Published: 22 July 2025
Last updated: 22 July 2025
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.
Comments5
Rachel Sussman2 August at 07:01 am
I found this article incredibly sad on so many levels…
It is one thing to be open to listen to others and understand their narratives, it is another to deny one’s truth and worse still historical truth… ‘zionism’ is not brain washing, I grew up in Israel and I was not brainwashed, we learned history all around… while I encourage myself to be open to listen I will not apologize for the historical truth not the rights of my own people… I find it sad and indeed upsetting when so many within us start to manipulate our own truth, our history, our rights, just to ‘fit in’ to please and to be seen as ‘progressive’ or ‘open minded’. It is time for us Jewish people to learn that we must stop apologising for our existence and our rights!
Simon Krite24 July at 09:05 am
Miriam, Jewish trauma isn’t a weapon ! it’s history. What is weaponised is the Palestinian cause by Hamas, the PLO, and their backers who thrive on victimhood and rejectionism.
Coexistence fails not because of Israeli fear, but because Palestinian leaders kill peace efforts and glorify martyrdom. Pretending this is a conflict of equal traumas is comforting, but false. One side wants peace. The other wants us gone. That’s the clarity you’re missing.
Miriam Feldheim23 July at 09:40 pm
Simon, the response to decades of genocidal rhetoric and violence is part of the Jewish trauma handed down from centuries of persecution. Trauma which has now been weaponised to persecute another people. The indoctrination is one tool in that weaponisation.
When you speak about one side building coexistence programs, such programs require co-operation of both sides for the programs to take place. You generalise coexistence programs and martyrdom to refer to all the people on one side or the other. In between the extremes of Hamas and this Israeli government are thousands, millions of people who just want to live in peace.
It seems to me Simon, that your trauma prevents you from thinking clearly.