Jewish Journeys from Zionism – Robert Cohen (6)

JVL Introduction

We are pleased to publish the sixth “Jewish Journey from Zionism”. Robert Cohen shares fascinating information about his own history in relation to and away from zionism with profound reflection on young people, antisemitism and more.  He also says:  “This JVL “Journeys” project…is helping to lift up and make more visible what appear to be dissident, non-mainstream, edgy positions. To see that something’s possible you need to see that someone else is doing it. People need role models…We’re showing that non-Zionists are not weird, wacky people who don’t give a damn about being Jewish. They haven’t just thought up being non-Zionist overnight, or decided after seeing a few TikTok videos. They have done a lot of intellectual and emotional work to get to this point, so they deserve to be listened to.”

So a great endorsement of the project too.  As always our thanks to Kitty Warnock for collecting these stories.

LL

Robert Cohen 58 years old, Kendal

Childhood

I grew up in Bromley in southeast London. My parents were both Jewish, both born in London. In my father’s case it was his parents who were the immigrant generation. My mother’s mother was originally from Lithuania but born in Limerick in Ireland, and I think her father was born in London. My parents belonged to a United synagogue in Catford, but moved when I was quite young to Bromley Reform Synagogue, and that’s what I remember – very much a Reform Jewish upbringing. I remember it all very fondly, very affectionately. It was a lovely warm community. I went to Hebrew classes on a Sunday morning, had my Bar Mitzvah, and went to the Reform Synagogue Youth club and summer camps.

Index of all the personal stories

I don’t remember Zionism being central to our lives as I grew up. But I do remember one incident: at a High Holy Day service – it might have been during the first Lebanon war in 1982 – our rabbi made a critical reference to what Israel was doing. Someone in the congregation stood up and shouted at the rabbi that it was an abuse of the pulpit, and stormed out. I was bemused. Perhaps that was my first realisation that Israel can be a contested and problematic issue within Jewish communities.

My parents were actively Jewish but not in an Israel-focused way. They were very active in the synagogue, in Bnei Brith, and in the issue of Soviet Jewry. It is a great irony that my parent’s generation, particularly the women, who had very liberal values and outlooks, were campaigning for Soviet Jews to get out of Russia, and then when the Soviet Union collapsed and nearly a million Jews from there moved to Israel, it contributed to the right-wing turn in Israeli politics[i].

I think my parents’ understanding and acceptance of Zionism was shaped by the experiences of their generation. They would have been deeply influenced by the memory of the holocaust, and they had been adults during the 1967 war.  They bought into the narrative that Israel was an existential necessity for Jewish safety and security. They would have had very little knowledge of the Palestinian story, beyond the idea that there were Arab terrorists who wanted to kill Jewish people.

We had cousins, particularly on my mother’s side, who had made Aliyah, but we never went to Israel as a family for holidays. The first time I went was in my gap year, when I was 19. My older sister had been, and when I was wondering what to do between school and university, I thought, ‘Well, I should probably go to Israel.’  Something in me obviously thought that it was a significant place to go, something I ought to see.

First visit to Israel

Today there are lots of very structured and organised Israel tours you can do, but it wasn’t like that at that time.  I went to see the Israel representative for Reform Judaism in an office in north-west London, and the only thing he could suggest was that I go and spend time on a kibbutz. So that’s what I did. I had some understanding of the history of kibbutzim, the whole romantic socialism thing, but that’s not why I went. I went because it was the only thing there was.

I spent some time on a kibbutz, working in the morning, and learning Hebrew in the afternoon. But I’d never been good at languages, and I hated the Hebrew classes. I left the kibbutz and got a bus down to the Jewish Agency in Tel Aviv and asked, “What else can I do?” They said, “There’s this programme in Safed (Tzfat in Hebrew) called Livnot U’Lehibanot (Hebrew for “To Build and Be Built”) in northern Galilee. Go up there and see if they will let you in.” So I did, and they let me join. It was a programme to encourage young Jews to make Aliyah, educating us in the history of Zionism and so on, trying to persuade us to become the kind of modern orthodox Jews that come and live in Israel. It didn’t work on me. Perhaps I was too young – they wanted people who had already been to university, whereas I was about to have that experience.

I didn’t feel much affinity with the Israeli Jews that I was meeting, either on the kibbutz or on the programme in the Galilee. I had much more in common with the other diaspora Jews I met. I thought, ‘I can relate to you, even though you’re from France, or America, or South Africa.’ Their experiences of being a minority in a majority culture seemed very similar to mine, whereas the Israeli experience of being in a predominantly Jewish society is very different. Israel had its own distinct culture that I didn’t recognise – even though it was very secularised.  I had learned that you are meant to arrive in Israel and feel that you’ve somehow come home, or that you’re returning to your ancestral homeland. I didn’t feel anything like that.

