Confronting Zionism: Why I Pursued a PhD in Rhetoric and Composition
Brooke Hotez (unaffiliated)
The summer of 2019 I was getting ready to go into my fifth year of the PhD and start my academic job search. I knew the job market was going to be rough, but I did not anticipate a global pandemic. In February 2020, after returning from a campus visit, I was hoping for the offer but bracing for another round on the market. I applied for a graduate fellowship to support a sixth and final year of my PhD. One or two weeks after that, the world went into quarantine. It was like each flashing light in Times Square was turning off one by one, at a pace slow enough to register yet fast enough to cause a fearful experience of disorientation that all you could do was hide, unsure of what was lurking on the other side of your locked front door.
All the undergraduate student dorms closed. The rec center closed. The library closed. The city around me shut down. One year later I had a virtual campus visit, a Zoom dissertation defense, no graduation ceremony, and did not get to say bye to anyone in person before I packed up in May 2021 to move to a city I had never been to before. I did, however, organize a rally to protest Israeli apartheid, the bombing of Gaza, and the violent dispossession of Palestinians from their Jerusalem neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah.
Around Friday, May 7, 2021, as my fingers typed the epilogue to my dissertation and as I made sure to pay filing fees on ProQuest, Israeli crackdown on Palestinian resistance escalated. Palestinians were defending their homes and resisting forced displacement. Forced displacement, according to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (2023), means being displaced “as a result of persecution, conflict, violence, human rights violations or events seriously disturbing public order” (p. 2). Ten days earlier on April 27, 2021, Human Rights Watch dropped their monumental 224-page report “A Threshold Crossed” concluding Israel is committing the crimes of apartheid and persecution against Palestinians. Humanitarian legal definitions of apartheid include the International Convention on the Suppression and Punishment of the Crime of Apartheid, adopted in 1973 by the U.N. General Assembly and registered ex officio in the Treaty Series in 1976, which defines it as “inhuman acts committed for the purpose of establishing and maintaining domination by one racial group of persons over any other racial group of persons and systematically oppressing them” (p. 245). Apartheid is similarly codified in the 2002 ICC Rome Statute.
In the days of escalation leading up to the outbreak on Monday, May 10, 2021, I was glued to my Twitter feed. Israeli police violence and Jewish settler attacks targeting Palestinians were mounting throughout Jerusalem and against worshippers at the Al-Aqsa Mosque at the end of Ramadan. Hamas sent rocket fire, and for 11 consecutive days and nights, Israel once again bombed Gaza to destruction. At least 256 Palestinians including at least 66 children, and 13 Israeli Jews including two children, were killed. In my dissertation epilogue, I was writing about how the Israeli drone missiles and U.S.-made MK-84 bombs that wreak havoc on Gaza massacring entire families, committing war crimes before our eyes, are bankrolled by U.S. taxpayer dollars. There are 2.1 million people in the Gaza Strip (25 miles long, five miles wide)—the most densely concentrated population in the world’s largest open-air prison with 50% under the age of 18. As one example of U.S.-supplied weapons that Israel uses to unleash hell on earth, the MK-84 is a 2,000-pound free-falling bomb dropped from F-16 fighter jets made by U.S. company Lockheed Martin and flown by Israeli Air Force pilots. These bombs can cause lethal fragmentation to a radius of 400 yards (370 meters). Although I had just defended a dissertation on Jewish rhetoric for Palestinian rights, no amount of research and analysis could prepare me for the shockwaves of grief I was feeling that May 2021.
I pursued my dissertation about Jewish identity and Palestinian liberation because 10 years prior as a young adult witnessing the violence of occupation on my computer screen, my pro-Israel worldview fell apart, and I needed alternatives. My Jewish identity felt shattered, and I was furious with the adults who raised me on an Israel education that not only erased the Palestinian people but stigmatized any mention of “the Arabs” as “the enemy.” I pursued my dissertation because it was something I felt like I had to do, to re-educate myself and do my part however big or small to help repair the egregious violence committed in the name of Jewish self-defense. With a bachelor’s in creative nonfiction and a master’s in women and gender studies, I was drawn to the interdisciplinary nature of rhetoric and composition and its potential for cutting-edge work at the nexus of culture, identity, and literacy/knowledge. I was drawn to the field’s emphasis on social justice pedagogy, critical praxis, and “learning from the historical legacies of those silenced (or erased) under Western global expansion,” to quote my alma mater, the University of Arizona’s Rhetoric, Composition & The Teaching of English program website.
I also saw the PhD as a way to channel my fiercely curious personality; I yearn for intellectual stimulation and the beauty of back-and-forth argumentative analysis to arrive to better understandings of society. Doing the PhD helped me realize the extent to which I am motivated by a sense of justice in the world and the relentless pursuit of truth that goes with it. You don’t have to pursue a dissertation to heed the call of justice and truth, but this is where life led me. No matter how dark and depressed I may sink inwardly at times, I still feel that inkling of how precious life is and is worth protecting. In her remarks for the Palestine Festival of Literature, Michelle Alexander (2024) reminds us:
All of us have a conscience that whispers to us, sometimes in the dark. The mandates of conscience that arise within each of us arise not out of loyalty to abstract principles or doctrines but from a place of deep knowing — a deep knowing that we owe something to each other as human beings, that we belong to each other, and that our freedom and liberation depend on one another.
