My Freedom from Zionism

TMS PEACE JOURNALISM, 1 Dec 2025

Daniel Klein | Truth, Reconciliation, and Love - TRANSCEND Media Service

A Testimony of What I Saw, Why I Left, and What I Learned

20 Oct 2025 – I was born and raised in a religious-Zionist home in a settlement in the West Bank, where I lived for the first 22 years of my life.

What I’m about to share isn’t a political position. It’s a confession to my brothers and sisters. Not to accuse anyone, not to claim moral superiority or judge, but to speak plainly about what I’ve seen, what I believed, and what I can no longer deny.

I grew up inside the system. I know it intimately. I know how it thinks, how it builds its logic, how it shapes those within it into true believers. I know what it does to people who question it. I’m living that experience. Friends and family have called me traitor, terrorist supporter, accused me of hating and abandoning my people, or have ceased communication with me completely.

But silence has its own cost. And I’ve learned that the cost of speaking is nothing compared to the cost of living a lie.

Before my birth, my family settled a community in the West Bank. Guarded suburban hilltops woven into every layer of the system. Culture, philosophy, education, politics, military. I grew up embedded in its architecture, inside its institutions: programs, schools, yeshivas, a commander in the IDF. Every aspect of my life was shaped by and in service to the Zionist project.

I believed everything. Not as ideology I chose, but as truth I was conditioned into living. The land was ours, waiting empty for our return. Palestinians weren’t even a people. Their lives, their claims, their suffering were secondary to our divine purpose, or didn’t even exist at all. We were chosen, righteous, perpetually on the edge of annihilation. The world wanted to destroy us for being Jewish, and only our power could prevent it.

I believed our survival justified anything. That fear demanded we strike first. That the suffering we caused was tragic but necessary. That our claim ultimately came from God himself, and no one else’s claim could stand against it. I believed erasing a people could be holy. Not just defensible, holy. The only way to advance salvation.

These were certainties I held with the absolute conviction of someone taught them by people he loved and trusted, in the name of God, in the name of safety, in the name of “never again”.

This wasn’t a sudden awakening. It was a slow unraveling. A crack in the foundation that spread for years before the structure finally collapsed.

For a long time I whispered my doubts behind closed doors, afraid. Not of being wrong, but of the cost of being right. My identity. My family. My safety. My reputation. My place in the only world I’d ever known.

I witnessed the parallel reality we created for Palestinians. Different rights, or no rights at all. Curfews, restrictions, displacement, domination, humiliation, the cameras, drones, fences, and pillboxes, the papers checked at gunpoint, raids in the middle of the night, checkpoints that turned a ten-minute drive into a nightmare. I watched people spend hours herded through checkpoints to reach low-wage labor on the other side of the fence, building the infrastructure for the very system that controls whether they can move, work, or exist at all. I started asking myself what it would feel like to live on their side of the fence, in their world.

I was born during the Gulf War. I lived through the Second Intifada, and through every war until I left Israel in 2023. I lost friends. I lost people I loved. I lived in terror. My family suffered. I know that pain intimately. I’m not claiming we don’t bleed. But I also know that our pain is not a license to inflict endless pain on others. Suffering does not grant us exemption from basic humanity. And somewhere along the way, we stopped asking whether what we were doing was right. We only asked whether we could justify it. And we always could. It was always “necessary.”

Slowly, painfully, I began to see what we’d become. It’s really hidden in plain sight. The most clever things are. People think something this obvious couldn’t possibly be what it appears to be.

I went back to the spaces I grew up in, the rhetoric I’d absorbed as sacred, and I heard it clearly for the first time: calls for total displacement, for destruction, and for extermination. I didn’t hear this from fringe voices, but from leaders, soldiers, journalists, neighbors, family members. I heard talk of flattening Gaza, of “no innocents,” of finishing what we started. I heard open fantasies of conquest, expulsion, settlement expansion, real estate opportunities in the ruins.

And I saw celebration. Observation decks to watch and celebrate death and destruction. The absolute certainty that this was righteous.

The reality is that Gaza is a concentration camp. Over two million people concentrated, trapped, systematically terrorized, controlled, bombed, and sealed off from the world. We don’t call it that, of course. We have other names. Blockade. Security measures. Defense. But words don’t change what it is.

We call them animals. Non-humans. We mock their starvation. We laugh at their destruction. We openly dismiss, justify, and sometimes even revel in their suffering. We do the very things we swore we would never do, the very things done to us, and we do it while invoking the memory of those who suffered them.

We don’t see human beings anymore. We see threats. Statistics. Targets. We don’t see children. We see future terrorists. We don’t see a neighborhood. We see a military objective. We don’t see families. We see acceptable collateral damage.

