Leaving to Zion

“If tomorrow I was leaving to Zion, then I wouldn’t stay a minute more.”
Black Uhuru, Leaving to Zion. 1981.

This week I made aliya. It’s been 13 months since I made the decision, not to mention my 28 years a British citizen. Like Black Uhuru’s yearning for Africa, I’ve been longing of leaving for a place where I’ll no longer be in the minority. The modern Jewish Zionist movement and the Rastafarian call for black repatriation share the common desire to be redeemed from exile and rebuild anew. The geography may be different but the concept of Zion, whether Israel or Africa, is rooted in the same source: the Hebrew bible. But I’m on no divine mission to the Promised Land. My set texts are Theodor Herzl’s Jewish State and Shai Agnon’s Only Yesterday, not Numbers and Deuteronomy.

Why on earth?
Of course, the reality of Israel in 2007 is very different from Herzl’s utopian vision for a Jewish ‘national home’ a century earlier. But forty years of occupation, celebrity endorsements for anti-Zionist campaigns and the blurring of lines by the left mean that Israel isn’t on the top of the list for many people to visit, let alone emigrate to. Since the Six-Day War, the Israel Defence Forces have gone from being global pin-ups to figures of hate. I was astonished to hear a liberal-minded colleague tell me that Golda Meir was his hero during her tenure as Israeli Prime Minister. “Israel really had it’s back against the wall in 1967”, he said. “Things were much more clear cut than they are today.” So, on the 40th anniversary of this turning point in history, and with little end in sight to the conflict, why on earth am I going there?

‘Here it is. I’m a Zionist.’
Once consequence of living in a city – Bristol – with a tiny Jewish community, is that a common response to learning that I’m moving to Israel is to ask ‘Why?’ To pack up and leave behind family, friends and a rewarding job to start from scratch requires motivation, not to mention an ideological or religious commitment (and, some might say, recklessness). The most simple explanation for this upheaval is: ‘Zionism’. But this simple word, and the ignorance and misconceptions surrounding it, raises more questions than it answers. Ha’aretz’s Bradley Burston faced a similar quandary when he ‘came out’ as a Zionist recently. ”Were I to come out with it, I thought to myself, I'd be asking to be lumped in with people who are routinely shunned, reviled, quarantined by polite society, spat at by the over-righteous, openly blamed for global ills,” said Burston. “So here it is. I'm a Zionist. Go ahead. Take your best shot.” I’ve never hidden my own identity and many non-Jewish people have been supportive of my decision. But I’ve also received emails from colleagues in the past extolling terrorism against ‘invaders’ or accusing me of ‘personal, vested interests’, as well as the accusations of being a ‘Nazi’ and ‘racist’ spat by the local Palestine Solidarity Campaign. Last year, an old school friend told me that he was not anti-Israel, but was opposed to Zionism. I explained that Israel was the outcome of the modern Zionist movement and that a Jew moving to Israel is the ultimate act of Zionism. He hadn’t thought of this and, by coming out unequivocally as a Zionist, I hope it makes people think more deeply about ‘the Z-word’.

One less settler
For me, making aliya means creating a small, but vital, shift in Israel’s balance. By becoming an oleh chadash, Israel will have one more Progressive Zionist pursuing a two-state resolution and one less West Bank settler. In this sense, making aliya is more ‘pro-Palestine’ than the posturing of Jews for Justice for Palestinians or Independent Jewish Voices, with their de facto boycott of the Israeli Peace Movement, will ever be. My experience in the British environmental movement has taught me that it is far more effective to work for change from the inside than to scream from the margins.

Glorious ideals
The case for Israel is sometimes made by recourse to anti-Semitism, but for most Jews in Britain it is not a daily issue. Even the Jewish Agency admit surprise over immigration from Western countries, “It is easy to assume that when the threat of war is looming over Israel and terrorism is unceasing, Jews who have a choice would remain in their native countries.” One hundred and three years after Herzl’s death, Jews are still intoxicated by his infusion of hope for the future and reflection on the past. In 1897 at the First Zionist Congress in Basle, Herzl declared that “Zionism is not only a sad necessity, it is also a glorious ideal”. In 2007, “aliya by choice” represents a positive action, not a negative knee-jerk. As an environmentalist, I will work to protect and enhance Israel’s natural resources. In a nation where people are so obsessed with the ‘Land’, there’s a grim irony in the damage regularly done to Israel’s soil, water and air. Fulfilling this ideal may take even longer than leaving for Zion.