I pursued my dissertation because I felt a mandate to recuperate voices of justice and peace in Jewish tradition that have otherwise been subsumed by a dangerous ethnonationalist ideology that dehumanizes “the other” to justify mass slaughter and dispossession.
During my PhD, I finally got involved in the Palestine solidarity movement. It took me some time unfortunately because I was afraid of ostracization from the organized Jewish community in which I was raised and for whom the assertion of Palestinian freedom is seen as an existential threat to the State of Israel. But by that point I’d started discovering Jewish voices of dissent and knew I wasn’t alone. Around 2017, after a discreet invitation from a new friend at synagogue who was a poli-sci grad student, I finally went to my first meeting with the Tucson chapter of Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP). Four years later by May 2021, when I was graduating, I’d become one of the designated chapter leaders. I was sad to leave. In the days, hours, minutes leading up to May 10th, I was feeling overwhelming distress trying to pack up my small apartment as I schlepped more than 70 books back to the still mostly closed university library praying that Israel would leave Gaza be. The moment Israeli U.S.-made bombs began wreaking havoc on the trapped civilian population I stopped everything I was doing and found myself in high gear mobilizing a protest.
I called my fellow organizers in JVP and the Arizona Palestine Solidarity Alliance to tell them we had to do something. My heart was on fire, and I was ready to run into the streets and lead the way. We picked a day, time, and spot. I made a digital flyer. We got local groups to sign on as co-sponsors. Derechos Humanos, Alliance for Global Justice, Tucson for Bernie, St. Mark’s Presbyterian Church, O’odham Anti-Border Collective, Tucson Second Chance Community Bail Fund, Tucson Peace Center, Veterans for Peace Chapter 13, Tucson Anti-War Committee… The co-sponsor list kept growing and I had to keep updating the flyer and reposting to social media.
What seemed like out of nowhere, I was taking calls from local TV news outlets and doing interviews that got airtime. Intuitively as though I were designing a lesson plan for composition, I created an outline for the protest, which included organizing a list of speakers. I drafted some opening remarks to welcome people and introduce the line-up. A small klezmer-style ensemble of musicians said they would come with drums and a melodica. I was following groups online like the Defense for Children International – Palestine to gather as many names as I could of children who were slaughtered in those few days. I collected their pictures. I ran to campus to print color images of their pictures to hand out during the part of the protest that I would read off their names and ages. Lina Iyad Fathi Sharir, 15 years old; Zaid Mohammad Odeh Telbani, four years old; Hala Hussein Rafat Rifi, 13 years old; Miriam Telbani, two years old, was missing and presumed dead; Muhammad et-Tanani, three years old, and his three siblings, Ethem, four years old, Emir, five, and Ismail, six; Hamza Mahmoud Yassin Ali, 12 years old; Yahya Mazen Shehada Khalifa, 13; Muhammad et-Tanani, three years old… Within hours of the protest, I kept finding new names and pictures. I was hot and sweaty and crying, running on adrenaline back to the main campus copy desk for more color photo prints on 8½ × 11 paper that protesters would hold high.
I ran to the local florist for dozens of single red roses to accompany the pictures. I ran to the store for supplies to make large banners. Someone said they would bring cases of bottled water. A few first aid volunteers and legal observers said they would be there. The night before I stayed up late in an organizer friend’s garage painting signs and banners and ran across town to pick up some megaphones from a migrant rights activist who I had never met but graciously handed them to me.
Everything had coalesced in a matter of days. It was as if I was operating automatically without a second to waste on self-doubt. Nonetheless, as the main organizer, I was terrified. I had never rallied a protest like this before. I had no way to know how it would go and if everything would be okay. There were antagonizers in the beginning. A fellow organizer looked at me when some people started shouting at each other and gave me a nod that said let’s harness this energy. We picked up our megaphones and belted out our list of prepared chants in the style of call-and-response. There was no time to think, we had to act. And it turned out magnificently, better than I could have hoped for. A local news crew showed up and they estimated about 300 people were in attendance. We had a brilliant coalition of community organizers show up in solidarity and take turns addressing the protesters who cheered and cried and cheered in unison.
Getting involved in local grassroots activism with a global solidarity movement during my PhD, I learned so much. What an invaluable experience. Too many scholars are afraid to speak out on Israeli impunity, U.S. complicity, and Palestinian rights for fear of accusations of antisemitism. Jewish American dissident and public intellectual Noam Chomsky has been accused of being a terrorist sympathizer and self-hating Jew since the 1970s. The late Palestinian American dissident and public intellectual Edward Said had bulletproof windows in his office at Columbia and a special buzzer for sending direct signals to campus security. Fallacious accusations against academics have damaged lives and ruined careers. Examples of high-profile cases of tenure and the question of Palestine include scholars such as Norman Finkelstein (denied tenure at DePaul University in 2007), Joseph Massad (awarded tenure at Columbia University in 2009), Nadia Abu El-Haj (awarded tenure at Barnard College in 2009), Steven Salaita (offered then denied tenure at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign in 2014), and Cornel West (West resigned in 2021 after Harvard denied a review for tenure).