And we’ve been taught to see this way. Through indoctrination so thorough, so sophisticated, so woven into every institution, education, media, religion, politics, that it doesn’t feel like propaganda. It feels like truth. It feels like survival. It feels normal.

But it’s not normal.

We’ve become exactly what we said we’d never become. The victim became the perpetrator. And it’s not because we’re evil. It’s because we never healed our own trauma, and our wounds were weaponized.

To admit what we’re doing would require us to admit that the people we say were evil were human too. That good people can do horrific things. That entire populations can be blinded by fear and propaganda. That normal citizens can live next to camps and not see. That leaders can speak genocidal language while the people applaud. That it doesn’t happen overnight. That it happens through slow normalization, desensitization, and dehumanization of another people.

To see what’s right in front of us, the displacement happening in real time, the openly stated plans for expulsion, the celebration of destruction, the rhetoric that mirrors what was once said about us, would force us to reckon with everything we believed about how the Holocaust happened.

And that reckoning would shatter us.

Because if we admit we’re capable of this, we’d need to be forgiven. And if we need to be forgiven, then we’d have to forgive the people who hurt us. Not because what they did was acceptable, but because the same mercy we’d ask for ourselves, we’d have to offer them. And that would mean we’re not special. Not exempt. Not the eternal victims who could never do any harm. It would mean our entire moral framework, our identity as the people who suffered uniquely and therefore see the most clearly, was built on a lie.

So we cling to victimhood. We believe we can do no wrong because wrong was done to us. The wound blinds us. We become desensitized. We believe this is normal, necessary, righteous. And once we dehumanize, anything becomes possible.

Healing would require confession. Confession would require humility. Humility would require us to see that salvation is possible, that forgiveness is real, that we are not what we’ve done. And if that’s true, then peace within ourselves and between our peoples becomes possible.

But we’d rather stay in hell than do that work. So we dig deeper. We make it worse, and turn delusion into doctrine. We choose to become the monster rather than face the mirror.

However, when I forged connection with Palestinians, I encountered something we’re never shown. I heard stories, pains, hopes, and clarity. And what I discovered shattered every lie I’d been told.

I encountered love. Deep, resilient, humble, unbroken love. Humanity that hasn’t been extinguished despite everything done to destroy it. Compassion that should have been burned away by now but somehow remains. A desire for dignity, for coexistence, for life.

Most Israelis have never truly met or seen a Palestinian. Not fully. Not as a person. Not in a way that requires them to see, to listen, to sit with the reality of their experience. The system has been built to prevent that encounter. Because if we truly saw them, if we truly connected, the whole thing would crumble.

The Palestinians I met speak in the name of God too, but here I encountered a call for justice, not domination. For mercy, not supremacy. For coexistence, not erasure. The truth is simple: they just want to be seen as human. They want to live. They want their children to grow up free. They want what we all want.

Along the way I realized Zionism doesn’t heal trauma. It weaponizes it. It keeps us locked in survival mode, perpetually on the edge of annihilation, addicted to fear as a way of life. If we’re always about to be destroyed, we’ll justify anything to survive. Even embodying the very thing we claim to fight against.

This isn’t an accident. It’s the design.

The system needs us afraid. It needs us traumatized. It needs us convinced that the whole world wants us dead, that we’re surrounded by enemies, that our existence depends on absolute control, absolute power, absolute dominance. Because as long as we believe that, we’ll never question what’s being done in our name.

We’ll never ask whether the threat is real or manufactured. We’ll never wonder whether our “security measures” are actually creating the very violence they claim to prevent. We’ll never consider that our survival doesn’t require their slow destruction.

Zionism has convinced us that Jewish safety and Palestinian freedom are incompatible. That this is a zero-sum game where one people’s liberation means the other’s annihilation. It’s a lie we need to believe in order to keep doing what we’re doing.

And so we stay trapped. Perpetually wounded. Perpetually justified. Perpetually at war. Not because we have to be, but because the ideology requires it. Because without the existential threat, without the constant fear, the entire framework collapses.

We’ve made trauma into identity. Victimhood into virtue. Survival into religion. And in doing so, we’ve lost access to actual healing. To actual peace. To actual safety.

Zionism is a political ideology. It’s not Torah. It’s not Judaism. It’s not God.

It has a start date, and it will have an end date.

It tells a story of entitlement, that someone born in a foreign place, speaking a foreign language, has more claim to this land than those whose indigenous families have continuously lived, worked, died, and been buried here for generations. That claim is sustained by the sword. It’s not justified by divine right, but imposed with military might. The land doesn’t belong to an ideology. It belongs to all who live on it, who respect it, and who share it.

Israel is a political state. Palestine is a land. The state was built on control and domination. The land is not. The state excludes. The land does not. The state demands allegiance to a narrative. The land asks only that you walk on it with humility.

