Israelism shows the Beauty of Unanticipated Change

A review by Barry Weisleder

Growing up in the Jewish community in 1960s North Toronto I inhaled the pervasive, smothering influence of Zionism. To question the role of the State of Israel was inconceivable then and there. For example, at late-afternoon Hebrew School classes, which I was obliged to attend to prepare for bar mitzvah, the teacher appealed for contributions to the Keren Kayemet LeIsrael, the Jewish National Fund. He did not mention how our nickels and dimes furthered the Apartheid mission of the JNF.

Israelism, a highly acclaimed, powerful documentary (1 hour, 24 minutes, 2023), depicts the massive shift in opinion that erupted recently amongst North American Jews. The beauty of big change in unlikely places provides a lesson to all who deny its possibility.

“Nothing is permanent but change”, said Heraclitus. The ancient materialist philosopher is proven correct again, notwithstanding the obdurate power of global elite propaganda.

The film follows two young American Jews, Simone Zimmerman and Eitan, who were raised to defend the state of Israel, no matter what. Eitan joined the Israeli military. Simone campaigned for Israel on the ideological battlefield of U.S. college campuses. However, when they witnessed Israel's mistreatment of the Palestinian people with their own eyes, they were horrified and heartbroken.

They made common cause with the movement of young American Jews battling the old guard over Israel’s centrality in American Judaism, and demanded freedom for the Palestinian people. Their stories speak to a generational divide in the American Jewish community as young Jews question the narratives their synagogues and Hebrew school teachers fed them as children. From this political rupture emerged organizations like Independent Jewish Voices, the International Jewish Anti-Zionist Network and Jewish Voice for Peace.

The film also presents people like Jacqui, a Jewish educator who says “Judaism is Israel and Israel is Judaism”, and former Anti-Defamation League President Abe Foxman, who derides the Jewish opposition to Israel as marginal. Leftist intellectuals Peter Beinart, Jeremy Ben-Ami, Noura Erakat, Cornel West, and Noam Chomsky also have their say.

Israelism is directed by two first-time Jewish filmmakers who share a similar story to the film’s protagonists. It is produced by Peabody-winner and 4-time Emmy-nominee Daniel J. Chalfen (Loudmouth, Boycott), executive produced by two-time Emmy-winner Brian A. Kates (The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, Succession) and edited by Emmy-winner Tony Hale (The Story of Plastic). The video uniquely explores how Jewish attitudes towards Israel are changing dramatically, with massive consequences for the region and for Judaism itself.

I highly recommend Israelism as a seminal production. It is a great learning and teaching tool -- despite some noteworthy omissions.

In the first place, while it shows how Israel disappoints liberal Jewish idealists, it fails to recount how the state was founded on designs of deliberate expropriation and mass expulsion of Palestinians. It treads lightly on a century-plus of settler colonialism. For instance, there is no mention of the fierce, Zionist-enforced boycott of Arab labour by the mainly white European colonists, and the response to it in the form of the Palestinian uprising of 1936-39. (For corroborative details, see “The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine” by Rashid Khalidi.)

The Yishuv metastasized into an exclusivist Jewish state, funded by the western powers who desired “a little loyal Ulster” in the oil-rich Middle East. Conflation of Israelism and Judaism provided a convenient ideological paint brush to erase the indigenous people of the region and to assuage liberal guilt over the Nazi holocaust.

The film excoriates the brutal present, but it does not grapple with the future. It seems to presume a two-state solution, widely discredited by decades of settlement expansion that marginalize even the most minimalist, pathetic Bantustan prognosis.

Israelism does not advance the idea of a Democratic, Secular Palestine – a one state solution framed in an anti-imperialist narrative – and thus it is open to collaboration with the political parties of global corporate rule, the parties that enabled the U.N. vote to create the Zionist state in 1947, including the Democratic Party USA and the Liberal Party of Canada.

Before World War 2, diaspora Jews were, in their majority, anti-Zionist. It took generations of miseducation to alter that. That involved consciously letting capitalism, and its congenital offspring fascism, off the hook for the highest crimes against humanity. The political landscape, shaped by Wall Street and Hollywood, re-defined the mainstream institutions of the Jewish community. The Canadian Jewish Congress in July 2011 re-named itself the Center for Israel and Jewish Affairs – a not-so-subtle subordination of the fight against anti-Semitism to a strategic subservience to the Zionist state. Concomitant is the reduction of Palestinians to what a current Israeli cabinet minister refers to as “human animals.”

Israelism is an epic story about how mass consciousness is altered by searing events. The resistance to Zionist genocide unfolding in Gaza and the West Bank continues to drive change, primarily across the streets and workplaces of the world, not without impacting corporate pension fund investors, global trade route navigators, and the International Court of Justice. Might it be nominated for a well-deserved Academy Award? Don’t hold your breathe.

In any case, what Israelism lacks in revolutionary strategy it delivers in empathy and courage with abundance, along with crisp editing and affective music. Share it with all your friends and relations.