The Reform youth movement I’d been in didn’t have a heavily Zionist or Israel-focused programme at that time.  I felt I should check Israel out, but I didn’t feel as if I was on a mental journey about deciding that I should live there. I think my mother would have been horrified if I had made Aliyah.  I know that in Habonim, the socialist Zionist youth movement, or Bnei Akiva, a right-wing Orthodox Zionist group, I’d have had a different experience. My cousins who did make Aliyah, I’m sure that was to do with their having been in the Bnei Akiva youth movement.

Starting to dissent

It was at university that I really began to engage with the history of Israel and Zionism. I was at Manchester University, which at that time was the go-to destination for Jewish students, but I hadn’t chosen it for that reason. Where I grew up in south London, there would only have been one or two of us Jewish boys in my school year, and I wasn’t used to being in a strong Jewish scene. But in Manchester I saw a lot of how Jewish student politics plays out. I wasn’t particularly comfortable in the Jewish Society environment – because I hadn’t grown up in that north-west London scene. I hung out more with the Progressive Jewish Students group. My friends and I were strong supporters of the idea of a two-state solution – which at that time, long before the Oslo peace accords, was a radical and controversial position to hold. We were at what was then the radical edge of liberal Zionism.

I was in my last year when the first Intifada broke out, at the end of 1987. Trying to understand what was going on, I spent hours in the university library, where I could read lots of international periodicals and magazines, things like the New York Review of Books, and more right-wing journals like Commentary[ii] magazine (an American Jewish journal), and Foreign Affairs. There was no internet or social media, so you were reliant on these establishment American journals that were at best liberal Zionist.  I was very influenced by big name liberal Zionist thinkers like Amos Oz and David Grossman, who were critical of the Israeli government and wanting to show a degree of empathy and understanding about what happened to the Palestinians. Through all that reading I realised that the Jewish people appeared to have become Goliath and the Palestinian people were David – a switching of roles, at least for the Jewish people. That was the beginning of my journey of self-education.

I joined the BBC as a radio news reporter, and my ambition was to be the BBC’s Jerusalem correspondent. When I watched the White House handshake on TV in 1993 – when Bill Clinton, Yitzhak Rabin and Yasser Arafat were signing the first Oslo Accord – I thought, ‘It’s all over, there’ll be nothing to report any more!’.  The next visit I was able to make to Israel was to cover the general election in May 1996, in the wake of Rabin’s assassination. I was a news producer at BBC Radio 5 Live, working with presenter Eddie Mair. Everybody thought that Shimon Peres, Rabin’s deputy, was going to win, but he didn’t – it was Netanyahu who won. Looking back, I feel some degree of regret: I didn’t do a very good job as a journalist, I didn’t make enough effort to find Israeli Palestinian voices for Eddie to speak to.

By the late 90s the Oslo process was collapsing under Netanyahu, who was not interested in making it work. And then when the second Intifada began in 2000 and all the suicide bombings were happening, I remember thinking I’d never be able to visit Israel again.

A turning point in my journey away from Zionism was the Gaza war of 2008-9. We had always had the Jewish Chronicle delivered at home when I was growing up, and I liked to read it – it was my route into the wider Jewish community beyond my synagogue. But in 2008, reading its coverage of this Gaza war, I realised how far I had moved from the mainstream Jewish positions. Seeing how institutional Judaism and the opinions in mainstream Jewish spaces were viewing the war, I realised that none of it made sense to me anymore. The reporting and the opinions seemed so at odds with everything else I was seeing about what was happening and how devastating it was for the Palestinians in Gaza. It was as if Israel had no real culpability, as if the war was being forced on them. I had noticed how the Jewish Chronicle had moved to the right over the years, but now I thought, ‘I can’t read this paper anymore.’

