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April 15th, 2021 
Awake Goy “Birthright was established to give every Jewish person the ability and the chance to make the journey to his identity, to explore his identity,” Chaim, a tour guide for Birthright says in a key moment in Ben Grayzel’s 2020 documentary, Stranger in Zion. “There is no agenda but to explore the Jewish identity,” he says again.
Chaim’s repetition of the word “identity” shows the extent to which Birthright goes to ensure Israel remains the center of Jewish identity, and is just one of several ideas brought up in Grayzel’s film.
The documentary, which has so far received little attention in the Jewish community, chronicles Grayzel’s first trip to Israel in January of 2019 as a Birthright participant and the weeks following as he traveled throughout the West Bank interviewing Palestinians. Jews who are questioning their relationship with Israel should view it because it humanizes Palestinians and questions Zionism.
Grayzel grew up in Portland, Oregon, and decided as a filmmaker to attend Birthright after seeing it advertised on Facebook. Birthright does not allow participants to film events, but he worked around the prohibition to create the documentary.
“I have this kind of complicated relationship with my Jewish identity,” he says in the film, “and to the state of Israel.” Grayzel, like many young Jews, is in an early process of becoming aware of how complex the notion of identity can be, especially for Jews who have family members who were in the Holocaust.
In one tender scene with his grandmother, Grayzel shows an understanding of the trauma that older generations of Jews went through and the desire for a Jewish homeland that followed from it. Frida Grayzel survived Auschwitz and after the war, began to learn about Zionism. She wanted to go to Palestine to help set up a Jewish State. Her parents applied to immigrate to Palestine or the U.S. and decided they’d go to whichever country granted the visa. “The U.S. visa came first,” she said.
Had the visa to Palestine come first, Grayzel notes, the family would have been Israeli. The scene deals openly with the tension that can develop when young Jews begin sorting through the different parts of their Jewish identity. This process can get further confusing when forces like Birthright and other Zionist organizations target young Jews and try to indoctrinate them in believing Israel should remain central to their identity.
Grayzel admits to feeling more connected to both his Jewish identity and the land of Israel once Birthright ends. This isn’t surprising, of course, given that the program is staffed with people like Chaim who are in love with Israel and whose mission is to get others to fall in love with it, too–to see Judaism and Zionism as synonymous. In the Birthright ethos, a participant’s story is deemed “successful” when they fall in love with Israel or even better, when they fall in love with an Israeli and move there, making aliyah.
Molly, a Birthright staff member, describes the instant bond she felt with the land when she arrived as a Birthright participant herself. “When I got to Israel,” she says, “it was like something just clicked.” Grayzel’s cousin, Jennifer, is another “Birthright success story.” She met an Israeli on the street and eventually ended up moving to Jerusalem. “I asked for directions, and he asked me out,” she says in the documentary, blushing and giddy, “and now here we are.” I wasn’t sure if her rosy cheeks were stemming from her love for Israel or for her partner, but I suppose it was likely both.
Birthright, of course, wants both a Jew’s love for the land to be conflated with a love for another Jew as much as it wants Jews to conflate Judaism and Zionism. These are all parts of Jewish life, according to Birthright. I could relate. When I was a young Zionist living in Jerusalem, I talked about the city as though she was my beloved, too. I’d watch the rosy light hit the stones of the Old City and I’d think Jerusalem was blushing. Even now, I can be quickly transported back to that time, for those feelings are still ingrained in my mind, wired in the neurotransmitters in the back of my brain. Israel was at the center of my Jewish identity–the two were so fused it seemed impossible that they should ever separate.
It’s impressive that Grayzel becomes critical of Birthright, given how determined the program is to make sure Jews continue to fuse their religion with nationalism. The program is “ten days of an emotional rollercoaster sleep-deprived journey,” he says in the film, “a powerful experience which is all well manicured to make American Jews or other Jews from around the world have this bond with Israel.” Most of the participants took what the guides said at face value, he wrote to me in an email recently, “returning to [the] diaspora with positive associations with Israel experienced with the rosiest tinted glasses $3,500 could buy.”
Some of the participants, however, also become critical of Birthright’s agenda. This is another strength of the film because we see young Jews in the process of figuring out what is most important to their Jewish identity, and whether this has to include Israel. Amanda, who attended the LGBTQ-themed Birthright trip, said she left the program uncomfortable “with being a Zionist,” and admitted to feeling a tension about the idea of a Jewish State. “Does that imply Jewish supremacy?” she asks. “Is that the equivalent of white nationalism?”
Elliot, another Birthright graduate, states his unwavering opposition to Zionism. “I’m certainly comfortable saying and having it be documented that I’m more pro-Palestinian,” he says in the film. Elliot spent time in the West Bank, and states he is more of “a Palestinian empathizer than I am a supporter of Israel.” It’s significant that the film shows these Birthright alums empathizing with Palestinians and questioning the oversimplified notion that to be Jewish means to be Zionist.
Humanizing Palestinians is vital for Jews who are questioning the extent to which Israel has been a part of their Jewish identity, and Grayzel’s portrayal of Palestinians in his film may be another reason why the documentary isn’t being shown in Jewish institutions.
