IfNotNow founder Simone Zimmerman was detained for questioning at a border crossing into Israel on Sunday.
Zimmerman tweeted that she and a friend, Abby Kirschbaum, were detained for four hours at the Taba crossing from the Sinai Peninsula.
Israel’s Population and Immigration Authority said the two were held by the Shabak, which initially refused to comment on the matter.
On Monday, the Shabak acknowledged that it did in fact instruct the Population and Immigration Authority to stop and question the two young women, claiming that the focus of the questions were “their involvement in violent protest against Israeli security forces in Judea and Samaria.”
Following an interrogation, Zimmerman and Kirschbaum were permitted to enter Israel.
“We’re out. That was four hours of rounds of interrogation, waiting and mostly attempted intimidation centering on our connections to Palestinians,” Simone Zimmerman tweeted.
Zimmerman said she told her interrogators that she is currently living in Israel and works for the Gisha human rights organization. She tweeted concern over what she perceived to be an attempt by Israeli security forces to stop Jews from working on behalf of Palestinians.
“The scariest part is the horrifying realization of how badly the Israeli government wants to scare Jews away from Palestinians. They are using all tactics to make the cost of knowing & working with Palestinians too risky that we don’t dare to do it at all,” she tweeted.
The Shabak claimed on Monday that it did not give instructions for any questioning relating to the political stances of either women.
Zimmerman had been an adviser on Jewish affairs to United States Senator Bernie Sanders during his 2016 presidential run, but was suspended from the campaign following reports that she called Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu a “manipulative asshole” who sanctioned mass murder of Palestinians.
During Israel’s 2014 Gaza war, Zimmerman was one of the leaders of a group of young Jews that held regular protest vigils outside the offices of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, reading the names of Israelis and Palestinians killed in that conflict.
Zimmerman was a founder of the IfNotNow movement, which was first established in the summer of 2014 to organize young Jews opposed to the war but has since evolved into a rapidly growing activist community steeped in both left-wing protest and Jewish tradition.
The movement, which takes its name from the statement “If not now, when?” by Hillel the Elder, has directly challenged the North American Jewish establishment and its narrow pro-Israel positions. The movement has organized mass protests against major Jewish institutions, including the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) and Hillel.
While the movement is a wide enough tent to include members who are two-staters, one-staters, self-defined Zionists, anti-Zionists, pro-BDS and anti-BDS, the common denominator among activists is a commitment to challenging Israel’s occupation of Palestinians, which is largely understood not as Jews living in the West Bank or Israel holding the territories, but rather as an oppressive military bureaucracy controlling the lives of millions of people without offering them any means to influence the systems they live under.
Activists from IfNotNow recently staged walk-outs from Birthright tours in Israel, claiming the program was “hiding the realities of the occupation” faced by Palestinians.
Such actions have alarmed the pro-Israel community, both in Israel and abroad, and have resulted in heightened Israeli security measures against Diaspora Jews in Israel working with Palestinian activists. But these measures are clearly counterproductive and only serve to generate an image of Israel as a police state. A nation claiming to be a free society shouldn’t interrogate or intimidate people for their political positions.
What most of the pro-Israel community is ignoring about IfNotNow activists like Simone Zimmerman, however, is that many of them are the products of a failed Israel advocacy system. Before getting involved with J Street U (where most IfNotNow founders came from), Zimmerman was a pretty run-of-the-mill pro-Israel advocate on her campus.
Confronting the Palestinian narrative rather than dismissing it introduced her and countless like her to a story far more powerful and compelling than the pro-Israel narrative she was raised with.
The Jewish community needs to recognize and take responsibility for the political trajectory of its brightest and most passionate young people. The messages coming from the pro-Israel establishment are simply not nuanced or compelling enough to keep the best Diaspora Jewish youth committed to Jewish national aspirations.
Jewish students can see that they’ve been denied access to the Palestinian narrative. But they mistakenly believe that they’ve been given the full Jewish narrative. In truth, the shallow pro-Israel education most young Jews receive in North America erases both the Palestinian and Jewish stories. So when young Jews ultimately do engage the Palestinian narrative and hold it up to the shallow Zionist narrative received from the establishment, they naturally resent being misled their whole lives and often come to fully embrace the Palestinian struggle.
But while the generic Palestinian narrative is far more compelling than the Zionist narrative being peddled by mainstream Jewish organizations, there exists an even greater narrative that includes the full story of the Jewish people – our incredible struggles, aspirations and historic achievements – as well as the Palestinian story. This larger and more inclusive narrative is what Jewish education needs to pivot towards if it hopes to keep the next generation not only connected to Israel but also personally invested in overcoming the challenges confronting her.
The time has come to have deeper and more sophisticated conversations when it comes to Israel that are critical and intellectually satisfying enough to inspire our best youth to become active participants in the next chapter of the struggle for Jewish liberation.
