Tel Aviv/West Jerusalem – In 2015, Maya, an Israeli Jew, traveled to Greece to help Syrian refugees. At the time, she was an exchange student in Germany and was deeply moved by the photographs she saw of desperate people arriving there in small boats.
There he met Palestinians who had been born in Syria after their parents and grandparents fled there during the founding of their own country in 1948.
They told him about the Nakba – or “catastrophe” – in which 750,000 Palestinians were expelled from their homes to make way for the newly established Israel. Maya, 33, who had been taught that her country was born through “a war of independence” against hostile Arab neighbors, decided that she needed to “unlearn” what she had learned.
“I never heard of the right of return or Palestinian refugees,” he told Al Jazeera.
“I had to leave Israel to start learning about Israel. It was the only way to poke holes in what I had been taught.”
Maya, who asked that her full name not be used for fear of reprisals, is one of a small number of Israeli Jewish activists who identify as “anti-Zionist” or “non-Zionist.”
According to the Anti-Defamation League, a pro-Israel group with the stated mission of fighting anti-Semitism and other forms of racism in the United States, Zionism means supporting a Jewish state established for the protection of Jews around the world.
However, many anti-Zionists like Maya and the people she works with view Zionism as a Jewish supremacist movement that has ethnically cleansed most of historic Palestine and systematically discriminates against remaining Palestinians, whether as citizens of Israel or residents. of the occupied territories.
But since the deadly Hamas attack on Israeli civilians and military posts on October 7, in which 1,139 people were killed and nearly 250 taken captive, Israeli anti-Zionists have been accused of treason for speaking out about Palestinian human rights.
Many have called for a permanent ceasefire in Gaza to stop what they see as collective punishment and genocide of the Palestinian people.
“Believe [anti-Zionists] I always affirm that Jewish supremacy is not the answer and is not the answer to [October 7] murders,” Maya said.
“Israelis do not understand that Palestinian history revolves exclusively around the Nakba, refugees and the right of return. If we are not able to deal with that, then we are not going anywhere.”
Perceived as “traitors”
Since October 7, Israeli anti-Zionists have described living in a hostile political and social environment. Many say police have violently repressed anti-war protests, while others have received threats from far-right Israelis.
Roee, who, like Maya, did not give his last name for fear of reprisals from Israeli society or authorities, is also an Israeli Jewish activist. In October of last year, he attended a small demonstration of a couple dozen people a few days after Israel began bombing Gaza. The protesters were calling on Hamas to release all Israeli captives and for Israel to stop the war.
“The police pushed us all [out] violently in just two minutes,” Roee, 28, told Al Jazeera in a cafe in West Jerusalem.
Weeks later, Roee and her friend Noa, who also did not want her full name revealed, attended another silent demonstration outside a police station in Jerusalem. They taped their mouths shut to denounce the widespread arrests of Palestinian citizens of Israel who had also called for an end to the war in Gaza.
But again, the police chased the Israeli protesters and beat them with batons.
“I think it's very clear that the police recognize us. It doesn't matter what signs we have. They know us. They know that we are leftists and that we are 'traitors' or whatever they call us,” Noa told Al Jazeera.
Many Israeli anti-war activists have also been defamed or “doxxed,” a term given to people whose identities and addresses are made known on social media by those hoping to intimidate them into silence.
Maya said a right-wing activist had accused his romantic partner of cooperating with Hamas by informing them about the whereabouts of Israeli positions in Gaza. The activist posted photos of her partner on Instagram with captions detailing the trumped-up accusations.
“We were afraid that our management would be exposed, but fortunately that was not the case. Even before October 7, [these groups of extreme right-wing people] He tried to get people's addresses to “dox” and mock them. Some of our friends had to leave their apartments. That was our main concern,” Maya said.
conscientious objectors
While most Israelis are required to join the military after high school, anti-war activists have refused to take part in their country's continued occupation of the West Bank, where raids and arrests are common. have intensified since October, or in the war in Gaza. Two young Israelis who publicly refused to enlist in the army are now serving short sentences in a military prison.
Einat Gerlitz, a “non-Zionist” and member of Mesarvot, a nonprofit that provides social and legal support to Israeli conscientious objectors, said more people may have refused military service since the war in Gaza began. , because not everyone goes. public.
“The army does not publish the figures… because its interest is to ensure that [refusing service] It is not a topic that is talked about in the public sphere. “The government and the military work very hard to glorify military service, so they want minimal attention to be paid to conscientious objectors,” the 20-year-old said.
While she herself is happy to make her views public (she spent 87 days in prison in 2022 for refusing to serve in the Israeli military (IDF), she added that many others do not make them public for fear of social backlash or reprisals.
Gerlitz added that the October 7 attack did not make her reconsider her peace activism, but she is very concerned for the friends and peers who were quickly sent to Gaza.
“I was worried about them, but also about some of the orders they might need to follow,” she told Al Jazeera, referring to her concern that soldiers could be ordered to commit atrocities or violate international law.
Over the past five months, Israeli soldiers have razed entire neighborhoods in Gaza, bombed universities, hospitals and places of worship, and shot at crowds of starving Palestinians lining up for food aid.
Human rights groups say these attacks constitute war crimes and, taken together, may constitute a campaign of genocide.
“We need greater empathy”
Many anti-Zionist Israelis say their goal is to get their fellow Israelis to recognize the humanity of Palestinians.
However, they say it has been difficult to counter the messages of Israeli politicians, some of whom have called Palestinians in Gaza “animals,” “subhumans” or “barbarians” in order to drum up support for the war. Some of these statements were highlighted by the International Court of Justice (ICJ), which issued an emergency order in January on the genocide case brought against Israel by South Africa.
Israeli society also expresses little empathy for Palestinians in Gaza, several Israeli activists told Al Jazeera. They explained that they believe this is partly because the Israeli media rarely reports on the army's likely war crimes, nor on the catastrophic humanitarian crisis caused by Israel's war.
Maya remembers attending a demonstration in Tel Aviv calling for a permanent ceasefire in Gaza at the end of October. About 50 people attended, many of whom held photographs of children killed by the Israeli army. But when the Israeli children saw the photographs, they claimed they were fake.
“[Young Israeli kids] He pointed to a photo of a father holding a dead baby in Gaza and said: 'How can you believe this? It's not real. He's acting,'” Maya said.
“[Another child] “He pointed to another dead baby and said, 'This is a doll.'”
Addam, an Israeli anti-Zionist and graffiti artist, who did not reveal his full name, was also at the protest. He said an Israeli woman called protesters “traitors” and said her own brother had died fighting for Israel in Gaza.
While Addam was heartbroken to learn of his loss, he said he believes the government is using Israeli grief as a weapon to commit atrocities in Gaza. He added that he tries to humanize Palestinians through his art and spoke about a project in which he photographed the physical scars that Palestinians and Israelis had from past conflicts.
“Once there is empathy, it creates a completely different foundation to start engaging with reality,” he told Al Jazeera. “It should be taken for granted that Gazans are human beings with families, dreams and jobs.
“But, for many factors, there is this continuous process [in Israel] of dehumanizing the Palestinians.”
