1948--Nakba, Brandeis & Apartheid
On my early experiences with Zionists in college that shaped my politics, the racist roots of Zionism, my love for Palestinians & South Africa...again.
They said something about never again and then/ they made close to one million human beings homeless—June Jordan
I feel stupid and selfish even writing this, but many days I have struggled to get out of bed over the past month because of debilitating sadness for Palestine. Stupid, because experiencing grief amidst a televised genocide seems obvious; selfish, because while this genocide is bankrolled by my government and my tax dollars, I am not Palestinian nor am I in Gaza. The place I was randomly born is not one sought after for land theft by Israeli imperialists. I have been confronted with Zionism since becoming an adult, and this is an exercise in exploring that personal history. I do not claim to even offer anything new because there’s nothing new to say. We know who Israel is and what they are doing.
Momodou Taal, the brilliant British Gambian graduate student whose student visa was revoked by the Trump admin for his solidarity with Palestine, recently said in an interview, “I’ve often held that to be pro-Black is to be anti-Zionist.”1
I have been thinking about these words and reflecting on the foundational experiences I had in college at Brandeis University amongst Zionists that pushed me to deepen my study of the Black radical tradition. Israel has waged an ongoing genocide for over 610 days on Gaza. For 77+ years they have dispossessed Palestinians from their homeland and committed horrendous acts of imperialist violence. Let’s stop tip-toeing around the fabricated feelings of Zionists. Palestinians deserve a world absent of Israeli chauvinism.
In late October 2023, a good friend of mine, Professor Ra Malika Imhotep, posed a question about which I can’t stop thinking. Ra and I met at college and they are now a Black feminist scholar at Spelman College. They asked, “Was Brandeis’ inception part of the Zionist project?”
The University opened in 1948, the same year the Jewish ethnostate, Israel, was founded, with school colors that matched the newly formed state’s flag. Brandeis is technically a secular school with Jewish roots and was also founded at a time when Ivy League schools had quotas limiting the number of accepted Jewish and non-white students. America, like much of the western world in 1948, was antisemitic. Still, Louis Brandeis, the school’s namesake, was a leader in the Zionist movement. Albert Einstein, an initial supporter of Brandeis who eventually withdrew his support of the university, opposed the creation of Israel as a political ethnostate.2
I decided to go to Brandeis because of its history of educating Black feminists and Leftists like alumni Angela Davis3, Patricia Hill Collins and Hortense Spillers. I was drawn to a perceived overall culture of leftism at the University; Jewish leftists Mendy Samstein of SNCC (and close friend of Stokely Carmichael/Kwame Ture) and Abbie Hoffman, Chicago Seven, also graduated from Brandeis.
I imagine that the University perhaps at one point was a place where leftist students could express political theories and ideas. That was not my experience when I arrived on campus in January 2009 as a midyear freshman amidst the Gaza Massacre that year.
I use the word “massacre” rather than “war” because approximately 1,400 Palestinians were killed by the Israeli Occupying Forces and over 46,000 Palestinian homes were destroyed, which left about 100,000 Gazans homeless. In comparison, 13 Israelis were killed in total, most of them soldiers, some by friendly fire. I was just 19 years old, but I was beginning to form an understanding of Israel and settler colonialism. I had grown up around lots of Arabs, including Palestinians, in Chicago and could parse out Islamophobic lies doled out by mainstream news outlets. I began discussing my opinions of the massacre and Israel in my college dorm, not to be confrontational, but because I foolishly believed college to be a place in which we could freely discuss ideas and societal issues. I remember a particular late night argument with a peer who berated me in saying that I did not know what I was talking about because I hadn’t been to Israel, Hamas was a terrorist organization, and because I supported Gaza, I was antisemitic. This was the consensus of many of my Brandeis peers, or to avoid conflict, they’d condescendingly advise me to “learn more because the issue was complex.” A lot of their assumptions about me were probably racist, although it would take years for me to understand that truth. I remember feeling frazzled and frustrated. According to Jewish law, I actually am ethnically Jewish (matrilineal heritage. It’s complicated), I have never practiced Judaism, and I certainly did not identify with any of the Zionist rhetoric.
