What I learned from the inside
A decade old poem, one of few my father read before his death, and what writing taught me about Israel, my parent, and Zionism (tw: mention of PTSD, substance abuse)
In retrospect, I have calculated that I flew to Israel more than 25 times in the first 20 years of my life. Even before my father moved back to Tel Aviv from the US, I was traveling to Israel once a year, but more often twice.
Truthfully, I didn’t get the hype.
I have many theories for how Zionism’s perverted charm missed me in my youth, but most plainly and conclusively, it was because of who Israel made my father to be, and who it made everyone in its society to be.
My father was violent. It was always clear to me that Israel (Zionism) had made him that way — including the British, too, who steered the project. As someone born in Jerusalem in 1935, a piece of Zionism and Israel’s veil was always missing. I could literally see a time that was prior to Israel’s statehood, because of my own father’s existence.
As the oldest child in his family, but 5-8 years younger than his cousins and uncles, my father was too young to take up arms during the Nakba. His relatives did commit crimes, though I’ll never know exactly how or where. Yet, I wonder about the conscription class my father was part of. The young, ‘New Jew’ bodies, militarized — Jewish men, most white Ashkenazi, like him, responsible to operate, build, maintain, and enforce the war machine set to bulldoze Israel’s path into the 1950s.
After giving his life to the military until early retirement in his late 40s, I noticed many similarities between my father and US Army veterans. Growing up in America, I saw these patterns in my father’s anger and abuse, his PTSD and alcoholism.
The military-industrial complex was making itself known in my own childhood home, even if the army in question was thousands of miles away.
Growing up in a nearly dual-life, something I have understood friends of different immigrant families also feel, I was almost always in relation to Israel. But to be in relation to Israel, no matter how ‘peace-oriented’ my father worked to be in the latter half of his life, meant we all had to be in relation to the Israel Defense Forces.
Even before my IDF Draft Package arrived at my father’s address in Tel Aviv, even before the city of Tel Aviv provided my father’s household with gas masks, even before I had multiple friends my age serving in the IDF, I understood quite clearly how violent this place was.
“you learn how to crawl in a play pen / of guns. you teethe on grenades, take /”
How else are Israeli children growing up, if not amongst guns? Amidst ammunition? Always in the perpetrator’s, colonizer’s, position — taking.
Galia Oz, daughter of Amos Oz — also known as ‘the father of Israeli Literature’ — published an opinion piece last month in Haaretz, one of Israel’s most circulated newspapers. The article’s title speaks like it has read my poem “shielding david” — “It's Hard to Raise Good Children in a Country That Normalizes Killing Children.”
Galia writes, "They started it" and "Let them free the hostages and everything will be alright" – this is childish talk. Children are dying now, at this very moment. Children are being seriously wounded, and it's impossible to save them.
Children are undergoing medical procedures such as amputations without painkillers, dying from malnutrition. An adult who has a working reality checker is not meant to respond "they deserve it" or "Amalek" to the sights of an infant with amputated limbs.
Maybe you think it all goes over the children's heads, they don't understand what is the importance of this loss of compassion? That this brutality doesn't threaten their ability to empathize?
You will find it hard to raise good children in an environment that normalizes killing children. You can't protect them without recognizing its existence.
Those of us who have been on the inside, know what Israel has created. The violent society that it engineered into existence. A growing group of us are becoming activists, draft-refusers, protesters, dissenters, and other Israelis are becoming soldiers.
Becoming David.
The poem was initially titled “being david” — in reference to the ‘strong King of Jerusalem.’ The New Jew. The Star’s namesake in the center of the national flag. The active verb of embodying the State.
“shielding david,” was one of the first poems that I crafted in Intermediate Poetry Workshop during my second semester of college in spring 2015. I was still visiting Israel frequently — the trip and destination’s dread residually leaving me, prompting the beginning of my writing about Israel and my father. Unknowingly, I was drafting a poem that would anchor my 10-year-in-the-making poetry collection about my father and his death.
“you draft / the words of your will in high school / and train for early death”
Israel is its Defense Forces. A country with a mandatory conscription — for which I endured a lengthy process to receive exemption paperwork that was required on hand anytime I was in the country for 5 years after my draft age or I faced detainment — is its military.
I wanted to explain to others outside of Israel how incredibly abnormal it is for all civilian centers, malls, museums, learning institutions, to be manned in every corner of the spaces by men in military uniform, assault rifles slung behind their back.
“your parents sharpen / your tongues on german barbed wire. / your parents teach you of hate.”
As someone born in the 1930s to grandparents who, too, were born in Jerusalem, my father’s relationship to the Holocaust was vastly different than most Ashkenazi families. The child of Palestinian Jews with both Ottoman and Lithuanian ancestry, my father was often angered by the politicization of The Shoah and its role in Israel’s “religious fanatic-fascist” (my father’s words) agenda.
I now understand this to be his articulation of criticizing Zionism’s weaponization of Holocaust trauma for geopolitical gain. How legacies of trauma and hatred molded antisemitism into a consistently exploited claim, practically empty in meaning.
“you storm into battle headfirst. / blood always staining milk and honey. / you are born to shield.”
A grandchild of Jerusalem Rabbis, my father loved Judaism’s spirituality and mysticism, but abhorred its hierarchies and commandments.
I can relate as someone who spent two years religiously observant. I fell in love with the traditions and rituals and stumbled where equality and collectivity faded away.
In a land, sanctified by so many, blessed as the fertile ‘earth of milk and honey,’ I never understood how one could ever desire destroying it. To stain it all with bloody violence. There is countless footage of Israeli soldiers tearing down olive orchards, aged centuries.
‘Needing’ to shield, to contaminate the harmony that was historic Palestine with violence is born from false truths and false needs for protection.
In the photo above, posted by the Radical Left (Anti-Occupation) Movement in Israel in May 2025, an Israeli Defense Forces reserve soldier is visiting his newborn son in the hospital. Below the soft, tiny infant in the bassinet, lays the father’s rifle. The photo is captioned “born to kill.”
If that is not a play pen of guns, what is?
“shielding david” was the only poem of its kind that my father would read before he died in December 2015.
It was a poem my father loved so much, he emailed Haaretz himself to ask for it to be published.
I was rejected as an unpublished poet without a full-length collection. I still don’t have a book published…
But my 10-year-in-the-making collection is accomplishing the meaningful work I’ve been trying to convey for a decade — of wrestling with grief, Zionism, violence, the decays we experience within the generations.
Israel and its societies, armies, systems, were never created without violence.
And such violence can no longer persist. Israelis and Israeli-Americans are demanding the end to occupation, in big numbers. It is time to unravel this project whose only aim is violence.
this essay is a gift - thank you for writing - thank you for teaching
such powerful testimony! thank you for sharing ♥️