I want my word back.
I was once accused of being a Zionist. I was held responsible for Israel’s “Berlin Wall,” and for a few other crimes and misdemeanors, some with a legitimate historical basis, but most of the grossly exaggerated or wholly fabricated variety.
How, my latter-day Zola wanted to know over a cup of tea, could I subscribe to an ideology that would deny the collective identity of the Palestinian people? Had I not been young, naïve, and struck dumb, this is how I might have answered: How can you sit across me at a table and deny me mine?
I am a Zionist.
These are the things I am not: a blind supporter of Ariel Sharon and his disciples, a blind supporter of anything or a follower of Rav Kahane. Nor am I evil, greedy and ignorant. Yet these are the attributes that are most commonly ascribed to Zionists when we are mentioned in the media and on university campuses.
I will not dare to define what a Palestinian is. I would not even venture a guess about the basic nature of a liberal, even as I consider myself one; too many people seem to think that liberalism and shameless, unwavering belief in the state of Israel are incompatible.
Imagine the uproar if I, an American Jew, were to complete the sentence: A Palestinian is …
I would ask that the same courtesy be extended to me. Through literature, through critical theory, through a sometimes-ugly culture war, the gay community reclaimed the word queer from the negative connotations it had been given by the straight world. I would like to be able to replicate that success. Queer did not always mean faggot and, mostly, no longer does. Zion was not always a four-letter word, nor her supporters the ranks of the damned.
I will start here. I am taking my word back: I am a Zionist.
So listen up you anti-Zionists, you post-Zionists, you anti-Semites, you Palestinians, you Democrats, you Republicans, you crusaders, and you who are indifferent: Wipe your rhetoric clean from my word. I am taking it back home. I am a Zionist.
The war over the rhetoric is perhaps more thought-provoking than the war itself. What is Zionism, really? Who gets to decide? Meting out words is certainly a crucial component of the overall “situation,” especially because any solution will ring out in at least three distinct languages with totally distinct sets of terminology: One of the most interesting discoveries I made while living in Israel was that words we use in English in America to talk about the conflict in the Middle East don’t make sense to Israelis, translated into Hebrew — they just don’t think about it the same way we do, and so of course they cannot use the same terms.
To keep current with the rhetoric, I read a whole host of publications: American and international; mainstream, alternative, and collegiate. And in one of these, an article that appeared in the Yale Daily News authored by three students of the Arab Students’ Association, I found a brief discussion of what Zionism is. Its first paragraph reads: “It is understandable that listening to Norman Finkelstein can be difficult for those raised in Zionist households, just as it was difficult for us to listen to him speak of the failures of the Palestinian resistance movement and its leaders over dinner earlier that evening. We are raised with ideologies that we feel define us, and it is often shattering to discover the falsehoods, exaggerations or even failures inherent in those ideologies. A belief in the correlation between the horrors of the Holocaust and the moral righteousness of the state of Israel is one such ideology — and it is one that needs to be reevaluated.”
I am offended by the writers’ infantilization of their ideological opponents whom they label as people who were “raised in Zionist households” and whom they thus construct as uncritical and blind. I am not a Zionist because I was raised that way. I certainly do not hold all of my parents’ views — and Zionism is simply one of those. It is a principle whose tenets I have explored, and know, and in which I myself believe.
In response to this and similar sophistry, I have seen many people retreat. They accept the definition of Zionism that other people have written, that anti-Zionists have forged. They become afraid to say that they are Zionists because they internalize or admit that Zionism is racism, or that Zionism is an endorsement of everything that Sharon has ever done in his life, or that Zionism is unnecessary or hypocritical or wrong or evil. They are too scared, or spineless, or careless, or — dare I say it? — self-hating to say: Yes, I am a Zionist, but not in the way you spit the word. Or to say: I am a Zionist according to my own beliefs and not yours. And I am saddened by Jewish people, and all the more saddened by people who support Israel, who are still unable to say that they are Zionists.
I will not be so audacious as to define what it means to be a Palestinian. I don’t know what the words liberal or conservative mean. But I can tell you what a Zionist is: She believes that just as there are governments built on Christianity and Islam, there morally may be a state constructed around the values of Judaism. She believes that just like Christians and Muslims, Jews are entitled to collective rights.
The fact of being a Zionist is not a statement of a belief in what Israel’s borders should be, nor an endorsement of all of Israel’s laws. A Zionist does not necessarily have particularly strong opinions about Palestinians at all. A Zionist simply believes in the right of the state of Israel to exist as a sovereign and modern nation-state, just as France or Iraq or the United States have the right to exist.
Once, I was accused of being a Zionist. And the funny thing is: I am.
Sarah Pearce graduated from Yale in 2005 and is living in San Francisco until she begins her graduate work in Spanish literature in the fall.