My Palestinian best friend made me a proud Zionist.

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict came between us — but it was never the whole story.

Please consider supporting our mission to help everyone better understand and become smarter about the Jewish world. A gift of any amount helps keep our platform free of advertising and accessible to all.

---

This is a guest essay written by Liza Libes, who writes the newsletter, “Pens and Poison.”

You can also listen to the podcast version of this essay on Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, YouTube, and Spotify.

---

The summer before the third grade, nibbling on a piece of challah at my Jewish summer camp, I learned about the mystical Land of Israel.

Growing up in a secular family of Jewish refugees — where Judaism was not mentioned unless someone really asked — I did not know much about my people or their historical fate. As a kid, I simply knew that we did not celebrate the holiday with the fat red man or the one with the cute bunny, and we ate bad-tasting bread for a week every spring after setting up a plate with horseradish, lettuce, and a bone (for some reason).

And unlike some of my peers who had grown up with Jewish pride, I certainly did not think of my background as anything to be proud of. Instead, I did everything I could to forget that I was Jewish. I convinced my parents to buy me Christmas presents so that I would have something to talk about with the other kids when I went back to school after the holidays, and I was adamant about staying away from Hebrew School, which just seemed like another chore reserved for the other weird kids.

Yet, the summer I was sent to Jewish summer camp, I was thrust into a world where things were done completely differently. Every morning, we would sing a song in Hebrew, whose words I pronounced but did not understand, and every Friday right before sunset, we would gather in a large white tent and drink grape juice and eat challah. I did not know what we were celebrating, but as a fan of grape juice and challah, my 7-year-old self thought that this was Judaism at its finest.

One evening, we received an unexpected guest: a girl in a green uniform who taught me about something I’d never heard before. She had flown in from a relatively new country many miles away called Israel, where all young girls just like her had to serve in the army, and she was here to tell us about what it was like to be in the IDF.

My only thought back then was that of horror; what sort of a country in the 21st century sent women off to battle?

My understanding, of course, of the IDF back then was very limited, yet that disdain for Israel must have stayed with me for several years after; whenever it was brought up, I always thought of it as a backwards country with backwards values that did not keep up with modern life in America. Israel was a distant land for those other weird kids, and its fate did not concern me.

By the ninth grade, I had successfully distanced myself so far from my Jewish identity that, if you asked me anything about my religion or my background, Judaism was never mentioned. Instead, I played up the Russian side of my heritage, recounting stories about how my parents had emigrated from the Soviet Union in the 1990s and how I had grown up on old Soviet cartoons.

As a third culture kid, I naturally gravitated towards other first-generation Americans and soon befriended a Ukrainian girl and a Taiwanese boy at my high school. I was somewhat happy with my limited yet close set of friends until, one day, a girl in a shawl around her head approached me in the hallway to tell me that she heard that my parents were also immigrants and that she thought we might be friends.

Having attended a small, predominantly white school for my entire life, that was perhaps the first time I had ever interacted with — or maybe even seen — a Muslim. I didn’t know what to make of her green scarf, but I had been taught the value of inclusivity for my entire life, and the girl seemed very nice. Bonding over our families’ immigration stories, respect for tradition, and shared values, we quickly became friends.

One day she told me that her parents had come from a country called “Palestine.”

I had never heard of the country before — but at 14 years old, I had probably not heard of my many countries. Based on her description, it seemed like another country in the Middle East, like Syria or Jordan or Iraq, and I was fascinated to learn about her Arab background.

I listened to her stories about holidays like Eid and Ramadan, and picked up a few words in Arabic. By the following year, we were inseparable, participating in the standard set of teenage girl activities together: exchanging homework, meeting up for brunch, hanging out at the mall, and going to the gym — until I soon considered her my best friend.

Not once did it cross my mind that anything could possibly be amiss.

One afternoon after school, we drove home with my grandparents, who started a conversation with my friend in their broken English. I quickly jumped in to translate their questions from Russian into English: “How old are you?” “What’s your favorite subject in school?” “What do you want to be when you grow up?”

Then: “Where are you from?”

“Palestine,” she answered.

All united for a country that does not exist (photo: Muhammad Shaheer/Unsplash)

For a moment, I wracked my brain to remember the name of the country in Russian, for I had never heard it mentioned before in our language, but I quickly caught on that my grandparents understood, I did not have to translate.

The conversation had ended.

When we dropped my friend off at her destination, my grandmother turned to me with reproachful brown eyes and asked, “She’s Palestinian?” I did not know what was meant by the question. I did not know a thing about “Palestine” other than the fact that it was a country, as my friend had said, in the Middle East. I nodded and frowned, asking my grandmother for clarification.

