Thinking about Israel at sixty makes me want to look back in time to figure out how the Zion of the Jewish people ’s dreams became Israel as we know it today. In the early days before statehood, Zionism was a complex phenomenon. While some talked of nationhood and governance, others wanted to build a society based on the highest Jewish ethical principles where Jewish culture could flourish. We have forgotten the cultural Zionism of Ahad Ha ’am, the pseudonym of Asher Ginsburg, who wanted to create a place where Jewish art, music, literature, and intellect could thrive. We have forgotten the socialist Zionism of Martin Buber and Judah Magnes who knew that this “land without a people” was inhabited by Arabs, and argued early on for a binational state rather than the British partition plan in the 1940s. But after the state was established in 1948, the myth of nationhood gained absolute supremacy.

Although there were Zionists in Jewish populations around the world, and being anti-Zionist was becoming less acceptable in the Jewish world, in the early days of statehood Israel was by no means the center of American Jewish life. As far as my Reform synagogue in the 1950s and 1960s was concerned, Israel did not exist. Although there were exceptions, most of the Reform movement was in the non-Zionist camp. Israel wasn ’t part of our Hebrew school curriculum—in fact I learned to speak Hebrew in an Ashkenazi dialect that differed from the Hebrew adopted by Israel. My rabbi never gave a sermon about Israel, and not one dime was raised to support the new nation. All I knew of Israel was from what I read in the newspapers or learned in Social Studies class in junior high school.

But in June of 1967 all that changed. The Six Day War put Jewish communities around the world on notice that Israel was vulnerable but also powerful. Its military exploits in defense of its right to exist against Arab nations bent on its destruction were an instant source of pride. Almost overnight, Israel became the focus of American Jewish life. Any group that had previously considered itself non-Zionist quickly changed its tune. It was not possible to imagine that Israel was anything less than perfect and that the survival of Judaism depended on what happened in this tiny country.

To understand this for myself, I decided to spend my junior year of college (1969) at Hebrew University in Jerusalem. Two years after the war, I landed in a country that had just secured its borders by having captured land from Syria, Jordan and Egypt. The feeling in the country was euphoric and it was impossible not to be moved by what I saw. I landed in Jerusalem to visit the holy sites of Islam, Judaism and Christianity, all within walking distance of one another. I saw excavations of ancient sites I had read about in the Bible alongside modern museums filled with Israeli art. I lived for the summer in the Negev desert where I picked peaches from trees that grew in the sand and learned Israeli folk songs and dances, along with properly-accented Israeli Hebrew. I heard the inspiring words of David Ben Gurion, the country ’s first prime minister, who told this group of young Americans that Israel was the key to the survival of the Jewish people. It was hard not to fall in love with the place. And then they took me to Gaza.

Not many American Jews saw this side of Israel back then, and I’m still not sure what they were thinking taking a busload of us to a refugee camp. Perhaps they meant to show us the cruelty of the Egyptians in forcing their Arab neighbors to live in conditions that were not fit for human life. Girls wearing woolen dresses in sweltering heat, rationed food that consisted of small amounts of oil and grain, with milk only for nursing mothers and children under five, people begging us for our leftover lunches. It was hard to envision these people as the enemy. Why Israel wasn ’t doing anything to ameliorate these conditions in its newly occupied lands was not explained.

I began to notice that, despite the rhetoric that what made Israel special was that Jews did all the jobs, the construction of my building was being done by an Arab work force. The women who cleaned our dormitories were Arab and so were the day laborers I observed coming from East Jerusalem early in the morning. Something was just not right ….

By the end of the year I was convinced that I was destined to be an American, not an Israeli Jew. But my skepticism put me out of step in the American Jewish community, which was becoming more and more Israel-centered. I never questioned the need for a sovereign state, for a safe and secure place where Judaism could flourish and Jews could live in peace. I could not align myself with those forces on the American Left that turned against Israel, denouncing Zionism as racism after 1967. But I also assumed that Israel intended to return the land it gained during the war in exchange for peace. I never imagined an occupation that was to last for more than forty years and change the character of the country completely.