The Jewish Community Rupture Over Israel–Palestine

This week on Deconstructed, Ryan Grim speaks to the filmmakers behind “Israelism,” a new documentary that takes a narrative look at the unique relationship between the American Jewish community and an idealized version of the state of Israel. Grim is joined by “Israelism” co-directors Erin Axelman and Sam Eilertsen. Axelman and Eilertsen are two first-time Jewish filmmakers who share a similar story to the film’s protagonists, Simone Zimmerman and Eitan. Zimmerman, co-founder of the progressive Jewish organization IfNotNow, also joins the conversation. To watch the film, visit Israelismfilm.com; you can also find upcoming screenings on their website.

Ryan Grim: Welcome back to Deconstructed. I’m Ryan Grim.

These are some pretty dark times, so I wanted to start with two pieces of good news from previous episodes. Now, first, you might remember the episode we did on the county commissioners in The Villages, Florida, who tried to fight back against the local DeSantis machine. And they lost, with two of them catching charges, and one even spending 75 days in jail for what I described at the time as “bogus felony perjury charges.”

After our report, listeners to this podcast and readers of the article donated tens of thousands of dollars to his legal defense fund, which enabled him to appeal his conviction. A three-judge panel made up entirely of Republicans — some of them DeSantis appointees — not only vacated his conviction, but forced the same judge who railroaded him to enter a verdict of not guilty; not a plea of not guilty, but a verdict of not guilty. And then the judge who railroaded him announced he was retiring, even though he was only fairly recently reelected.

Oh, and next, Ron DeSantis is going to have to give Commissioner Oren Miller his seat back on the County Commission and pay him six figures in back pay. Hard to imagine a more satisfying outcome for a piece of journalism. And so, thank you to everybody who listened, and everybody who gave to that legal defense fund making his appeal possible.

And, last April, if you’ll recall, we interviewed two DHL workers trying to organize a union at the major airport in Cincinnati in northern Kentucky. Not only did they successfully organize with the Teamsters and get recognized, they went on a 12-day strike and won an extremely good contract for more than a thousand workers at the airport. I’ve been covering the labor movement for a long time, and it’s awfully rare to see that big and fast of a victory.

Meanwhile, of course, the world is continuing to spiral out of control. The Biden administration claims it is trying to restrain Israel and prevent the conflict from spreading regionwide, but they’ve done nothing of consequence to rein Israel in, and their efforts of de-escalation have bizarrely taken the form of repeated airstrikes on Yemen, each of which has predictably been met with a ratcheting up of hostilities.

Here in the United States, one of the hallmarks of the last three months has been the extreme rupture inside progressive communities generally — and inside Jewish communities specifically — when it comes to the war. Into this rupture has landed a new documentary called Israelism, which obviously was finished long before October 7th, but has taken on deeper resonance since then.

The film takes a narrative look at the unique relationship between the American Jewish community and an idealized version of the State of Israel. We’ll talk to its codirectors, as well as one of the main characters, Simone Zimmerman, who is now the head of the Jewish American peace group, IfNotNow.

Before that, though, she was a committed college Zionist. While she was in college, the student government began debating a resolution about divestment from Israel, a tactic aimed at pressuring Israel to end its occupation, following the playbook deployed against apartheid South Africa. A young Simone went to the student government meeting with her fellow pro-Israel activists armed with a set of talking points and did rhetorical battle with defenders of Palestinian rights.

But Simone did something unusual. She listened to the other side. What she heard changed her life. Here she is in the film Israelism describing that moment: 

Simone Zimmerman: I just knew it was this bad thing that I had to fight. 

UC Berkeley Attendee Speaker: It is antisemitism. It is. 

UC Berkeley Student: You are trying to make me feel marginalized on my own campus.

Simone Zimmerman: And I remember all of us going, well, uh, you shouldn’t boycott Israel because it’s applying a double standard. And you shouldn’t boycott Israel because it’s unfair to single out Israel.

UC Berkeley Student: Please, I beg of you. I beg you, please, to have compassion and to remember that we are alienating students. And I am devastated by this bill. I am a human being.

Simone Zimmerman: I still remember. You have these Palestinian students who get up and said, “Jewish students, you are crying about feeling silenced and marginalized. You know, my aunts and cousins didn’t sleep for weeks while bombs were falling overhead in Gaza. What do you have to say to that?”

UC Berkeley Palestinian Student: If divestment is hostile, then where do we begin to describe the hostility of a military occupation?

Simone Zimmerman: I was thrown into all these conversations where people were throwing around all these words that I’d never heard before. Occupation, settlement, apartheid, ethnic cleansing. I just never heard anyone use any of these terms before.

RG: Today we’re joined by Sam Eilertson and Erin Axelman, who are codirectors of a new documentary called Israelism, which you just heard sound from there. It’s on the evolving relationship between Israel and the American Jewish community, and it’s a compelling work, I strongly recommend it. And my understanding is that you can — Erin and Sam, correct me if I’m wrong here — you can, you can rent it now? Where would people go to find that?

Erin Axelman: Yes, you can go to our website israelismfilm.com and the rental link is right there. And yes, we’ve made it publicly available to anybody in the world. And we’re also about to announce our brand new winter tour date slate. So, we’re still doing tons and tons and tons of in-person screenings. We have many hundreds of requests, but we’ve also decided to make it available online indefinitely. 

