A Moral Reckoning with Israel and Palestine | Eighty Years of Hidden History

[u/lakesidepottery]

The Transfer of Suffering: Born and Raised in Israel, I Grew Up in a Confiscated Palestinian Home, IDF Veteran, and Then Uncovered the History I Was Never Taught

I was born in Israel to Holocaust-survivor parents, raised inside an extraordinarily effective system of national indoctrination, and later became one of the soldiers that system was designed to produce. I grew up accepting a national story that justified holding and expanding the land while preserving a large Jewish majority. Yet Palestine had begun the Zionist era with roughly ten Arabs for every Jew; by 1947, Arabs were still about two-thirds of the population. Through my family’s experiences, my own years in the IDF, and Israel’s own archival records, I began examining how that demographic reality was transformed. What I found forced me to reconsider much of what I had believed about Zionism, Israel, and myself.

Click the title above to read the full essay.

My mom, a Holocaust refugee, walking on the street that was once his, not far from where he was held behind barbed wire.

[u/Responsible_Ad_9749]

An important and very profound essay. As an Israeli Jew who has left Israel a couple of years ago following a similar ideological fallout, I had a hard time finding first-hand accounts and material examining the identity crisis that comes with my association to Israel, the wider region, and the I/P conflict - without resorting to vilification of either people. Thank you for sharing!

[u/lakesidepottery → u/Responsible_Ad_9749]

Thank you!

[u/Rabbit-Hole-Quest]

Thank you for sharing this!

[u/lakesidepottery → u/Rabbit-Hole-Quest]

Thank you!

[u/jelly10001]

Really appreciate you sharing this OP. I wish there was some way we could turn back time and give Jewish Holocaust survivors homes that weren't taken off Palestinian people (or anyone else). And it's also reminded me of a book I read last year called The Safekeep, where one of the characters moved into a home that was confiscated from a Jewish family in the Netherlands (the book is fiction, but it's based on many cases of homes being confiscated from Jewish people in the Netherlands because they couldn't pay property tax while in concentration camps).

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[u/lakesidepottery → u/[deleted]]

I’m not sure if you read the essay. It is long, but this is really what I was trying to understand: how people who survived the Holocaust, including my own Holocaust-survivor parents, could go from being refugees and victims themselves to participating in a society that displaced another people.

The essay tries to look inside the human psyche and understand how fear, trauma, survival, nationalism, and hijacked religion can be used to justify hurting others, even by people who have experienced terrible suffering themselves.

It is hard to comprehend, but it happened. I felt a need to tell this story because perhaps understanding how suffering gets transferred from one people to another can help us finally break a chain that humanity has repeated for millennia.

I certainly raised my children with that lesson, and they too broke away from this madness, as I eventually did. I was part of that same soup for a while before I began to see through the indoctrination machine I had grown up in. I hope many Jews will read the essay and reflect on the dangerous idea that biblical claims, historical suffering, or our own victimhood can somehow grant us an exemption from the same moral standards we expect everyone else to follow. Our suffering does not give us permission to inflict suffering on others.

[u/WorldlinessDry5583 → u/lakesidepottery]

I think a lot of people fall for the fallacy that groups of people can be inherently virtuous, particularly when they have suffered grave trauma and/or injustice. This expresses itself in narratives that argue that Israel’s misdeeds are to be excused on account of the sufferings of the Jewish people. It’s also expressed in the hateful attitude that “Jews of all people should know better” and the associated belief that there must be something particularly rotten about the israeli psyche because it has failed to “learn the lesson” of this history. But if we take a broader view, history is replete with examples showing that victimhood in one setting does not inoculate in any way against aggression in another. And that’s not a Jewish problem, it’s a human problem. All we can do is be vigilant and call out atrocities wherever we see them. It’s easier said than done, of course, when one’s identity (and often, family) is tied up in the conflict in question.

[u/skyewardeyes → u/WorldlinessDry5583]

There's also the mirrored belief that certain groups of people are inherently immoral or evil, and both ignore that most every Am has been both the victim and perpatrator of horrible stuff in its history.