I was an 'anti-Zionist' Jew once upon a time.
Now, I’m an Israeli citizen living in one of the country’s most diverse cities, where coexistence isn’t just a buzzword but a real way of life.
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This is a guest essay written by Hether Warshauer, who writes the newsletter “Finding Simcha.”
You can also listen to the podcast version of this essay on Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, YouTube, and Spotify.
Well, at least that’s probably what I would have called myself if I had known the term.
I was never part of any activist movement, never attended protests, and never deeply studied Zionism itself. But I held strong opinions about Israel — ones that, in hindsight, were based on a narrow and one-sided perspective.
Now, I’m an Israeli citizen living in one of the country’s most diverse cities, where coexistence isn’t just a buzzword but a real way of life.
What happened?
Well, I grew up and had the audacity to learn from Israelis, not just from what Al Jazeera and United Nations resolutions had to say about them. This is my story.
When I started college, I was deeply involved in Model United Nations. As a student focusing on international affairs and diplomacy, I frequently represented Arab states in committees like the League of Arab States and the Commission on the Status of Women. At four separate conferences, I represented Jordan, and inevitably, “the Palestinian question” was a topic of debate.
Year after year, I heard students deliver speeches denouncing Israel in inflammatory terms. Zionism was equated with racism, and comparisons to apartheid and genocide were thrown around with little hesitation. Some of it was standard diplomatic rhetoric — delegates trying to remain “true” to their assigned countries’ policies — but much of it revealed a deep, unquestioned bias. Their sources were almost exclusively previous UN resolutions and Al Jazeera English. Few had any real command of Arabic or Hebrew, and certainly none had engaged with Israeli perspectives.
At first, I accepted all of this uncritically. But then, one incident shook me.
While volunteering at conference, I was staffing a committee when a student, who was visibly Jewish, was personally attacked in another delegate’s speech. The Jewish student wasn’t even representing a Middle Eastern country; his country assignment had nothing to do with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Yet another delegate stood up and personally attacked him, accusing him of being “complicit in the genocide of Palestinians.” The hostility in the room was palpable, and I had to remove the student who made the attack.
I remember feeling uneasy, not because I was particularly sympathetic to Israel at the time, but because something about it felt wrong. Why was this Jewish student being treated as an extension of Israel, as if his mere existence was offensive? And why had I never questioned the kind of rhetoric I had heard for years?
Then, something happened that forced me to confront my own biases.
At the suggestion of one of my professors, I applied for an internship at the Israeli Consulate in Atlanta. To say I walked into my interview confident about my views would be an understatement. I remember sitting across from the Consul General passionately arguing that Israel needed to “withdraw from the West Bank” and “stop oppressing Palestinians.” He listened patiently, then chuckled — not dismissively, but with the kind of knowing amusement that comes from experience. “I think you’ll learn a lot here,” he said.
He was right.
Days after I started my internship, the 2010 Gaza flotilla incident1 happened, and I was suddenly thrown into a whirlwind of media narratives, diplomatic statements, and historical contexts I had never considered. What I had always accepted as fact didn’t align neatly with what I was seeing. The conflict wasn’t black and white; it was deeply complex, shaped by history, security concerns, and competing narratives that I had never taken the time to truly understand.
For the first time, I realized how limited my knowledge was. How could I call myself an academic when I had never read a single Israeli historian’s account of the conflict? How had I not noticed how biased my sources were? If I were truly committed to understanding international affairs, didn’t I owe it to myself to hear from all sides?
That realization set me on a new path.
Over the years, I made a conscious effort to expand my sources. I read books and articles from a wider range of perspectives — not just Ilan Pappé, the anti-Zionist darling I had once viewed as the sole authority on the conflict, but also historians like Benny Morris and journalists like Matti Friedman. I studied the history of Zionism from its own intellectual traditions, not just through the lens of its critics.
This process didn’t (and still doesn’t) make me an uncritical supporter of everything Israel does. It didn’t (and still doesn’t) erase the complexities of the conflict. But it did give me a much more nuanced understanding of the region, one that wasn’t shaped by ideological echo chambers.
Flash forward 15 years, I made a decision I never could have imagined back in college: I moved to Israel.
If you had told me years ago that I would move to Israel (after October 7th, no less), I would have thought you were insane. Why would anyone choose to move to a country in the middle of a war, where rockets fall on cities and terrorists can cross the border to massacre civilians in their homes? And yet, that is exactly what we did.
My husband and I didn’t move here despite October 7th. In some ways, we moved here because of it. Watching the worst attack on Jews since the Holocaust unfold from afar, my husband felt an overwhelming need to be here, to stand with this country in its darkest moment.
While I had spent years studying the region and arguing about Israel from a distance, it wasn’t theoretical anymore. This was real. Families were burned alive in their homes. Women were brutalized in ways too horrific to put into words. Children, like Ariel and Kfir Bibas, were taken hostage and dragged into tunnels, where they were brutally murdered. And as Israel mourned, much of the world gleefully celebrated.