RG: Great. And we’re also joined by Simone Zimmerman, who is a founder of IfNotNow, which is an American Jewish organization dedicated to ending the Israeli occupation, and today it’s one of the leading organizations calling for a permanent ceasefire in the war in Gaza right now. Simone is also kind of a star of this documentary, I would say.

Simone, Erin, and Sam, thank you so much for joining me.

Simone Zimmerman: Thanks for having us.

Sam Eilertsen: Thank you for having us. 

RG: And so, Erin, can you start with how you decided to make this film? And give us a little bit of the background that people who’ve seen the film would have gotten; we don’t have time to play the whole film for them. 

Erin Axelman: Of course, yeah. So, Sam and I began this film in 2016. It took about seven years to make, and it really is both of our stories. So, it really is kind of a way of telling our stories, as well as telling the stories of so many of our close friends and family members, and, really, the story of our community at large. It really tells a story of how so many young American Jews are raised to kind of love Israel unconditionally, and are really taught that, to be a good Jew, it means supporting Israel to the best of your abilities.

And then, many of those American Jews then come into contact with Palestinian narratives, either Palestinian friends, or Palestinian colleagues, or Palestinian works of art. And, ultimately, are quite heartbroken at what they find to be the oppression of the Palestinian people at the hands of the Israeli state, which has kind of caused a massive transformation in our community, as more and more American Jews realize that, to live out our Jewish values to the best of our ability, we must fight for Palestinian freedom and equality, while also fighting for the safety of Jewish people across the world.

So, we’re really telling a generational story, and Simone’s story is really representative of that, and is an amazing way of telling that story in a large way.

RG: And, Simone, as you were telling the story in the documentary, I was watching it and thinking, this is impossible. It just seemed unfathomable to me that somebody who’s in college, and is working, and is like, really deeply engaged in this issue, is kind of hearing these things for the first time, the word occupation and things like that. How did that happen?

SZ: Well, I was raised with a deep relationship with Israel, a deep connection to the place. And part of the discourse in that community is one about how we can’t trust other people who are outside of our community. So, nobody knows the truth about us and about Israel, except us. And that was a message that I heard a lot over the course of my upbringing.

And so, when I prepared to go off to college, one of the things I was told was: they hate Israel there, they hate Jews. Those two things are always conflated, right? And you have to go tell people the truth about Israel. I also chose to go to UC Berkeley, because I was curious about the world beyond the small insular Jewish community that I grew up in and… Well, actually quite large Jewish community; I grew up in Los Angeles. But I was interested in meeting people from different backgrounds and learning more about the world.

And so, that curiosity comes into direct conflict with going to be a propagandist for this cause. And, very quickly, I found myself sitting down, having conversations with students who did not grow up like I did, who just had basic questions about things they were reading in the news. And I very quickly found myself running out of talking points.

It was a very uncomfortable and disconcerting experience, because … The first time I busted out the talking points, I was really proud of myself. And then I ran out in the middle of the conversation, because they had follow-up questions that I didn’t have answers to.

RG: And this is for all of you, but … Simone, did you do a Birthright Israel trip? And can you guys talk about how Birthright Israel fits into this narrative, and this coming together of the two countries and communities?

SZ: So, one of the ideas in the nineties was that a way to help kind of revitalize Jewish identity, and to stop a process of assimilation among American Jews, was to do these trips called Birthright, where you take young Jews to Israel for free and they experience this deeply meaningful, emotional, intensive experience with other Jews traveling in the land. And they see their own identity as Jews and their ties to the Jewish community as deeply connected to that experience that they have on the ground in Israel.

I personally did staff a Birthright trip, and I also participated in a number of other Jewish youth programs when I was in high school. So, I went with my summer camp and with my high school to spend time in Israel.

Abraham Foxman: If you were to ask me, if you had a hundred million dollars, how would you change the future of American Jews? I would make trips to Israel available to any Jewish kid who wanted to go, make that experience. They’re doing it now; it’s called Birthright.

Event Speaker: It is up to you to be our soldiers abroad, armed with love and knowledge and conviction, ready to sway public opinion in Israel’s favor.

EA: I also did Birthright. In 2016, I had no money to make the film, actually, so I realized the easiest way to get to Israel for low cost was to do Birthright. So, I had a backpack full of film gear, and just didn’t tell them that I was a filmmaker. I wasn’t able to film on the trip itself, but it was as disturbing as I thought it would be; in some ways, worse.

They frequently told me to not ask questions. They took us to an illegal Israeli settlement in the West Bank without telling us, and I had to prove to the entire group that we were in an illegal West Bank settlement by showing everyone Google Maps. And the tour guide responded. I said, why are you taking us to an illegal settlement? You know, this is a colony. This is, in some ways, a war crime. And the Birthright staffer’s response was, well, we could have gone to one in Israel, but that was a, quote-unquote “shitty resort.”

So, like, the option was, go to a shitty resort, or go to one that was illegal under international law, and they took us to one that was illegal under international law. There was a complete erasure of the Palestinian experience. It was incredibly disturbing.

SZ: When I staffed Birthright, my group also stopped in the West Bank, which was pretty shocking to me because I, also, at that point, had enough awareness of the situation to know where I was and what was happening. And I also staffed Birthright during 2014, right before the assault on Gaza in 2014.