I will remember her answer, spoken in that shaking, almost desperate voice, for the rest of my life: “But you are a Jew.” I did not know what she meant.

The incident did not come up again until several years later, when my Palestinian friend informed me that she would not be attending prom because the event went against her family’s Muslim values. By that point, I was 17 years old and had begun to understand at least a little bit about life, and the conclusion I had drawn from my many interactions with my friend (as well as what I was being taught in school) was that religion was repressive and that secular humanism was the only way forward.

So I took issue with her decision — after all, I did not want to go to prom without my closest friend — and demanded to know why she took her religion so seriously. It had not been the first time that her religion had barred her from doing certain normal teenage things: She had a boyfriend whom she hid from her parents, and every spring, she disappeared for half a month to starve herself and to act sad.

I did not understand anything back then, and I was frustrated that anyone could take a religion so seriously. We got into an argument about the situation with prom, and I brought up the Ramadan fast and how I found it ridiculous, especially given that she was an athlete and needed to train consistently.

“Don’t Russians have any holidays where you fast?” she asked.

“Sure, we have Yom Kippur, but I don’t really do that one, and it’s only for a day.”

There was a startled look in her eyes: “Yom Kippur?”

“Sure, you know the one where you’re supposed to ask God for forgiveness. I’m not about to starve myself for a day, though, c’mon.”

“Yom Kippur is a Jewish holiday,” she said softly.

Somehow, over our four years of friendship, it had never come up that I was Jewish.

“You’re Jewish?” she asked, her voice quivering just like my grandmother’s had that one afternoon in the car.

I did not know what that meant either, but I shrugged it off and said, yes, I supposed that I was. That might have been the moment from which, gradually and painfully, our friendship would begin to erode.

When I moved to New York City to attend Columbia University, I was thrust into a completely unfamiliar yet welcoming environment: This was not my predominantly white Protestant high school. This was a world where almost every third person you met was a Jew!

And, suddenly and inadvertently, I began to have an easier time making friends after I had always thought of myself as a social outcast throughout my teenage years. I was bonding over the experience of putting that bone on that plate or playing hide-and-seek with matzah on Passover. Suddenly, my friends were Jewish. Now, I was no longer strange. And, somehow, these people understood me!

Calling my Palestinian friend back home, I told her all about the Jewish clubs I’d joined and how I had gotten involved at Hillel. I told her about the Jewish history I learned and how I was becoming more fascinated by religion. I still didn’t know a thing about the details of those countries called Israel and “Palestine,” but I thought that my religious friend would be happy for me and my new religious experiences.

Instead, she was visibly discomforted on our FaceTime call that afternoon. She did not want to hear about all of these Jewish things, and, frankly, I did not want to hear about the restrictions that her religion posed on her life either. I began to grow annoyed with her citations from the Qur’an and her inability to wear shorts in the summer, and perplexed when, showing up in a long skirt on the hottest day of the summer, she would complain that she was on the brink of passing out.

I did not have anything against Islam in particular, but its rules did not seem to be particularly conducive to a good life in the 21st century. I was a secular liberal humanist, after all, and that was what I had been taught. And though I had begun to learn more about Judaism from a historical perspective, I did not think that I would ever become religious.

It must have been towards the end of my freshman year of college that I learned about the history of Israel and “Palestine.” As an English major, I was very well-read in the sphere of literature, but because I had devoted my teenage years to the Western literary canon, I couldn't say I knew much about history outside of what had been taught in school. And back then, they certainly did not touch the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in classrooms.

Yet, curiously enough, unlike so many young Jewish people, it was not from a pro-Israel perspective that I was first introduced to the history of the Middle East; it was, instead, through the writings of Edward Said, a Palestinian cultural and literary critic I had been assigned for one of my English lectures.

Coming into the reading with little knowledge of the region, I read through his overview of British and Israeli colonialism with an open mind; yet I felt, nevertheless, that something was missing from his account. To Said, the Israelis represented the epitome of villainy, but surely that chipper girl in the green IDF suit who had visited my summer camp in the third grade was no villain, even if her country was a bit strange for making girls go off to war.

Coming home that summer, I asked my grandmother to tell me about Israel.

As it turned out, my extended family — cousins and great uncles and distant relatives — were citizens of Israel. As it turned out, every week, my grandparents and aunt and uncle called our relatives in Israel, relatives who had grown up hearing stories about our lives in America, and relatives who, halfway across the globe, had been privy to my family's entire history, and relatives who had heard infinite stories about their Jewish niece somewhere now in New York City, and relatives who loved me!

Israel was not a distant country somewhere in the Middle East; Israel was home!

