I grew up in a strongly Jewish home with a deep love of Israel. My first trip to Israel was in the summer of 1969 when I was a dedicated anti-war activist on my campus at the University of California, Los Angeles. I traveled to Israel with a group of young Jewish women to study with Inbal, the Yemenite dance theater of Israel. As part of the trip, I attended a conference for Jewish progressive young people from four countries.

When I went for my first visit to the Wailing Wall, I saw the Israeli military with their guns guarding the sites surrounding the Wall. I had a strong premonition that day in 1969 that I couldn ’t shake off: that the occupation of Arab lands and the dependence on military strength to secure Israel ’s well being would be the downfall of my people. Everyone around me was celebrating the victory, that Israel could defeat her enemies in six days. I was heartbroken because I could see that the Israel I loved from afar as a child was being consumed by a military victory that was so foreign to my understanding of what it meant to be Jewish. I went in search of those within Israel who shared my concern. Since buses didn ’t run in Jerusalem on the Sabbath, I walked five miles on a Saturday afternoon to find the one conscientious objector I had been told was refusing to fight in the Israeli army. He was a lonely voice speaking out against the growing reliance on the military.

I came back to the United States and tried to talk with my Jewish friends and my rabbi at Hillel about my worries for Israel. I couldn ’t find anyone Jewish to talk to. In those years, many Jews were saying that there was no such thing as a Palestinian. No one could listen to a twenty-year-old who had just come back from her first trip to Israel and was grieving about the growing pride in military solutions for a complex struggle.

The only person I could find who understood my worries for Israel was an African American friend, Lou Smith, who directed a storefront in Watts for Black empowerment, Operation Bootstrap. I had begun attending White-Black Dialogue sessions at Operation Bootstrap while I was still in high school, and I built a strong friendship with Lou. He told me that one of the reasons he liked me so much was because I was proud of who I was —and I was proud of being Jewish. I invited Lou to speak to the seventh graders I taught at a local Reform Synagogue. Here was a strong African American community activist telling my seventh grade students why they should be proud of being Jewish. It was to Lou I turned in 1969 when I couldn ’t find anyone Jewish to talk to about Israel. I cried with him about my worries that Jews were celebrating a military victory over Arabs and how I thought this could destroy the soul of the Jewish people. Lou was able to tell me about his similar worries with the growing militarism in the Black Power movement.

I spent the next forty years trying to understand and then help Jews heal from some of the scars I saw that summer in Israel. As part of that work, I have led workshops all over the world for Jews on issues of Jewish identity, Jewish internalized oppression, and Jewish-non Jewish alliance building. In thousands of counseling sessions, I have listened to Jewish stories —and come to understand first-hand how the unconscious collective memory of the Holocaust invades every part of our daily lives as Jews in ways that very few of us have a full picture of —and affect deeply American Jewish responses to Israel.

Those of my generation, born either during or directly after World War II, bear some of the strongest scars from the Holocaust. Many were born into families who either lost loved ones in the death camps or had to bring children into a world that had just gassed six million Jews, including thousands of Jewish babies.

There is one phrase I have heard so many times in my life, whenever concerns about Israel and Palestinian rights are raised: “How can we, a people who have experienced 2,000 years of mistreatment, turn around and mistreat another people?”

Denial is one of the first psychological stages of dealing with unbearable grief. Many Jews in the United States deal with the enormous feelings of grief and devastation from the Holocaust by denying that they knew anything about what was happening to Jews.

I took my parents to the United States Holocaust Museum when it first opened in Washington, D.C. Before getting to the museum, my dad sat me down and said, “Honey, we just didn’t know what Hitler was doing.” When we got to the museum, I walked with my dad hand in hand through rooms with newspaper clippings from the New York Times, the Chicago Tribune, and other papers, all dating back to the late 1930s. Article after article spelled out clearly Hitler ’s design for Jews. I turned to my dad, who is an avid newspaper reader, and said as lovingly as I could, “I don’t understand. How can you say you didn’t know anything?”

The guilt for so many American Jews is enormous. I was fifty-three years old before hearing that there was a huge part of my family that were never heard from again after 1941 and most likely perished in the death camps. I know many Jews of my generation with similar stories of only recently seeing pictures or being told about family that were killed.

The amount of hidden, denied parts of our past means that we as American Jews are hidden —with important parts of our own history locked up in denial. How will American Jews ever agree to examine their unquestioning support of some policies of the Israeli government, when parts of their own family histories are so deeply unexamined? Is it possible that there is a connection between those Jews who have a difficult time facing the unfaceable —the destruction of six million Jews—and the Jews who have a difficult time facing that the Israel we love so much could be contributing in significant ways to the daily suffering and mistreatment of the Palestinian people?

A Palestinian and Israeli team presented a slide show last year in my community to a largely Jewish audience about their reconciliation work with Israelis and Palestinians in Israel. At a Shabbat morning service at my synagogue later that month, I listened to a young Palestinian speak about the day he had been shot by an Israeli soldier. He told us about lying in a hospital bed, filled with rage towards Israelis, and planning for revenge, when his father came to visit him. His father convinced him to move beyond his hatred and work instead for Israeli-Palestinian reconciliation.

I was deeply moved to hear these young Palestinian speakers. I was glad their stories were being heard by so many American Jews. But I couldn ’t help thinking also that American Jews only invite Palestinian speakers into their synagogues who have a gentle message of reconciliation. The Palestinians who are angry, who are suffering daily indignities under the continuing occupation, and whose messages aren’t so clearly filled with hope, are rarely invited to speak in Jewish congregations. This insulates Jews in the United States from hearing firsthand from Palestinians who are suffering under Israeli occupation. This denial, initially born out of tremendous unhealed grief from the Holocaust, has now rigidified into a similar denial about Palestinian oppression.

For all of us in the United States who love Israel and want her to flourish and grow for the next sixty years, we may want to consider that there is prerequisite work to do with Jews to un-numb from the Holocaust and its continuing effects on all of our daily lives. As we reach beyond our own denial, we might be more effective in assisting U.S. Jews to un-numb and to then make the important connections between our pain as a people and the pain being inflicted by our beloved Israel on the Palestinian people.