Time and again university leadership has succumbed to McCarthyite pressure, not only failing to ensure the right of academic freedom for their faculty but in so doing reinforcing a chilling effect on dissent. These coordinated smear campaigns are based on the fallacy that anti-Zionism or criticism of Israel is de facto antisemitism, disproportionately targeting Arabs and Muslims who speak out about Palestinian rights and/or support BDS, boycott, divestment, sanctions, a set of nonviolent tactics to hold Israel accountable to international human rights law (Palestine Legal, 2021). In 2023, before the month of October, the Middle East Studies Association Committee on Academic Freedom released official letters for five individual cases of false accusations of antisemitism against scholars speaking out for Palestinian human rights to Cornell University, Harvard University, George Washington University, New York University, and Princeton University.
In context, the recurring false allegations of antisemitism — its weaponization — has become a go-to tactic of U.S.-Israel national security rhetoric to evade accountability for the crimes of apartheid and genocide. The weaponization of antisemitism includes guilt by association, character assassination, and an onslaught of outside pressure against individuals’ employers calling for them to be fired. This abuse not only attempts to stifle dissent and scare advocates into silence, but also becomes a tactic of distraction that tries to pull time, energy, and resources away from Palestinian rights advocacy.
Once I decided to pursue my dissertation topic, there was no turning back. In my research, I began to discover Jewish dissenters for Palestinian freedom whose influences have helped me reconstruct my sense of self. My interest in the rhetoric of identity comes from my belief that the types of stories we tell about ourselves and each other have the power to shape the world around us. We must be unwavering in our commitments to truth and justice. We must take risks to reach unexpected audiences. And what better discipline than rhetoric and composition to pursue this work, I thought to myself. For rhetorical studies, the suppression of dissent for justice in Palestine should be especially pertinent. It deeply concerns me that our field has shied away from this issue. Why haven’t our professional organizations like CCCC or RSA made forceful statements about our rights of academic freedom and free speech in response to the exigency we currently face? The evidence of the problem of McCarthyite suppression is truly stunning. How can we pretend like it doesn’t concern us? Scholars and educators of rhetoric and writing?
The current historic wave of McCarthyite suppression of speech for justice in Palestine is effectually exposing itself, in that there is no convincing moral argument for Israeli apartheid, so it resorts to threats and bullying to hold sway. In the face of this suppression, the failure of leadership by university presidents to protect scholars’ rights, and students’ rights, is also exposing the imbalance of power wielded by trustees who prioritize political agendas and business interests over the core values of intellectual freedom and the right to dissent they are entrusted with. When state governments cut public funding for higher education, university administrators are placed in an untenable position regarding politically motivated private donors on their boards and among community stakeholders who exert outsized pressure on academic affairs. This is an obvious conflict of interest that fundamentally undermines the core values upon which the university rests. During the Q&A of his Davis, Markert, and Nickerson Lecture on Academic and Intellectual Freedom at the University of Michigan, Gene Nichol (2018) says we must demand more from university leadership,
but we’ve got to press it ourselves. It’s not going to come from courts, it’s not going to come from higher-ups, it’s not going to come from private foundations, it’s not going to come from running our campuses like businesses, it’s going to come only from the engaged demands of faculty and students and those who support them in the broader world. It’s the only option.
Who will defend the rights of our students and our rights as scholars, if not us?
If we believe in the value of academic freedom, which is codified in the AAUP 1940 Statement on tenure, then we accept the moral responsibility of speaking up when there are abuses of power or if something is fundamentally unethical. We are responsible for publishing conclusive evidence and argumentative reasoning that may otherwise be construed as a threat to corporate authorities and/or state and military powers. Matthew Abraham (2014) calls attention to the insidious nature of this suppression:
I have witnessed how gingerly journals and press editors approach the topic of Israel-Palestine when it comes to determining whether a manuscript will see its way into print, suggesting that certain sensitivities around the conflict should not be explored for fear of offending the readership. (p. 155)
Where is our courage? Our scholarship and teaching would be meaningless without the undergirding principle of academic freedom. Academic freedom is about seeking truth, about defending an open society, and it is being quashed in broad daylight. Tenure has become a manipulative process to quell the very thing it is meant to uphold. The midcareer and senior scholars in our field who should know better have largely been silent. Why are graduate students and junior scholars in rhetoric and composition the majority of those who are currently speaking up?
As I got more involved in community organizing while writing my dissertation, I had the opportunity to work in a coalition with the Arizona branch of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) to advocate on behalf of academics and other professionals being targeted for speaking about Palestinian rights and help defend their freedom of public expression. This was around 2019–2020 when mirror bills SB 1143 and HB 2683 were going to a vote in the Arizona legislature to codify a controversial definition of antisemitism into law. The ACLU of Arizona et al. (2020) argued that the definition “incorrectly equates constitutionally protected criticism of Israel with anti-Semitism, effectively chilling free speech” (p. 1). Antisemitism is traditionally defined as prejudice against Jews for being Jewish, and is manifested in stereotypes, conspiracy theories, hate speech, and physical violence. In 2016, the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) adopted a framework of antisemitism that expands upon the traditional definition to include the targeting of Israel for criticism, such as claiming that the existence of the State of Israel is a racist endeavor is a form of antisemitism.
