious mistake he made was presenting the Western Media as left wing whereas it’s, in fact, right wing (see the Propaganda Model, proposed in Herman and Chomsky’s Manufacturing Consent). A common belief is to suppose that a violent media attracts more viewers and thus more money, so portraying Israel as more and more violent will gain more viewers as the media gets further critical Israel (or the United States, or any country). However, this model commits the mistake that the viewers are the consumers paying for violent media, whereas in fact the viewers are the product and the consumers are the corporations buying airtime for advertisements.
Given this economic model and basic laws of supply and demand, the media corporations such as CNN will only stay in business if they appeal to the demands of their customers, the corporations. Thus, corporations have a say in what is and what isn’t news. Given that politicians can’t get elected without corporate money, it’s safe to say corporations effectively control both the government and the media and are both increasingly right wing. While Israel may be portrayed as violent the majority of the news portrays Muslim terrorists as more violent, which is patently false as shown elsewhere in this essay.
Chief among Burman’s errors is his ignoring of much of Israeli violence and oppression. For details on this see here.
While seemingly trivial it’s a grave error (one that’s led to many deaths) to confuse the usage of rockets and missiles and thus to ignore that Israel has a massive upper hand. Missiles are guided and only used by Israel, whereas rockets are uncontrollable and only used by Palestine.He praised Iron Dome despite that it’s media hype and military industry profit.
While it’s true that most of the time Iron Dome has launched it has worked, it’s only needed to work 20% of the time because most rockets are too far off course for Israelis to worry about. The occupation that controls what goes in and out of Gaza down to the calories consumed, as cited above, was ignored, as was the transportation of basic economic necessities, not just rockets, through the Gaza’s tunnels. The icing on the cake was that when I asked him for his thoughts on the political work of Noam Chomsky, who has written extensively in critique of Israel and support for Palestinians, he said “Chomsky is not a historian,” despite never even reading his work.
The next day, the seventh day, we went to the Holocaust Museum. Holocaust museums alone are haunting, depressing, and makes you feel emotions you never thought you had. To use the Holocaust as a propaganda tool, however, is grotesque to the worst degree.
We visited Israel’s National Holocaust memorial museum in Jerusalem, Yad Vashem, in the morning rain, one of only two times it rained during the program, and after the three hours in the museum we exited to a beautiful sunny day, a perfect symbol for the darkness the Jews suffered coming to an end after WWII.
I was disappointed there was nothing at the end saying we will prevent this from happening again, to anyone else anywhere. There was no talk about other genocides like Kurds, Armenians, American Indian. It was a moving museum nonetheless, with beautiful architecture.
Naturally, it impacted us heavily and primed us for the events later that day when we visited Mount Herzl, the burial site of Theodore Herzl, the founder of Modern Zionism.
As I said above, Herzl wanted a poor man’s funeral, to be treated as an ordinary person. I told Maxi that Herzl was socialist, his response indicated he has no idea what socialism even is, stating that, “Socialism is when you help everyone and Herzl’s goal was to just help the Jews, so he was not a socialist.”
After the museum, we went to Mount Herzl to see the graves of fallen IDF soldiers and have their last words and personal stories presented to us by the IDF soldiers traveling with us. One story, in particular, was of a soldier whose last conversation with his mom was on the phone. We all pulled out our smartphones and heard that very conversation in Hebrew, as the IDF soldiers that were with us translated for us. The now dead IDF soldier in the story had called his Mom to tell her to check the notes section of his phone if something happens to him, implying a goodbye message was written there in case of death.
I ask you now to reflect that the ratio of Palestinians dead to Israelis dead is the inverse of what the mainstream media has you believe. Many more Palestinians have died, each with stories of their own, often dying in the arms of their families. If our Birthright trip took the time to hear the stories of each person who has died at the hands of the IDF we would be there for months.
I don’t mean to cast the deaths of IDF soldiers as meaningless. They are human beings that deserved a full life. But I am simply pointing out that the IDF is just as complicit with compulsory military service for Israelis and has more blood on their hands than Hamas as many more Palestinian civilians have died than Israelis.
Note that this was very calculated that this happened right after holocaust museum. It effectively gave us a persecution complex to make us feel like everyone hates Jews and justify the atrocities IDF commits.
Such practices are not uncommon in Israel, where the Prime Minster Benjamin Netanyahu “frequently invokes the Holocaust in urging the international community to crack down on Iran’s nuclear program.” In the same vein, the education system has recently begun teaching the Holocaust to children as young as 5/6 years old, despite the resistance from parents, teachers, and psychologists warning that this is too young of an age. Mandatory teaching of the Holocaust started in 1982 after successive wars with neighboring Arab countries and is part of an increasing trend using the genocide as a “political ploy meant to guilt and traumatize children into a certain kind of patriotism.”
