The Trees We Thought Were Ours
On Nakba Day, Confessions of a Former Zionist
Chapter One: The Neighborhood
I grew up in a neighborhood where Jewish holidays punctuated the calendar with more reliability than seasons. The air carried the scent of brisket and memory. The mailboxes in our apartment building had names that seemed both familiar and distant: Goldfarb, Cohen, Levi. My friends recited prayers I did not know and spoke casually about summer trips to Israel like it was an ancestral birthright, as if some genetic compass pulled them toward it.
If you live in New Hampshire, please join us on Saturday, May 17 at 1:00 in Manchester to remember Nakba Day. Details and RSVP here.
We were not Jewish. But we were there. There enough to celebrate with them. There enough to stand beside them in solidarity that asked for little thought and no questions.
I was a child shaped not by doctrine, but by proximity. I loved my friends. I wanted what they wanted. And they wanted Israel. A place I imagined was both ancient and invented, born from ruins but always triumphant.
Of Palestinians, I knew nothing.
Chapter Two: Exodus
I read Leon Uris’s Exodus when I was twelve. It was given to me the way you might be handed a key. It felt like a gift. A story of suffering transformed into strength. A people long persecuted, finally home. I read it as history, as truth. It never occurred to me that it was fiction.
I rooted for Ari Ben Canaan with all the fervor a child reserves for heroes. He was handsome and brave and good. The British were in the way, the Arabs in the shadows. The Jews fought for survival. The others were obstacles. Scenery. Anonymous threats.
Palestinians were not named. If they were there at all, they were background noise to the grand orchestra of redemption. I remember a line about a hostile desert. How it had to be tamed. The people who lived in it were like the sand itself: mute, shifting, inconvenient.
I did not know that what I read was not just a novel, but a weaponized narrative. One that made dispossession invisible. One that taught me, without my knowing, to cheer for the erasure of another people.
Chapter Three: Coins and Roots
We collected coins to plant trees in Israel.
The slogans were soft: “Make the desert bloom,” “Reclaim the land.” There were no images of soldiers, no mention of checkpoints or demolitions. Just saplings and sunlight. We believed we were helping to build a paradise.
No one told us what those trees covered.
Later, I would learn about Imwas, Yalu, and Beit Nuba: villages that no longer exist. Bulldozed in 1967, their memory buried under a forest planted by the Jewish National Fund. A forest we might have paid for. What we thought was restoration was part of a campaign of erasure.
Palestinians had names. Homes. Harvests. Their olives were centuries old. Their villages had histories. And yet, in my world, they did not exist; not in the fundraisers, not in the children’s books, not even in the adult conversations held in lowered tones behind closed doors.
Chapter Four: The Silence Between Stories
It wasn’t just that no one talked about Palestinians. It was that their absence was engineered. Like a photograph where someone has been carefully cut out. The land was “empty.” The refugees were “Arab.” The resistance was “terror.”
It was only in recent years that the picture began to shift. I met Palestinians who had grown up in exile, in camps, under military rule. Their parents held deeds to homes they could not enter. Their grandparents held stories that mirrored the ones I thought belonged only to my side.
I listened to a girl from Gaza describe watching her school collapse. A boy from Haifa who could not visit his grandmother’s village without a military permit. I heard them speak not in anger, but in weariness. As though they had told the story so many times, and still, it slipped through fingers.
They were not shadows. They were not threats. They were dispossessed, unheard, and very much alive.
Chapter Five: Rewriting the Map
Zionism, I came to understand, was not just a political movement. It was a story. A story that chose what to include and what to erase. I had lived inside it. It had offered me moral clarity, a clean division between right and wrong. But it was a clarity that demanded blindness.
There was no room for the Nakba, the catastrophe in which 700,000 Palestinians were expelled or fled from their homes in 1948. No room for the fact that half the population of historic Palestine lives under military occupation or as second-class citizens. No room for the apartheid that now defines life between the river and the sea.
And yet, Zionism had not taught me to hate. It had taught me to forget. To overlook. To love one people so completely that I could not see the other.
Chapter Six: Memory and Guilt
I don’t hate the boy that I was. He acted in good faith. But good faith, I’ve learned, is not a shield. Intentions do not erase impact.
I look back and I see the small betrayals: the jokes I didn’t question, the arguments I avoided, the silences I mistook for peace. I think about the trees, about the way they looked so innocent in the brochures. Trees don’t kill, I thought. Trees grow. Trees shelter.
But a tree planted atop a ruin is not neutral.
A tree grown in the soil of someone else’s home, without their consent, can be a weapon too.
Chapter Seven: After the Bloom
Now, I read books with many voices. I read Palestinian poets who write of jasmine and checkpoints in the same breath. I listen to historians who refuse to let myths stand in for maps. I hold in tension the suffering of the Jewish people and the suffering of the Palestinians inflicted in their name.
I have learned that solidarity must stretch wider than comfort. That to love justice, you must sometimes betray loyalty. That complexity is not the enemy of clarity: silence is.
There is a Palestinian boy planting trees, too. His name might be Yusuf. His trees are often uprooted by settlers. His grove is fenced in. His cousins cannot visit. He plants anyway, as his father did, as his grandmother once did; before the road, before the soldiers, before the wall.
I do not know if the trees we planted are still alive. But I know what I would do now. I would walk with Yusuf. I would listen to the story I was never told. And I would ask permission before planting anything again.
If you live in New Hampshire, please join us on Saturday, May 17 at 1:00 in Manchester to remember Nakba Day. Details and RSVP here.