Alice Rothchild’s path to becoming an anti-Zionist Jew took many years, many hard conversations, and required a lot of critical self-reflection. But she is part of a growing, powerful chorus of Jewish voices around the world speaking out against Israel’s Occupation of Palestine and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians—and she is urging others to join that chorus. “The time is long overdue for liberal Zionists to find the courage to take a long hard look at their uncritical support for the actions of the Israeli state as it becomes increasingly indefensible and destabilizing, a pariah state that has lost its claim to be a so-called democracy (however flawed) that is endangering Jews in the country and abroad as well as Palestinians everywhere,” Rothchild writes in Common Dreams. In the latest installment of The Marc Steiner Show’s ongoing series “Not in Our Name,” Marc speaks with Rothchild about her path to anti-Zionism, the endgame of Israel’s genocidal assault on Gaza, and the need to liberate Jewish identity from Zionist state of Israel.
Alice Rothchild is a physician, author, and filmmaker with an interest in human rights and social justice. She practiced ob-gyn for almost 40 years and served as Assistant Professor of Obstetrics and Gynecology at Harvard Medical School. She is the author of numerous books, including: Broken Promises, Broken Dreams: Stories of Jewish and Palestinian Trauma and Resilience; Condition Critical: Life and Death in Israel/Palestine; Old Enough to Know, a 2024 Arab American Book Award winner; and Inspired and Outraged: The Making of a Feminist Physician. Rothchild is a member of the Jewish Voice for Peace Health Advisory Council and a mentor-liaison for We Are Not Numbers.
Producer: Rosette Sewali
Studio Production: David Hebden
Audio Post-Production: Alina Nehlich
Transcript
Marc Steiner: Welcome to The Marc Steiner Show here on The Real News. I’m Marc Steiner. It’s great to have you all with us.
Today we’re going to talk with Dr. Alice Rothchild. She’s a physician, an author, a filmmaker, an activist for the rights of Palestinians. She was an OB-GYN for almost 40 years and served as assistant professor of Obstetrics and Gynecology at Harvard Medical School. She directed this incredibly amazing documentary called Voices Across the Divide. It’s about the struggles in Israel Palestine. Her books include a young adult novel, Finding Melody Sullivan; Old Enough to Know; Broken Promises, Broken Dreams: Stories of Jewish and Palestinian Trauma and Resilience; On the Brink, about her experiences in Gaza and the West Bank; and most recently, Inspired and Outraged: The Making of a Feminist Physician.
Alice, welcome. It’s good to have you with us here on The Marc Steiner Show and Not in Our Name. It’s really great to have you here. Thank you for joining us.
Alice Rothchild: Well, Marc, it’s really great to be here.
Marc Steiner: So let’s take a step backwards a bit. I’m always fascinated by the journey people take growing up Jewish and then having this… Not necessarily a moment, but having a series of things happen that shift feeling inside. I can remember in the late ’60s trying to volunteer for the Israeli army in ’67 and then meeting Palestinians and left-wing Israelis and things began to shift, dramatically shift, and it was hard and painful. But tell us about your own story there.
Alice Rothchild: OK, so I am a second generation from Eastern European Jews that came over and lived in Brooklyn and worked in sweatshops in that whole era. So I grew up in a small New England town called Sharon, Massachusetts. My family went to a conservative temple. My parents were not Orthodox like their parents, but moving outside of that, but not far enough for me. So I went to Hebrew school three days a week. I had a bat mitzvah. I went to Israel with my family when I was 14, it was like this magical trip. I have my diary, so I actually know how I felt. And I had, despite the fact that I had very liberal parents who were supporting the Civil Rights Movement and all that kind of stuff, we actually had very racist attitudes towards Arabs, and I had no idea that we were racist towards Arabs.
And so I was going along on that journey. And then I’m also a child of the ’60s, so in college I got to be acquainted with political movements and fighting the Vietnam War, and then went to medical school and got more radicalized when I hit up against all the sexism and racism in the healthcare system. And so I was moving left, but I didn’t have the energy and insight to know what to do with my love of Israel. I was a big fan of Israeli dancing, that kind of thing.
