The Year I Left Israel Behind

This piece belongs to a series of op-eds and columns to be published throughout this week reflecting on the one-year anniversary of October 7th.

—Tommy Barone ’25 and Jacob M. Miller ’25, Crimson Editorial Chairs

The last time I was in Israel, I didn’t know it was also Palestine.

It was June 2017, and my family and I were in Jerusalem for my bat mitzvah. We held the ceremony at the Western Wall and then traveled south, to the Negev desert. There, we toured the Ramon Air Force Base and ate ice cream on the side of the road. We stayed with friends on a kibbutz — a communal settlement unique to Israel — and then flew home on El Al, the national carrier. We laughed about how outdated the plane was (the seats had built-in ashtrays, not TVs).

I had been to this land — which I used to think was mine — once before. I was five. I surveyed desert expanses from the peak of Masada, explored ancient cities overrun by cats, and felt the Dead Sea’s brine in every split of my skin. I remember, with biting clarity, crisp white hotel sheets, smoothies served in shot glasses, a man reading in a lawn chair buoyed by the sea.

I remember standing, then, in the kitchen of a house in Kibbutz Ein Dor. I’ve craned my neck to study the fridge. It’s a picture of the family we’re staying with: two parents and four children. I’ve met all of them but Nadav, the oldest brother. I ask where he is.

Nadav is away, serving in the Israel Defense Forces. I am afraid of guns and bombs and death; I ask why anyone would want to join the military. It was not a choice, I am told; service is mandatory for all Israeli citizens over the age of 18. I look up to the fridge one more time, and I think of Nadav.

I wonder where he is at that moment. I wonder if he is scared.

***

I spent last October 7th — and the days following — crying. I recited the Mi Shebeirach, the Jewish prayer for healing, again and again. I prayed for the 1,200 Israelis killed and mourned the breach of somewhere sacred.

When, that same day, more than 30 student organizations held Israel “entirely responsible” for all unfolding violence,” my grief warped into anger. They didn’t get it; they didn’t know the Israel I knew.

But when those same students were publicly and recklessly accused of antisemitism, I took pause. I couldn’t understand why their criticisms of Israel (albeit maddening) had been advertised as prejudice. On campus, disingenuous claims of antisemitism were wielded to silence anyone who sought to challenge Israel’s immediate and devastating retaliation in Gaza. Forged allegations were levied against anyone who, like those 35 student organizations, sought to situate the violence of October 7th in the context of the decades-long occupation that arguably bred it.

On a global scale, exaggerated charges of antisemitism were used to justify very real hatred — and indiscriminate violence — against Palestinians.

Grief turned to anger turned to guilt. As a Jewish student on campus where — according to University administration and every major media outlet — the Jewish community was imperiled and afraid, I felt directly responsible for this narrative perversion. For the no-hire lists and “doxxing trucks,” for the students driven to remove their names from their doors and walk to class in pairs, for the imagination of Jewish grief and Jewish safety as above all else.

And as a Jewish person in a world where Jewish safety is prioritized over and at the direct expense of Palestinian safety, I felt — I feel — directly responsible for what I came to understand was a genocide in Gaza.

So, hesitantly at first and wholeheartedly now, I took to organizing. I occupied University Hall last November to call for a ceasefire; I camped in Harvard Yard this spring to protest the University’s investments in Israel; I was suspended (and unsuspended) from school for my participation in said encampment.

Still, I haven’t even come close to achieving what I view as a central goal of my organizing for Palestine: to reproduce the undoing of my own Zionism on a mass scale.

The conflation of antisemitism and anti-Zionism — the latter of which only entered my vocabulary this past year — did not begin with doxxing trucks, congressional subpoenas, or federal lawsuits. It merely (and shamefully) took the campus-turned-national controversy for me to realize just how far back it stretched.

Indeed, since its inception, Zionism has worked to trap Jews in a state of perpetual, existential fear to excuse the inexcusable: the existence of an ethnostate and, now, the genocide it commits.

Israel’s story is an illusory one. It cannot be told without burying another story: that of Palestine. I know this because for twenty years, I peddled it.

