Becoming a Jew Without Borders

Joel Beinin

I grew up in an intensely Jewish but secularist and Zionist family for whom Jewish identity and survival were central concerns. In the foreground of my earliest memories of thinking about my identity is a profound feeling of not belonging in America because of my Jewish commitments. Perhaps my sense of difference began because until I was four my parents and I lived with my maternal grandparents in South Philadelphia, where the language of the home and most of the Jews in the neighborhood was Yiddish. I knew no one else my age who spoke Yiddish, which I regret having lost after my grandparents died and I had no one with whom to speak it. 

Soon after my father graduated from the University of Pennsylvania, like many upwardly mobile Jews, we moved to North Philadelphia. Our neighborhood was almost entirely Jewish. I had one non-Jewish friend, a Catholic, who could not attend my Bar Mitzvah in accord with pre-Vatican II church rules. The Thomas K. Finletter School, which I attended from first to eighth grade, was located on the boundary between my neighborhood and a heavily German neighborhood sometimes known as the “new Third Reich” because support for Hitler had been widespread there in the 1930s. There were many conflicts between the Germans and the Jews in and around school. 

Going to school was often an exercise in asserting my Jewish identity. I spoke out against singing Christmas carols in school assembly and reading from the Bible in class daily (some of my Christian classmates made a point of choosing passages from the New Testament that are especially offensive to Jews). Despite my parents’ secularist outlook, they encouraged me to absent myself from school on every Jewish holiday and to attend synagogue every Saturday and holiday. Unlike many of my friends, I attended Hebrew school enthusiastically and was deeply engaged in studying Hebrew and Jewish history. 

The most vivid memory of my elementary school years is of an oral report I gave on the trial of Adolf Eichmann in eighth grade together with another Jewish classmate. We were proud that the organizer of the mass murder of our people had been apprehended by Israel and his crimes exposed to the world. Perhaps there was also a vengeful tone in our account of the Jerusalem trial. Following our presentation, as the class was preparing to go to lunch break, a girl of German ancestry bitterly proclaimed, “Hitler made only one mistake.

He didn’t kill all the Jews.” Our teacher and principal tried to convince the Jewish students that, “She didn’t mean it,” and above all not to tell our parents about it. This did not avert a very heated lunch period. 

At the age of ten I began to attend the summer camp of Hashomer Hatzair (The Young Guard) — a socialist-Zionist youth movement affiliated with the MAP AM party in Israel (now a component of MERETZ) that trained its members to emigrate to Israel and join kibbutzim where we would achieve self-realization and form the vanguard for a future socialist Israel. The message provided an explanation for my experiences and feelings of alienation from the United States. Before my first summer was over, I resolved that this was the correct path for me (and indeed for all Jews). I became deeply involved in the organization, especially after my family moved to New Jersey in 1963 and I could travel to weekly meetings in New York. Eventually, I became director of the Queens branch, a head counselor at summer camp and responsible for educational programs in the national leadership. 

Consequently, I was only superficially involved in the political and cultural upheaval of the 1960s. We members of Hashomer Hatzair thought of ourselves as more serious than the American new left. We professed a clearly articulated ideology: “Zionism, socialism, and brotherhood of peoples”; we believed in the redemptive value of physical labor and prided ourselves on the ability to do practical things; and we rejected consumer culture, rock music, make-up, dating, and smoking in favor of a youth culture emphasizing simplicity, scouting skills, and intense emotional bonding to the collective. We participated in the civil rights and anti-Vietnam War movements, but usually with the feeling that we were trespassing in American politics because we were soon going to live in Israel. This attitude was encouraged by our emissaries from Israel, who argued that we should not participate in demonstrations against the Vietnam War because we were leaders of an educational movement whose focus was Israel. Subsequently I realized that they also opposed the anti-militarist sentiment of the demonstrations. 

During the summer of 1969 I took an intensive Arabic course at the American University in Cairo. In the dormitory I met several Palestinian Arab students who were studying English. Within the spectrum of Zionist opinion, Hashomer Hatzair had the most accommodating attitude towards Arabs, so I was predisposed to get along well and to listen respectfully to their views about the Arab-Israeli conflict. Their insistence that they were part of a Palestinian Arab national community was jarring, but I could not deny the sincerity of their convictions. This was my first step away from the milieu of Hashomer Hatzair. 

After graduating from Princeton and getting married in 1970, I went, together with my wife and our group of about 60 veterans of Hashomer Hatzair, to live in Kibbutz Lahav in the northern Negev desert. My first job on the kibbutz was as a cowboy. On horseback or in a jeep, I tended a herd of beef cattle that ranged over much of the 2,500 acres occupied by the kibbutz. This forced me to confront daily the situation of the kibbutz on the lands of three former Arab settlements — Zag, Umm Ramamim, and the sedentarized Laqiya al-Asad bedouin. Two of the Laqiya al-Asad worked as wage laborers for the kibbutz in the field crops branch, despite the official prohibition on wage labor in the kibbutz, farming lands that they had formerly claimed as their own. They ate lunch every day in the communal dining hall with the other members of the kibbutz. But often they sat alone at a table for six because most kibbutz members avoided eating with them despite the social norm that all tables should be filled in order.

