Jewish pro-Palestine activist to 'Post': As an American Jew I have no obligation to support Israel

Adam Grunbaum has spent his whole life in New York, but in the last year, he has participated in 20 demonstrations against the Gaza war – and was arrested once as a member of Jewish Voice for Peace.

A former high school principal and a practicing attorney, Grunbaum had grown up in a secular Zionist home and had taken an intensive year-long class on Israel at Amherst College. He has never been to Israel.

“Israel was kind of a fact… It was the place where we could go if things ever got terrible,” Grunbaum said in a Zoom conversation with The Jerusalem Post this month.

He also said that he was raised on the idea that the United Nations is an antisemitic institution, and he believed that for a while. His family came to America in the 1840s, as wealthy bankers from Alsace in eastern France, which is next to Germany and Switzerland.

He reflected on his activism against the Gaza War and his involvement in one of the more high-profile grassroots Jewish organizations organizing pro-Palestinian protests across the United States.

Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP) describes itself as “the largest progressive Jewish anti-Zionist organization in the world,” according to its website.

“We’re organizing a grassroots, multiracial, cross-class, intergenerational movement of US Jews into solidarity with the Palestinian freedom struggle, guided by a vision of justice, equality, and dignity for all people,” it says next to a placard that reads “Zionism ≠ Judaism.”

“After October 7, I think that’s when I resubscribed to JVP. I was a member many years ago – I don’t remember exactly when – but it was shortly after the bombing of Gaza began and the horror of October 7, was on one side, but it was clear that Israel’s response was going to be beyond self-defense,” he began.

“There were various marches, rallies and protests, and JVP was the one that I felt most comfortable with.”

When asked why, he said, “They clearly weren’t going to be antisemitic, and it also fit with my politics around Israel.”

“I was oriented towards a single-state solution, freedom for everybody, and equal rights for everybody, which I still sort of think is the ideal” and such a state “could still be a Jewish homeland – and I would want that as part of it – but I don’t think it needs to be a majority Jewish state and I don’t think it needs to be a state that practices apartheid,” Grunbaum explained, elaborating on his Israeli politics.

“At this point following October 7, and as things have gotten worse and worse, anything that stops the killing right now is fine with me – and if it’s a two-state solution that people think is the best route there, though I don’t think it’s is a great plan, I’m OK with it.”

APARTHEID IS broadly defined as the official policy of segregation and political, social, and economic discrimination against the non-white majority in the Republic of South Africa. Even when applying the definition to Jews and Arabs in Israel, the two groups of people are not segregated, and Arab Israelis enjoy opportunities and rights under the law equally with their Jewish counterparts.

No obligation to support Israel as an Jew

“I think Israel… it obviously has a right-wing government – and it appears to be dominated within the population by an increasingly conservative ethno-nationalist Jewish supremacist outlook, which I think has resulted in it pursuing policies and actions that are bad for everyone including Jews in Israel, but obviously that’s a decision Jews in Israel can make,” Grunbaum said. “But as an American Jew, I don’t feel any obligation to support it: I oppose it.”

When asked what made him turn against Zionism, he said, “When I got to college, I took a year-long course on the history of Israel taught by a neo-con [neoconservative] guy who was very smart and charming – Gordon Levin, who made a very strong case for Israel,” Grunbaum began, adding that he got “steeped in that history.”

The course was in 1988, and he recalled that it was just when the military archives were being opened and Benny Morris was beginning to write his first books on the topic. After he graduated, Grunbaum began reading some of the new scholarship. “I was learning that what I had been taught had been inaccurate, and had kind of obscured the origins of the state and the Nakba” – Arabic for “catastrophe,” referring to the mass displacement and dispossession of Palestinians during the 1948 Arab-Israeli war – “and the fact that it was not a land without people, which is kind of what I had been taught,” he said.

After he went to law school in 1999, he met some Palestinians and got to know people who were not Zionist Jews and “realized there was more going on” than he had understood before. “That is when I started evolving away from Zionism, and moving towards the people I was hanging out with in law school,” he said.

In terms of the United Nations, “Over the years I’ve come to understand that most of the UN animosity to Israel is towards the final colony that exists and the UN is set up to wind down the colonial era. The UN passed resolution after resolution on South Africa and I think it’s sort of analogous,” he said.

GRUNBAUM TOLD the Post that since Israel has the majority of power and is the one that has maintained “the status quo,” it is the party that has the responsibility to end it. In the conversation, there was no responsibility put on the Palestinian Authority or on any Palestinian leadership to improve the status of their people.

