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<\/a><\/p>\n\n\nFrom the 1940s through the 1990s, American Jews on the left, including the pacifist left, were often, though not always, committed to some form of humanistic Zionism. The Arab-Israeli wars were widely understood as tragic conflicts between a peaceable Israel and a belligerent Arab World.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
By the end of the 1970s, in Israel, power shifted from the social democratic Labour Party to the nationalist right, and besides a few precious years in the 1990s, Labour never fully recovered its earlier idealism. Since the rise of Netanyahu and the Palestinian organization Hamas in the mid-1990s, the violence of the Israeli state against an increasingly beleaguered Palestinian population has produced a new generation of American Jews disillusioned with the state of Israel, even having second thoughts on the Zionist project itself. As small sectors of American Jews have become more anti-Zionist, the Jewish Israeli population has grown increasingly undemocratic, chauvinistic and militaristic toward the Palestinian people, including rising open hostility to the Arab citizens of Israel, who make up over 20 percent of the population.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
As is the case for many American Jews today, Ariel Gold\u2019s pro-Palestinian commitment emerged out of horror at the violence of the Israeli state towards Palestinians in its punishing assaults on the Gaza strip, as well as firsthand observation of Israel\u2019s stranglehold over Palestinians in the Occupied West Bank through what activist Jeff Halper has called a \u201cmatrix of control.\u201d Gold comes to FOR from years of anti-occupation activism. She is so much an agitator that, because of her activism, she has been denied entry to the state of Israel.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In your testimony \u201cMy Jewish Story\u201d in the edited collection \u201cReclaiming Judaism from Zionism\u201d you mentioned that you came to Israel\/ Palestine activism relatively late in your career. Before then, what kind of activism had you been involved with?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n I grew up in the anti-nuclear and antiwar movement of the 1980s. My parents had met in college during the Vietnam war and were very active. They divorced, and my mother stayed very engaged in street activism. We lived in Gainesville, Florida, not too far from Cape Canaveral. So I spent a lot of my childhood at the military base, and was probably marching alongside FOR people then \u2014 there were a lot of faith-based activists. I would ask my mom: \u201cWhy is it always the priest or the nun that goes first in civil disobedience?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n I did my first civil disobedience when I was 15, at a Nevada nuclear test site. I would like to say that I was always politically minded, but really, at 15, I just wanted to play around.<\/p>\n\n\n\n You were surrounded by Christian activists, but what was your experience with Jews and Judaism?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n I grew up so secular \u2014 which is a little bit confusing, because on my father\u2019s side we were long-time Zionists before it was popular. Early in the 1900s in Utica, New York, my maternal grandmother\u2019s family formed an early chapter of the Zionist Organization of America, raising money for the state of Israel. But I didn\u2019t go to Hebrew school, I wasn\u2019t bat mitzvah\u2019ed, I was very secular. So my knowledge was very minimal.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I knew lots of us got made fun of, being Jewish, on Christmas. I didn\u2019t have any of those experiences. I remember in the fourth grade, it was very exciting, because there was one other Jewish kid in the class who was very popular and cute; everyone thought he was great. During Christmas we were sectioned off to our own table, with blue construction paper, and told to \u201cdo your thing.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n I didn\u2019t have much real religious consciousness. My father remarried a Protestant. My mother was very culturally Jewish, but not religious. In Ithaca, New York, there\u2019s not a huge Jewish population. I was raised with a lot of internal antisemitism, that came through the general culture. I remember thinking about how my family was seen by others: that we were really gross, and that when we all ate, we interrupted each other. We can all talk at once and all know what each other is saying. I grew up with a lot of inner hatred about that. I thought I had this giant nose! It\u2019s really not that big, and now I really like it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n My grandmother is still alive \u2014 she\u2019s 102. She was a huge part of my childhood and is still part of my adulthood. She is culturally Jewish in every way that you can think of \u2014 ethnic, loud and just Jewish; Yiddish was her first language.