Last night I had the pleasure of attending an event featuring speakers from Standing Together/Omdim Beyachad, the largest grassroots Jewish-Arab solidarity network in Israel-Palestine. I won’t derail this newsletter with a full explanation of the scope of their work (though you can learn more about them here), but I bring them up because of something that happened as I heard Sally Abed and Alon-Lee Green, the organization’s leadership, speak about their clear and morally correct vision of an Israel-Palestine where all Israelis and all Palestinians are able to live in peace and safety.
I started crying. A lot.
It wasn’t just because of my grief at the thousands of lives lost over the past month, the homes across the region that have been destroyed, the family lines wiped out, the rapid acceleration of fascism that has led to a squashing of any dissent. Yes, that was all there, and in a space that was openly supportive of both Palestinians and Israelis, I could actually feel it in a way that I cannot in spaces where I feel expected to apologize for the fact that I am an Israeli citizen by birth and have Israeli family.
But what was also there — what I could feel as the tension that I have been holding in my muscles for weeks finally began to release — was the immense shame that I have felt over that Israeli heritage, shame that I have carried with me for decades. It’s the shame that has prevented me from stepping foot in the country since 1996 (nope, I didn’t even do Birthright), shame that has made me feel like I have to shout, “But I’m not a Zionist!” any time I tell people where I’m born. Shame that has, quite frankly, weighed me down and made me useless. Shame that has made me avoid everything Israel-Palestine — that has made my brain shut down at the mere mention of either country.
As I cried listening to the Standing Together leadership, I felt that shame release. I am Israeli. It is a basic fact. I would rather use that status to fight for Palestinians than attempt to amputate it and render myself useless. Because those are, quite frankly, the only choices. I cannot un-Israeli myself anymore than I can un-American myself; and to attempt to do so leads only to my own shame spiral.
And it was strange, having this experience last night, because a part of me feels like I should know better. The shame I feel as an Israeli is functionally identical to the white guilt, the cis guilt, that I know serves no purpose other than distracting me from broader issues of justice. And yet when it comes to my Israeliness, it is hard to dismiss the voice that says that the shame is justified, that the shame is warranted, that I should feel bad because I am bad.
But this is not a newsletter about Israel-Palestine, despite the fact that that topic is pretty much the only one that I can think about these days. It is a newsletter about bisexuality. And I’m telling you this story because I know in my heart that the shame I have carried with me over my Israeli identity, the shame that led me to break down in tears yesterday in a moment when I finally felt safe, is the exact same shame that I have felt as a bisexual.
I mean, obviously there are differences. No one has created an ethnostate for bisexuals that violently oppressed another marginalized group; the US government does not send military aid to bisexuals (it barely even knows that we exist). But there are emotional parallels all the same: the knowledge of your own oppression at the same time as you are being told that your mere existence oppresses others. The feeling that you must make yourself smaller, must erase a piece of yourself, in order to not step on other people’s suffering. I felt it last night, just as I felt it back in June 2020, when I finally confronted my bi shame.
It’s a little embarrassing that it took me decades, that it took into middle age, to grapple with this shame. But what can we do: the past is a sunk cost. What I am realizing now — what I hope this newsletter can help you, yourself, to realize — is that there is no functional purpose to shame. The embarrassment you feel as a bisexual because “other queers have it worse” does not make life better for those other queers. It solely serves to make your life worse — often while blinding you to your own real pain and suffering. Your shame is not good praxis: it is nothing more than navel gazing self-punishment, a form of self-harm that makes all of us less free.
Why should any of us want that?
This is so good and helpful. One of the best things I've read.
As a fellow non-Zionist Israeli living in NA, I have never heard that descriptif the shame and anger and frustration so perfectly described. I spent hours trying to reconcile my personal upset over the shul my mom worked out having just been firebombed with the reality that it’s just property damage. Try and find a way to acknowledge my fears without diminishing the far greater dangers faced by others.
Thank you for your words.
Arnon