Israelism Review: Revisions Inside the Promised Land
By: María Teresa Fidalgo-Azize/ Arab America Contributing Writer
Israel is the insurance policy. It’s still- today a Jew doesn’t have to worry where he is going to go. God forbid. Even here. No Holocaust survivor will say to you: It could never happen again.
Abe Foxman, Former National Director of the Anti-Defamation League
Abe Foxman is a Holocaust survivor. To contradict or attempt to disagree with a person who has witnessed the industrialized and organized evil that is Nazism and whose lineage was systematically targeted for extinction is not only futile but disparaging. Foxman’s assertion that Israel, the nation-state, guarantees survival to the Jewish people from external forces is rooted in his status as a survivor- only the experience of another survivor or their descendants could legitimately refute his position. After the horrific October 7th attack against Jewish Israelis committed by Hamas, the world has seen how Israel’s retaliation has escalated into genocide in the name of state protection- correlating Palestinians to be indiscriminately the same as members of the terrorist organization Hamas. The 2023 documentary Israelism, directed by Jewish filmmakers Eric Axelman and Sam Eilertsen, sits in conversation with Foxman’s Israeli nationalistic ethos, posing the rhetorical question: To what and what cost is Israel worth defending and dying for?
The documentary’s principal interviewee subjects, Simone Zimmerman and Eitan, are two young American Jewish people raised in the worldview that Israel was an empty promised land for Jewish people, who now pioneer a new generational zeitgeist of what it means to be Jewish without supporting the nation-state of Israel’s displacement of Palestinian people. Israelism is not a film against the Jewish identity, an identity denied validation for centuries, but a film inquiring about what it means to be Jewish beyond the appointed limitations of land ownership.
Israeli Militarism Culture and the Nakba
Sending the Jewish refugees to Palestine was a byproduct of European guilt, but a hypocritical king of guilt they did not want to bear the social and economic cost of absorbing the refugees themselves. The majority of Jewish refugees who came were not Zionist. They did not have a choice about where to go.
Salim Tamari, The Road to 1948, and the Roots of a Perpetual Conflict
Both Simone and Eitan express how, during their childhood and adolescence, the teachings of the state of Israel and the encouragement for nationalistic pride at school were inherently intertwined with how the Jewish identity required military defense and activism. The mythology of Israel as a homeland was constructed to be under the threat of continuous attack. Simone attended summer camps where extensive military training exercises were provided. Typically, it was under the military practice of what was perceived as an anodyne summer camp that young Jewish Americans first encountered bearing arms.
Despite the thousand miles of distance between the United States and Israel, Eitan felt compelled to enlist in the IDF (Israeli Defense Forces) after graduating high school. It was during his time of service that he first learned about who the Palestinians were and what it meant that a part of the indigenous population of the land lived under Israeli occupation.
The displacement of 750,000 Palestinians from their home in 1947 and the death of 13,000 were not only physical acts of erasure, but their omission from official historical documentation marks the categorical invisibility of Palestinian existence[1]. After the Six-Day War in 1967, the territories of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip have been occupied by Israeli forces. Palestinian people in these settlements live under Israeli military law as seen in the documentary, the dehumanization of Palestinian people as non-citizens rose to categorical demonization. Their existence was considered a threat to Jewish identity. Therefore, their existence was to be met with immediate resistance. Eitan’s experience of witnessing the brutal beating of a Palestinian man in his custody awakened him as to how the only visibility for Palestinians under the lenses of Israeli authority is that of demonization. Israelism allows its viewers to witness the testimony of active-tense Israeli colonialism.
Conclusion: Reclaiming Pride
They are a lot of Jewish young people who see a Jewish establishment that is racist, that is nationalistic.
Simone Zimmerman
The documentary Israelism has been met with support from prominent figures such as Noam Chomsky and Dr. Cornell West while also falling victim to the censorship tactics purported by institutionally approved dogma. Examples are Hunter College’s decision in November of 2023 to pull back Israelism’s screening on campus and the back-and-forth attempts to blacklist cancel-publicly- the film. Israelism’s ethos lies in the proclamation that the Jewish identity cannot enshrine an oppressive modus operandi to assert its identity as a historically disfranchised exiled people.
Towards the end of the documentary, Simone Zimmerman and Rabbi Miriam Grossman lead a group section where they discuss how their public denunciation of Israeli occupation is not equivalent to denying their Jewish identity. To acknowledge Israeli abuse is a step towards a doctrine of Jewish liberation. Watching Israelism helps non-Jewish people understand how, regardless of institutional backlash, paradigmatic change towards a world of Palestinian humanization is being cultivated within the children of what has recently been discovered to be an ideologically constructed homeland.
Works Cited:
Axelman , Eric and Sam Eilertsen, directors. Israelism. 2023.
Bazelon, Emily. “The Road to 1948, and the Roots of a Perpetual Conflict.” The New York Times, The New York Times, 1 Feb. 2024, www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/02/01/magazine/israel-founding-palestinian-conflict.html.
Francois, Myriam. “‘Israelism’: The Promised Land Needs a New Narrative.” Al Jazeera, Al Jazeera, 29 Jan. 2024, www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2024/1/29/israelism-the-promised-land-needs-a-new-narrative.
Patt, Avinoam. Israel and the Holocaust ( Perspectives on the Holocaust). Bloomsbury Academic, 2024.
Wolfson, Sam. “Raised to See Israel as a ‘Jewish Disneyland’, Two US Film-Makers Are Telling a Different Story.” The Guardian, Guardian News and Media, 12 Nov. 2023, www.theguardian.com/film/2023/nov/12/israelism-documentary-american-jewish-israel-palestine-conflict.
[1]Since 1917, the territory known as Palestine was part of the British Mandate after the end of World War II (previously controlled by the Ottoman Empire). Its ethnic makeup is comprised mostly of Muslim and Christian Palestinians and a small Sephardic Jewish minority. Supported by the ideological infrastructure of Zionism ideology espoused by Theodor Herzl that advocated for the establishment of a Jewish homeland in Palestine after the World War, mass Jewish emigration from primarily Eastern Europe arrived in Palestine. This immigrant influx was met with resistance from the Arab population, culminating in the Arab Revolt of 1936. The Arab Revolt demanded Arab independence and the end of Jewish mass migration, as they considered it an act of settler colonialism against the indigenous population. In 1939, Jewish migration decreased.
After the end of World War II, when 6 million Jews died in the Holocaust, many of them were left without a country. Western countries like Britain and the United States did not accept a migration influx due to post-war economic instability. In 1947, the United Nations proposed that Palestine be two independent states: Jewish and Palestinian. Neighboring Arab states rejected this proposal: Egypt, Transjordan, Syria, Lebanon, and Iraq. In 1948, after Israel was recognized as an independent nation-state by the United States and the Soviet Union, a civil war broke out. During this period, the Nakba, violent displacement of Palestinians ensued.
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