<\/p>\n\n\n\n When I reached adulthood I felt like a huge part of me was missing; that I didn\u2019t even have the option to reject Judaism! So I started to explore being Jewish in every way: I enrolled in Hebrew classes, took classes in college, I read every Holocaust book I could find. I started dipping a toe into showing up to services \u2014 but feeling very shy about it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Had you been attentive to Israel\/Palestine issues then?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n As an adult I heard about the occupation and I was very opposed to it. It sounded dreadful, terrible, but I still thought somewhere, \u201cWe must be really confused, because Jews are really good people, and we mean well.\u201d I remember I had a poster that said something like \u201cI love Israel, I hate the occupation\u201d \u2014 a liberal Zionist slogan that hung on my walls for years. But Israel wasn\u2019t my main focus. I did a lot of local politics, and anti-Iraq War politics, and then I was raising my kids.<\/p>\n\n\n\n What was your \u201croad to Damascus\u201d moment?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n It was the 2008-2009 assault on Gaza that really tripped me out. My kids were old enough that I could drag them out to the protest, so we went, and I cried, a lot. But I went back to life, my kids were still young (five, seven), I was a single mom. Then in 2012, a short war happened, a week long. Again, I was just horrified, and I said to myself: \u201cI will never want to wonder, where I was when this was happening. To be asked, what was I doing when these things were happening, when my people killed children?\u201d And I haven\u2019t really stopped since.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I had just finished my graduate degree (my Master\u2019s is in social work) but I wasn\u2019t working yet. I wanted to do macro-level work and community organizing rather than personal one-on-one or family therapy. So I was looking around. I worked for awhile at the Friends of Sabeel North America, a Christian Palestine rights organization: I designed a BDS [Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions] campaign for them. That wound down; it was a temporary position.<\/p>\n\n\n\n CODEPINK was organizing civil disobedience against Netanyahu, who was in town for the AIPAC convention. I had always been a fan of their bold and colorful tactics. I met Medea Benjamin and was arrested in that action. It was its own challenge, as most arrests are; there\u2019s a negotiation with the police and wanting to get your message across so it\u2019s not just a stunt, but that you\u2019re telling a story. After that, CODEPINK was looking for a temporary intern to lead a delegation to the West Bank. By then I had already been going to the West Bank, so I said to the co-director at the time that I would be interested in doing this, in between things. Can I send you my resume? Medea said, \u201cYour resume is when you were arrested at AIPAC!\u201d So I never actually applied to work at CODEPINK. There I worked on the war on Ukraine, Venezuela and a lot of parts of the Middle East. But my specialty is Israel-Palestine, and that, naturally, is what I read in the morning.<\/p>\n\n\n\n So in more than a dozen years of really intense work on Palestinian solidarity and the issues of the Middle East, what has worked?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n I don\u2019t want to discount any part of the activism, but BDS has. But not in the same way that it did in the South African struggle: It\u2019s a different country, a different time. BDS has made only the tiniest dent in Israel\u2019s economy. But we have raised the issue, and brought awareness \u2014 sometimes good, sometimes backfiring. What I\u2019m really impressed by in terms of that movement are two things. One: young Palestinian diaspora, and young Arab Americans, taking power and raising up their struggle and telling their story, eventually moving into having their voices heard. For a long time, when a journalist wanted to record a story, they would look to Jewish voices or Christian voices, and not Palestinian voices. So there\u2019s been a lot of work that\u2019s been done there. Two: Jewish youth. We have moved the needle in our own community in the last five years.<\/p>\n\n\n\n For so long, it was those of us who were anti-occupation organizers \u2014 and I did a lot of work that I\u2019m very proud of, before I got banned from Israel: on the ground, living in the West Bank, and working one-to-one with Palestinian families and activist groups engaging in nonviolent direct action. I was much older when I reached an age to say, \u201cThis is really ugly and awful and this is not the Judaism I love.\u201d Jewish youth of my children\u2019s generation are finding out much younger about what is happening. This is the shift in young Jewish opinion. I saw it in my own kids.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Tell me about your own family\u2019s relationship to Judaism.