And so this continued, and then I was an obstetrician-gynecologist, so I was a little busy and I had two children and all that was going on. And then in 1997 as a member of what was then called Workmen’s Circle that’s now called Workers Circle, which was a secular Jewish group. It was national, a hundred years old, was originally for immigrants, founded by people from the Bund. Complicated but interesting. And we had created a school there for our kids so they would have a sense of Jewish identity but not have God and religion. So it was a complicated thing we were doing.
And so we did these secular holidays. So after the Yom Kippur holiday, we were sitting by Jamaica Pond throwing in bread for the ducks and to get rid of whatever we were getting rid of, and we realized we needed to have a political focus for the year, and it was going to be the Israel 50th anniversary, and there was going to be a massive celebration in Boston with Israeli bands and face painting and fireworks. And we thought, well, we’ll submit a suggestion to the Jewish Community Relations Council about having a peace forum, and they’ll say no, and then we’ll have a protest. And that was the total extent of our knowledge.
So we put together this thing, and much to their credit, they said yes — But then we were stuck because we didn’t know anything [Steiner laughs]. So we immediately went into high gear and started inviting Palestinians from the Boston area as well as lefty Israelis to come and talk with us. We had a very rapid education. And as I learned more and more, all the pieces of the puzzle began to fit together. I knew about colonialism and imperialism, I knew those concepts, but I had never applied it to Israel.
So we actually pulled this off. 200 people came, Barney Frank was the speaker. It was just an amazing, empowering experience. We had a children’s section with kids doing the flags for both countries. And we were so excited. We thought, we need to have a grassroots organization to learn more and to teach our community. So we did that, and we started having events with the public library and adult education and that kind of stuff.
Within a couple of years, we were totally blacklisted, and so we were kind of frustrated. And we thought, well, a bunch of us are doctors. Maybe we could approach this through health and human rights. So we started organizing health and human rights delegations to the region, first one went in 2003. And so I went almost annually, until COVID. Originally, there were about 15 years of doing this delegation. I went on a whole bunch of other delegations.
My commitment, my understanding, my experience really deepened. I’ve been to Gaza four times. I was in Gaza in August of 2023. So siege, occupation, racism, Islamophobia are not theoretical concepts for me.
And as we went through this journey, we really started struggling with the whole question of Zionism because we started out as nice two-state people, which was a very radical idea at the time.
Marc Steiner: It was.
Alice Rothchild: And then I gradually began to understand that Zionism as a political ideology is actually based in British colonialism and imperialism concepts. And also that Zionism, the privileging of Jews over other folks in historic Palestine, requires harm to Palestinians. I’m into mutual liberation, and so Jewish supremacy didn’t fit with that ideology.
Marc Steiner: [Laughs] Really?
Alice Rothchild: So really, I gradually became an anti-Zionist. I began to understand the power of the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions movement. All those things fell into place, and it’s become an increasing commitment for me.
And so I’ve always, my mother was a writer, and I always swore I would never be a writer, so, of course, I wrote a book in… Let’s see, was it 2013, Broken Promises, Broken Dreams, which really gave me a taste of the power of writing about my experiences. And I figured out that a lot of people couldn’t handle politics, but they could handle I went here and I talked to this person, and guess what I learned, sort of the personal, and that was a way to get under people’s defenses. So that led to more books and a documentary film and a greater commitment to working on these issues.
Marc Steiner: One of the things I’ve wrestled with a lot, and I’ve talked to some other people about this as well, is how the oppressed can become the oppressor.
Alice Rothchild: It’s painful.
Marc Steiner: It is painful. You grow up knowing that there’s a whole body of people who do not like you and hate you because you’re a Jew. And I experienced that a lot when I was young. But then what we in turn have done to the Palestinians — And I always use the word “we” because I can’t separate myself from it.
Alice Rothchild: These are our people, right?