Zionism is a form of exclusionary ethnonationalism that has resulted in anti-Arab racist policies including legal segregation from Jews and the ongoing dispossession of Palestinians from their land. Israeli apartheid systematically deprives Palestinians of rights such as the right to vote for the government that exercises control over them. However, in the framework of the IHRA definition, which conflates the Jewish people with the State of Israel, critics of such crimes can be accused of antisemitism. The IHRA definition and the vast effort of pro-Israel advocates to codify it into U.S. law is not particularly new. It is the culmination of decades of insistence that anti-Zionism is “the new antisemitism.” This insistence has largely ended up feeding into Israeli impunity rather than combatting the problem of actual antisemitism.
In the spring of 2020, I was able to get a Zoom call with an Arizona house representative to talk to about HB 2683 and why he should vote no. He was a younger white guy and had 10 or 15 minutes for the meeting. I remember telling him about the serious problems of the IHRA definition of antisemitism and how this bill was unconstitutional, a violation of the First Amendment. I will never forget what he said in response. “So what if it’s unconstitutional, my constituents want me to vote yes.” I was taken aback. How could our elected officials not care about upholding our constitutional rights? In a gaping moment of quiet, he must have noticed my look of incredulity. “If the bill is passed but is unconstitutional, then it will go to the courts where it can be overturned,” he tried to reconcile.
I think about this moment a lot. I wish I knew better at the time, ready to counter his rationalizations with the fact that after such a bill is passed it can take years for it to go through the courts before it is deemed unconstitutional, years that pro-Israel actors exploit to weaponize the law and harass Palestinian rights advocates, dragging them into very costly legal battles causing harmful mental and emotional stress, trying to make examples of them to others who dare speak out. But would that point have had any effect? Through my network and research, I was aware of the groups in his particular district who were lobbying for him to vote yes. Sitting on the Zoom call, I was witnessing with my own eyes and ears the extent to which individual representatives are pressured by their Jewish pro-Israel constituents to vote a certain way on these issues. His rationalizations had an air of desperation, like what could I expect him to do? He probably agreed to meeting with me because, aside from the ACLU of Arizona’s professional opinion on the matter, I was an anomaly in his world—a Jew telling him to vote no.
Regardless, his hands were tied. I wish I was also ready to challenge him on the pedagogical aspect of his role as an elected official in a constitutional democracy. Did his constituents know about the ACLU’s concerns? Did his constituents know the ACLU of Arizona had contacted him and maybe had a point, given they are one of the leading civil liberty groups in the U.S.? Did he make any earnest effort to convey the concerns of the ACLU to his constituents regarding this bill? Did he not have a responsibility to do so, as a good faith intermediary? You know what, forget about the First Amendment and HB 2683’s criminalization of constitutionally protected free speech. Did he and his constituents realize such legislation was in fact unnecessary, that there’s reporting procedures for hate crimes directed at Jewish persons already in place at the state and federal levels? I wish I was ready to counter his “so what?” claim, but I sat there almost dumbfounded. I’m ready now and won’t let that happen again.
Human rights activists and feminist thinkers have taught me there can be no peace without justice, no justice without truth, no truth without courage, and no courage without love. I got to see ACLU free speech advocates do what they do best behind the scenes and in action. It was grueling and glorious. I also worked with JVP organizers across the country to mobilize for state-level, country-wide, and transnational initiatives to fight against the weaponization of antisemitism and its smear campaigns trying to shut down debate on the question of justice in Palestine. These community organizers and rights advocates taught me—showed me—what real courage is about: Principled action. Hard listening. Helping others. Learning from everyone. Owning up. Righting wrongs. Taking each necessary step to ensure transparency, which may entail admitting mistakes or missteps along the way. “We must speak,” as Alexander (2024) says:
When antisemitism and Islamophobia slip in through the back door of supposedly progressive spaces. When Palestinian children in refugee camps are bombed and killed. When schools and hospitals and entire neighborhoods are laid waste. We must speak. When international law is treated like a naïve suggestion, we must speak.
Yes, it may be difficult. Yes, we will make mistakes. We are human. And yes, we may be afraid.
But we must speak.
Countless lives and the liberation of all of us depend upon us breaking our silences.
We must resist the temptation of conformity and remember that we are not alone. We can seek out allies, nurture our communities, re-learn our rights, and reject the illusion of being a lone individual. Each voice has a unique and essential contribution to the broader whole. What does using your voice look like for you? There is a democratic tradition we must rightfully reclaim before fascism takes hold.
***
In June 2018, when I heard about the first, and then second and then third Birthright walk-offs in protest of the occupation, I was amazed. As a Jewish American coming of age with Birthright, I saw these 10-day trips as sacrosanct. When I signed up for my Birthright trip to Israel through the Hillel on campus in 2005, I did not know a thing about Israel’s military occupation subjecting millions of Palestinians to arbitrary legal violence with no due process. I had a mainstream Jewish upbringing at a Reform synagogue in Phoenix, Arizona—Sunday school at the JCC, youth retreats at Camp Pearlstein, slipping coins into the Jewish National Fund’s blue boxes believing I was giving important tzedakah. I had a bat mitzvah and attended Hebrew High on regular school nights. The State of Israel and Zionism were normalized aspects of my religious culture, imbued with an ever-present invocation of Holocaust memory.
Being a U.S. Jewish teenager, for me, meant growing up on Adam Sandler movies and listening to Maroon 5 with my best friend Rachael while braiding each other’s hair in the morning before school. Hannukah, Pesach, Purim, Sukkot, Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur, and Yom HaShoah were always in the mix. As a college first-year student in December 2005, when I signed up for Birthright, I didn’t know about the Second Palestinian Intifada (Uprising) that erupted in 2000 and was barely coming to an end five years later.