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n I raised my kids in a very Reform, URJ [Union for Reform Judaism], environment. They went to Hebrew school, they were bar and bat mitzvah\u2019ed, and most importantly Jewish summer camp, which was the basis of their whole friendship groups. They started at age seven. While my son was there, only two grade-years above my daughter, he was very badly bullied because of me \u2014 because my politics were known, because I had pulled some stunts with CODEPINK. And both of my kids, at their bar and bat mizvahs, talked about Palestinian human rights. He was teased and called \u201clittle Hamas.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n But only two years later, my daughter, she didn\u2019t have the same experience. By the time she was coming of age at camp, many in the Jewish world were familiar with [the Jewish organization] J Street, with liberal Zionism, and questioning what was taking place. So we\u2019ve seen this shift, and I very much believe this is only the beginning of the changes that the next generation of Jewish youth are going to bring. I think we are already seeing it: We see the state of Israel not relying on the American Jewish community for support, but relying on the Evangelical Christian community. And they said as much \u2014 that \u201cAmerican Jews have given up on us.\u201d Jewish youth did that: They shifted [the positions of] their parents and grandparents.<\/p>\n\n\n\n FOR was founded in Europe in 1914, and in the U.S. the next year. It has taken on some of the most important questions of that last century. What do you see as the role for FOR going forward within a larger institutional activist ecosystem? How do you see its mission?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n One of the things I think is very important is that FOR already has been, in name, interfaith: committed to the diversity of religion. It\u2019s one of the reasons I\u2019m really proud to be its first Jewish director, bringing my own faith-based perspective to finding the commonalities between the three Abrahamic faiths and beyond. Because there is that commonality of humanity and love and nonviolence.<\/p>\n\n\n\n What really attracted me to FOR is a reflection of where we are in this ecosystem.<\/p>\n\n\n\n We\u2019re not going to be leading the Palestine work in FOR. There are credible organizations of young Palestinians, Jewish Voice for Peace, IfNotNow, and others who are leading that. FOR made a decision a few years ago to focus on national issues, to look at what\u2019s going on here in the U.S., because we all know our country is a mess.<\/p>\n\n\n\n FOR-USA\u2019s domestic focus takes a bite out of the larger picture. We are part of the work towards a less fascist, less racist, less military-budgeted, more human needs-focused world. And for us to make an impact worldwide, we have to clean up what\u2019s going on here at home.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Taking that on, and considering what\u2019s unique about FOR, our niche \u2014 in a time when we are shrunken in organizational size \u2014 is our interfaith approach. That we can come from a faith-based position, coming from multiple faiths, and being part of this larger peace-and-justice ecosystem. To transform ourselves here domestically and to let that shine outward.<\/p>\n\n\n\n When we look at the field of religious organizations and advocacy groups on the move, where do you see FOR fitting in in terms of issues?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n I\u2019m glad the FOR is going to focus on domestic issues because we are a hot spot, and not just of imperialism. We\u2019re becoming a multipolar world. We \u2014 the U.S. \u2014 are just not the singular power we once were. I\u2019m a campaigner, so I think in terms of campaigning: What can we collectively and strategically and measurably contribute? If you want to get your message out you need to be in the conversation in our country, addressing the economic and racial injustices which are so deeply embedded in our systems. And the intersecting issues which have long been FOR\u2019s work, specifically concerning white nationalism and white supremacy \u2014 these are also Jewish issues.<\/p>\n\n\n\n What is the nonviolent approach to the far right?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n We often think of nonviolence and pacifism as \u201cpassive\u201d but they are absolutely the opposite. When we look at the teachings of some of the great leaders, Martin Luther King to Medea Benjamin, it\u2019s not at all about being passive, but about reflecting a mirror on the systemic violence, the racism \u2026 and creating friction at that point.<\/p>\n\n\n\n You can have many different goals in an action, and those goals can range from capturing the media, when they are pointing cameras on you in a Congressional hearing \u2014 or on your sign! \u2014 to disrupting daily life. It\u2019s really about friction, about showing the contrast. Systemic violence: racism, gun violence, white nationalism and fascism; from India to Israel to Hungary and Brazil to here in the U.S. \u2014 it\u2019s rising everywhere. Showing that absolute difference, that contrast, is where faith comes in as I practice it, as we at FOR since 1914 practice it: love and nonviolence.