Marc Steiner: Right. It’s my cousins, it’s my family. They’re there, Mifalsim, Kissufim, Jerusalem, they’re there. So the question, when you wrestle with this — And I know you’ve been wrestling with this a lot over your life — Is how does that happen? How do we, as a people who are oppressed, who identified, where 70% of all the white civil rights workers in the Southwest were Jews, that we’ve been fighting for human rights across the globe and against our own oppression, how do the oppressed become the oppressor?
Alice Rothchild: That’s one of the core questions. So I think that, first of all, Jews as a community have psychopathology that we have not seriously dealt with around the issue of trauma and the Nazi Holocaust. And what happened was that this traumatic experience in our community, after years of antisemitism, has become almost a religion. It became, we are the supreme victims of the world, and our victimization gives us the right to do anything in order to survive.
And you see that happening particularly in Israel where originally the Holocaust survivors were looked down upon. They were the weak-kneed survivors. Who knows what they did, who knows how they cooperated, all sorts of horrific things. They did not do well in Israel, and they were not well-funded and taken care of. So Israel was very into creating the new Jew, the muscular, bronze, tanned fighter Jew, and Holocaust survivors didn’t fit with that.
But then it became useful to the Israeli propaganda machine to embrace the Holocaust as the reason why we can do whatever we want to do. And I think that’s what we’re seeing now, and it’s a real abuse of Holocaust memory. And people have written endless books and papers on this, but I think it is a pathology in us as a community and something that, until we work it out, we’re going to keep doing horrific things to people. It’s almost like the abusive parent abuses the child. It’s all that kind of stuff.
But it’s also sort of an othering. So, everybody else is out to get us, everybody else is demonizing us, and we are not responsible for what we’re doing to provoke that. And that’s a huge problem within the Jewish community. And more mainstream Jews don’t want to hear that because I grew up like the Jews are the good people. We are the people, we’re chosen. My mother didn’t think we were religiously chosen, but we’re chosen to make the world a better place. So if you buy that and then we go do something that really is not making the world a better place, it’s very hard to square that.
And so that’s the struggle that’s going on, I think, one of the many struggles going on in the Jewish community, both in Israel and here and all over the world.
Marc Steiner: I’ve been really shocked and happy to see the number of Jews who [are] coming out to say no to what’s happening in Gaza. The demonstrations [have] been huge and mostly Jewish. It’s been here in the city, in New York, Baltimore, around. There’s a shift taking place. This internal battle is taking place. Increasingly, this means that Israel becomes a pariah over what’s happening in Gaza.
Alice Rothchild: The other thing I’ve seen over the decades is that originally when I started doing this work, there were very few Palestinians out in the open. And I think particularly Palestinians in the United States were mostly people who came here. They were anxious about being accepted in the United States. They were worried about being targeted or deported, and they kept their heads down. Their kids and their grandchildren aren’t doing that. They are out there on the front lines.
And so what a lot of young Jews are doing is standing in solidarity with Palestinians and understanding that this is actually a Palestinian-led liberation movement, and we need to embrace it as a liberation movement also for ourselves because we’re all trapped in the ways of our parents and our grandparents
Marc Steiner: As we see all this unfolding around us, one of the things you wrote about that I found really interesting that’s not getting a lot of press is the number of people who, you wrote about, who have stopped serving in the Israeli army, who refuse to go to Gaza. Talk a bit about that because I really think it’s not covered in the Times, it’s not covered in major papers, nobody’s really talking about a hundred thousand Israeli Jews saying, no, we’re not going.
Alice Rothchild: So this is an interesting development. I think we need to understand there are obviously Israeli Jews who are aware of the genocide in Gaza and are horrified. Most Israeli Jews who are against the war are against the war because they want the hostages back and they want their soldiers to stop dying. Israeli Jews tend not to be that sympathetic to the fact that they’re committing genocide. That’s not what the headlines are about. The headlines are about we want our hostages back. And that’s fine. If we could stop the war, that would be great. And if enough refusers refuse, that will be more pressure on the government.