While Palestinian and Israeli society lingered in turmoil around me, I travelled unaware in an alternate universe from Tzfat to Tel Aviv to Jerusalem to Masada and the Dead Sea on the Birthright tour bus. I learned nothing about Palestinian society on the trip. I learned nothing about the recent wave of Israeli conscientious objectors who were around the same age as me —18, 19, or 20 years old — refusing to serve in a vicious occupation and spent time in prison for their refusal. Instead, I was raised to believe the occupation was necessary for Jewish security and that the IDF was the most moral army in the world. Growing up in synagogue, I never thought twice about the Israeli flag perched opposite the American flag behind the bimah. I never thought twice about the “Greater Israel” maps hanging on the walls that fail to demarcate the West Bank and Gaza Strip, as if no illegal occupation exists, as if Palestine and Palestinians do not exist, as if all the territory is naturally and legitimately a part of the Jewish state. I was led to believe the late-19th century slogan, that Israel was “a land without a people for a people without a land.”
In December 2005, my mother was nervous for me to go on Birthright in fear of the suicide bombings she’d heard about on cable news. I generally had a vague notion of “a conflict” around Israel. It all felt like a distant looming threat, something I didn’t understand, but had to defend. The Birthright trip coordinators insisted on our safety and all I had to pay for was getting myself from Arizona to the JFK airport. I was fascinated by the prospect that if I wanted to, there was a Jewish homeland in the Middle East where I could live and have dual citizenship. That is what “birthright” promotes, after all.
A key part of the Birthright tour was a day-long visit to Yad Vashem, the Holocaust History Museum in Jerusalem. In the narrative I grew up with, the State of Israel’s founding is regarded as a miracle born from unthinkable tragedy. As Bashir Bashir and Amos Goldberg (2018) write: “The expression meSho’ah le-tekumah (from Holocaust to rebirth) became a constitutive slogan of Zionist consciousness, and it remains so to this day” (p. 5). Fifth-grade Sunday school for me in the late-90s was all about the Holocaust. I can still see the front cover of the lengthy paperback textbook with bold serif lettering accompanied by a grayscale image. A history of the Holocaust, my own copy handed to me by my religious schoolteacher. I loved reading as a kid, and I lingered over the textbook’s pages with its unbelievable photographs of victims. Children who were lined up and waiting for the trains wearing the yellow Jude badge. Those children later, emaciated behind a barbed wire fence. A pile of corpses, bones with flesh. The yellow star of the Holocaust would become the emblematic sky-blue Star of David on the Israeli flag.
Around this time of my life, books like The Diary of Anne Frank, Night by Elie Wiesel, and Number the Stars by Lois Lowry fell into my hands. I was mortified that Anne Frank didn’t make it. But even as an 11-year-old girl, I could feel my friend Anne living on in those pages. The survival of her diary felt extraordinary, and I alone shared her secrets. I would never let her memory die. Around 1998 the summer before sixth grade my mother planned our family vacation for Washington, D.C. She wanted my younger sister and me to see the nation’s capital, but perhaps more so, she wanted us to go to the still-new U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. It opened in 1993 with grand ceremony. We dedicated an entire day to the four floors of the museum, taking most of our time with the Daniel’s Story exhibition designed for elementary and middle school children, where my sister and I were each given little booklets the size of our palms about a child who died in the concentration camps. I glanced over my sister’s shoulder to see who she got, and then went back to mine, pulling the booklet closer to my chest, pronouncing the unfamiliar Polish-language name in whispers like a prayer of sacred memory. Practicing and saying the child’s name felt like an affirmation of life. Young one like me, we will not forget you.
I identified deeply with these stories, in awe of the fear of being forcibly separated from my family with the chance of never seeing or hearing from them again. I stood in astonishment before the glass cases filled with victims’ confiscated items. I knew the Nazi check-in routine by then: they take your luggage, your shoes, your glasses, your hats, the clothes off your back, all your things. They cut your hair, shave your head, and then, the number tattoo. And there these items were, once taken by Nazis, now here in the museum. Shoes of all sizes, piled to the ceiling. Then the eyeglasses, piled to the ceiling. Once personal belongings now preserved artifacts. There were photographs on display, devastating and incomprehensible. I can still see one black-and-white photo of identical twin sisters, standing completely naked side by side, with a man in a doctor’s coat waiting nearby. The man in the white coat was conducting a “medical experiment” forced upon the teenage girls. I remember looking up for my own family, my mother somewhere with her fanny pack and my younger sister dawdling near our father. I looked away from the photo in sudden desperation for forgiveness for seeing what I saw, a burning shame inside of me.
The question indelibly seared into my mind: how could anyone allow this to happen? So much of my sense of justice in the world comes from the Holocaust education I was raised with, along with the Jewish values of tikkun olam (repair) and tzedek (justice). It comes from the mandates of conscience that arise from a deep knowing.
Over six million Jews were murdered in concentration camps from 1941–1945, otherwise known by Nazi officials as the “Final Solution to the Jewish Question” policy of extermination. How could this happen? Jewish tradition has taught me that the horror of the Holocaust was made worse because the world stood by and let it happen. “Never Again” means never again for anyone. I refuse to be a bystander to genocide. I refuse to be silent.
