Why I've had to give up my Zionist beliefs

Opinion editor's note: Star Tribune Opinion publishes a mix of national and local commentaries online and in print each day. To contribute, click here.

•••

Unspeakable acts of violence have been perpetrated by people on both sides of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict: The massacre of Palestinian villagers at Deir Yassin during the 1948 War; the murder of Israeli athletes during the 1972 Munich Olympics; the slaughter at the Sabra and Shatila Palestinian refugee camps during the Lebanon War of the 1980s; the indiscriminate killings of Israelis by Hamas fighters; the current Israeli blockade of Gaza, which is causing pain, suffering and death indiscriminately on a massive scale. The list could go on and on.

We must condemn each and every one of these horrors, and we must mourn all whose lives have been lost. Condemnation and mourning, however, will not bring back the dead. Nor will it break the cycle of violence. For that to happen, we must shift our attention from the horrors of the moment and instead seek the underlying causes of the conflict.

As a professional historian raised in a strongly Zionist environment, I have had to confront some difficult truths. The first is that the root cause of the conflict in Israel/Palestine is and has always been the Zionist vision of constructing a "Jewish state" in an already inhabited land. The second is that peace and justice will only come to Israel/Palestine when the idea of a "Jewish state" is replaced with a vision of two peoples living together as equals in a shared land.

I did not come to these conclusions quickly or easily. My early childhood memories include seeing the horror on my parents' faces as we watched the news from Munich in 1972. And arriving at temple the morning of Yom Kippur in 1973 to overhear grown-ups speaking in hushed tones about the war launched that day by the governments of Egypt and Syria. My mother sharing stories of her youth during World War II, watching her parents follow the news from Europe and worrying about the family members left behind in Poland who were never heard from again. The stained glass history of the Jewish people at my Temple, where the final panels portrayed the state of Israel emerging from the smoke of the ovens at the death camps.

But my memories also include the day in school, shortly after the 1973 war, when we were reading an article in a children's news magazine on the "Arab-Israeli conflict" (as we called it then). I took a pencil and began stabbing a picture of Palestinian teenagers, yelling "This is what I think of Arabs!" A classmate grabbed a pencil and began stabbing a picture of Israeli teenagers, yelling, "Well, this is what I think of Jews!"

I remember the shock of recognition as suddenly, even at that young age, I realized that this was all very, very wrong.

For many years, I tried to reconcile my Zionist beliefs with my commitment to peace and justice for Palestinian people. But the more I learned about the history of the conflict, and the more I observed the policies of the Israeli state, the less tenable this became. I learned that at the time of the 1948 War (which gave birth to the state of Israel) the population of Israel/Palestine was roughly 30% Jewish settlers and 70% Indigenous Palestinian Arabs. I learned that the Zionist settlers could never have created a viable Jewish state but for the ethnic cleansing of more than 700,000 Palestinian Arabs in the 1948 War.

How could the creation of the State of Israel under those circumstances not have resulted in war and Indigenous resistance?

For a time, I believed that a two-state solution offered a path toward peace and at least a modicum of justice for Palestinian Arabs. But over time, it became clear that the policy of establishing Israeli settlements in the occupied Palestinian territories (and the Israeli security policies that accompanied the creation of the settlements) had rendered a two-state solution impossible.

Today, there is a single state that governs the entire territory of Israel-Palestine. It is a state that denies millions of those that it governs their most basic human rights and imposes on them apartheid-style conditions. How could we expect anything but an endless cycle of violence to result from this?

The solution is clear (though the path to arrive there may be murky). If Israel/Palestine is to be governed by a single state (which it already is in all but name), it must be a state that provides equal citizenship and equal rights to all that it governs and that provides an equal voice to both Arabs and Jews in charting a common future for the land that they have come to share.

Pursuit of this vision will require acceptance of some difficult truths and abandonment of some long-cherished beliefs. But the alternative is a future filled with an endless cycle of death, condemnation and mourning.

Joel Sipress is a professor of history at the University of Wisconsin-Superior. He is a member of Twin Ports Democratic Socialists of America and chair of the Senate Eighth District DFL Party in Duluth. The views expressed are his own.