But I don’t think we should delude ourselves into thinking that after decades and decades of incredible assaults and occupation and harm to Palestinians that Israeli Jews of a progressive nature are suddenly waking up to this, they’re much more aware of their own pain, which is losing their sons and not having their hostages back.
Marc Steiner: So your perspective and your analysis is that the majority of these Israeli Jews are saying, no, I’m not serving, that’s because they’re more concerned about the hostages coming back home —
Alice Rothchild: Absolutely.
Marc Steiner: — Than they are about taking Palestinian lives or [inaudible] Gaza.
Alice Rothchild: Absolutely. And also it’s not good for the Israeli economy to have all these young men in combat. They’re pulled from their jobs and their tech industry. And industries are also leaving, like tech industries are leaving. So I think that there’s a lot of economic things going on as well that Israelis object to. But I don’t delude myself into thinking that there’s sudden awareness and consciousness of the horrible harms to Palestinians. That’s not part of the deal as far as I can tell.
Marc Steiner: [Laughs] I think what you’re describing is really important because when people hear people refusing to serve, it’s like, for me, it was like going back to Vietnam going, no, I’m not going. I’m not going.
Alice Rothchild: It’s not a Vietnam situation.
Marc Steiner: So this is a very different dynamic — But a dynamic that could lead to things.
Alice Rothchild: Netanyahu and his right-wing henchmen are a segment of the population that doesn’t represent the secular, liberal Tel Aviv Jews who don’t espouse his right-wing politics. So there’s a huge crisis going on in Israel right now politically.
Marc Steiner: So I’m really curious to hear your thoughts and analysis about where this takes us. We have this right-wing government here in the United States. Trump is a literal madman at the helm who doesn’t really care about Jews that much but loves the idea of Israel doing what it’s doing.
Alice Rothchild: If Trump really cared about Jews, he wouldn’t have forgiven all the crazies who attacked at the time of the election. Those people are fanatical antisemites. He wouldn’t get rid of gun control. He’s unleashing all these forces that are intensely antisemitic. So it’s not that he doesn’t care much about Jews, he does not care about Jews. He cares about Trump. Just to clarify that.
Marc Steiner: [Laughs] An important clarification.
Alice Rothchild: Yes.
Marc Steiner: In that and what we face here and the right-wing government in Israel, I worry about several things. A, I worry about the future of the Palestinian people, what’s going to happen to them. We’re slaughtering people all through Gaza. I’m in touch with people in the West Bank more than I am in Gaza who are telling me these horrendous stories that are taking place. It also unleashes an antisemitic fervor that’s always bubbling below the surface. Not that antisemitism is our fault, but this is unleashing it. And the right is in control in many sectors of this country and across the globe.
I’m not a negative person by nature [laughs], but I’m looking at this and going, OK, so where do you think this takes us? Where does your organizing have to take place to turn this around?
Alice Rothchild: So first of all, I don’t know where this takes us, but I am completely terrified. Early on in this war, I would say the goal of the Israeli government is to depopulate Gaza. And everybody [would] go, oh, that’s too extreme. But the way it looks to me right now is that their goal is to completely devastate the Gaza Strip, to push everybody south, to starve people to death if they don’t kill them with bombs, and then at some point to open the gates and to have voluntary migration. I think that’s the plan. And then the settlers will move in and they’ll clear everything up and they’ll get billions of dollars from US Jewish organizations. And it will continue the dispossession expulsion of Palestinians, which started way before ’48.
And then I think they’re going to do it in the West Bank. I mean, we talk about the Gazafication of the West Bank. They’re bombing refugee camps. They’re displacing people. They’re killing people. They bombed hospitals. This is not new, this is a continuation.
I really also am not shocked by this because if you look at the underlying goals of Zionism and Jewish supremacy, it is to get rid of the Palestinians as much as possible and to take as much land as possible. So in some ways, as horrible as this is, we are just having the fruition of all the dreams from founding the state and creating a state for Jews only. So I am completely terrified that that’s the direction we’re going in.
