The first time I ever challenged the notion of what I had been taught about Israel was in my early 20’s, after college, during my first job and my first relationship.
The guy I was seeing at the time texted me sheepishly (I imagine sheepisly…it was text) one day confessing that he didn’t know much about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and would I mind explaining it to him.
Because I lacked confidence in my own knowledge and my ability to explain anything particularly well (and with no emotion…this was before my emotional awakening), I decided to find a video that would explain it on my behalf. And when I did, another video popped up about the Nakba (this must have been before the YouTube algorithm pushed you further into your echo chamber …interesting).
In a somewhat random somewhat not random act, I decided to send him both. I presented them as “the version I grew up learning” and “another perspective.”
I say random somewhat not random because, well, I had kind of been prepared for this. You see my parents often reminded me “history is written by the victor” but never, in really any topic, but especially not this one, did they push me to seek out history written by anyone else. And so when I spotted that video about the Nakba, something in me remembered that history is flawed and that it is very likely that the history I learned about my county was flawed.
I also say random somewhat not random, because Fox was often on in our household growing up (recovering conservative here) and “fair and balanced news” while now feeling highly ironic was somewhat imbedded into my brain.
So all that to say, I had a vague sense that maybe what I was taught wasn’t the whole picture and that getting the other side would lead to some “fair and balanced” perspective.
The thing I want to look back on is my parents’ never urging me to seek a different history than the one I was taught. I think this is two-fold. My parents were both born in Israel in 1950. My mom’s parents survived the Holocaust, but lost children in it. My dad’s parents had left Eastern Europe before the Second World War, but were still impacted by the pogroms that took place in the late 1800s and early 1900s. My parents grew up experiencing wars and attacks on the only country they had ever lived in (yes the country also did the attacking). What I’m trying to say is my parents were ripely set up for two things, (1) to believe that Jewish people needed Israel no matter what and (2) to believe that we were not the victors writing history.
I will say this second one is a total guess. But just based on the way I have heard them and many Israelis of their generation talk about the country, I really get the sense that there is this deep-set belief that Israel is the underdog, and the underdog doesn’t get to write the story. And I think more accurately the belief that Jewish people are the underdog and never the victors writing history.
It took me many many more years to actually seek out other perspectives on history, both Israeli and American and global, really. It took my making a conscious choice to choose to unlearn everything I had learned. To challenge myself to be open to seeing things differently. And I will keep sharing about that.
tmd 