Palestine Tet – 117 – Gabor Mate – I am not the only one who left Zionism

Israel blocks entry of food and aid supplies, kills starving civilians in attempt to forcibly displace Palestinians from northern Gaza
(Photo credit Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Monitor)

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Gabor Mate – I am not the only one who left Zionism

Sit down, relax be somewhere where you can listen to this interview (click link above) with Gabor Mate uninterrupted. Here he is interviewed by Ghadi Francis, a Lebanese journalism

It is wonderful.

Like Mate and so many others, I go to sleep distressed thinking about Gaza and wake up in the morning worried about how many more Palestinians have been slaughtered while I sleep so far away and safe in my bed. “The first fact of the living is the war”  – a saying from a poster about the Vietnam War that is on our living room wall. Once a

Gabor Mate – on Gaza, Jews in WW2, on trauma and healing …

gain, it resonates.

There are people around me who put into words my rage at injustice, my frustrations, my hope for the future despite the horrors of today – and in many ways my history. Like Mate, They speak softly – ie, their tone is soft – but profoundly about Palestine, Israel, being Jewish. I try to do likewise these days so that people can hear what I have to say. But at nearly 80 the words to describe what I’m thinking, feeling come only with difficulty; So Mate articulates what I cannot, or cannot as he does, simply without an academic or political vocabulary.

None do it better than Gabor Mate.

We are about the same age; he just turned 80; I will do so in a few months. We both came to grips with Zionism – that toxic mix on the Jewish body politic – during the 1967 War, in part because of our understanding of that war (it was not an Israeli war for survival but a war of expansion), in part because of the influence that the Vietnam War had on the peoples of North America.

What he has dealt with of the course of his adult life, more or less, so have I, being as I am, an anti-Zionist Jew. “If you can’t stand the heat, get out of the kitchen” – that’s what Jack Galvin’s mother told me in 1974 when I first came under attack by Denver’s mainstream Jewish Community. Great advice Mrs. Galvin; I send you greetings wherever you are!

Gabor knows and knows well, how isolated we both were (and others like us) within Jewish Communities, and how welcome is the eruption of anti-Zionist sentiment among young Jews both in the USA and Canada (where I believe Mate lives) that has coalesced since October 7. The hegemony which the Zionist narrative has held over North American Jewry has been shaken;  it will never be reestablished; too much blood in the soil of Gaza and the West Bank. All the terror unleashed against Gaza have shattered Israeli legitimacy globally.

And that we are not alone anymore.

I watch the ethnic cleansing, the genocide that Israel is perpetrating on Gaza and do what I can – never enough – to get the Biden Administration to pressure Israel into a ceasefire and to stop the slaughter. I know we have a long way to go, and that the horror which Israel is inflicting on Palestine has not run its course. But it will. I am convinced that the Zionist state of Israel – in the long run – has no future. It is unsustainable. Nothing can soften or erase the horrors Israel is perpetuating in Gaza. It will not recover from this politically, ethically. Ever.

During the 1967 War I was in the North African country of Tunisia as a Peace Corps Volunteer there (and for a number of months a staff member). Even though Tunisia is far way from the actual fighting, when the war broke out there were massive pro-Palestinian, pro-Arab demonstrations throughout the country including in Tunis. I witnessed those close up, on the streets of Tunis. I was noticed by a number of my students from L’Institut Bourguiba des Langues Vivantes (an annex of the University of Tunis). They stayed by my side for the next two days. That was the first time I ever heard “the Palestinian narrative” in depth. … from my Tunisian students.

As with Mate, that, the 1967 War, was the personal turning point.

So it began, my growing alienation from and soon rejection of political Zionism. And long before I understood how Washington is using Israel as a proxy, when the geopolitics of the region was hazy in mind, even back in “the good old days of social protest” – the 1960s – I understood something that has stayed with me all these years: they (the Israelis) are doing ” it” (the Occupation, the repression and now the genocide) in my name. I had to speak out … and still do.

There are other things that happened during those Tunisia years – a visit to Tunis by then Vice President Hubert Humphrey, trying to measure European and Arab support if the U.S. dropped nuclear weapons on Vietnam, a demonstration by Tunisian youth against the war in Vietnam, several trips to Algeria just a few years after their war of independence had ended, with a death toll of at least a million (and some sources now say two million) lives… all of which if I wrote memoirs (which I have no intention of doing) would feature in my “awakening”.

Back to Mate.

How he speaks, what he says about the Palestinians, about Jews about “the empire” ,,, we’re on the same page. But mostly what touches me is his understanding, his empathy and his refusal for not backing down from telling the truth – to power, or anyone else and his faith in humanity. I don’t speak about it much, but it’s there and has been my whole life … and still burns inside of me this belief in humanity, in its ability to overcome, its resilience … and who is more resilient than the Palestinians? …

Thank you Gabor Mate. I wonder if you’d like to join our burgeoning new organizations – Alte Kockers for a Ceasefire!

Rob Prince at 22 years of age. Summer 1967, just after the 1967 Middle East War had ended. In Tunis – Ave de la Liberte – just acorss the street from the Monoprix