In case you didn't glean from my name, my bio, or my background image, I'm Jewish. As in, very Jewish. A bona fide, dyed-in-the-wool Yid, who went to Hebrew school, Jewish summer camp, and shul, who had a Bar Mitzvah Bat Mitzvah Bnei Mitzvah who stood on the bimah, chanted Shacharit, then read Torah at age 13. I'm a matrilineal Ashkenazi whose ancestors fled Vitebsk, Belarus, to escape antisemitism (and the Russo-Japanese war), I say the Shema before bed every night, and I have appropriate contempt for Christians who try to cosplay as Jews. I keep kosher, I keep Shabbat (mostly), and I can look at a page of Talmud without wanting to cry (mostly). Before I started transitioning, I wore a kippah regularly. I'm not Orthodox, but I make Conservative Judaism proud. (And no, being a Conservative Jew doesn't equal being a Jewish conservative. I'm a leftist, politically.)
I don't, however, live in Israel. I live in Canada, and I have no intention of making aliyah. So, this is it. This is the "Chaia talks about Israel" page. This might turn into a video or two, or it might just stay a page on my website, I honestly don't know. So let's do this thing! Without further ado, I give you:
The reasons Chaia doesn't live in Israel
Reason 1: Palestine
I'm not a Zionist. I was raised as one, and I was one for a long time, but as my politics turned leftward - and as my eyes were forcibly snapped open by the Sheikh Jarrah crisis in 2021 - I began to learn things I was never taught in my Israel Advocacy class. (Yes, that was a real class my high school had, and it was not an elective. Still unpacking that one.) As a Canadian, I had my own country's sordid settler-colonialist past and present to reckon with, and as I sat down to actually read works that I had been told about but never studied, like Herzl's The Jewish State, Moses Hess's Rome & Jerusalem, and Ahad Ha'am's Truth From Eretz Yisrael, I noticed a resonance in the ideology in play that walked, talked, and smelled very similar to European colonialism. Hess in particular gave a lot of grandiose talk about bringing "the light of European science" to a "barbarous East" that wouldn't have been out of place in the ravings of any Western imperialist.
I've been to Israel several times. I have family there. But as I read the destructive, harmful ideology of the foundational texts of Zionism, and as I studied the real statistics and anecdotes of the ’48 and ’67 wars, I began to feel complicit in… something. Like all this horrible stuff had been going on beneath my nose, with my name slapped on it. I felt like the people who'd taught me about Israel - my school, individual teachers, my community - had lied to me.
Stop me if you've heard this one before. The exact same feelings that I'd been grappling with as a Canadian hit me again, but this time, as a Jew.
(And, look, just a reality check. My feelings are not the most important thing here. One settler feeling upset about her complicity in the system is not a big deal compared to the Indigenous people who face systemic harassment, displacement, and brutalization on a daily basis. This is my website, so I'm gonna talk about my feelings, but at the end of the day, when you've finished reading my thoughts, go and listen to the people directly affected by settler-colonialism.)
I recently saw an advertisement in my local Jewish newspaper for an Israel Advocacy seminar for "the youth", to try and re-engage young Yidden like me on Zionism. One thing that really stuck out to me was a single sentence. "Zionism is not about the Palestinians," it claimed, "Zionism is about the Jews!" Frankly, I think that's a perfect summation of the whole damn problem. Zionism demands that Jews be self-centered; that we pretend the Palestinians aren't there, or that they're irrelevant. It asks us to look up at shining Eretz Yisrael: at the blue-and-white flag; at the Western Wall; at the Tomb of the Patriarchs and the Startup Nation and Yerushalayim Shel Zahav - and to never look down at the nets erected in Hebron to keep shit from being flung down at Palestinians by the settlers; at the families being evicted from the homes they've owned for generations in East Jerusalem; at the countless villages being terrorized and bulldozed by settlers and soldiers together in the West Bank; at the blockade in Gaza; at the ruins of Palestine that Israel proper built itself on top of in the ashes of 1948. If the Palestinians do come up, we're asked to dismiss them as terrorists, or as whiners who missed their chance, or to accept Israeli Arab MKs as proof that there's no real discrimination, which is pretty much Tokenism 101.
Honestly, I could stop there. The devastation of Palestine is reason enough to condemn the State of Israel. If I made aliyah, I'd be living under the Israeli government, paying Israeli taxes, funding occupation and settler-colonialism. But the thing is, I live in Canada. I'm already funding settler-colonialism through my taxes to the Canadian government. So, really, I'm just choosing which facet of my identity is bloodstained. And, yeah, there's a part of me that's more comfortable condemning my white identity as bloody than my Jewish identity. I'm much less attached to my whiteness, especially as I read more antiracist authors like Ibram X. Kendi. But that's just a cognitive bias. I'm doing the same harm as a settler on Treaty 1 territory as I would be on Palestinian land. So, why am I not in Israel, fighting against the Occupation from ground zero?
