Mo: Zionist Guilt?
Series Review: Our current Mazkir, Aidan Lester, shares his thoughts on the 2022 Netflix Series ‘Mo’.
Mo is a Netflix series that follows the life of Mohammed Najjar, a Palestinian asylum seeker born in Qatar and raised in Houston, Texas. The show has been out for a while, but for a long time I couldn’t bring myself to watch it. I suspected the narrative presented would be one I would find uncomfortable. However, a little over a week ago, I finally pressed play.
The series is excellent. It is two seasons long and navigated the extremely complex issue that is the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in a somewhat comedic, nuanced manner. Mo lives with his mother and older brother, while his older sister has already moved out. The family has been in Houston for around 20 years as asylum seekers, with the hope that they would one day be able to gain US Citizenship and return to their family in the West Bank, where Mo’s mother grew up.
In one episode, Mo’s mother says something that really resonated with me – something that made me realise the story of the Palestinian people and the story of the Jewish people is not so different:
“What do you want us to do? Sit and cry! You think your grandmother cried and died because the Zionists seized her land... We carry on. That’s what we do, us Palestinians, we carry on.”
There are many things to be said about the Jewish people, but one thing is undeniable: our history is rooted in persecution, loss of lands and discrimination, but in the face of that, we carry on. We don’t sit and cry, we move forward. We work it out, rebuild and we survive. Mo’s family lost their home not once, not twice, but three times and his mother tells him: “We carry on.”
Granted, there are differences here. This goes beyond discussions of antisemitism and antizionism; it goes beyond politics. These are lived experiences - stories of families who had a home one day and lost it the next.
Yet, the Palestinian people, the ones who simply want to live in peace, in the place they come from – they are, in many ways, like us. I am sure Mo and his family would disagree with me and I would have to accept it. But I truly believe that we are more similar than the world tries to make us out to be: two peoples, with a deep connections to a land, that want to live in peace, divided by entities and authorities that want it all for themselves. Two peoples who carry on in the face of persecution and difficulty.
As a Jewish Zionist, the series forced me to confront my own beliefs. It also made me angry. I wish I could speak to Mo and tell him that his experiences with Israeli people are not reflective of the entire nation; I, too, would condemn the officer at border control who destroyed the only copy of a video of his deceased father just as much as him; that I am sorry his family was evicted from their home in Haifa before 1948, and again from the West Bank and moved to Qatar. I wish I could tell him that there are so many Israeli people who feel the same frustration and pain, not unlike his.
I am angry that Jews and Palestinians are so divided that we are unable to have these conversations with each other. I know Mo hates Israel, but I can also understand why. After 20 years of waiting, he returned to the West Bank and was confronted by hostile settlers, harassed at the border and made to feel like a second-class citizen. Why would he feel any different?
Being a Jew and a Zionist is difficult. We are often made to feel guilty for things that are entirely beyond our control. We are the only people who have to defend our right to exist, our right to have a country that we can call our own. We are the only people that are forced to defend a war that we didn’t start but decided to finish. We are the only country facing claims of ‘genocide’ when it simply wanted its people to be returned from captivity.
So why should I feel guilty? This is my identity and something I should feel proud of. There are so few of us in the world, we should be out and proud to say ‘I am a zionist’. But to Mo, the ‘Zionists’ are the settlers who attacked his family, destroyed his belongings and changed the entire trajectory of his family’s history. How can I not feel guilty as I watch this story unfold?
So what is the point of this article? Simply this: in this conflict, the people who are truly affected - the Palestinians, the Jews, the Israelis - are all entitled to their feelings. We can feel anger toward the ‘other side’, we can cry for the people we know, we can hate the people who want to bring about the destruction of our people and our home. But we also have a responsibility to seek change.
We need to be able to watch something like Mo and recognise that there is more to the conflict than our side’s narrative. We need to be willing to learn, to empathise, to grow as people. Until this mindset becomes the norm, the cycle will continue.
For Mo and his family, it might be too late. But for me it isn’t - and it doesn’t have to be for you. Don’t feel guilty for being a Zionist. But don’t fall into the extremism that has consumed so many on both sides.