The break with Zionism

At that point I decided I would really like to go back to Israel, but only if I could find a way to go to the occupied territories and meet Palestinians – which I had never done before. In 2011, I found a way to do it, through Amos Trust, a Christian charity committed to human rights that’s been taking people on visits to the West Bank for many years. My wife and I signed up for a trip. We went to the West Bank and into Israel proper. But it wasn’t meeting Settlers and Palestinians in the West Bank that made the biggest impression on me (although that situation was bad enough). Instead, it was meeting Palestinian families in Nazareth and realising how Israeli society discriminated against them as non-Jews. That’s really when the penny dropped for me. Even the 20% of Palestinians living in Israel get such a raw deal, in terms of cultural, institutional and structural discrimination against them. They have a separate school system. They don’t serve in the IDF, so all sorts of jobs and positions aren’t open to them. It was understanding this that made me think, ‘I’ve had it with this whole Zionism thing, it’s not working.’ The idea that you could have a Jewish and democratic Israel, I could see that it was a fiction.  Israel’s democracy and liberal values don’t extend beyond Jews, that’s the reality. That’s certainly the case for the West Bank and Gaza but it was also a serious democratic deficit within Israel itself.

Why hadn’t I realised this before? Because I had been in the paradigm of Israel as an entirely Jewish project, a Jewish framework of history. I understood where the project of Zionism had come from as a response to antisemitism in Europe, and the feeling that the only way out of that was to have your own nation state. It was only through a lot of study and reading that I began to understand that the Palestinian experience of Zionism was entirely different.

It was on that trip in 2011 that I stopped being a liberal Zionist and became a non-Zionist. When I came home I was ready to be public about it. It had been a long journey of finding myself increasingly at odds with mainstream Jewish opinion on Israel, but after that trip I had the self-confidence to be clear about what I thought and to articulate it in public. I started writing a monthly blog, which I called Micah’s Paradigm Shift. I was hoping to talk to people like myself, other Jews who were on the same journey, in the hope of speeding up the journey for them.

In 2011 I didn’t see many other Jewish voices in the UK being critical of Jewish institutional positions from a Jewish perspective. So I wrote a lot of pieces critical of the Board of Deputies or the chief rabbi, or trying to draw out what I felt were the moral inconsistencies or political hypocrisies about Israel and Zionism, but doing it all from a Jewish perspective. I built up a little following, and people invited me to give talks. I found myself talking to Christian groups – Methodists, Baptists, Quakers, left-wing Christian groups who were very engaged in this subject and excited to discover a Jewish voice that agreed with them. But these non-Jewish readers weren’t my target audience at all. Other Jews weren’t reading me, or if they did they weren’t contacting me, certainly not inviting me to their synagogues. I sometimes felt uncomfortable about this: am I a kind of “good Jew” that non-Jewish groups want to connect to?

The hypocrisy and so on are not just in Jewish institutions, of course, but more widely in this country. I noticed this in the years following the Iraq war of 2003. At the time I was supportive of what Tony Blair was doing, but later I thought, ‘No, we’re being conned here.’ I was still thinking then in a narrow Jewish-Israel-Zionism context, and it’s only more recently that I’ve been able to broaden that out to understanding how Zionism fits into the broader history of settler colonialism and imperial histories, a leftist analysis. But I am still most interested in the specifics of this particular expression of settler colonialism and imperialist history, and in coming at it from the particular Jewish Reform upbringing I’d had. Reform Judaism has always put more emphasis on the Jewish ethical tradition rather than Halakhic rituals and practice. That was the dissonance I was experiencing: how can we have the ethical values that I was taught as a child, and yet we excuse the behaviour of the Israeli state, which is claiming to speak in the name of all Jews?

While I was writing my blog, I quickly realised that the vehement pro-Israel activists in the UK were keeping an eye on me. Sometimes individuals engaged directly and commented on my posts and could be pretty nasty, but I learned not to take it personally. In the background, I knew that the Board of Deputies was watching me too – not surprisingly, as I often wrote about them. Around 2016-17, when I was giving quite a lot of talks around the country, I would often discover that the BOD had contacted the organisers of a talk to try and persuade them to disinvite me. I learned this from the organisers – they would tell me they’d been asked, or they’d had a meeting with a BOD representative. I was always grateful that they weren’t intimidated: they would listen to what the BOD was saying but they were confident in having the right to make their own decision about who to invite to speak at their own events.

I often talked about my developing views with my parents. I was very grateful that they were willing to engage with where I had got to in my thinking. My dad in particular was always happy to hear me out, and we never got into arguments. I had more disagreement with my sister. We have found it difficult to talk about Israel, and we’ve learned to avoid the subject, for the sake of not busting up our relationship. During the 2014 Gaza war, I think, we were constantly exchanging texts, and I realised we must stop doing it. We had to stay on good terms if we were going to manage looking after our, by then, elderly parents. It’s the same in this current situation – we don’t talk about it, because our good relationship is more important to me.