Later I worked tending the turkeys of the kibbutz, a job which I disliked because turkeys are stupid and vicious animals and because my coworker, the manager of the turkey branch, was something of an Israeli Archie Bunker. Our most onerous task was to shovel the manure out of the sheds after mature birds had been sent to market as part of the process of preparing the sheds to receive new three-day-old chicks. Once we decided to experiment with a new technique for this process: chemically disinfecting the old manure so that it would not have to be removed after each cycle of birds. The procedure failed, and as a result we were under great pressure to remove the manure manually before the new birds arrived. I suggested that we ask the kibbutz work organizer to give us some temporary extra help because we would not be able to complete the job on time by ourselves. He responded, “This is not work for Jews, this is work for Arabushim” [the modern Hebrew equivalent of niggers applied to Arabs]. The next day a crew of Arab laborers appeared and cleared out the manure-a flagrant violation of everything I had been taught and taught others about the meaning of “Zionism, socialism, and brotherhood of peoples.” 

These experiences, and many others involving gender relations, attitudes toward the military, and the blind opposition of most of the kibbutz members to those aspects of American culture that we inevitably brought with us despite our conscious rejection of that culture, led my wife and me to leave the kibbutz and move to Jerusalem in the early summer of 1971. I was deeply disappointed by the realization that the kibbutz was not the vanguard of social change in Israel, but still committed to living and being politically active in the country. Continuing the academic interests of my undergraduate years, I enrolled as a graduate student in the Department of History of the Islamic Countries at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem (the Israeli practice of locating Islamic and Jewish history in departments separate from general history is a manifestation of a problem whose full dimensions I appreciated only much later). At the same time, I joined a largely student political organization called Israeli New Left (SIAH) which focused primarily on the Palestinian-Israeli dispute and organized some of the first demonstrations against Israeli settlements and confiscations of Palestinian land in the West Bank.

That summer a group of Moroccan Jews from Jerusalem slum neighborhoods formed the Black Panther organization, consciously invoking the militant example of the African-American group of the same name, to protest the second-class status and discriminatory treatment of Middle Eastern Jews in Israel. We supported them, and in December 1971 SlAH participated in a large demonstration called by the Black Panthers in front of the Binyanei Ha-Umah convention center where the World Zionist Congress was convening. It was then virtually impossible to demonstrate legally in downtown Jerusalem. We had asked for permits for several demonstrations and had been told we could only demonstrate in distant suburbs. Consequently, most demonstrations in Jerusalem were illegal, as this one was. We students marched from the university to the convention center where we found the police dispersing the demonstrators using clubs and water cannons. As we were dodging the police and trying to remain in the area I said to a friend, “The police are really making me angry. In another minute I’m going to pick up a stone and throw it at them.” I was immediately arrested by an undercover agent and spent two weeks in jail before I was charged. The written report of the police stated that I had been standing on a car and directing the crowd to throw stones at the police. 

Before the academic year was over, I was arrested once again for demonstrating and once for handing out leaflets. I was distributing Arabic leaflets in East Jerusalem. Since this was territory annexed by Israel it was subject to Israeli law and not military law. Leafleting did not require a permit, but because I was appealing to Arabs the police treated me like an Arab, though only temporarily, since I was released after a short time. 

After my third arrest, I was called into police headquarters and informed that I was being charged with causing death by negligence in an incident that had occurred at the Swedish Village, an institution for the developmentally and emotionally disabled where I had worked during the summer between leaving the kibbutz and starting graduate school. One of our patrons had run away, and I had been directed by my supervisor to search for him in the hills surrounding the institution. I was not on the premises when a physically disabled man was badly burned by hot water in the shower after someone had changed the temperature of the water. He had been screaming for help because he could not move away from the shower head on his own. My coworker was chatting with a friend in a different building when this occurred, and I discovered what had happened when I returned from my search in the hills. I took the burned man to Hadassah Hospital, where he died several days later. 

An investigation was conducted at the time of this incident, and I was cleared of all responsibility. My supervisor covered up for my coworker, who should have been on the spot when the accident occurred. It was generally assumed that this was because they were both religiously observant. The institution was operated by the Ministry of Interior, which was then in the hands of the National Religious Party, and that’s how things worked. 