And so, I was actually reading the news on my phone of, like … There were those weeks before the war where the Israeli government was whipping up all this public vengeance, and just building support for this war in Gaza. And I remember reading stories on my phone about thousands of homes being raided in the West Bank, and people being shot, and all of these things. And there was no room to have those conversations within that space.

Meanwhile, we had Israeli soldiers on the bus just outright saying some of the most racist and vile things I’ve ever heard about Palestinians in my life. They could say these things completely unquestioned. I, as a kind of like, open, curious American Jew, had to frame anything that I said as a question, you know? Could you consider that there might be another side of the story? While they could just say things like, “the Arabs lie, they want to trick the Jews. It’s all Hamas.”

EA: We were in the Israeli Hall of Independence in Tel Aviv talking about 1948, and I asked a question about, did it make sense in some ways why surrounding Arab countries and the Palestinians would have rejected the U.N. partition plan? And asked a pretty reasonable question, and the tour guide looked at me and just said, “the Arabs hate the Jews.” There was no willingness to discuss the actual context for the history. It was just, “They hate us. Period.”

RG: Well, first of all, Simone, when you made the journey from Zionist — and, as you described, kind of propagandist — to the activist that you’ve become now, was there any particular moment or awakening that did it? Or was it a gradual process?

SZ: I would say it was probably both. The moment that you described earlier on campus… For me, my freshman year of college was just an ongoing experience of rupture, in many ways. Being in those student government hearings, hearing Palestinian students speak about their own life experience, what it was like to be living with bombs falling overhead in Gaza. In 2009, the Goldstone report … We’re having this conversation right now, as there’s this case at the International Court of Justice about Israel and the charge of genocide.

And, again, in that world of pro-Israel propaganda, all accusations of human rights violations are dismissed outright. There’s a very systematic effort to stop any conversation that engages with the reality directly. To see reality, but also to learn about it.

So, when I actually was confronted … I have a memory of a student activist coming into this meeting with a stack of papers reading about American weapons that were used to decimate families in Gaza. White phosphorus, Apache helicopters. Just war crime after war crime. Testimonies from Israeli soldiers speaking openly about what they had done.

And, I mean … I didn’t know how to respond, because these things were so systematically kept out of my awareness that I couldn’t speak about them. And when you watch someone just, you know, page after page of evidence, it becomes a much harder to just say, all of that is antisemitic, when many of the student activists themselves were not only Palestinian, but Jews, and Jewish Israelis.

RG: Sam or Erin, was there a moment for you?

SE: Well, yeah. So, first of all, I just wanted to add that the story that Simone is telling — of this gradual transformation as just being exposed to more and more actual facts and evidence — is one that we both observed during our time at Brown University. So many of our peers who were also Jewish kind of came to school like Simone, really believing that they needed to stand up for and defend Israel. And then, by the time they were graduating, were actually engaged in activism for Palestinian rights.

And we do think this is very much a generational story, I think the surveys bear that out. I would also say that we interviewed many, many more folks who have similar stories to Simone. So, Simone ultimately became one of the main focuses of the film, but we had, like, a dozen interviews that were very similar stories. And every single screening we do, almost always, there’s someone who comes up to us, a young Jewish person, and says that it’s their story, too, which is really incredible to hear.

And we’ve also seen in the reaction to the film, similar types of attacks were claiming that even the film telling these Jewish stories by Jewish filmmakers is inherently encouraging antisemitism, or even antisemitic itself. And, unfortunately, because criticism of Israel and antisemitism has been so conflated in the mainstream Jewish community that, like, even just speaking basic facts can get you accused of bigotry, which is just so contrary to Jewish values that are based on questioning and open dialogue…

I would say that — and I’ll let Erin chime in if they want to — I would say that I was raised with a pretty diverse range of opinions about Israel and Palestine around me. So, I think, if anything, the narrative I grew up with was more that this is a sort of complicated conflict, and there have been bad things done on both sides.

I will say that in college, what really sort of made me move a little bit on from that sort of both sides-ist perspective was seeing an Israeli soldier from the group Breaking the Silence, which is a group within Israel that are veterans of the Israeli army who speak out against war crimes that they may have seen during their service. And just seeing that described by a veteran of the Israeli military, speaking directly about human rights abuses, referring to this as an occupation rather than a conflict, very much changed my way of thinking about things.

EA: Yeah. For me, I very much kind of fell in love with Israel, mostly after my bar mitzvah, actually. So, I was given a number of kind of pro-Israel classic Zionist books for my bar mitzvah and, especially, the book “Exodus” by Leon Uris, which was turned into a hit movie with Paul Newman, and stuff like that. And, for me, Israel really became the center of my Jewish identity and, really, my way of connecting to Judaism, and I became as passionate about Israel as I possibly could. 

I considered joining the Israeli military in high school. But my senior year of high school, I was doing an independent study in my public high school, and the teacher who was running the independent study, I was going to make a documentary on the history of Zionism. And, at one point, he just asked me, do you know anything about Palestinian history?

And because the books that I read and the narratives I read didn’t really mention Palestinians at all — they rarely mentioned Arabs, if anything — I said, no, I don’t know anything about Palestinian history. It wasn’t threatening, I just didn’t know. And so, over the course of this year he gave me all of these books by both Palestinian as well as left-wing Israeli authors, and it really opened my mind.