After Birthright, Grayzel spends two weeks in the West Bank interviewing Palestinians. His process follows the archetype of other Jews who visit Palestine to “see the other side,” who experience a paradigm shift, often for the first time. They go through the checkpoints, see the wall, get to know their hosts. I went through a similar process when I went to the West Bank for the first time, too. It seemed phenomenal to me-I went to Palestine and heard Palestinians’ stories!-even though their stories had always existed. It’s an important process for Jews to go through because it works. If you want to know what is going on in the West Bank you need to go and witness it for yourself. Once Grayzel talks with Palestinians and sees what is going on in the West Bank, he cannot unsee.
Wael, a Palestinian student born in Jerusalem, talks about the absurdity of Birthright. He says it’s crazy that an American Jew who has never come close to the Middle East has such a birthright. “The Birthright movement is funny and ironic to me because most of my cousins are Palestinian and maybe 90 percent cannot enter Palestine,” he says. “That doesn’t make sense.”
Issa Amro, a human rights defender and Palestinian activist in Hebron gives a passionate description of his life under occupation:
To live in Palestine and especially in Hebron, it means you live without your basic human rights. As a Palestinian I am under the Israeli military law which means I’m not allowed to practice any kind of general assembly-I’m not allowed to protest peacefully, I’m not allowed to express my opinion against the occupation. I don’t have any kind of freedom of movement in my own city and in my own country.
Amro’s situation is the direct result of Zionism. Birthright’s mission is to inculcate young Jews with a loyalty to Israel that is actually a loyalty to Zionism–and to equate that loyalty as essential components of Jewish identity. A film like Stranger in Zion is valuable in the way it exposes younger Jews not just to the “other side” but to the complexities of what they haven’t been taught about that other side.
Listening to Amro talk in the film reminded me of Erich Remarque’s 1929 novel about World War I, All Quiet on the Western Front. The narrator, a German soldier who is guarding a Russian prison, talks about wanting to know his enemy. “If I could know more of them, what their names are, how they live, what they are waiting for, what their burdens are,” he writes, “then my emotion would have an object and might become sympathy.” If Zionists took the time to learn about Palestinian history, they would have to acknowledge the damage Zionism has caused. But the system of Zionism is structured to ignore Palestinian voices, to silence the entire notion of Palestine. The level to which Amro and other Palestinians are humanized in Grayzel’s documentary is precisely why mainstream Jewish institutions may want to stay away.
Although Amro says that Israel continues to dehumanize him, he also shows an incredible amount of empathy towards Jewish suffering:
They know what it means to be a refugee, they know what it means to be without any rights, or to be stateless, to be checked in the streets, to be, you know, completely and violently attacked. I’m suffering now as a Palestinian from what they suffered in the past. All the Jews in the world should come and see the real truth of Israel…I am not equal with you now. That is a part of Judaism? Completely not. In Birthright you don’t see that.
If Jews have suffered so much, Amro asks, how can they allow others to suffer, too?
Birthright won’t mention Palestinian suffering, but it does, however, strongly emphasize Jewish trauma. In his film, Grayzel points out the “jam-packed tragic day,” which includes visiting Yad Vashem and Mt. Herzl, strategically scheduled after participants have already bonded for a couple days. Birthright uses Jewish history to manipulate and break the young Jews down and get them to love Israel, exploiting those who may already be questioning their identity, especially those who had family members in the Holocaust and who have been taught that Israel was born out of what happened in the war.
I was still a Zionist when a young Palestinian from Bethlehem, Rami, asked me, “How long do I have to pay for the Holocaust?” I was facilitating a dialogue group of Israeli and Palestinian teenagers when he said this, and his words stung. Later, I read Edward Said’s 1979 essay, “Zionism From the Standpoint of its Victims.” I felt I had to listen to Rami and I had to read Said and I had to find my own way out of Zionism through my Jewish identity–to decide what I would conflate and what I would separate and what would become most vital to my identity as I age.
But it wasn’t always that way. I was raised with the ethos that Zionism and Judaism were synonymous. If I didn’t conflate them, I was a bad Jew. I thought I could love Israel and support peace with Palestinians, and I believed when people I loved told me these two ideas were compatible. My political awakening came at a cost. Ironically, it was the values I was taught by my parents when I was a child–to care for others and to fight for justice–when taken to their logical conclusion, that caused me to eventually leave Zionism. I had to turn my Jewish identity inside out and rebuild it. Luckily, Grayzel has the support of his family. His Judaism isn’t called into question if he criticizes Zionism. The film is a solid gateway into the complications of Zionism.
The documentary ends in another moving scene where Grayzel returns to his grandmother. He asks her if she thinks it is important for him to have a Jewish identity. She tells him he’s an adult and it’s his decision “whether you want to accept that heritage or not and which part of it do you accept and which part you don’t.” I was surprised he didn’t mention Israel/Palestine specifically and how his grandmother would have responded if he had.
And I wondered, too, how he will continue to think about these more complicated aspects of Jewish identity as he gets older. “I think my generation of diaspora Jews has a moral responsibility to critically engage with Israel/Palestine,” he wrote to me. “In practice over the last hundred years Zionism has resembled a movement I cannot in good conscience put myself behind.”
You can see Grayzel’s doc on Youtube, here.
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