On the eighth day, we drove to the Dead Sea, the lowest point on Earth, where it is so salty the human body stays afloat and cannot stay in longer than fifteen minutes due to blood pressure changes. Swimming in it was fun yet challenging as I was floating far higher than usual and I had to keep my head out of the water to avoid the pain of too much salt in my eyes. Due to its high mineral content, the Dead Sea is a source of extraction and thus environmental issues as Israel and Jordan exploit the resources to make high fashion skin care products and potash. Palestinians, however, are restricted from visiting or building their own factories along the Dead Sea.
On our bus ride away from the Dead Sea our guide told us the Dead Sea is shrinking due to various factors including humans, where he alluded to climate change. This is when he spouted that there was a debate among the scientific community as to whether climate change is being driven by humans or not, which is totally false, and makes him a climate denier.
On the ninth day we visited the Negev desert, where our guide Maxi kept rambling on about how the Israelis are making better use of the desert by developing it into sustainable agriculture, which is subtle racism implying Jews are better than Muslims. However, desert farming is inherently unsustainable because you will always need resources imported from outside the desert. It’s claimed that Muslim countries don’t do it because they don’t have technology, motivation, or ideology, but it’s in fact because they’ve been here longer and know the land better: that it is stupid to farm in the desert since it is incredibly difficult and unsustainable. Israel farms there because they are trying to colonize as much as possible, and wipe out the Bedouin nomads who have lived in the desert for thousands of generations.
That day we met the only Muslim we were sanctioned to talk to: essentially an actor wearing Bedouin garb and living in a tent. A scene likely designed to reinforce the stereotype that Muslims and Arabs are living in the past and unable to adapt to modern life.
The 10th and last day of our Birthright trip included us visiting the Ben Gurion memorial. We were told the controversy is about him giving money or not to Ashkenazis, but this ignores the terrorism he supported.
“Let us not ignore the truth among ourselves … politically we are the aggressors and they defend themselves… The country is theirs, because they inhabit it, whereas we want to come here and settle down, and in their view we want to take away from them their country.” David Ben Gurion, quoted on pp 91-2 of Chomsky’s Fateful Triangle, which appears in Simha Flapan’s “Zionism and the Palestinians” pp 141-2 citing a 1938 speech.
To the inevitable rebuttal that I am being divisive, alienating fellow Jews, friends, and family, it should be remembered that divisiveness can go both ways. As Jewish Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel says, “We must always take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented.” By remaining silent, we let Israel continue to oppress and marginalize Palestinians, further dividing them from ourselves. It is our choice to be divisive against the rich and powerful or the poor and oppressed. Personally, I would rather be an ally to those struggling against Palestinian apartheid.
Most people working with Birthright are probably genuinely good people who believe they are doing the right thing of supporting Israel. However just because they have good intentions does not let them off the hook. Regarding this, for example, racists are probably the last group of people to identify as racist since it requires a certain degree of self-awareness that racists do not possess. Acting as a racist requires a lack of empathy for large groups of people and thus a lack of understanding of what one’s actions are doing. It is not an intentional act of evil but rather a manifestation of subconscious ideology. Not being racist is thus not an identity but rather a continuous process that requires self-reflection of one’s thoughts and behaviors.
When I accuse Israel of war crimes in this essay I am not accusing the people living in Israel, but rather the head politicians, CEOs and executives of multinational corporations and financial institutions. Perhaps I should have been more careful with my language. There are many different groups of people within Israel, working class to ruling class, some of which are more responsible than others. I do not mean to guilt-trip the workers of Birthright or the State of Israel, I do not blame them as it is not their fault but instead are complicit in an institution governed by the ruling class, affectionately known as the one percent by Occupy Wall Street.
Author’s note: Today, the day this was published, is the Jewish holiday of Yom Kippur: the day of atonement. The holiest day of the year in Judaism, we fast and ask God for forgiveness of our sins. As a Jew myself I bear responsibility to speak out against the sins the country of my religion creates including decades of occupation and war crimes.
As Jews, I believe we should act in solidarity with the Boycott, Divestion, and Sanction (BDS) movement, listen to what Palestinians want most from activists, and boycott Birthright rather than go and fight the propaganda.
This essay is a shorter version of this more descriptive recounting of the same experience.