And especially seeing and reading left-wing Israelis criticize the occupation and talk openly about the Nakba made me realize that I could be Jewish, and also just learn about the basic facts about Palestinian history, and be able to criticize Israel in the same way that I criticize America, or any other countries whose foundings have been based upon the ethnic cleansing of other populations.

RG: And, Simone, one thing that has characterized the kind of post-October 7th  response in the United States — to both the attack by Hamas, and then the Israeli response — has been this kind of cascading series of ruptures, political and personal, within the progressive community, but also within, specifically, the Jewish community as well.

And so, I’m curious how that’s been for you since October 7th. But, also, when you kind of turned away from Zionism in your freshman, sophomore year, what was the familial cost? What was the personal and relational cost that came with that? Or were you able to bring people with you? How did that shape your journey?

SZ: I mean, first thing I’ll just say is that, actually, for a while, I just called myself a liberal Zionist. I thought I could do this change from within the community. And I think the more I saw about the reality on the ground, and the more I saw how much this idea of Jewish supremacy, the idea that Jews have an exclusive right to that land, and how that dominates everything, in both the material policies on the ground, and just how the politics in the American Jewish community, are shaped, I found that irreconcilable. So, I now would no longer try to do that work within any… I mean, I would call myself an anti-Zionist. I don’t try to do that work to make Zionism better.

I think in terms of the rupture and the cascades from that, Israel has, on the ground, built a reality in which Jews — Jewish Israelis — don’t have to see the Palestinian experience. They can drive on roads that bypass Palestinian cities. The wall is built in such a way that they literally do not have to see the absolute misery and brutality of Israeli apartheid. They can live every day thinking they live in this normal wannabe-Western country, and have normal lives, sit at their coffee shops, drive around, as the situation on the ground for Palestinians has gotten worse and worse. The denial of freedom has gotten so much more blatant, and the sense on the ground has been so despairing that there’s any possibility for change.

And human rights experts have been warning for years that this situation is unsustainable, that it’s going in a direction in which there’s an inevitable violent response to this degree of oppression and hopelessness. And, since October 7th, obviously, the absolute horrific atrocities of that day have totally shattered that paradigm and have proven those warnings correct.

But for people who were living in denial of those realities to begin with, they refuse to look at that context. Even the idea of saying we should talk about the context behind October 7th is considered heresy in so many parts of the community.

It’s such a profound rupture, what’s happening right now. People who, from day one … On October 7th, Israel already started bombing Gaza, right? So, what we’re talking about here is people who see the reality fully for Jews and Palestinians who want to consider the experience of all people who live in that land. And then people who only want to see what’s happening for Jews, and say, oh my God, this came out of nowhere. What would you expect us to do?

RG: And how different has the post-October 7th time been for you, compared to before that? I mean, you’ve been doing the same advocacy in the several years leading up to October 7th as you’ve been doing post-October 7th, but my guess would be that the reaction to it has been orders of magnitude greater and more personal. Is that right?

SZ: Yeah, absolutely. Basically, every person I know is deeply impacted in a very personal way by the events of October 7th. I know people who were killed that day, I know so many people who know people who were killed. And then, of course, I have Palestinian friends and colleagues who now have — in the dozens of — family members who have been killed in Gaza.

And holding that magnitude of grief just to start with is so difficult, and then, to hold that in a political environment in which it feels like there’s very little room to actually hold the humanity, and the safety, and aspirations of both peoples right now. Then we start getting into the efforts, the repression, right? There’s been an effort for many years already to conflate pro-Palestinian advocacy with antisemitism, and that entire infrastructure that has been built to criminalize pro-Palestinian activism has just been ratcheted up to 1,000.

RG: And has done so in Israel, with the counterterrorism law passed after October 7th.

SZ: Yeah. My Israeli friends are terrified. I mean, the environment there is incredibly fascistic. There are very open calls for genocide. [Everyone], from the grassroots to the media to the politicians, are openly just calling to flatten Gaza. Teachers, or just individuals who express any even belief in the humanity of Palestinians, even just saying, there’s a story about a teacher who said there are mothers in Gaza, there are children in Gaza … And that has created such a blowback.

People are really afraid to speak publicly, to protest. Palestinian citizens of Israel, the repression that is happening at universities, at people’s jobs … It’s an incredibly scary environment on the ground.

RG: And, Sam, or Erin, how has the film been received in Israel? Or is it even playing there?

SE: We have not done screenings in Israel yet. We do plan to organize them. 

Before October 7th, we were planning on trying to organize a screening tour there, ideally in late fall or winter. Those plans have been a bit thrown for a loop. But we do have organizations in Israel that we’ve been partnering with that will be excited to bring the film to Israel. And I’ll be really interested to see what the reactions would be; I mean, A, whether there are attempts to actually ban the film in Israel. And then, B, how Israelis might react to seeing the diaspora Jewish conversation. 

RG: And how have you been able to navigate this personally, when it comes to the rupture that I was talking about with Simone?

EA: It’s been interesting. I mean, I’m quite lucky in that my family has, in many ways, come with me as I’ve changed. I’ve just had open conversations with my family members, especially my dad. And as I have become much more aware of the suffering of the Palestinian people and the structural inequalities and racism in Israeli society, my parents have changed with me.