And then, sitting before a map, examining that region of the world closely for the very first time, I could not find a country called “Palestine.” I did not know what to make of that or all of these stories, but I did know that the flag of Israel, plastered with a large, blue Star of David, commemorated the same Biblical king who had given his name to my little brother. Jewish history was quite literally in my family, and I knew nothing about it.

The Israeli flag flying in Jerusalem (photo: Levi Meir Clancy/Unsplash)

From that moment, I made it my mission to read everything possible on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, if only to figure out how to navigate my relationship with my best friend. I finished Said’s book, “Orientalism,” and picked up Alan Dershowitz’s book about Israel.

I didn’t know what to make of that either; Columbia University was telling me all about how the Jewish People were settler-colonist oppressors, but Dershowitz told the story quite differently. It was the same story with two different approaches. The Jewish People had been chased out of their homes and deserved a home; the Palestinian people had been chased out of their homes, and deserved a home.

But wait…

That was 2016. In that same year, Donald Trump entered the White House for his first term and soon signed the monumental Abraham Accords, the first successful peace deal in the Middle East for a very long time.

My friend was livid.

I had not voted for Trump; in 2016, I was a hardcore Democrat, and I did not want to support any of Trump’s policy decisions. Yet I remember feeling a certain pride when President Trump officially recognized Jerusalem as the capital of Israel in 2017, and by the next year, I was officially in love with Israel and everything it stood for. I was what they called a “Zionist” because my people had been persecuted and deserved a home.

I was a Zionist because, as I discovered when I turned 21, my parents and countless other Jews around the world had been chased out of their home country for being Jewish.

My dad had been framed for fraud by an antisemitic group of Muslim officials in the country of Azerbaijan and had spent nine months in prison as a result — just because he was a Jew. My parents had come to America on political asylum, and if Judaism had not been mentioned in my home when we were growing up, it was because no one in my family had ever wanted me and my brother to suffer like my dad once had.

Was that so hard to understand?

I do not remember at what point my relationship with my best friend had visibly soured; perhaps it had been sour from the moment that she learned I was Jewish. But by our third year of college, our phone calls had become more tense. We no longer spoke about religion or our family backgrounds. We discussed school and art and philosophy; sometimes, we touched on politics, but never foreign policy, and certainly not anything going on in the Middle East.

We saw each other once every several months on break, and then, the frequency of our phone calls began to dwindle. We had once bonded over shared understanding. But now, our understanding of one and the same story — the story of the Middle East — could not have been more different.

And as I grew more into Israel as I got older, as I began to proudly wear a Star of David around my neck, as I began to date a Jewish man to give a Jewish future to my future kids, I knew that she, too, was becoming more in-tune with her religion and more in love with “Palestine.” After all, it was also her home! And just like my family had been chased out of our homes by the people who shared her religion, so her family had been chased out of theirs.

My family had suffered at the hands of her people, and her family had suffered at the hands of mine. We should have been steeped in mutual understanding, yet we only could see ire and fury for the other side — because that was how we, two people who put family first above all else, were taught to think. We were two people whose values were one and the same, yet who, somehow, had drawn vastly different conclusions from those same values that had once brought us together.

And was there anything wrong with loving your family so dearly? Was there anything wrong, now, with the tacit antipathy we felt towards one another?

I don’t remember at what point the phone calls stopped, but it must have been around 2021, when Hamas launched a series of rocket attacks on Israel. The incident, of course, has been overshadowed by the atrocities of October 7th, but back then, it was all the same: I saw Hamas as a terrorist group out to obliterate my people, and she saw Hamas as a freedom-fighting organization out to liberate her people from oppression.

And no matter how vehemently I disagreed with her, could I really just dismiss her perspective, having heard her entire story? Was this not the same person who had held my hand when the first boy had broken my heart in high school, or listened to all of my stories about my love of literature? Was this not the same person who helped me pick out prom dresses when she knew she could not go herself, or helped me through all of my biology labs in the eleventh grade?

What did this little plot of desert in the Middle East matter over our many shared experiences, and shared humanity?

But it did matter. And it matters so much more today.

On October 7, 2023, Hamas launched the largest terrorist attack against the Jewish People since the Holocaust. We have all heard the story, I do not need to repeat my version of events here. After I decried the attacks on social media, my friend reached out to me for the very last time, expressing her outrage at my defense of genocide, employing the term long before it had become popular in the public eye.

In fact, I am quite sure that I didn’t understand what she was referring to — until, of course, the term would lose all meaning over the next several months.

“I’m really hurt by the deterioration of our friendship,” she wrote.

I will never forget writing back to her through my anger at her total mischaracterization of my people, of my cousins and other relatives who proudly fly their Israeli flags. The message I composed to her received no response, but I am infinitely proud.

---