Daphna Levit, a writer who was born in Israel and served in the army, is co-author of Israeli Rejectionism: A Hidden Agenda in the Middle East Peace Process (2011) and Wrestling with Zionism: Jewish Voices of Dissent (2020), which shares a chronology of Jewish voices questioning Zionism. She writes: “I have come to understand that to achieve a moral peace, many of the conventional assumptions about Israel must be reexamined and many of the myths deconstructed.”
As Levit describes it, “the immediate threat of annexation is outrageous but not unexpected; it is merely an augmentation of an institutional process that Israel began as early as 1948 — of a continued dispossession of Palestinian land with the world watching, complicit in its silence to the theft.”
Levit received undergraduate degrees in linguistics and literature from Tel Aviv University. She discusses her book on rabble.ca. Rabble blogs are the personal pages of some of Canada’s most insightful progressive activists and commentators.
A detailed review of Wrestling with Zionism was published by Steve France in Mondoweiss: https://mondoweiss.net/2020/12/the-land-will-sink-beneath-your-feet-a-century-of-jews-wrestling-with-zionism/. The review is entitled ‘The land will sink beneath your feet’ — a century of Jews wrestling with Zionism.
Published by Interlink Books in 2020, in Wrestling with Zionism, Levit compiles Jewish voices, from the birth of Zionism until the present day. These include Theodor Herzl, Ahad Haam, Martin Buber, Albert Einstein, Hannah Arendt, Noam Chomsky, Benny Morris, Avi Shlaim, Ilan Pappe, Gideon Levy, Amira Hass, and Michel Sfard, among others. (Many of these people have entries in our Jewish Voices museum back room and elsewhere in our online museum.)
Wrestling with Zionism can be purchased from Interlink Books or Amazon.com.