My dad spent a lot of time in Israel in the sixties; we’re actually related by marriage to Levi Eshkol, the Prime Minister who began the Six-Day War, began the occupation. And so, my dad spent a lot of time with him and his family in the sixties.

But, from what he’s told me, he always knew something was wrong. He always knew that there was something wrong about how the Palestinians were treated. And, as I began questioning and began learning more about the occupation, the Nakba, he began learning as well. And other of my family members have come along as well, even family members in their 70s and 80s — who, for decades were die-hard supporters of Israel — love my film, and love our film, and have been willing to engage with it in a way that I did not think was possible ten years ago.

So, it’s been much easier for me than so many other folks, because my family and friends have been quite willing to engage with discussions critical of Israel, and kind of come along on the journey with me. 

SE: Yeah. And I would say that, I actually think my family’s biggest reaction since October 7th related to the film specifically has just been being worried about my safety, and our safety going out and showing the film. But I will say that, actually, the conversations that we’ve been having around the film have been extremely respectful, and I would say, actually, healing, in fact. And we have really not had incidents of actual threats or issues at any of our many screenings that we’ve held at this point over the past few months.

The only pushback I’ve gotten from anyone I actually know personally is, someone who I went to high school with sent me a bunch of angry messages about the film. And then also, basically, saying that he believed … I didn’t respond to any of them, so it was kind of a one-sided conversation. And he kept sending me messages, and suddenly it started going in the direction of him sending arguments for why he thought that Gaza needed to be completely ethnically cleansed of Palestinians. Which was quite depressing to see someone who I know personally actually believing in this. But it wasn’t a close friend or anything.

So, yeah. It’s been a really challenging time, obviously, as Simone and Erin have said. We have friends and colleagues in Israel, we have friends and colleagues who are Israeli American, we have friends and colleagues in Palestine who are Palestinian American. So, almost everyone in the circle around the film has been grieving and suffering, and having a really difficult time the past few months.

RG: And, Simone, how do you see that rupture evolving? Because the facts on the ground, obviously, are different today into January than they were on, say, October 8th. And I remember a lot of people in the first couple of days saying, let’s not go overboard, it’s not fair to say that Israel is responding too harshly. That what Hamas did is absolutely barbaric and unforgivable, and a response is justified, but they’re not going to engage in ethnic cleansing. These are deeply irresponsible accusations to make. And you say, OK. Well, let’s pause and let’s see what happens.

Now we’re several months in, and there’s no longer really any intellectual debate about what’s going on. And I’m wondering if you’re starting to see the pendulum shift at all, or if the emotional valence is just so wound at this point that it’s going to be a long time before that’s even possible.

SZ: I think it depends on which communities you’re talking about. I think in mainstream liberal American communities, there is still a lot of: We know our soldiers, we trust our soldiers, we know that they would not try to harm civilians, even though there is widely documented evidence of the IDF targeting civilians.

I’m still in shock that anybody who has been following this government over the last year could have any doubts about who they are and what they are about. From day one that this government was sworn in, they have been openly declaring their intention to ethnically cleanse Palestinians from the West Bank. They have openly declared genocidal animus, many of the ministers in the government.

A lot of very reasonable observers of the situation on the ground long before October 7th were warning about the degree of fascism in Israeli society, the degree of racist incitement, and were very concerned about what this government was capable of doing.

We saw the pogroms in the West bank over the last year. Every single day, in 2023, the IDF killed a Palestinian in the West bank. Since October 7th, over 300 people have been shot in the West bank, alone.

So, I think there’s still a very high degree of denialism about who the people in charge are. There’s just an unwillingness to look that reality squarely in the face. At this point, there is an awareness of … I mean, mainstream media is now reporting on how horrific what is going on in Gaza is. These numbers are coming out. Eighty-five percent of the population displaced. These numbers about hunger and starvation; you know, Gaza is now the leading place in the world, has the highest concentration of cases in the world, the vast majority of cases, of children living in hunger, severe food insecurity.

I think that we are going to see more and more people waking up and speaking out. It’s still hard to make predictions about what that means right now because, for months now, we’ve seen the support of this operation that has led to this level of catastrophe, that we just know is… Even as the Israeli military is kind of saying that they’re winding down parts of the operation, they’re still massacring people in Gaza. And they’ve created the conditions that just… We could see hundreds of thousands of people dying in the coming months, or in the coming year.

So, I do think more people are going to be speaking out. The question is, are they going to speak out before it’s too late? I mean, it’s already too late for tens of thousands of people in Gaza.

RG: A subtext of the film — and, Erin and Sam, correct me if you think I’m getting it wrong here — is the almost unclosable gap for so many people between the dream and the vision of a liberal Zionism and the reality of it on the ground. 

Michelle Goldberg in The New York Times had an interesting line the other day, where she said American liberals have to stop pretending that Israel is waging the war that they would like them to, [the] nice, precise and clean war that they’d like them to wage, and need to recognize the war that they actually are waging. And that felt like kind of a metaphor for the broader situation, that there is a vision that might go back decades that doesn’t match what’s going on, on the ground.

And I want to ask you, then, about this other clip that I’ll play from the film. This is a soldier from Georgia. Erin, what was his name?

EA: Eitan. 