To me it is deeply sad that for many Jews a hypermilitarized homeland in the name of self-defense against the seemingly ever-present existential threat of another holocaust was and remains the only answer. This kind of prevailing logic can be traced to the rhetoric of Menachem Begin, leader of the Jewish Irgun paramilitary group in Palestine from 1944–1948 and sixth Prime Minister of Israel from 1977–1983. Like his ideological predecessor Ze’ev Vladimir Jabotinsky (1880–1940) and present-day Likud party successor and longest-serving Prime Minister of Israel Benjamin Netanyahu, Menachem Begin was a territorial maximalist who believed the Holy Land from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea belongs solely to the Jews. Begin was known to be a persuasive orator whose “Holocaust-to-rebirth” worldview and hardline Zionist ideology held no compromise in the name of Jewish security. For him, the use of “violence, even if it resulted in the death of innocent Palestinians, was needed to protect the Jews” (Rowland & Frank, 2011, p. 47). He also took the notorious stance that “placed ultimate responsibility for the Holocaust on Jewish weakness” (Rowland & Frank, 2011, p. 51). In many ways, Begin’s stance about ultimate responsibility was a powerful call to arms: by becoming the New Hebrew hero, Zionists can cleanse themselves of so-called Jewish weakness and be reborn. The mythic Zionist hero not only defeats the “Nazi/Arab” villain, but in so doing redeems himself of Holocaust survivor’s guilt in the embodiment of national rebirth. I am so saddened by this equation and how one people’s trauma is reinscribed to enact violence and trauma on another.
What is thus mythologized as a miraculous rebirth for Jews resulted in a catastrophe of ethnic cleansing for Palestinians. Israel’s 1948 Declaration of Independence was for Palestinians the 1948 Nakba (Arabic for disaster, catastrophe, or cataclysm). Contrary to myth, Palestine was and is a land with a people, and the State of Israel was founded on an exclusionary ethnonationalist ideology that wants a maximum number of Jews in a maximum amount of territory with a minimum number of Palestinians. The 1948 Nakba and ongoing Nakba is the logical outcome of Zionism, not an incidental by-product of endless war. Israel goes to great lengths to try to physically and discursively erase Palestine and the Palestinians from view, including the denial of this very erasure.
Between 1947–1949, more than 750,000 Palestinians were dispossessed from their homes and 400–600 Palestinian villages were destroyed. Many Palestinians fled to the Gaza Strip. Today, according to the U.N. Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA), out of the approximately 2.1 million Palestinians in Gaza, about 1.7 million are 1948 Nakba refugees and/or their direct descendants. After 1948, approximately 150,000 Palestinians remained in Palestine under the State of Israel, about 40,000 of whom were internally displaced. Today there are about 1.5 million Palestinians in Israel proper. From 1948–1967, Palestinians in Israel lived under strict military law, enduring daily threats of police violence and further displacement, and heavy censorship of Palestinian print culture, media, and literature. Israel occupied the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and Gaza Strip in the June 1967 War, an occupation which continues to this day and is deemed illegal under international law while Israel’s territorial maximalists claim legitimate control.
Today there are approximately 3.5 million Palestinians in the West Bank, about 871,000 of whom are Palestine Refugees—1948 Nakba refugees and/or their direct descendants. Palestinians in the West Bank live under an Israeli regime of arbitrary military law with no recourse or due process. The Israeli military uses armored D9 bulldozers manufactured and supplied by the U.S.-based multinational company Caterpillar to inflict collective punishment on Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Every year these militarized bulldozers demolish hundreds of Palestinian homes and wide swaths of agricultural land and civilian infrastructure. As Palestinian homes are demolished and families are dispossessed, Israel takes the land and builds thousands of new housing units for illegal Jewish settlements to be guarded by IDF soldiers. Today there are more than 700,000 Jewish settlers in the West Bank with full rights and protections by Israel—an estimated 60,000 of whom are American Jews. According to the Arab Center Washington DC’s Brief Report on the Population of Palestine at the End of 2021, there are nearly seven million Palestinians in the global diaspora outside of Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza (Awad, 2022), including, according to UNRWA, nearly 500,000 Palestine Refugees in Lebanon, more than 500,000 Palestine Refugees in Syria, and over two million in Jordan.
Despite Israel’s ethnic cleansing, Palestine is still here. Palestinians live by their cultural value of sumud, steadfastness, refusing to disappear in their desire for life and freedom. Today, between the West Bank, Israel, and Gaza Strip (from the River to the Sea), there is demographic parity, with approximately seven million Palestinians and seven million Jews inhabiting the land, all of which is controlled by Israel. This does not include the Palestine Refugees in Lebanon, Syria, or Jordan or Palestinians in the global diaspora, or Jews in the global diaspora outside of Israel and Palestine. Hagai El-Ad (2021) contends:
Although there is demographic parity between the two peoples living here, life is managed so that only one half enjoy the vast majority of political power, land resources, rights, freedoms and protections. It is quite a feat to maintain such disenfranchisement. […] There is not a single square inch in the territory Israel controls where a Palestinian and a Jew are equal.
