One Jew's long road to anti-Zionism

A long time ago, in a universe now far away in time and, probably, space, a nice (half-)Jewish girl in New York's Long Island suburbs decided to wear a Star of David to make sure people would know at a glance that she was a Jew.

 

It was not very long after the end of World War II. The shoah, the Jewish catastrophe, was still vivid in recent memory, Zionism was alive and re-invigorated, and most of popular opinion was firmly on the side of what the folk group the Weavers called "the new land of Israel" when they recorded "Tzena Tzena." So, for different reasons, were the governments of the United States, Britain, and the Soviet Union, and thus, so was the US Communist Party.

 

For the nice half-Jewish girl on Long Island, putting on the Star of David turned out to be the first step on a journey that would take her to shoah memorials across the United States and Europe, to a moment in Germany, of all places, when she would see herself, at last, as a committed anti-Zionist, and finally, years later, to another moment—also in Germany—when she would understand, at last, how to communicate that anti-Zionism to the world. Along the way, she would learn the Arabic word that corresponds to shoah: al nakba. Like shoah, it means the “catastrophe.” It's what Palestinians call the 1947 UN partition of Britain's former Palestine mandate into the State of Israel and what was to become a state for what was then the Arab majority of the population there.

 

The half-Jewish girl on Long Island grew up to be writer and journalist Judith Mahoney Pasternak, and "Nine Stops on a Long Road" is her account of the road she took to anti-Zionism. Read it in Tikkun.