RG: Eitan. So, Eitan seems like a really typical American guy in high school. At Jewish summer camp, he gets kind of into the idea of being a soldier with the IDF. He goes and actually enlists, and finds himself doing patrols in the West Bank.

Eitan: We got to the detention center within the base, and right outside there were about eight soldiers waiting for us. They saw us come, they grabbed the detainee from our hands and threw him to the ground while he’s still blindfolded and hands tied behind his back. And they started kicking him for a good few minutes. I was responsible for this man’s well-being.

RG: So, how’d you find Eitan, and what made you focus on his story? 

SE: I met Eitan at an event where he was speaking about — along with other American veterans of the Israeli military — speaking about what all of them witnessed during their service in the Israeli military, and just struck up a conversation with him, and ultimately interviewed him for the film. His experience, unfortunately, is quite typical for folks who end up in the Israeli military, whether they’re coming from the U.S., or they’re Israelis who are drafted into the military.

The way he described it was that most of their actual training was sort of training for large-scale combat with an enemy army. And then, what they’re actually being sent to do on a day to day basis, is sort of patrol the West Bank, set up checkpoints, man checkpoints, and basically just harass Palestinians as they’re going about their day to day lives, and trying to live their lives. And this is largely what the organization Breaking the Silence has focused on in their testimonies, is just sort of the day to day reality of the West Bank in which Palestinians are unable to move freely about the West Bank without passing through all these military checkpoints, where they could be detained or harassed at any moment, and where they have basically no protections or civil rights.

If you’re a Palestinian and you’re accused of a crime, you will be tried in a military court that has a, like, 9-plus percent — I think it might actually be 95-plus percent —conviction rate. Whereas, if you’re an Israeli settler, or international citizen, like one of us who’s arrested in that same area, you’ll be tried in an Israeli civil court, where you’ll have all your normal rights like you would, theoretically in a democracy. So, just this really unequal situation.

In the specific clip that you played, Eitan told us that he was basically sent to pick up a detainee, a teenage Palestinian who had been arrested for something — I don’t think he actually knew exactly what — and was just sent to sort of escort this person back to a military base and detention center, and went and sort of walked this guy back. And this person is handcuffed and blindfolded; it’s very common for Palestinian detainees to be blindfolded when they’re arrested. And when they got to the base, this group of soldiers just sort of ripped the detainee out of his arms, and beat him.

And there was a military police officer actually watching this happen, and a commanding officer, and didn’t do anything. And so, Eitan felt like he couldn’t speak out, because his direct superior was there and not saying anything. So, basically sanctioned… And that was, I think, a moment that woke him up to the reality of the occupation. But then, also, he’s told us that after a long period of time sort of realizing that many of the day to day activities that he was doing as an Israeli soldier — manning checkpoints, and searching people’s cars, and questioning them, when they were just trying to go about their daily lives — were also sort of deeply troubling in many ways.

Eitan: Our missions included working in two different checkpoints, patrolling villages on foot in full gear and bulletproof vests. We would go into apartment buildings, go up to the roof, and make sure that we could be seen, so that we could make our presence felt. We wanted them to know that we were watching. That was the goal of the mission.

SE: And, unfortunately, brutal acts of violence towards Palestinians without recourse or consequences are sadly incredibly common, because Palestinians live under a brutal military occupation in which they are born into a different legal system because of their race, which is, obviously, a form of apartheid. And talking about what you mentioned in terms of the fantasy of Israel, I think, for many of us, we really grew up learning a fantasy about Israel. And it’s a beautiful story.

The story that we’re told is an incredibly beautiful, inspiring story. It’s a story that I very much fell in love with it, and empathized with, and connected to in a profound way. And I think because of the incredible trauma so many American Jewish families have gone through — and most Jewish families fled violent antisemitism or are the descendants of Holocaust survivors — Israel is kind of presented as the light at the end of the tunnel. After these millennia of horrible oppression, we’re seen as finally returning to our homeland, creating a brand new state, redefining ourselves in this really beautiful way.

And it’s a beautiful story, until you learn about the Palestinians. And the great tragedy is that that story, the traditional pro-Israel narrative, simply doesn’t have room for the Palestinians. The Palestinians are only viewed as an obstacle to that dream and that vision, and are not viewed as their own people with their own hopes and dreams, and their own rich history.

And so, hearing stories like Eitan’s where that kind of myth is shattered, I’ve been hearing those stories my whole life. And some of my friends in college actually had just got back from the IDF, had served, and seeing them process what it was like being a soldier in the occupation and, ultimately, their realization that they were part of an apartheid system, and that they were enforcing a system eerily similar to Jim Crow segregation in the U.S., made me realize that, if they could realize that, and if they could kind of change and transform, then any American Jewish person could transform. And it’s been incredibly inspiring to see people like that who have really bought into that vision, at some point realize that that vision is not the whole story, and have the ability to change, and see Palestinian humanity just as much as we see Jewish humanity.

RG: How does this system stay up? You’re talking to so many people who go through it and see it firsthand. Simone, you talk in the film about the first time you went to the West Bank and saw the occupation firsthand. Eitan’s description of going from his idealism to seeing what he’s participating in, given that it doesn’t withstand an ethical interaction with reality.

How does it remain the reality? What’s going on?