When he was asked if most of the people in JVP agreed with him on these issues. He recalled that there is a serious left-wing orientation in the group and towards communism, although he does not subscribe to that ideology himself. He seemed to be a more moderate member of JVP.

Grunbaum stated that he disagreed with the statements JVP made after October 7. According to the ADL, JVP released a statement following October 7, claiming that “the source of all this violence” was “Israeli apartheid and occupation — and United States complicity in that oppression.”

In interviews, JVP Executive Director Stefanie Fox and its Political Action Director Beth Miller both said that Israel was the “root cause” of the violence. Prominent JVP activist Ariel Koren said she believed Hamas’s actions were consistent with “Palestinians’ right to resist.”

In several instances, JVP or attendees/speakers at its rallies have expressed explicit support for terror against Israel or even overt antisemitism. The ADL provided the example of JVP DC Metro sharing a post on Instagram promoting Resistance News Network, a radical anti-Zionist English-language channel on Telegram and Instagram that “promotes violence and terrorism against Israel,” according to the ADL.

Grunbaum reached out to two other members of JVP to see if they would also be interested in speaking with the Post ahead of his interview and neither responded. The Post also separately reached out to the organization itself twice and nobody responded. However he did say that in terms of treatment of Palestinians, and wanting equal rights for them, they are all aligned.

AT DEMONSTRATIONS across the United States, and in Europe, protesters have been seen chanting, “Free Palestine from the river to the sea,” “Resistance is justified when a people are occupied,” “Globalize the intifada,” and “Intifada revolution.” The Post asked Adam what his thoughts are on these chants that are shouted at the same protests he attended.

No issue with 'from the river to the sea' chants

“None of the slogans are to me antisemitic or problematic,” Adam began. “They can be, for sure, but the people I know and talk to in JVP and elsewhere who use those slogans believe in some solution that I described.”

He then described his interpretation of what these slogans mean. “From the river to the sea [means] people should have freedom wherever they go. ‘Resistance is justified’ is hard to argue with for anyone who believes in anticolonial anti-occupation ideals. Under occupation, [Palestinians] are allowed to resist.”

He then specified, “That doesn’t mean that the laws of war do not apply or what Hamas did on October 7 was justified, but it does mean that certainly the First Intifada was justified and people who are under military occupation have a right to push back against that and the people in West Bank and gaza are under occupation.

Intifada is an ambiguous term. Do I think that suicide bombings on buses in Tel Aviv are acceptable? No. Do I think that throwing rocks at IDF soldiers in Gaza and in the West Bank is acceptable? Yes.”

“To the extent that intifada does not have a definite meaning other than shaking off the oppression of an occupier one can argue that intifada revolution is acceptable,” he added.

The Post asked two historians if the two intifadas, the first between 1987 and 1993, and the second between 2000 and 2005, could be viewed as resistance, or if any Palestinian terrorism can be labeled as resistance, and each one had different perspectives, although neither denied that the intifadas were terrorism.

“The First Intifada had to do with the understanding of the local Palestinians who were being pushed by the Israeli authorities,” Prof. Eyal Zisser, TAU Vice Rector and a lecturer at the Middle East History department and the Moshe Dayan Center for Middle Eastern Studies said. He said that the first intifada came at a time when Palestinians were ruled by military governance, and it was the beginning of “the settlement project.”

 He said that there was a sentiment in Palestinian society that Israeli presence is forever, that Israel would annex the West Bank, and nobody was thinking about offering Palestinians Israeli citizenship. He characterized the first intifada as resistance to this, and it was not too violent, mostly “throwing rocks, rarely a use of weapons, and [there were] not many casualties.”

THE SECOND Intifada was different, because the Oslo peace process was underway, as well as a path to a Palestinian state, Dr. Zisser said. “The question to be asked is whether this was [a product of ] resentment, an effort to impose a Palestinian state in the West Bank or whether this was part of a greater vision to change the equation and to challenge the existence of Israel. Each of these explanations has its space, statements, activities on the ground, it’s usually a mixture. Different people wanted different things.”

“I’m familiar with the Israeli response to non violence in the occupied territories, and it’s hard to argue that if only the Palestinians would be non violent things would be very different,” Adam said. “When Palestinians have tried non violence they have been met with sniper bullets,” he added.

