Anti-Zionist Jew? Your Privilege Is Showing
By: Living Jewishly
Tags: Zionism, Anti Zionism, Israel, Jewish, Mizrahi

Our father is one of the proudest men I’ve ever met. And not in a bad way. He’s a true Tzadik. Never wants anything that is unearned, hates gifts (but loves showering his girls with them), and handles himself humbly and piously. He is a family man through and through, the eldest son in an Iraqi family who set each of his brothers and sisters up and ensured they finished school before starting his own family.

I’ll leave my thoughts regarding what a blessing and a hardship it is to watch your parents age for another day.

This one is about why a man who chose to emigrate from Israel, after losing everything to be there, made us the Zionists we are today.

Our father cannot and does not speak regarding his childhood in Iraq and the journey to Israel. What we know, we’ve pieced together through our aunts and uncles’ stories, but still there are holes. The family lived very well in Kut. Our father attended alliance school for boys in Baghdad. When Israel was established, he smuggled his sister Rivka from Kut to Baghdad and placed her at their aunt Dina’s house to protect her. There she attended a Christian school, prayed in English, and never spoke in Hebrew. During Operation Ezra and Nehemia, he arranged for his parents, Rivka, and his youngest brother and sister to leave. He had already arranged for two of his brothers to leave prior, as a case of mistaken identity made one of them wanted for Communism. Our father stayed behind and arrived a few months later, because of his continued involvement with HaHalutz, a Zionist organization. What he did during those months, we’ll likely never know. When he finally left, he was allowed to bring one suitcase with essentials. That suitcase was ransacked, with anything deemed valuable destroyed and precious memories deemed nonessential. Important documents and family photos were confiscated and discarded. Decades, centuries, of history and ties to a country were thus demolished.

When my father arrived in Israel, his family had already been living in the refugee camp under horrid conditions and then moved to project-like housing. After 5 years, my father and his brother Shlomo renovated a house in Tel Aviv and relocated the family there. My father took a job with Israel’s National Bank (Bank Leumi) and worked there, supporting the family, until he left Israel in 1985.

They called him Abu Banat, father of girls. We always assumed that he was disappointed that he only had girls, and also that Michal may have been a last-ditch effort for a boy (she’s not reading this, right?).

He had dealt with losing everything upon leaving Iraq, and then arriving to horrid conditions in Israel and having to rebuild a life for himself and his family. He dealt with becoming successful again and paying exorbitant taxes and providing concessions to a coalition government. What he refused to capitulate was his girls serving in the army. At the time he left, girls in the army were not given meaningful roles and he preferred we spend those years continuing our education. And so, as his eldest was approaching her 12th birthday, he made the most difficult decision he had made in his life. He left his aging parents, his brothers, sisters, and nieces and nephews he helped raise, and he joined his youngest brother in the US. And by join, I mean he bought the house across the street. He left us in Israel for a year to reestablish himself again, this time in real estate, and ensure everything was set for when we arrived.

The first time I ever saw my dad cry was sitting at our new kitchen table, listening to Umm Kulthum, not long after we were reunited. I knew what a difficult decision he had made, and, over the years, learned that the pain was not only for leaving the family but also for leaving Israel.

If it were not for my father’s sacrifice and the importance of that decision to him, I would have returned to serve in the army and made Aliyah. But I knew how leaving Israel tortured and haunted him. To this day, when he sees pictures of extended family gatherings, he tears up. Every cause he supports and every dollar he donates is to ensure Israel’s safety and continued existence. He experienced first-hand what it means to need a place to go to escape persecution. And so we fight alongside him. We use our platform to educate, both non-Jews and those Jews with the privilege to not have been in that situation, we donate our time and money to Zionist causes, and we surround him with all the family he has in the area, as often as possible, so he knows how blessed we feel by his presence and his unconditional love. We do all of this while hoping that we will never again be in a position to need to escape our homes and to leave our histories and possessions behind, but also knowing, that if we do, we will have a place that will safely accept us.

And our father? Over the years we also learned that he never wanted boys. He cherishes his army of girls above all else. Abu Banat is his badge of honor. Zionist is all of ours.

Am Yisrael Chai.