And the United States, in all of its mishegoss, is going to support this. I think that the Trump-type people don’t like Jews, but they like strong governments, they like dictators and things like that. They hate Iran. They are Islamophobic. So here’s this little country that is doing the job for them. And so it fits with this MAGA universe and the things that they espouse.
And it’s sort of ironic to me that it’s all being done in the name of protecting the Jews. It’s like, oh my God, because this is going to be really dangerous. And when it’s all done, said and done, people are going to blame the Jews. And we have seen this before. And so this is dangerous for Palestinians, and then it’s going to be dangerous for Jews, and it’s just a terrible, terrible idea.
So in terms of trying to organize, I think I take a lot of hope from the organizing the Jewish Voice for Peace is doing because it is the most rapidly growing Jewish organization in the country. It is anti-Zionist, it is pro Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions, it is big tent, everybody’s invited, you don’t have to be a particular kind of person, and they’re really being very thoughtful about the kinds of messaging that they give. And there’s a lot more visibility from Palestinians, which is really, really important because one of the things that helps people be less terrified and racist and all the things that people are is to meet a Palestinian and find out, oh, they’re human. How do you like that? They value education. They want to be doctors. Their children are growing up and are nice people. But that’s on the one-to-one basis really, really important.
And then I think the other thing is that a lot of the catastrophes that have happened in the past were before social media. And because we have social media now, for all of its bad things, it provides us with an unfiltered opportunity to hear the voices from the region, and that makes a real big difference because much of what the Israeli military did for decades was just completely hidden unless you were looking for it from the public. And now it’s not hidden anymore.
I work with We Are Not Numbers, and we’re publishing two stories a day from young writers who are in Gaza writing about their experiences. So it’s on social media, it’s on a website, it’s all out there. You just have to read it, which is very different.
Marc Steiner: What was the name of the group?
Alice Rothchild: We Are Not Numbers.
Marc Steiner: We Are Not Numbers.
Alice Rothchild: You know that group?
Marc Steiner: Yes, yes, yes. I didn’t hear. Yeah.
Alice Rothchild: So I’m the mentor liaison, so I’m the person who gets the writer’s essay after, goes through some stuff, and then finds a published English-speaking writer and matches them, and then they work together on the essay. So there’s so much out there that wasn’t out there 20 years ago.
Marc Steiner: Yeah, that’s really critically important. I feel like, in some ways, historically we’re at this very strange moment. But when I saw the picture of the Israeli soldier holding a Palestinian kid who had a cast on his arm and the fear in the little boy’s eyes, and then I thought about that famous picture from the Warsaw ghetto of the Nazi and this little 12-year-old boy and the terror in his eyes.
Alice Rothchild: It’s not subtle.
Marc Steiner: It’s not, it’s not subtle at all. And you look at that, and I think about, in some ways, when I look at JVP, the struggle inside the Jewish world now, I think of the struggle in the early part of the 20th century between the Zionists and the Bundists, between the revolutionary Jews who were Bundists and the Zionists, many of whom were willing to sell out their own people to get what they wanted.
Alice Rothchild: And there were the Buber Zionists who wanted a binational state. Zionism was highly controversial basically until the ’67 war when it was propagandized that this was an existential struggle. And so Jews just got in line.
I had this famous conversation that a friend of mine was having with one of the Jewish machers in Boston, one of the Jewish leaders, and she was saying, why do you have to be a Zionist to be a Jew? And he said, you don’t understand, Israel is the religion. And I think that that’s really the turning point in ’67 is when that became the test, and you had to be a Zionist to be a good Jew. And that’s when more reform Jews got on the wagon. It was a major turning point.
Marc Steiner: I think that’s true. I’m curious as to your analysis about the shift you’re seeing inside the Jewish [inaudible].
Alice Rothchild: Well, I think what we’re seeing now, in the United States at least, is that Jews are traditionally progressive people, they raise their children to think about civil rights and equality and blah, blah, blah. And then the kids look at what’s going on in Israel and they go, I can’t buy that. So I think this generation is really questioning the things that their parents and grandparents just accepted as the Bible, basically. And the younger generations don’t have Holocaust memory, don’t have the upswing of the ’67 war and blah, blah, blah.