I took my classmates’ call to learn more about Palestine and Israel. This led me to Edward Said and Ilan Pappé, and I felt more articulate in my stance. In the Fall of 2009, back on campus as a sophomore, I attended a campus forum with Richard Goldstone, Jewish South African former Israeli ambassador to the UN, who was invited by Brandeis to discuss the UN Gaza Report, now more commonly referred to as the Goldstone Report. The Report documents settler violence both in Gaza and in the West Bank and Israel’s ongoing campaign to dehumanize and kill Palestinians. It’s 452 pages and is filled with evidence from a variety of sources. Students protested Richard Goldstone’s visit and called him a “self-hating Jew,” for documenting Israel’s cruelty. It’s laughable that a group of sheltered, rich college kids felt they knew more than a former judge, who is also a Zionist.
This is an excerpt from the report, “Groups of settlers threw stones at Palestinian houses and set fire to vehicles, agricultural fields, houses and the contents of one mosque. Settlers also attempted to force entry into Palestinian homes. One incident in which Israeli settler Ze’ev Braude shot and injured three members of the al-Matariyeh family was filmed and broadcast by the international media.”
The Zionist student protest of facts was revelatory to me. They weren’t protesting Israel’s vile practices. They supported them. They were protesting published proof of Israel’s depravity.
Up until that point, I had never seen such blatant disregard for reality. The campus Zionists and their gaslighting was bizarre for me because I did not yet know the extent of the propaganda in their lives nor of their anti-Arab/anti-Palestinian racism. I learned that many of the campus’ Zionist students spent years in private, sometimes religious schools, camps, community centers and in synagogues that centered Israel in their pedagogy. Not all of the Jewish students on campus were Zionists and many had alternative experiences in Jewish communities that focused on Judaism as independent of Israel. I do not believe Judaism has much to do with Zionism nor am I arguing that all Jewish people are Zionists.
I began biting my tongue around the Zionists. I also was just different from them because I grew up relatively poor, and they had mostly all grown up rich in homogenous affluent communities. My mom’s house was foreclosed on during college, and my dad didn’t even have a house, rented a room out of an older couple’s basement. The Zionist students’ families owned second homes and traveled abroad, often on trips to Israel, and yet they obsessed over their felt “oppression.”
Brandeis hosted a group of Al-Quds University students that same Fall 2009. Al-Quds is a public Palestinian university in Jerusalem. For whatever reason I got invited to spend time with this group, I think because I was a student journalist. We spent the next week building community with this small group of Palestinian students from the West Bank. We stayed up all night discussing normal youth nonsense, smoking and drinking but of course also discussing Palestine. I was horrified to hear about their experiences living in the West Bank—daily checkpoints; harassment, the premature death of family members and loved ones; regular physical, emotional, verbal, structural, spiritual violence.
On their last day, one of the Al-Quds students gave me a necklace pendant in the shape of a key, engraved with the map of Palestine and Handala. He explained to me that many Palestinians carry keys to their homes that were stolen from them during the Nakba in 1948, as a symbol of their will to return home. He said that he was touched by my compassion and that he hoped I would remember Palestine. One of my Zionist classmates told me that I was given a symbol of terrorism. I still carry the key with me today 16 years later.
The Al-Quds experience expanded my understanding of colonialism. The experience pushed me deeper into Black studies because part of what connected me to the Al-Quds students was my identity, and I don’t mean we felt connected because we both had darker skin, but rather we felt connected because we had all felt the crushing weight of white supremacy.4 Today, I still talk with an Al-Quds friend who keeps me updated on her life in the West Bank, and the Israeli cruelty she is subjected to particularly over the last 600+ days of genocide.
One semester at Brandeis, I took a class on redlining and the racial wealth gap. During a class, the professor lectured about the G.I. Bill. A Zionist girl adorned in all the markings of wealthy suburbia, those ugly Tory Burch flats and a boring Longcamp bag, raised her hand to essentially say that she didn’t think the G.I. Bill was a good enough excuse to explain disproportionate rates of Black poverty because her Jewish grandfather had worked his way up from nothing after the Holocaust and became a rich something or other. My Jewish professor graciously tried again to explain whiteness to her. The girl talked over him and ignored his explanation.