Reason 2: Queerness
Israel loves to tout itself as being super queer-friendly, especially to contrast itself against its neighbours, but the truth is, non-het marriage is still illegal in Israel, because there's no civil marriage in Israel. There's only religious marriage, and Jewish marriages can only be performed by a rabbi recognized by the Chief Rabbinate. Jewish couples who want to marry are forced to attend classes on niddah, whether they're religious or not, interfaith marriages are forbidden, and since only Orthodox conversions are recognized by the Rabbinate, non-Orthodox Jewish converts can't get married in Israel. The Rabbinate has massive control over Israeli law, and they're extremely ultra-Orthodox, queerphobic, and all-around schmucks. Conservative, Reform, and Reconstructionist Judaism are barely even recognized in Israel! Tel Aviv might be very gay, but Israel as a whole is an extremely conservative country. Why does the Rabbinate have so much power?
Reason 3: Israeli Judaism
Look. I really, really hate living under Christian hegemony. It sucks ass to be a religious minority. I could go on a whole rant about Christmas Creep, about how Christian holidays have everything close down, but I have to explicitly book time off for Jewish holidays, or about constantly getting proselytized at. It's awful, and I hate it. But almost as bad is seeing my own religion get turned into that same sort of hegemonic, all-encompassing juggernaut. When I was younger and still a Zionist, I fantasized about living in a place where things were closed on Shabbat, and I could see Chanukiot in every window in the winter. But Judaism has taken on a different form in Israel than it has out here in the Diaspora. With hegemonic power and the backing of the state, it's quickly turned into another tool of oppression. The narrowest, most conservative interpretations of halacha are upheld, and Haredi neighbourhoods are basically allowed to govern themselves, forcing women who enter them to dress modestly, and throwing rocks at cars who drive through on Shabbat.
And Haredim aside, the whole of Israeli Judaism just feels shallower, at least to me. When I was last in Jerusalem, the Jewish Quarter of the Old City felt like a massive tourist trap for the ultra-Orthodox. Sure, it was easy to get Judaica that's hard to get in Canada, but the sense of community that I prize in my Judaism was gone. When Judaism is hegemonic, alternative interpretation and dissent is gone. Instead of being deep, it becomes wide. It felt like there was no real reason to care about Judaism, because, well, it was everywhere. Static. Background noise. It really did feel like actual Judaism had been supplanted in favour of a state-religion with halachic flavouring. It tastes like Judaism, but the texture is bland and uninteresting. Maybe that's just my baggage, or maybe it's what Judaism had to become in order to bear the bloody history of Israel without breaking.
That's not to say that Israeli Jews aren't Jews. To be clear, they absolutely are. I'm not trying to pull a No True Scotsman. And this isn't a slight on any individual Israeli's Judaism, or the Judaism of any communities in Eretz Yisrael. I'm talking about the Judaism of the State of Israel and mainstream Israeli culture. It is Judaism, but it's a Judaism that's both coarser and more sanitized - the Judaism of a rising empire (or more accurately, a patron of the American Empire), and the Judaism of institutional power. The Judaism of Massada and the Judaism of the Knesset, rather than the Judaism of the shtetl and the beit midrash. And on some level, that was always Zionism's goal. Herzl's Jewish State talks a lot about the shedding of the weak, effeminate Diaspora Jew, and the birth of the strong, masculine (read: European) Hebrew. Maybe it's just my queerness talking, but I'd rather be a weak, effeminate Diaspora Jew who knows and cherishes her Judaism on a deep level, than a powerful, masculine Hebrew whose religion is spoonfed to him by a Rabbinate whose word is quite literally law.
And I guess, really, that's what hits at the crux of it.
Reason 4: The Diaspora
On some level, Eretz Yisrael will always be home to Jews. It's the focal point of Judaism, and it will never not be important to us.
But the Diaspora isn't just an exile. We're not all clawing at Israel's borders, begging to be allowed in. Diasporic Judaism is rich in its own right. Local traditions, local halacha, and international diversity are a precious part of what it means to be a Diaspora Jew. It's so much fun to go almost anywhere in the world and find Jews with their own rich history and traditions that differ from mine. The Jewish Diaspora is huge and interwoven, with a strong history of its own: from the rationalist Maimonides in Al-Andalus and Egypt, to the mystic Ba'al Shem Tov in Poland and Ukraine; from the Beta Yisrael in Ethiopia to the Bene Yisrael in India and the Jews of Kaifeng; from laid-back California Jews to Yiddish-speaking New York Jews who never left the shtetl. In the 1100s, Binyamin of Tudela traveled from Spain all the way through Europe, West Asia, and North Africa, meeting and documenting Jewish communities all along the way.
Eretz Yisrael is part of our community, and it's our Holy Land; but we don't need Israel to be B'nei Yisrael. Everywhere we go, we make our home.