Changing attitudes to Israel

Israel will remain significant for all Jews, because half the global Jewish population is now residing in Israel, and if you feel in some way part of this Jewish people, then you’ve got an emotional investment in what happens in the state of Israel, however critical you might be. I can’t just disconnect myself from it. But I’m sure we will see an increasing division between diaspora Jewry and Jewry in Israel itself, if the country continues on its right-wing trajectory.

This post-October 7^th moment may feel like a traumatic but unifying event for Jews: most of UK Jewry is leaning into Israel solidarity, feeling very threatened by what happened on Oct 7th, and worried about the spike in antisemitism that’s happening here.  But the longer-term trend is a fracturing of Jewish support for Israel. The Jewish Policy Research Institute published important findings recently which showed that the proportion of UK Jewish people identifying as Zionists has dropped 10% in ten years – from 72% to 63%.[iii]  Among people in their 20s it is only 57%. There’s also a growing number of people who say they are non-Zionists, about 15%, and 8% who say they are anti-Zionists. It’s people of my age, in their 50s, who turn out to be the most Zionist.

Younger Jews in particular have been responding to what’s been happening in Israel over the last 20 years. In the States you saw the emergence of Jewish Voice for Peace during the second intifada. And then the 2014 Gaza war produced the If Not Now movement. These organisations have grown in America each time there is a flare-up of violence, particularly in Gaza.[iv] In the UK, groups like Na’amod emerged, and because of what has been happening since October 7^th, they will continue to grow. There is a generational divide opening up. Older people might be feeling now that you have to show your solidarity with Israel. They feel deeply vulnerable seeing the pro-Palestine marches and the reports on antisemitism and all the rest of it; they don’t have the emotional bandwidth to take on board what’s happening to Palestinians. But younger Jews look in horror at what’s happening in Gaza, and think ‘Why would I want to align myself with this whole project of Jewish nationalism if this is where it ends up?’  I think this generational divide will grow. That has huge implications for Jewish institutional life in Britain: Jewish institutions all have Zionism built into their constitutions and values: how can they be a broad enough tent to include the younger generation who are at best conflicted and at worse totally alienated? Will there be some kind of reckoning within Jewish institutional life about the centrality of Israel and Zionism in their organisations, or are they willing to just say goodbye to the younger generation?

This JVL “Journeys” project, like my own PhD research, is helping to lift up and make more visible what appear to be dissident, non-mainstream, edgy positions. To see that something’s possible you need to see that someone else is doing it. People need role models. It encourages others, if they can see Jews standing up and saying: “I am Jewish, I care about being Jewish, I care about other Jews, but I’ve reached a very different position on this central issue to do with Israel and Palestine and what that means.” We’re showing that non-Zionists are not weird, wacky people who don’t give a damn about being Jewish. They haven’t just thought up being non-Zionist overnight, or decided after seeing a few TikTok videos. They have done a lot of intellectual and emotional work to get to this point, so they deserve to be listened to.

My PhD subject: Generation Z

I’m doing a PhD looking into how the younger generation of Jewish dissent – GenZ, people in their 20s now – differs from older generations, including my own. How do they understand the issues, what journeys have they been on? When I started writing my blog (which I stopped a couple of years ago) I noticed that the new generation of Jewish dissent emerging in the US was centering their opposition within a very Jewish context. This seemed different from earlier generations of Jewish dissent both in the US and the UK. Rather than coming from a secular, leftist and academic background like the older generation, these young people had grown up within distinctly Jewish spaces and mainstream Jewish institutions. They were reacting to the mismatch they saw between support for Israel and the ethical version of Judaism they had grown up with. As they grew up, the Israel story was dominated by a succession of Gaza wars, where Israel was the powerful player and appeared to be causing incredible harm against a much weaker population. They also had the internet and social media influencing the speed at which they went on their journey, compared to the speed of mine.

There are a number of factors contributing to the difference. One is that during the 1990s, Jewish institutions and youth movements, afraid of losing young people, realised that they had to improve their Israel education and Holocaust remembrance education. Jewish youth movements started organising Israel tours, and Jewish day schools and Jewish education increased, particularly in north-west London. People younger than me have had a more thorough Jewish education that I had.  You’d think that might make it harder for them to break away, but they’ve also been able to hear the Palestinian narrative and to visit the West Bank in a way that was difficult for me in the late 1980s. They have the example of what’s happening in the US, where dissent has become more visible, and they see different possible positions to hold. Besides, they are part of a generation that is very inclusive, very diverse, typically critical of institutions more broadly, and they don’t think that older generations have got the right answers to things. There’s a generational disquiet about the things that they are inheriting – such as Climate Change – and a willingness to question received understandings and narratives. Sometimes it’s ironic: liberal Zionist organisations like Yachad[v] started taking people on trips to the West Bank like the one I did in 2011. They want to give British Jews the opportunity to hear Palestinian voices, and educate them to oppose the occupation; but the young people who went on those trips often decide, “Well, actually things are worse than Yachad is telling us.” They become more radical than the organisation which took them.