Doing my PhD helped me see and un-learn the pro-Israel rhetorical strategies that propagate an “us versus them” mentality and manufacture consent for its apartheid regime. The United States has geopolitical “strategic interests” as an imperial power in its unconditional support for Israel, with whom our military industrial complex and political economy of manufacturing weapons is closely interlinked. In many ways, U.S. foreign policy appropriates a pro-Israel Holocaust-to-rebirth worldview to further its own aims and is mutually reinforced by groups like the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), and Christians United for Israel (CUFI). Combined with the complicity of legacy media, Israel has historically been presented as a Western-style democracy in a region of barbarism.
Because it is decontextualized and fear-based, well-meaning audiences can be susceptible to the insidious nature of mainstream U.S.-Israel propaganda that dehumanizes Palestinians as an entire group as animals and demonizes them as terrorists. The U.S.-Israel shared narrative frame suffers from a chronic absence of context, which works to position Palestinian resistance — from nonviolent protest to armed struggle — as atomized accounts of unprovoked antisemitic violence. U.S.-Israel national security rhetoric relies upon a narrative strategy that continues to isolate events in a string of seemingly unexplainable anomalies of violence other than that of pure Arab hatred of the Jews, as if each war begins with terrorist attacks and Israel has no choice but to defend itself. Within this frame, Palestinian resistance to Israeli occupation becomes an existential threat to the Jewish people rather than an organized liberation movement based on human rights precedent and a Third World solidarity tradition. When the Palestinian struggle for freedom is wholesale diagnosed as terrorism fueled by antisemitism, the larger context of military occupation and settler colonialism is conveniently disavowed. Decontextualization not only evades the reality of apartheid between Israeli citizens and stateless Palestinians. It also perpetuates racist stereotypes of the one-dimensional Arab terrorist, in effect justifying the status quo in the name of Israel’s right to defend itself.
The crimes of October 7 do not justify the active genocide in Gaza. In Jewish tradition, as I’ve learned from the teachings of Rabbi Arthur Hertzberg of blessed memory, our moral obligation does not include allowing ourselves to be slaughtered. But killing those who are simply unwilling to be ethnically cleansed is another matter entirely. It may not be easy discussing the context of apartheid and the right of resistance of a colonized people when faced with the slaughter of civilians on October 7. But as rhetoric and writing scholars and educators, what have we learned about the rhetorical situation if not the significance of context? We must speak up and dispel deadly equations that are made possible in the absence of context when we see it.
International humanitarian law, post-World War II, was precisely built on the idea of distinguishing between civilians and combatants and not holding the entire population responsible for the acts of individuals. Collective punishment is a war crime but is widely justified in U.S.-Israel media by government spokespeople and political pundits. The rhetoric of this justification relies on decontextualization, denial, and the fallacies of ad hominem and guilt by association which are often expressed in the scapegoating of an entire population as untrustworthy, evil, and subhuman. I’m flabbergasted by the U.S. denial of the death toll in Gaza, it makes me viscerally disoriented and nauseous. Human rights discourse in the context of colonial domination is one essential framework we can leverage to bear witness, sharpen our moral thinking, better articulate crucial distinctions, and effectively intervene in dominant discourses saturated with such dangerous speech. We must speak out and defend the work of human rights investigators and journalists who are risking everything to document the facts of reality that would elsewise be kept from view.
We can make the distinction between the right to resistance and not conflating that with condoning the slaughter of civilians, no matter who the civilians are. Critical humanitarian perspectives and anti-colonial freedom movements are not irreconcilable and an acknowledgement of the context of occupation does not condone the slaughter of October 7. Gaza has been declared an open-air prison, what is now being referred to as an open-air graveyard, in which nearly half the population consists of children who are under the age of 18. This population is being placed under unbearable stress and suffering because of the stifling and inhuman conditions the Israeli government has maintained as an occupier for many years, controlling the food, water, electricity, fuel, human movement, and population registry of the Gaza Strip. This illustrates the meaning of a “besieged” population in every sense of the word: to crowd around oppressively, being surrounded, harassed, and terrorized by armed forces and hypermilitarized technological surveillance trying to push the population out and force their removal, 24 hours a day seven days a week. The people of Gaza have been living under an air-land-sea blockade for 17 years and under an occupation since 1967. Many are refugees and direct descendants of refugees from the 1948 Nakba. In this context, human resistance against such circumstances is normal, expected, and is protected by international humanitarian law. Related to the principle of self-determination, the right to resist (including armed struggle) remains subject to the laws of war. Thus, the right to resist oppression is not to be conflated with the indiscriminate killing of civilians, which is a war crime.
Conflation and guilt by association abound. The persisting fact that Palestinians are always already assumed guilty of terrorism and antisemitism and must prove themselves otherwise to then prove their own humanity is cruel and fallacious. No more. Enough is enough. The Palestinian people are not motivated by an evil hatred. That is an imperious assumption. Palestinians are motivated by the life of their people and the struggle for human freedom. Enough is enough.
***
When I came back from my Birthright trip in January 2006, I remember wearing my Hebrew University sweatshirt and new Star of David necklace every day. Throughout my 10-day trip, I was astounded by how many young Israeli soldiers I saw everywhere with assault rifles casually slung over their shoulders. I was told, “that’s just how it is over here,” and that every 18-year-old Israeli Jew is conscripted for a minimum of two to three years before they can attend college. I would look at them and think, what if that was me? As I got to know our peers in the Israeli military who accompanied the trip (known as the mifgash, or “encounter”), I even considered the prospect of joining the IDF myself. Or I imagined moving to Israel to live on a kibbutz. My new Israeli Jewish friends promised they would help me out, and that I could stay with them for a while to get settled. I cried at the end of the trip when we had to say goodbye.