Nine months later, the case was reopened, and I was charged with responsibility for the death. My Israeli political friends had no doubt that this was because of my political activity. I had been exceptionally active and visible because I was a new immigrant, but fluent in Hebrew — an unusual combination. I consulted a lawyer about my case who advised me that he could not promise that I would not spend three years in jail. 

This was one of the major factors in my decision to leave Israel early in 1973. I might have been prepared to go to jail for a political charge, but not for a criminal charge. No Israeli lawyer would have been willing to argue in court that the state was conspiring to stop my political activity. In any case, doing so would have increased the likelihood of my conviction.

On October 21, 1967, I participated in a demonstration to surround the Pentagon and stop the U.S. war machine in Vietnam, an event idiosyncratically portrayed by Norman Mailer in The Armies of the Night. Like most of those present, I had little idea how this was going to be accomplished. As we reached the Pentagon, I found myself just outside a side door where, not knowing what else to do, we sat down. Moments later a phalanx of U.S. marshals charged out of the building wildly swinging clubs. A marshal’s club split open the head of a man next to me, and he fell into my arms bleeding. The shock of seeing that innocent blood and trying vainly to arrest its flow remains with me as an emblem of the arbitrary and unjust power of states. At this moment I understood that U.S. policy in Vietnam and everything that was done to enable it were unredeemably evil, and I saw no alternative but resistance. 

The Israeli police taught me that the Jewish state had no less capacity for exercising arbitrary power and committing injustice than the American state. Moreover, I came to feel that Israel was not a very Jewish place. The elements of the Jewish tradition with which I identify and from which I draw sustenance are the social ethics of the prophets who fearlessly criticized kings, the commitment to free inquiry and liberation of human potential exemplified by Spinoza, Marx, Freud, and Einstein, the values of the Jewish labor movement emerging from the immigrant experience in New York’s lower east side, and the commitment of Jews like Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman to the civil rights movement because they understood, as James Baldwin wrote to Angela Davis, “If they take you in the morning, they will be coming for me that evening.” 

Despite the nominal values of labor Zionism, in practice this has not been the dominant social ethic in Israel. In the early 1970s, when more Israeli Jews verbally embraced it than do now, most of them fell easily into uncritical acceptance of almost anything done in the name of national security, especially when it came to Palestinians and other Arabs. It was only in Israel that I came to understand that my commitment to this heritage was both an expression of my Jewishness and of how American I really was after all. 

It took a long time to integrate my experience in Israel into my scholarly activity. When I proposed writing a doctoral dissertation on the formation of the Palestinian Arab working class during the British Mandate my advisor at the University of Michigan told me that this would be a fine topic, but that if I wrote on Israel or Palestine, I would never get a teaching job. Several incidents during my graduate career made this seem plausible, so I wrote on the history of the Egyptian labor movement instead. Indeed, when I first lectured at Stanford on the subject of my dissertation, which had little to do with Arab-Israeli issues, someone in the audience asked why I had referred to the Arab-Israeli War of 1948-49 as the Palestine War. Even the word was a problem. “That’s what the sources I used call it,” I replied meekly. 

Israel’s invasion of Lebanon in 1982, belatedly opposed by a very large proportion of the Israeli intelligentsia, reconfigured political and intellectual life in Israel and made it possible for Jews and Israelis to discuss the meaning of Israel in ways not entirely constrained by the boundaries of official Zionist discourse. The school of new Israeli historians, including Ilan Pappé, Gershon Shafir, and Avi Shlaim, has begun to develop approaches to the history of Israel and the Arab-Israeli conflict that challenge the national foundation myths. Engaging in dialogue with these friends and colleagues has increased my confidence in Israel’s capacity to become a much better place than it is now. Gershon Shafir has insightfully argued that much of what is distinctive about Israel emerged as a consequence of the conflict with the Palestinians. My experience in Israel would certainly have been very different if the state had not come into existence through a process that dispossessed the Palestinian Arab people.

My recent book, Was the Red Flag Flying There? Marxist Politics and the Arab-Israeli Conflict in Egypt and Israel, 1948–1965 is an effort to come to grips with the history of Israel, and the nature of the Arab-Israeli conflict. It assumes that both the Arab and the Jewish communities of Palestine/Eretz Israel have equal rights to self-determination and security and seeks to explain the failure (so far) of those who have sought to resolve the conflict on this basis. My current research project, “The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry” is a study of the Egyptian Jewish community in the 1950s and beyond. A sympathetic exploration of ways of being Jewish in the past that have been ignored and minimized by the Zionist national narrative may suggest that there are also alternatives for the future.

Joel Beinin is the Donald J. McLachlan Professor of History and Professor of Middle East History, Emeritus at Stanford University, and a non-resident fellow at DAWN. He is the author of several critical books on politics of the Middle East and North Africa.

This essay first appeared in 1993 in Stanford Humanities Review.