Larry Gross: Reflections on Israel: From Idealism to Ethnic Cleansing

Larry Gross is the director of USC’s Annenberg School for Communication, one of the founders of queer studies and a scholar of art, media, and the portrayal of minorities.

In 1953 my family—my parents and their four boys, aged 4 to 12, I was 10—moved from the suburbs of Washington, D.C., to Israel, where we remained for seven years. My father was what might be called a McCarthy refugee, a former Truman administration official who was also a “premature anti-fascist” (look it up) and thus not eminently employable in that chilly era of Red-hunting. I’ve since read my father’s FBI file and I know how close he came to being fingered as a former Communist Party member (my parents both left the CP after the 1939 Hitler-Stalin pact). My father received offers to join many other former government officials in taking overseas posts in such imperial outposts as Japan, Indonesia and Pakistan, but my mother said she wouldn’t raise her children in a “foreign nationals” bubble surrounded by servants. An offer to my father to join a group of economic advisers to the prime minister of the then 5-year-old state of Israel was another matter. To my mother, the daughter of longtime Labor Zionists, this was an appealing option, and we left the States for what was to be a two-year stint. After the two years were over, my father moved to the Hebrew University, where he taught for the next five years before we returned to the United States and I started college....

Even then there were tangles in the stories that were woven through the nationalist tapestry: The barely disguised racism to which Sephardic Jews from the Arab countries were subjected, in comparison with the preferential treatment of Ashkenazi Jews from Western Europe and the United States—to my parents’ amusement, British and American Jews were routinely referred to as “Anglo-Saxons”—and the even less disguised racism directed at Arabs. Traveling with my father, whose advisory brief included public housing, to visit settlements for Sephardic immigrants—Maabarot—it was easy to see the contrast between the government’s views of various categories of olim (immigrants), and the vast difference in social services and opportunities extended. It was also easy to see that Israeli Arabs occupied a distinctly lower status....

Even more striking than the sheer growth of the city is its domination by the ultra-orthodox. I recall the first riot I ever saw, in the mid-1950s, when thousands of black-suited men thronged the center of the city to protest the building of the first public swimming pool in Jerusalem. The pool was expected to permit men and women to swim at the same time, a provocation and blasphemy that roused the orthodox communities to outrage. Previously, the orthodox communities had limited themselves to barricading their streets during the Sabbath and throwing stones at cars that wandered too close to their neighborhoods. They also greeted other violations in similar fashion: I recall my mother being pelted with pebbles by small boys when she wore a sleeveless dress as we walked on a street that was the border between orthodox and secular neighborhoods. But the tensions of that time were nothing compared to the rise of religious nationalism after the 1967 Six Day War, when many ultra-orthodox groups previously hostile to Zionism—God will decide when we return to Zion, not men, they argued, and thus Zionism is presumptuous—took the Israeli victory as a sign that God now favored the Zionist enterprise, and therefore Jews had the right and indeed the obligation to settle the entire Land of Israel.

Which brings me to the crux of the issue, the Palestinian Problem. When I was a youngster learning Jewish history in Jerusalem’s schools, the story was clear and even simple. In many ways, it could be encapsulated in a saying one heard occasionally, attributed to early Zionists: “A land without people for a people without land.” Well, there are several striking problems with this aphorism, the most obvious being that there were people already living in the Holy Land, the Palestinians. This phrase originated in writings of British clergy and statesmen who viewed with favor what later became the Zionist cause, decades before Theodor Herzl wrote “The Jewish State” (see the fascinating and important article by Diana Muir on the history of the phrase)....