<\/p>\n\n\n\n What do you see as the biggest issues confronting humanity?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n We can\u2019t get away from the environmental crisis, the climate crisis bearing down on us. On my children. But we\u2019re not at the 11th hour, and so I want to look at the intersections of how this is all so much one issue. What we have to face in the long term are the structures of capitalism, and corporations and consumerism, and resource wars, and it\u2019s a very large picture, and we can see it going on in Ukraine right now, and I\u2019m watching in horror. But as long as we are doing what we can \u2014 and that\u2019s all we can do \u2014 we can all take on a piece of the problem. It doesn\u2019t matter which piece you take up. That\u2019s the only hope we have. Lest we abandon hope, in this cataclysmic situation that we\u2019re in, both climate-wise and war-wise.<\/p>\n\n\n\n How then do you deal with possible ideological conflict, or different priorities, within the circles of people you are working with? With FOR trying to bring in different religious communities or individuals, there are inevitably going to be conflicts underneath us all saying \u201cWe are all for love and justice and peace!\u201d That stance can produce a blurring of differences actually existing on the ground, for example, around reproductive rights. What\u2019s your strategy for navigating those differences?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n I am a very strong advocate for reproductive rights. We have to look at the larger forms of structural violence, and at what it means to address the needs and health of the mother, regardless of our religious beliefs. Because if we are committed to building a better, more loving, more just world, then it isn\u2019t simply a question of destroying a fetus, but a question of structural violence and structural inequality, and the ways they play out on women and LGBT+ folks and people of color, and the impoverished, and so many issues.<\/p>\n\n\n\n As an interfaith organization it is necessary that we respect all faiths. To deny women abortion rights is a violation of religious freedom, certainly in the Jewish case. So we may all have our own opinions, but as a faith-based organization, having freedom of religion must take priority.<\/p>\n\n\n\n What motivates you to do the work you do?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n I think of the Pete Seeger lyrics to \u201cMy Name is Lisa Kalvelage\u201d: \u201cThe day of our protest\/Put a small balance weight on the other side\/Hopefully, someday my contribution to peace\/Will help just a bit to turn the tide.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n When my children or grandchildren will ask me, I want to answer that our work made some impact, that I placed some weight on the balance scales for justice. Where was I in effecting change for my people? Where was I in trying to turn this tide?<\/p>\n\n\n\n Sounds a lot like the Christian idea of \u201cthe witness,\u201d when awareness comes, and things are shown, and consciousness is changed, but the world doesn\u2019t change. I think of \u2014 call it Jewish activism \u2014 as one that gets things done, that passes laws, that mobilizes institutions.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Sometimes it is just awareness. Sometimes it\u2019s passing bills and making laws. In Palestinian activism, we were out there on our own, just standing on a rainy street corner with signs and umbrellas. It was not an easy path to take. People in my synagogue were offended by my advocacy. But we don\u2019t know that change is going to take place. And then it comes: Suddenly there will be laws, we have bills in Congress, something unheard of 10 years ago.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Pacifists are facing a difficult dilemma with Ukraine. What are your thoughts and analysis?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n I am a pacifist, but both growing up, and more recently, I\u2019ve had to question it. The recent Russia-Ukraine war has been a challenge, because there\u2019s an instinctual \u201cYes, Ukraine should win this!\u201d And it feels good. But I had to go back and take stock of what I believe.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I\u2019m against all fighting here \u2014 but it\u2019s almost an easy way out. So we have to work in coalition, and we have to find commonalities with our coalition partners. I have friends on very different sides of this. Some are very apologetic for Russia because of U.S. imperialism, and others are gung-ho that Ukraine should not give an inch, and deserve the arms they are getting. But what do we all agree on? That what is happening over there is not sustainable, and could likely explode. Think of damage to that nuclear power plant! I grew up around anti-nuclear activism, and I wake up at night terrified what might happen.<\/p>\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/wagingnonviolence.org\/forusa\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/3\/2023\/01\/Gold-at-her-sons-bar-mitzvah-1024x895.jpg\")
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