How I changed my mind about the Zionist narrative

For much of my young adulthood, I was fully invested in the Zionist enterprise, dedicating my personal, professional, and communal life to supporting my people. I was also intensely invested in fixing the patriarchal aspects of my culture, believing fully that my culture is inherently worthy and fixable.  

During those years, there was no room in my head for questioning the entire foundation, for looking too closely at how the outside world perceives us. I wasn’t there yet. It took me a long time, maybe too long. For that I am remorseful, but I’m also working on what my friend Eva Dalak calls “compassionate self-forgiveness”.

As I’ve learned, it’s not easy to unpack your own personal history so critically. How do you face the discovery that things you were taught as righteous and “good education” were actually forms of indoctrination and manipulation for the sake of power, tools to justify systematic oppression, dehumanisation, and even killing an entire population? This has not been an easy journey. But here I am.  

One major turning point for me came in 2009, when I landed a position as a writer for an Israeli so-called “media monitoring” organisation. I say “so-called” because the term “media monitoring” makes it sound objective and unbiased, though it is anything but.  

My job was to write organisational copy that counters what was labelled anti-Israel bias in articles, op-eds, and television items. In practice, whenever I came across anything even slightly sympathetic to Palestinians, my task was to find a way to debunk it by claiming that the “Palestinian narrative” is false. If a Palestinian spoke, my job was to argue that they were lying.