I’m an educator. As an adult now, I don’t entirely hold it against young people when they have underdeveloped ideas about the world even when their ideas are problematic and racist. Propaganda that comes from families and communities is hard to combat.
Zionism is a political ideology that requires its participants to invalidate the lived experiences of all oppressed people so that their ancestral trauma becomes the trauma event. That is part of the indoctrination. Norman Finkelstein, a descendant of Holocaust survivors, writes about this in The Holocaust Industry. Zionists or Jewish supremacists, as one of our time’s best writers, Mohammed el-Kurd, accurately names them, need to perpetuate the myth that the Jewish experience with genocide was the only experience with genocide. This myth-making serves as justification for the continued occupation of Palestine.
The problems arise when people age and refuse accountability or refuse to evolve from their racist world views. It is a choice that many make because their chosen ideologies are self-serving.
After October 7, 2023, many non-white and anti-Zionist Jewish fellow Brandeis alum began reaching out to me and to each other about the attack and Israel’s ethnic cleansing campaign. We all understood, as many who have organized against the colonial state do, that Hamas’ attack cannot be looked at as an isolated event but instead must be looked at as an act done by an occupied people against an occupying state. We were collectively disappointed in many of our alumni-peers’ commitment to supremacist logic and Zionism.
Since then, many of us have continued to talk about the morally repugnant things our Zionist classmates have written, said and done about and to Palestinians (I know one who volunteered to serve in the IOF and another who sends money to the IOF). Many of us have been called antisemitic for doing things like attending protests in keffiyehs or sharing news stories about dead Gazan children.
Zionism is an extension of Western imperialism. Israel is not just a Zionist project. It was a British project before 1948, and today is also an American project. The US supplies Israel with billions of dollars in military support and cosigns all of Israel’s brutality against Palestine.
While the architects of Zionism experienced antisemitism, they were also often racist, just like their colonial partners, the UK and the US. Theodor Herzl, the founder of the modern Zionist movement, supported the Uganda Plan, which would have “given” a portion of “British East Africa,” (now Kenya) to Jewish people to form a state. Planning the displacement of people on their land is racist. Colonialists are racist. According to historian of Zionism, Derek J. Penslar, Herzl believed in “civilizational hierarchy;” he believed that Europeans were at the top of hierarchy, then Arabs, inferior to them but still higher than the most inferior, sub-Saharan Africans.
Golda Meir famously said that there was no such thing as Palestinians. This rhetoric has been the impetus for the decades-long ethnic cleansing project. Contemporary Zionists on the far-right, like Bezalel Smotrich, echo this racist and erroneous sentiment.
South Africa’s apartheid government was one of the first states to recognize Israel–just nine days after Israel declared independence in May 1948. It does not seem coincidental that the apartheid regime came into power also in May 1948 alongside Israel. The Afrikaner apartheid regime was ideologically aligned with Israel for they too felt superior to the indigenous non-white majority population that surrounded them. They too believed in white supremacy and that their religion justified their colonial, violent presence.
By the 1960s, the two apartheid states had formed an alliance; the Israeli-South African Alliance. David Ben-Gurion traveled to South Africa in 1969 to solidify this allegiance. This was a white supremacist partnership between two reactionary colonial “states.” This was just two years after the June War (during which Israel stole 27,000 sq miles of land from Palestinians), and five years after Nelson Mandela had been sent to Robben Island.
The West Bank’s cities and villages, surrounded by Israeli colonizers, many of whom are bloodthirsty Americans, seem modeled after South African Bantustans and townships. While much of the world began boycotting, divesting from and sanctioning the South African apartheid government, Israel invited Afrikaner Hitler supporter, John Vorster, to negotiate arms deals. Israel armed South Africa throughout the violent apartheid regime’s fight against the indigenous Black South African population.5
I don’t care if I sound like a broken record; white supremacist networks are global.
