Memory

What has brought me here

I triggered myself with a memory this morning as I try to understand the journey I have been on that has brought me to this moment in my life. I am trying to reflect on how I was able to uncouple from the Zionist tentacles that bound me in childhood and my teenage years. The big question is how it hasn’t happened for more South African Jews who grew up exactly, or more or less exactly, as I did. I have many theories, ideas and feelings about this and I am beginning to realise that, in my case, it has more to do with the kind of person, personality, I am than anything else.

A defining moment for me was when, in standard 5 at a local (white) government school in Joburg, I had my prefect’s badge taken away, because I called my teacher a racist. I also used a swearword to describe him, and I think that was considered more offensive. I can’t remember clearly. To be honest, I don’t think I had a real idea of what I was talking about, but the moment identified me as a rebel. This was a label that has stuck with me throughout my life, and it has been an accusation, a justification, and not meant as a compliment.

I went from Cyrildene Primary school to King David High School. A terrible mistake and shocking lapse of judgement by my parents. I must have convinced them that I should go, because my best friend was going and I wanted to be with her. The irony was that we stopped being friends almost immediately after starting to high school. I was made to feel responsible for the choice of high school even though I was 12 years old at the time.

There are many moments that I look back on now, that add to the pattern of who I was to become, but today’s memory is one from standard 8, when I was 15 years old, in 1980. One of the compulsory subjects we took at King David was Jewish Studies. It was the usual conflation of Judaism, Jewish history and Zionism. Again, I don’t remember the exact question, but I remember asking our Jewish Studies teacher, an awful bully of a man called rabbi Katz, a question. It was obviously a contentious or controversial question because he erupted in a tirade, calling me a monkey, over and over again. I was given detention, and for the remainder of the year he would pick on me and single me out and bully me.

This memory has been so vivid lately, after I had buried it, along with others, under the general rubble of bad school memories.

I keep thinking about that moment, and how I must have touched a nerve, disrupted a particular narrative, shaken the status quo. I was singled out, and punished, both as a warning to others, and as a signal that I was wrong; certain things should not be questioned. It didn’t work on me. I am a rebel. But it must have worked on many in my class.

I believe it is this choice, about who to follow unquestioningly, blindly, fearfully, that makes the Zionist, and keeps them Zionist despite anything that shows what it truly means to be one. I get DMs every week, from people who claim to have known me at school (I have memory blocks about people there), telling me that they expected more from me, that they are disgusted by me, that they are shocked that I betray them, that they live in Israel now and can’t believe I wish for their deaths (this is a real comment), that I am a kapo, that they hope I get killed, that they will offer to buy me a one way ticket to Gaza, and that I should not be allowed to call myself a Jew.

I imagine myself back in rabbi Katz’s class, with these young people watching, as he called me a monkey, and I think about them making a decision about what side they were on. Their position has been decades in the making. And they are immovable.

I am not ever going to argue, debate with, answer a Zionist again. I am done.