It was simply a matter of time for me to learn the reality for Palestinians. Two years after my Birthright trip, after declaring a women’s studies minor and reading Gloria Anzaldúa and Audre Lorde for the first time, Israel’s 2008–2009 Operation Cast Lead in Gaza was the turning point for me. Reading headlines and seeing photos of slaughtered Palestinian women and children was horrifying. Was I naïve? I had been shielded by indoctrination. But I saw what I saw. IDF soldiers with assault rifles aimed at Palestinians in everyday clothes. My blood ran cold; I was devastated. I felt betrayed and ashamed. I remember researching the International Jewish Anti-Zionist Network, but despite my rage at the injustice, I was afraid to attend a local meeting in fear of what family and friends would think. My rage was not yet met with courage and love. I didn’t know how to deal with myself. I felt alienated and alone, not yet strengthened by the dissenters who have come before and found the courage to take risks and speak the truth. I bitterly refused to step foot in Hillel or attend synagogue where pro-Israel rhetoric flowed seamlessly without a single mention of Palestinian human existence. For a few years in my mid-20s I flittered about, testing my ability to neglect my Jewishness, ignore Israel’s crimes, and mute the mandate of conscience and call for justice in Palestine. Turns out I couldn’t neglect, ignore, or mute any of it.
Yes, I grew up with a deep-seated belief that Israel is a miraculous founding of a nation-state for Jews and an essential place for our safety. But because I also grew up with a Holocaust education and the values of tzedek and tikkun olam, the call for justice in Palestine reached me.
I pursued a PhD because I wanted truth. It hasn’t always been easy but thank God I’ve learned. Humanity is not a zero-sum game. The security and self-determination of Jews does not come at the expense of Palestinians. They are not our enemies. They are mishpocheh. In the Torah, God urges us: U’vcharta B’chaim! Choose life! Heeding the call for justice in Palestine is a mitzvah, a moral obligation, a righteous deed to help repair a broken world. Every day I wake up and heed that call. I heed the call for the fundamental human rights and liberation of all peoples around the globe facing injustice, catastrophe, and persecution. May justice and peace come speedily in our day.
References
Abraham, M. (2014). Out of bounds: Academic freedom and the question of Palestine. Bloomsbury Publishing Inc.
ACLU of Arizona, et al. (2020, March 4). RE: Oppose SC 1143 and HB 2683 for chilling and criminalizing free speech. https://www.acluaz.org/sites/default/files/coalition_letter_in_opposition_to_sb1143_-_march_4_2020.pdf
Alexander, M. (2024). Michelle Alexander on Palestine: Our liberation depends upon us breaking our silences. Hammer & Hope, 1(3). https://hammerandhope.org/article/michelle-alexander-palestine
Awad, O. (2022, January 3). Brief report on the population of Palestine at the end of 2021. Arab Center Washington DC. https://arabcenterdc.org/resource/brief-report-on-the-population-of-palestine-at-the-end-of-2021/
Bashir, B., & Goldberg, A. (2019). Introduction: The Holocaust and the Nakba: A new syntax of history, memory, and political thought. In B. Bashir & A. Goldberg (Eds.), The Holocaust and the Nakba: A new grammar of trauma and history (pp. 1–42). Columbia University Press.
El-Ad, H. (2021, January 12). We are Israel’s largest human rights group – and we are calling this apartheid. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/jan/12/israel-largest-human-rights-group-apartheid
Nichol, G. (2018). Political Interference with Academic Freedom and Free Speech at Public Universities. University of Michigan Davis, Markert, and Nickerson Lecture on Academic and Intellectual Freedom. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GdgSMZLuCdw
Palestine Legal. (2021, March 30). Palestine Legal submits report to UN on Canary Mission discrimination. Palestine Legal News & Updates. https://palestinelegal.org/news/2021/3/30/palestine-legal-submits-report-to-un-canary-mission-discrimination
Rowland, R. C., & Frank, D. A. (2011). Mythic rhetoric and rectification in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Communication Studies, 62(1), 41–57. https://doi.org/10.1080/10510974.2011.532428
United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. (2023, June 14). Global trends: Forced displacement in 2022. https://www.unhcr.org/sites/default/files/2023-06/global-trends-report-2022.pdf
United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East. (n.d.). Where we work. https://www.unrwa.org/where-we-work
United Nations – Treaty Series. (1976, July 18). International convention on the suppression and punishment of the crime of Apartheid. https://treaties.un.org/doc/publication/unts/volume%201015/volume-1015-i-14861-english.pdf
University of Arizona English Department. (2024). M.A./Ph.D. Rhetoric, Composition & The Teaching of English. https://english.arizona.edu/rcte
Brooke Hotez, PhD, MA, is an independent scholar, educator, and community organizer. Her article “Interrupting Identity: Zionism and the Palestinian Other” was recently published in a 2024 issue of Rhetoric Review. She presented her paper “Rhetorical Uses of Antisemitism and Jewish Dissent for Palestinian Rights” on the Jewish Caucus panel at the 2023 Conference on College Composition and Communication Annual Convention. She currently lives in Houston, Texas with her husband and two chihuahuas.