Nazism is barbarism, just as Zionism is barbarism because they are both forms of Western imperialism. They are similar systems of power. Participating in Zionism or any colonialism is dehumanizing for the colonizers. Accepting these ideologies means ceding one’s humanity for barbarism and nationalism. Aimé Césaire wrote about this process of dehumanization in Discourse on Colonialism. Césaire also argued that the Holocaust while horrifying, antisemitic and large scale, was shocking in part because until the Holocaust, colonial violence was largely perpetrated against non-white people. The violence and horrors of the Holocaust were not new. They have happened before, after and are happening now in Gaza, in the West Bank, in Lebanon and now in Iran at the hands of Israel and their supporters.
When people support Israel, they resort to regurgitating propaganda about the need to spread or maintain Western values. They are right in saying Zionism is a Western ideology. Let’s be honest about what these Western values are; these Western values are rooted in preserving racial capitalism and imperial order. These Western values have nothing to do with democracy, and everything to do with the illusion of democracy. The West values war as a way of securing resources and capital for the ruling class.
Laws that falsely liken anti-Zionism to antisemitism are very similar to the German Malicious Practices Act, which outlawed criticism of the Nazi government. While Zionists purposely conflate antisemitism with anti-Zionism to silence opposition, Israel bombs Gaza, shoots farmers dead in the West Bank, kills Lebanese people with explosive pagers, shoots starving people who attempt to get aid, starts war over fictitious nuclear weapons with Iran and cages Palestinian kids. They are waging a colonial campaign in conjunction with Trump’s colonial campaign here. The old world colonial order must fall. These systems thrive on death and destruction, and it is our job, as people who love people and this planet, to destroy these systems and build new ones that do not rely on the degradation of indigenous peoples and the land.
The only way forward is to dismantle Zionist ideology. Ideas are not living and breathing people. We cannot hold onto the ones predicated on violence and sectarianism.
My dad’s death forever altered my life. I am at least a little bit sad every day. Palestinians are experiencing unimaginable grief daily, often losing many family members in a single moment, like Dr. Alaa al-Najjar who lost 9 of her 10 children and her husband after Israelis struck her home on May 23rd.
I often replay a conversation I had with my Gazan friend Ahmed months before October 7, on the steps of the Brooklyn Library. He and I met organizing against anti-Black police violence on the streets of Chicago. On those steps that particular day, he told me that he had lost over 15 loved ones and was losing count of the harms committed against his family by the Israeli occupation. This was before the genocide. Imagine. This beautiful soul, who grew up under a violent occupation, in an open air prison, devoted his love, his dancing, his creativity, his passion and his energy to my people’s struggle— a struggle that bears similarities to his—racial segregation, economic exploitation, & the premature death of children, but is of course quite different. Solidarity is not about reciprocity. It is a practice rooted in love and in an understanding of how our struggles are connected. My struggle, our struggle, is tethered to Palestinian struggle. “To be pro-Black is to be anti-Zionist.”
I dream of the day I can sit on library steps with Ahmed again, but in a free Palestine, in a world without imperialism, discussing our freedom rather than what our people’s pursuit of freedom has cost us.
Recommended Reading This Week
This piece by
is necessary reading, especially if you care about Palestine. Just his whole Substack too. Read all of it.SNCC’s position papers on Palestine, written in 1967
https://snccdigital.org/inside-sncc/policy-statements/palestine/ (Is it really my Substack if I don’t mention SNCC)
Explore my friend Ahmed’s art (especially his gorgeous & heartbreaking films)
One reason, Einstein withdrew Brandeis support, was that he didn’t think the University’s leadership was progressive enough. He wanted Harold Laski to become Brandeis’ leader–a Jewish Marxist, who by 1948 was critical of Zionist extremism.
Brandeis ended the Al-Quds partnership in 2013, a year after I graduated because of anti-Israel protests at Al-Quds.
Tess, thank you for this reflection. I grew up with a lot of kids that went to Brandeis so your experiences feel very familiar. I hope to meet in BK one day—I've enjoyed being connected on here and reading your writing xx