States don’t have rights. People do. And when a state, any state, systematically denies those rights, when it builds itself on the dispossession and suffering of others, it has no moral ground on which to exist. It can claim all the legitimacy it wants through power, through international recognition, through military alliances. But neither power nor recognition amount to legitimacy.

I was born in the hills of Judea. I wandered its forests as a child. I drank from its springs. I slept under its stars. I know that land in my bones. It’s not that I own it, it’s that I belong to it. Not because of an ancient claim or any state’s permission, but because I am of it and understand what makes one worthy of it.

I learned what it means to be a Palestinian Jew. One who shares this land with other peoples. Not as separate nations competing for territory, but as brothers who came from and belong to the same land.

It’s about recognizing this land doesn’t belong to any one people at the expense of another. That Muslims, Christians, and Jews can all be Palestinian because Palestinian means of this place. It’s an identity that unites, not divides. One that sees belonging as shared, not exclusive.

Zionism has become a religion. And not just any religion, a false one. An idolatry so complete we no longer recognize it as such.

We’ve replaced Torah with nationalism. We’ve made the state our messiah. We wrap flags around prayers and call it worship. We allow nationalist symbols into synagogues, into spaces meant for God alone. We’ve fused the political with the sacred so thoroughly that to question the political is considered heresy.

This is idolatry. We’ve taken a political entity, a state, and elevated it to divine status, calling it the beginning of salvation. We’ve externalized our power and enslaved ourselves to the idol we created.

And this idolatry requires sacrifice. We offer children to it and call it service, duty, and honor. We send them to kill and die for this man-made thing we’ve made holy. And we turn that blood into collective unity, a feeling of transcendence that lets us avoid sitting with reality. The sacrifice enables the escape from the discomfort of stillness. So we perpetuate the machine endlessly, offering more blood to avoid facing the shame of where we are and how we got here.

We teach about the dangers of German nationalism. We study what happens when a people convince themselves of harmful myths and stories. And yet we call ourselves Jewish nationalists and never pause to ask what that means. What it’s becoming.

The messiah does not live in a state, nor is it a military conquest. It does not live inside borders enforced by checkpoints, and it certainly is not a politician. The messiah, in the Hebrew tradition, is an inner transformation. An awakening of love, justice, and liberation within. A knowable force that breaks chains, not one that imprisons.

Torah is not a deed to land. It’s not a weapon. For those that truly understand it, it’s a mirror. A map of the human soul. The question it asks of you is simple: what do you see when you look into it?

If you see external enemies that must be destroyed, evil that exists only outside yourself, then you’re projecting. If you can name an Amalek on the outside as evil but can’t see the same capacity within yourself, then you’re avoiding looking into the mirror.

The real work is recognizing what’s within. When you can see the parts of yourself that oppress, control, and call destruction righteous, without shame, you begin to understand why the person across from you reacts as they do. You see that the Amalek you read about, the threat you feared, was really created by you. The enemy on the outside is a reflection of years of choices.

That’s the war we’re called to fight. Not against Palestinians. Against the very parts of ourselves that create this situation.

To return to our humanity, we must let go of the belief that ancestral claims justify domination. A three-thousand-year-old story cannot erase the rights and lives of people who have lived on this land for generations. We walk on borrowed ground. No one owns land by divine right.

We must let go of stories that glorify suffering or supremacy. We must see what is actually here: human beings who have experienced immense pain and loss, not what we’ve been conditioned to see.

We must release the need to defend a tribe, a flag, a religion at the expense of another’s dignity. We must feel the pain of someone else as our own. We must recognize that control, separation, and violence are fear-based strategies that create the very insecurity they claim to prevent.

True safety is not domination, it’s relational. It comes from seeing the humanity in those we’ve been taught to fear and extending them the same safety we seek for ourselves. It comes through liberation for all, not for some.

Free Palestine means a land that is free and safe for all. Only an oppressor can confuse a call for freedom with hate.

When the oppressed say, “we want to be free,” the oppressor hears, “we want to destroy you.” This happens because deep down, the oppressor knows what they’ve done. Their mind projects that harm outward. They assume others will treat them as they’ve treated others. This is why “Free Palestine” triggers such fear.

To Free Palestine is an invitation.

It is an invitation to see clearly, and to recognize what’s right in front of us that we’ve been taught to ignore. To free ourselves from the colonial mindset that makes domination feel like safety, that makes prisons feel like security, that makes another’s erasure feel like survival. To free the land from oppression and return it to all who share it. To free all people from institutional terror. To free ourselves from the exhausting role of oppressor, and from the illusion that liberation requires subjugation.

Palestine is not a prize to be won. It’s a real place, filled with real people who bleed, love, plant, and pray. The olive trees, the hills, the languages spoken, the prayers whispered, the grief and joy passed down: these are not symbols, they’re living memory.