But there was more to our move than the events of October 7th. We primarily came to Israel for fertility treatment. After facing multiple pregnancy losses, Israel — renowned for its cutting-edge fertility treatments and high success rates — felt like the right place to seek help. In the midst of the devastation, Israel represented hope: the opportunity to try again, to find new beginnings, and to experience a sense of resilience in the place where survival and continuity are deeply ingrained in the culture. The decision to move here for both political and personal reasons felt like the right one at the time, and it still does.
That was the moment everything crystallized for me. The mask slipped. The chants of “Globalize the intifada!”, the celebrations in Western cities, the people tearing down posters of kidnapped children as if their suffering was a joke — it all made one thing clear: This wasn’t about policy. It wasn’t about human rights. It was about something much older and much darker.
So, we packed our bags and moved. Not because we had to, but because we chose to.
Living in Israel now, I’m not just grieving the loss of innocent lives or worrying the precarious status of the ceasefire agreements with Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon. I’m watching former friends and colleagues, people I once respected, declare that, because I live here, I am complicit in genocide. These are the same people who once preached nuance, who condemned “Islamophobia,” who went out of their way to listen to marginalized voices.
Yet, when it comes to Israel, there is no nuance. There is no listening. There is only a knee-jerk, almost religious certainty that Israel is evil, that Israeli civilians deserve to die, and that anyone who calls this country home must be shunned. It’s surreal to watch Americans, former friends, who know nothing about this region, who have never set foot here or have any connection to the land, erase my humanity with the same ease that they erase the humanity of the Israeli victims who were murdered on October 7th.
One recurring thought I’ve had since moving here is this: If people actually saw life in Israel — not tourism Israel, not religious Israel, but the daily reality of people living here — they might begin to see things differently. Beyond the conflict, beyond the headlines, Israel is a place where people go to work, send their kids to school, worry about rent, argue over politics and, yes, coexist.
I live in a city where Jews, Arabs, and other minorities interact every day, not as enemies but as neighbors. I work for Northern Israel’s largest hospital, and recently I noticed that when I walk around my office or the hospital campus, I hear more Arabic than Hebrew on a daily basis. Historically, there has been a long tradition of Arab Israelis working in healthcare; in fact, more than 40 percent of healthcare workers in Israel’s first language is Arabic, not Hebrew.
Many people, including my past self, view Israel through a binary lens: colonizer versus indigenous, oppressor versus oppressed. But our reality doesn’t fit into the neat narratives pushed by activists and journalists abroad, so they simply ignore it. Ignoring it, however, doesn’t make it any less real.
We’ve already seen how media outlets distort reality, often deliberately. Just look at the most recent “documentary” that the BBC retracted because it featured the son of a high-ranking Hamas member pushing false claims. We’ve seen journalists mistranslate Arabic to soften explicit calls for Jewish genocide, presenting extremists as “resistance fighters” instead of what they truly are.
If you truly care about justice, don’t take someone else’s word for it. Come see for yourself. Engage with Israelis, challenge your assumptions, and recognize that this place, this country, is far more than the villain you’ve been led to believe it is.
And to my former self — the one who didn’t question the narratives, the one who blindly accepted a version of the story that felt the most righteous — I want to say I understand. I get it now. The world is complicated, and it’s easy to latch onto a version of the truth that aligns with our feelings of justice and moral superiority.
But real growth comes from confronting uncomfortable truths, from stepping outside of the echo chambers and engaging with the complexity of the world. I wish I had been braver sooner — braver in questioning my assumptions, braver in listening to voices I didn’t agree with.
Yet I’m here now, and while I can’t undo the past, I can keep learning, growing, and striving for a better understanding of the world. And that’s where I find my peace now.
A small fleet of ships by the Free Gaza Movement and the Turkish Foundation for Human Rights and Freedoms and Humanitarian Relief that was carrying humanitarian aid and construction materials, with the intention of breaking the Israeli blockade of the Gaza Strip
Kol Hakavod. I commend you for coming forward with your story - welcome!
YESTERDAY was the 54 th anniversary of my moving to Israel from the USA on one of the first 747 Jumbos. I moved to Israel as a Labor Zionist and Golda Meir was my Prime Minister. As the oldest daughter of a Holocaust survivor and Nazi refugee and having lost paternal grandparents in a gas chamber - I knew our history very well and had no illusions of the "galut" I studied on ulpan on Kibbutz and moved after a year to TA.
I cut my wisdom teeth on the Yom Kippur War high pregnant with our oldest son. KEEP TALKING
Would that you could speak to all the former “friends” and colleagues that I have known in America- who only have one narrative that they want to believe in. Especially the “Jewish” ones who know minus zero about Israel. Ignorance is only part of the problem. Arrogance and disinterest in truth is the largest part.