SZ: I can’t help but I’ve been thinking about Naomi Klein, [what] she writes about in her new book, the idea of the mirror world. I feel that a lot of people in my community live in the mirror world. It’s a world in which there’s an alternative set of facts and an alternative reality that’s very rigorously maintained. But, also, that there’s legitimate grievances — or legitimate concerns, rather — that are used and manipulated by the people who construct that world to keep people in it.

So, what I’m talking about is obviously antisemitism, you know? Jewish fears of antisemitism are real and valid. Israel was offered as a solution to the Holocaust; that is why there’s such broad support for Israel in the community. And the ongoing fear of antisemitism is manipulated very effectively, by both the Israeli government itself and by its defenders abroad.

I have to just mention right now, because these numbers just recently came out … The Anti Defamation League, the so-called leading Jewish civil rights organization that actually spends most of its time attacking pro-Palestinian speech and activism, and prioritizes that time and time again.

RG: Right. And even some of its staff complained publicly about that recently. And so, this is not just you saying that. This is ADL staff.

SZ: Yeah. Jewish Currents just reported about a departure of a major staffer from the organization, who came to actually fight hatred and bigotry online. And, specifically, the way that Jonathan Greenblatt, the head of the ADL, has whitewashed Elon Musk’s antisemitism, and not actually effectively stood up to him. This is a pretty stark example.

You know, Elon Musk boosted one of the most virulent antisemitic conspiracies; I mean, he regularly boosts just some of the scariest antisemitic conspiracies. Some people have called him the most powerful antisemite in the world. Notably, both Jonathan Greenblatt of the ADL and Prime Minister Netanyahu are very happy to continuously be seen in public with him and to celebrate his leadership, because one day after Elon Musk tweets an antisemitic conspiracy, the next day he says he will ban pro-Palestinian words on Twitter, and Jonathan Greenblatt is very happy to work with him to do that.

Just recently, the ADL released this report about antisemitic incidents in America, and the data is still a little bit opaque, but it’s clear from what they have put out, that at least 40 percent of the incidents that they have counted are actually pro-Palestinian protests and rallies, which they call antisemitic. That includes calling Jews who plan those marches, Jews who have called for a ceasefire, anti-Zionist Jews, the ADL calls us antisemitic.

That’s all to say that there’s this very effective industry that really manipulates the fears of the community. You know, if you’re just an average American Jew who’s not paying attention to these issues as closely as I am, you hear “major spike in antisemitism reported by the ADL.” If you don’t actually dig into what that means, you might not know that the ADL is actually lying and manipulating your fears, right? And that they’re becoming more and more powerful. They’re setting the terms on what is and isn’t antisemitic, but they’re not actually doing the things that might actually help keep our communities safer.

So, we’re in this really horrible …In some ways it’s a cycle of the fear and the grievance being fed back into this bigger project of building up support for Zionism.

SE: Yeah. And I would just add that — calling back to something Simone said earlier — if you’re an Israeli going about your life, you can sort of totally avoid largely interacting with Palestinians or seeing the occupation. If you’re an American Jew going to visit Israel, again, on Birthright or any of many organized trips in the community, you can sort of totally miss the occupation, and have it be totally not seen by you.

And so, then, when you get an attack like October 7th, or the many suicide bombings that happened during the Second Intifada, or any kind of violent resistance that’s absolutely traumatic — and it should be traumatic, any kind of violence against civilians is going to be extremely traumatic — but if that’s the only thing you ever hear about Palestinians, and that’s unfortunately the reality very often in both the Israeli public and the American Jewish public, then you’re going to just see it through a lens of, like, this is just antisemitism. This is just hatred of Jews as Jews.

And, also, as Simone was saying, organizations like the ADL have really played a role of conflating all criticism of Israel with antisemitism, really muddying the waters, and making it hard to call out real antisemitism as it happens. And, at the same time as that’s happened, which is sort of a process that’s begun starting in the sixties and seventies, there was a real effort in the community — including through trips like Birthright and, also, the Jewish education system — to sort of make Israel a cornerstone of American Jewish identities. Back in the fifties, you would not have seen, or it would have been very unusual to see, an Israeli flag hanging on the Bema in a synagogue. Now, it’s extremely common.

So, the result of that is a really conscious effort to make Israel not just seen as a political state that we have interests in maintaining, in terms of Jewish safety, or geopolitical interests, or what have you, but that supporting Israel actually becomes an identity. And the result of that is that any sort of criticism of, or even just basic facts about, the reality of Israel, is processed by many people as an attack on their identity, and not just as a challenge to facts that they believe. And that makes it so much harder to get through and have a conversation.

Again, as Simone has described, this is a transformation that’s happening over and over in our community. But one thing Simone said that kind of surprised me when we were doing an interview is that you, Simone, you were sent to go to AIPAC conferences. You’re literally going to a conference where you’re doing lobbying efforts on behalf of a government, but you sort of thought about it as like a community event. And that’s a very common attitude in the community, is that doing what actually is political activism on behalf of the government of Israel that isn’t, as you’ve said Ryan, an idealized government that’s doing these moral things, but is a real government that’s doing, in my view, deeply immoral things on a daily basis. That’s sort of like an everyday community event, in a way of acting out your Jewish identity.

EA: To add off of what Sam was saying — and to kind of answer your question, Ryan — about, how has this narrative been maintained, a Jewish educator in our film says, to her, Israel is Judaism, and Judaism is Israel.