You cannot sanctify by erasing. You cannot claim holiness through domination. Freedom means releasing the grip and recognizing that this land belongs to all who share it.

This doesn’t diminish or deny Jewish pain and history. The history is real. The pain is real. It’s multigenerational. It has shaped us. But healing means holding all the truths, not just the one we inherited. And we have a choice: hold the discomfort of this truth now, or be forced to reckon with its consequences later, when denial collapses and history asks where we were.

Through this work, I met my person. A Lebanese-Armenian woman whose grandfather’s home was destroyed by Israel. Though her family carries that loss, when they met me, and learned where I came from, they didn’t reject me. They had every reason to.

I was taught my whole life that Arabs and Muslims wanted us destroyed. That we could never coexist. That they would never accept us.

They shattered that lie through how they showed up. They chose love over inherited pain. They chose connection, presence, and grace. They offered the same humanity I’d been taught they didn’t possess.

The threat was never real. The ideology was.

The people on the other side just want to be recognized as human. We can meet them there. It begins when we’re brave enough to say: I was wrong. I see now. I want to repair.

The journey of getting here wasn’t easy. There were times I felt alone and afraid. I didn’t just take part in collective sin. I learned about the nature of personal betrayal. What it means to go through a process of inner and outer reckoning, to face what I’d done, to sit with the consequences, to beg for forgiveness, to rebuild. I’m still living the journey. Secrets, denial, truth, confession, betrayal, collapse, rebirth.

The ability to hold this truth can’t be forced. It unfolds in its own time. I can’t judge anyone for not seeing this perspective, because that was once me. I once believed those same things. I held the same fears. I saw the same threats and I felt the same certainty that anyone who questioned was against us.

I know many close to me haven’t been able to receive what I’m sharing. I’ve been told I chose to leave, that my views threaten Jewish existence, that I don’t “get it”, that I want my family to die, that I’m a traitor who abandoned his people and supports their enemies. That I’m just being spiteful and rebelling. That this isn’t the “real” me saying this.

People will say anything to avoid sitting with the truth.

I haven’t left Judaism. I’ve returned to its heart. I haven’t abandoned my people. I’ve reconnected to what being a Hebrew actually means. I haven’t betrayed our tradition. I’ve honored it by refusing to let it be performatively weaponized.

I love the people I come from. I haven’t left. I’m still here. I still speak our language, connect to our roots, and love the land. What’s changed is I can no longer be silent about what’s being done.

To everyone reading this who feels alone in their own transformation: you’re not alone. Those navigating betrayal, in any form, facing the consequences of their choices. To anyone living through secrets coming to light, through collapse, through the loss of everything they thought they knew. To those being cast out for speaking truth.

You’re not crazy. It’s messy. It’s painful. It can isolate you before it connects you to something bigger. Our capacity for love, for forgiveness, for healing, is deeper than we’ve been taught to believe.

To healing, peace, freedom, and liberation.

إن شاء الله כן יהי רצון

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Daniel Klein – Left a West Bank settlement and the Zionist ideology that shaped my entire life. Writing about deprogramming minds, truth, betrayal, collapse, rebirth, and what it costs to leave systems. Engaged to Christina. Writing from lived experience.

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One Response to “My Freedom from Zionism”

1. Alberto Portugheis says:

   1 Dec 2025 at 22:31

   Dear Daniel,

   Your writing is truly from the heart and reflects the hearts, the feelings of many others. You say you left Israel in 2023. Was this before or after 7 October? I’m asking because I know a few Israelis with young families working in Security/political circles, who left Israel in May and June 2023, to settle abroad and protect their children, as they knew what was coming, what was being planned, through negotiations.

   Israel has always been aware of the famous tunnels and kibbutz model built in Gaza, for training. I could go and and one on the subject of war negotiations, as I lived for seven years in Geneva in close contact with diplomats and politicians working in the International War Club UNITED NATIONS.

   As the late American president Franklin Delano Roosevelt said: “No war is an accident. If there is war, it means all fighting sides agreed to the slaughter”.

   You say “The threat was never real. The ideology was.” With all respect I tell you that the only thing real is the War is business. Politicians are paid very well to promote military sales, exports and imports. What hypocritical politicians and Media (or ignorant journalists and populations worldwide call the ‘Defence’ industry, is in reality the Death and Destruction industry.

   Even if Israel got rid of its Armed Forces today, it would make no difference to the world. A just world will exist only the day we rid the planet of Armed Forces and the war industry.

   To believe that machine guns, landmines, grenades, bombs, cruise and guided missiles, rocket launchers, tanks, bombing drones and helicopters, air-FIGHTERS, WARships can create a world of Peace, equality, Justice and Human Rights is the same as believing we can plant orange trees to reap bananas.

   Reply