In Hebrew school, I colored in maps that treated Gaza, the West Bank, and the Golan Heights as undifferentiated parts of Israel — a single, crayoned mass of blue. In my third-grade class I was told, outright, that “Palestine never existed.” I was taught an incomplete history: 1948 as the declaration of Israeli independence, without mention of the catastrophic expulsion of 750,000 Palestinians.

I have spent my whole life wondering what it means to be Jewish. I used to imagine Judaism through the celebration of holidays, recitation of prayers, and a commitment to “tikkun olam,” or repairing the world. I conceived it through my memories of and allegiance to Israel.

But when I think about Judaism these days, I just feel deceived.

***

The memory of the ride back from Ben Gurion Airport makes me sick. What that crappy, outdated El Al plane represents — unfettered access to the land between the Jordan and the Mediterranean — is not afforded to millions of Palestinians.

I feel foolish for laughing at that plane, for making light of the fundamental right to return home, granted to Palestinians by international law but not by Israel. I feel ashamed for ever deriving joy from a state and ever believing in an ideology which lie at the root of generations of Palestinian trauma, dispossession, and destruction.

Israel’s deception is convincing, its narrative compelling, and its trauma gripping. It requires us to believe that the Holocaust is unique not just in particulars, but in essence. It is not. The evil that consists in the extermination of a people — and the annihilating bigotry that engenders it — is hardly exceptional. Genocides have raged across history and the world — in Myanmar, Armenia, Rwanda, Cambodia, and now Gaza.

To imagine the Holocaust as the ultimate, inimitable evil — to clutch and disfigure its memory as Zionism has — is to disgrace that memory and the mandate of “never again.” I was raised saying these words; I grew up attending Jewish World Watch’s annual “Walk to End Genocide” with my synagogue.

That chants of “never again” have, for many Jews, become “not in our name” means we have not just failed to learn our history, but twisted it to wreak similar horrors. It is Palestinians who are the chief victims of that failure — made unsafe by the lethal lie that Jews can only be safe in a state of and for Jews.

Jews don’t need a state of and for Jews. Certainly not one that comes at this cost. We can live and have lived in diaspora — we did so for thousands of years prior to 1948, and more than half of us still do. I, for one, am not made any safer, nor is my Judaism any more affirmed, by the existence of a country halfway across the world.

I understand why those in my grandparents’ and parents’ generations might disagree — they are that much closer to the Holocaust, that much closer to the shattering of everything we had known.

I know, though, that the world is safer for diasporic Jews now, that “never again” rings true for us. And if the last year shows anything, it is that Israel’s so-called safety — the mirror image of Gaza’s unsafety — is as fragile as it is tainted.

***

For the past year, my world has spun on an unfamiliar axis. Not a day passes that I don’t think about Palestine. Every day I am haunted by the near-paralyzing guilt that this time it is us Jews who are winning the narrative war, us Jews who are carrying out the genocide.

The distortion of my world pales in comparison to the more than 42,000 worlds Israel has extinguished, the nearly 100,000 it has debilitated, and the almost two million it has uprooted since October 7th. To the 750,000 worlds seized and relocated to make room for a Jewish state in 1948. To the six million worlds that exist, to this day, in forced diaspora.

I finally met Nadav — the soldier, the eldest son — on my second trip to Israel; it was he who gave us the tour of the Israeli Air Force base, where he was working at the time. I don’t know where he is now.

My childhood fear for him has matured into rage — at the state that conscripted him and at the ideology that legitimizes that state. In fact, since I stopped valorizing Israel and started organizing for Palestine, I’ve felt a lot less fear than hope.

I dream of the day when there are no more Nadavs, because there will no longer be a need for guns and bombs to keep Palestinians out of a place they call home. I dream of the day when I can stomach my children having their own b’nai mitzvahs at the Western Wall. I dream of the day when my Palestinian friends and their families can join us — when “us” means all of us.

The next time I am in Israel, it will also be Palestine.

Violet T.M. Barron ’26, an Associate Editorial editor, is a Social Studies concentrator in Adams House and an organizer with Harvard Jews for Palestine, Harvard Out of Occupied Palestine, and the Harvard Undergraduate Palestine Solidarity Committee.