Historian and former Israeli Ambassador to the US Michael Oren said that terrorism has been an “integral part of the Palestinian struggle against Zionism and later the Jewish State.” He provided the examples of the Hebron massacre of 1929 and massacres in 1920 and 1921. “Terrorism is most frequently attached to religious motivations, the lie that Israel Zionists or Jews are threatening a Muslim holy place typically Al Aqsa,” Oren said.

He added that there have been terrorist organizations that were not religious including the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine and the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine, each of which held communist ideology.

Even when he was pressed on whether terrorism could be viewed as resistance in any of these circumstances, he responded, “It began before the creation of Israel, so resistance to what? The people they massacred weren’t Zionist they were Orthodox Jews who were either non-Zionists or anti-Zionist.”

The Post asked Adam what he knew about the history of Mizrahim in the Middle East before Israel, and the status of Jews in the land of Israel before 1948.

“A good friend of mine is sephardic Israeli and his father is Egyptian and he teaches history in one of the schools that I work with,” he began. “His family talks about being a refugee twice. Certainly my understanding of the Jewish experience under the Ottomans and in the Muslim world is that there were preferences for Muslims and that non-Muslims were treated as second class citizens, although not without rights. There were plenty of Jews who were high up in the Ottoman government and were afforded privileges. To the extent that Jews were not treated as first class citizens, it was because no one who was non-Muslim was, so they were treated the same way that Christians were.”

HE THEN compared the status of Jews in the Middle East to the status of Jews in Europe, and brought up that many Jews in Europe fled to the Ottoman empire for better treatment. He then said that only after the state of Israel was formed and “the Middle East was in turmoil” that there were acts of violence and a push to get Jews to leave various countries.

I clarified and asked him if he thought that life before Israel for Jews in the Middle East was tolerable. He confirmed, however he did say that Jews have never been treated well anywhere, including in America.

When asked the same question about the status of Jews in the Middle East, Dr. Zisser said, “There is antisemitism rooted in Islam like there is antisemitism rooted in Christianity,” and he said the situation for Jews under Islam was much better than in Europe. Still, he said Jews were second class citizens. In comparison to Christians in the Middle East, “Sometimes Jews were treated better than Christians because they were not associated with western enemies and the number of jews was very small. In the 19th century there were many massacres carried out in Syria and Lebanon against christians and Jews were not hurt.”

Oren however said, “You cannot generalize about the Middle East. There are periods where Jews did well. However, between 1942 and the early 1950s hundreds of thousands of Jews were evicted without provocation, and that was not the case with Christians. They weren’t kicked out of their homes. That predated the creation of Israel. The Farhud in Iraq took place in 1942.”

Believing that Israel commits crimes against humanity 

After this discussion, the Post asked Adam if he believes that Israel is committing genocide. “It’s a tough question,” he responded. “I think Israel is committing crimes against humanity,” he stated.

HE THEN added that he believes that although at this point a genocide is considered the crime of all crimes, he believes that crimes against humanity should be considered worse. He said that the problem with considering a genocide worse than crimes against humanity is that the number of deaths does not determine whether a party is committing a genocide, however it is a factor when determining whether crimes against humanity are being committed.

“I don’t care what the term is,” he declared. “I think Israel is committing gross crimes against humanity. I think Israel’s campaign in Gaza is abhorrent. Obviously I think Hamas’s strike on October 7 was not justified and also contained crimes against humanity and war crimes, but I think the response has been beyond anything that can be reasonably described as self defense and part of a project that Israel seems to be engaged in – ethnic cleansing in Gaza and the West Bank.”

He continued, “It’s hard to make the case that Gaza is simply about Israel’s peace and security.”

Throughout the interview, there was not a single mention of the hostages still remaining in Gaza. October 7 was discussed as a single event, and not as ongoing.

“There’s about 17,000 orphans. It’s hard to imagine those kids growing up in a stable environment where they would be looking for peaceful solutions in the future. So what’s the plan to deal with those 17,000 children so that israel would feel safe having them anywhere nearby?”

The 17,000 number is an estimate from UNICEF, although UNICEF admits that it is impossible to confirm any precise figure.

“I think genocide is such a triggering term for so many people, but I believe, as does the ICJ, there is a plausible case to be made for it.

And I think the campaign to continue starvation and deprivation of humanitarian supplies fits with it. What is the basis of starving people to death? The first people to die are infants and nursing mothers. They’re not the fighting force. What’s the basis for that?” Adam asked rhetorically.

In response to the justification of the war as a method of deterrence, Adam responded, “Deterrence can justify anything. Israel could drop a nuclear bomb on Gaza and call that deterrence.”