These dissenting young people often get dismissed by their elders and by institutional Jewish voices as being irrelevant or disconnected from the Jewish community. They are told they are “self-hating”, or “internalising antisemitism”, they get all this nonsense thrown at them, just as previous generations of dissent did. But it’s much more difficult to make these accusations against this younger generation: they have grown up within Jewish spaces, they’ve gone to Jewish Youth movements, they’ve gone on the Israel tour, they’ve had the Holocaust remembrance education, yet they are reaching different conclusions. They still want to assert the Jewish identity they have been raised with, and they centre that within their opposition.  Knowing all sides of the story enables them to have a very rounded and nuanced understanding. They are incredibly well educated; they’re capable of understanding both the mainstream Jewish perspective and the Palestinian perspective, and they can hold these together simultaneously and try to find a way through it. But at the same time they are rejecting mainstream Jewish institutional positions. So, I think they are a very interesting generation of Jewish dissent, worth studying.

Antisemitism

Sadly, I think there is antisemitism within the pro-Palestinian movement. I follow a lot of social media, and I see a lot of ignorance that plays out as antisemitism. But I also think that some of the criticism levelled at those in Palestine solidarity can be disingenuous or unreasonable. A young British Muslim going on a pro-Palestine demonstration in London or Leeds is not immersed in Jewish history in the way the Jewish people are; they may know little about the Holocaust, about why Jews are in Israel in the first place, about why people think they had the right to build a Jewish state in Palestine. But there’s a responsibility in the Jewish community too. Mainstream institutional Jewish leaders are constantly fuelling and stoking the conflation of Jews-Zionism-Israel. How can they expect protestors to make nuanced distinctions about Jews and Israel, when they themselves are not willing to criticise the military campaign, and then talk of Zionism being essential to Jewish identity? Recent demonstrations against antisemitism are full of people waving Israeli flags, so it’s very hard for people from the outside to make proper distinctions. When Ephraim Mirvis, the UK’s chief rabbi, talks about “our heroic soldiers” in Gaza, he’s helping to generate the antisemitism we are seeing.  He clearly wants to blur any distinctions between the interests of the state of Israel and the interests of diaspora Jewry, it’s all the same thing as far as he’s concerned.

Antisemitism is deeply embedded in Western culture, so it’s easy for people to end up drawing on it in some way. When I speak at marches or to Palestine-supporting groups, I try to call out that this is a problem for them. Antisemitism in the Palestinian movement does no favours for Palestinian liberation: it plays into the hands of opponents, enabling them to dismiss it all as antisemitism.

The future for Israel

As for Israel itself, the danger is that it becomes more and more right wing, if it thinks that it can maintain the status quo through force of arms. A lot depends on the United States in terms of what happens next. If Trump becomes president there’s no pressure on Israel to change its trajectory. The Israeli leadership is terrible; the Palestinian leadership is immoral and lacks democratic accountability. Western leadership is also pretty rubbish: they aren’t willing to engage in the history of the conflict properly, to understand the West’s role in creating this situation, or even to think about antisemitism apart from, “We must support this Jewish state, that’s how we can express our opposition to antisemitism”. It’s hard not to feel very pessimistic about the future. Where I see hope is in the steadfastness of the Palestinian people themselves, despite all of their terrible suffering; and in the example being set by a new generation of Jewish dissent.

[i] Between 1990 and 2001, nearly 900,000 Jews from the former Soviet Union moved to Israel. In comparison, the total number of immigrants from all countries in the period 1919 – 1948 was around 500,000.

[ii] Commentary is a monthly US Jewish magazine of intellectual opinion and debate, founded in 1945 by the American Jewish Committee. In the 1970s it became “the flagship of neoconservatism”, according to its website.

[iii] The Institute of Jewish Policy Research is a London-based independent think-tank carrying out policy-related research and analysis for individuals and organisations concerned with the enhancement of contemporary Jewish life. The report mentioned here is the National Jewish Identity Survey, Feb 2024

[iv] The If Not Now Movement is a Jewish organisation that challenges U.S. support for Israel’s apartheid system and advocates for equality and justice for Palestinians.

[v] Yachad (“Together” in Hebrew) is a UK NGO founded in 2011 that campaigns for peace based on a two-state solution.

Index of all the personal stories