Jacqui Schulefand: Can you separate Israel and Judaism? I don’t know. I can’t. You know, some people, I think, can. To me, it’s the same. Yeah, you can’t separate it. Israel is Judaism, and Judaism is Israel. And that is who I am, and that is my identity, and I think every single thing that I experienced along my life has melded into that. Like, it was never, you know, a divide for me.

EA: And that is a relatively common viewpoint for many in our community. And so, if you abandon support of Israel, or if you start criticizing Israel, under that understanding of Jewish identity, you’re losing your entire identity. And so, Israel has been so tied to Jewish identity, that it’s so difficult for many people to get out of that, because our entire identities are based around it.

And so, it becomes incredibly difficult to actually have critical conversations, when criticizing Israel means criticizing your own basis of your identity.

RG: I’ve been really shocked in the last few months about the linkage, that identity linkage, the linkage between Judaism, Jewishness, and pro-Israel attitudes. And I’ve been stunned to see criticism of the IDF killing, indiscriminately, women and children across Gaza, as somehow conflated with Judaism. And so, looking at it from the reverse angle. I would think, who would ever want to associate those two things? Like, to me, they could not be more different.

You know, one represents all that is good in the world. Spirituality, communalism, learning, community. Like, one of the greatest aspirations for people around the world. The other is just evil and destructive militarism.

Why cling those two identities together? Like, it seems a defeating of the good one, to link it to what the IDF is currently doing.

SZ: Yeah. I think you’re absolutely right, Ryan. And I would say, for me, part of why this film is such a powerful tool, and why the message that I continuously just come back to is, like, you have to see the Palestinian reality. You have to read Palestinian authors, you have to learn about their history. You have to see what is happening in Gaza.

I honestly think that the average person who is justifying what’s happening in Gaza doesn’t actually know what’s happening in Gaza. They don’t actually let themselves look. So, you know, the Israeli government will call the accusation that they’re killing children a blood libel, hearkening back to one of the most original antisemitic tropes, this idea of Jews killing non-Jewish children to harvest their blood.

Well, that only works if you don’t actually know that the Israeli military is literally killing thousands of children right now. And I think it falls apart the second you actually look at that reality.

I guess I want to add two other things that I sort of see as connected, is that, I think, as you said, absolutely, for so many Jews, critical thinking, open debate, compassion, equality, the sanctity of every human life, these are also values that were instilled in us in our community. Not to mention: Holocaust education, learning about the horrors that Jewish people have faced in other places throughout the centuries but, specifically, about the horrors of the genocide, the Nazi genocide.

And I know there are lots of, in particular, young Jews, but also many older Jews, who are themselves Holocaust survivors, or come from Holocaust survivor families, who are reading about what’s happening in Gaza, who are watching the videos, and they can’t help but see the parallels and the echoes of the worst traumas that our people experienced throughout history.

I mean, even just, you know, for me, something I’ve been thinking about, I have no one directly in my family who survived the Holocaust, because they escaped Europe before the Holocaust. But these stories now of Palestinian families who are in this impossible situation of like, you know … Do we stay in Gaza? Stay and be blown up in our homes? Die of starvation, something else? Or do we try to leave and, first of all, know that we might never be able to go home ever again?

And second of all, just, where do we go? How much money do people have to raise to try to get their families out? There are all these stories now on the internet of people who are trying to crowdfund to help their relatives escape. I mean, these are things that, like… The stories of where our families could go a century ago, we see those parallels. They’re undeniable. So, I guess there’s been parts of this that have been a very depressing conversation.

But I do want to say something that does make me hopeful is how many Jews are seeing these parallels, and are speaking out against the Israeli military’s genocidal violence against Palestinians in Gaza. And to go back to the politics in the U.S. as well, American Jews are overwhelmingly liberal, overwhelmingly committed to issues of racial and economic justice, and the fact that, to maintain this pro-Israel consensus at all costs, you have groups like AIPAC, who have endorsed insurrectionists who literally are boosting some of the most antisemitic, homophobic, Islamophobic, Christian fundamentalists in this country, and empowering this movement [which] I know that, for a lot of people, has been a breaking point. They’re like, enough. I can’t be part of this.

And so, I think we are seeing right now a very significant overreach by the pro-Israel establishment that’s prompting a huge backlash in our community. And I do think, on a more hopeful note, that you will see more and more American Jews, not just joining the ceasefire movement, but rejecting these institutions, and seeing them as not only something they disagree with, but something that they actually see as hostile to their own wellbeing, as Jews and as Americans. 

RG: Well, Simone, thank you so much for joining me.

SZ: Thanks for having me.

RG: Sam, thank you.

SE: Thank you, Ryan.

RG: And Erin, I really appreciate it.

EA: Absolutely. Thank you so much for your work.

RG: Deconstructed is a production of The Intercept.

This episode was produced by Laura Flynn. Our lead producer is José Olivares. The show is mixed by William Stanton. Legal Review by David Bralow and Elizabeth Sanchez. Leonardo Faierman transcribed this episode. Our theme music was composed by Bart Warshaw. Roger Hodge is the Intercept’s Editor-in-Chief. And I’m Ryan Grim, D.C. Bureau Chief of The Intercept, and the author of my new book, “The Squad.” Go ahead and get that if you haven’t yet.

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