So it’s like a fresh batch, and they’re really having trouble standing with Israel. There are certainly ones that do, but as a group, it’s a whole different ball game. And the majority of people in the United States support an arms embargo against Israel. That’s revolutionary. It hasn’t penetrated to the people who sell the arms, but that’s a major, major shift.
Marc Steiner: So in all the years that I’m trying to figure out for myself as well, talking to other people in our generation where the hope lives that this ends, and how you organize [inaudible] and where you take it. When I see the growth inside the Jewish world of alternative synagogues, even though I’m not a religious person, when I see that, look at that. Or when you watch what JVP is going and the eruption saying, no, not in our name, taking over. And then you see this right wing surge as well. We are on this, it seems to me, a political precipice at the moment, and it takes voices and organizing to really shift it.
And I was just curious, in your own work, you’ve written these books, a physician, an activist, where you see the optimism, where you see the fight going at this moment.
Alice Rothchild: So first of all, it is very hard for me to remain optimistic, but I’m really trying. I’m not a naturally optimistic person [Steiner laughs], I always say I’m pessimistically optimistic.
Marc Steiner: I understand.
Alice Rothchild: And I also feel like, particularly having become a part of the feminist movement, you take two steps forward, one step back, then you get knocked on the head, then you get up again. So I’m not starry-eyed about this.
I am incredibly impressed right now with the assault on universities and the pushback from university students and their professors. This very much reminds me of the Vietnam War. Because there is this massive assault, not only on Palestine, but on DEI and all the things, you know. And more and more universities, their students are getting out in those encampments, they’re putting up their protests, they’re organizing in their communities, they’re doing alternative conferences, they’re doing fasting for Gaza. There’s all sorts of things that young people are doing. And that, for me, is the most hopeful place.
It is also the most dangerous place because the pushback against them is very powerful, very well funded. We should know who all the donors [to these] universities are who are pulling all these strings. And the right wing has been planning for this for decades. And if the right wing wins, they’re going to destroy universities as we know it, and they’re going to destroy a generation of young people, researchers, thinkers, professors, educated people, and that will be catastrophic.
So my hope is with the younger generation and what they’re doing now, but also I see a tremendous amount of support from older people as well. And also that it’s intersectional, which is a new thing. When we started, we were like, will anyone actually be interested in this [Steiner laughs] besides Jews and Palestinians? Will anyone come to our meetings? And now people understand this is much more than the actual topic. This is about the remnants of colonialism. This is about fighting racism. This is about police brutality, this is about the military-industrial complex, all the big things that run the universe. This is what this is about, and this is the test case. And I think we have to be clear on that and clear on how big the struggle is because the opposition is very, very well organized, well funded, and has been planning this for decades.
Marc Steiner: Well, I think the work you’ve been doing, the books you’ve written, and your film, which we’ll be linking to so people can actually watch it — Your film is amazing.
Alice Rothchild: Thank you.
Marc Steiner: We could spend an hour just talking about the film itself — Which we may do! Because I think it’s a powerful piece. And I want to thank you for your work and for not stopping the fight and the struggle both in terms of Palestinian rights and for a better society here. And I really appreciate you taking the time out. It’s been really a great conversation.
Alice Rothchild: Well, it’s been a pleasure, Marc. Thank you so much.
Marc Steiner: Once again, I want to thank Dr. Alice Rothchild for joining us today. And thanks to David Hebden for running the program, and our audio editor, Alina Nehlich, producer Rosette Sewali for making it all happen behind the scenes, and everyone here at The Real News for making the show possible.
Please let me know what you thought about what you heard today, what you’d like us to cover. Just write to me at mss@therealnews.com and I’ll get right back to you.
And once again, thank you to Dr. Alice Rothchild for joining us today and for the incredible work she does. So for the crew here at The Real News, I’m Marc Steiner. Stay involved, keep listening, and take care.
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