Voices from the Conflict: Mira Sucharov

A former "liberal Zionist" now advocates for both Israeli and Palestinian rights

A FEW YEARS AGO, after her youngest child’s b’nai mitzvah, Mira Sucharov had all her children’s Hebrew names tattooed on her arm. She has always spoken only Hebrew with her children, who are now all young adults, and the tattoo honored her love of both the language and her children.

This year, Sucharov had the tattoo modified, adding the Arabic translations of her children’s names. “What I hadn’t fully internalized is how Hebrew sounds to Palestinians, how threatening it can sound because Hebrew is the language of the occupier for Palestinians,” she explains. “This signals that my values around Hebrew are not meant to imply Palestinian erasure.”

The tattoo story perfectly encapsulates her evolving consciousness of the complexities of the situation in the Middle East. Sucharov, a professor of political science at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada, once thought she’d make her home in Israel, but settled instead for making Middle Eastern studies her career. Outside of the university, she has written for the Israeli daily Haaretz, the Forward, Jewish Currents, and other publications.

Sucharov grew up in a tight-knit Jewish community in Winnipeg, where she attended Hebrew Day School and Camp Massad, a Hebrew immersion overnight camp. She developed a deep connection with both the idea of Israel and the place itself. That relationship was cemented on the first of many visits to Israel, when she spent three weeks there in fifth grade visiting her aunt and uncle on a kibbutz in the southern Galilee.

These days, though, her aunt and uncle no longer speak to Sucharov because of what she describes as her full-throated support of Israeli and Palestinian rights. As a teen and young adult she identified as a progressive Zionist, and later a liberal Zionist. “That term is so elastic now it means almost nothing,” she says. Despite choosing not to make aliyah, her connection to Israel remains strong.

But about ten years ago, Sucharov hit a turning point. “I realized I had some blind spots that I hadn’t been willing to face,” she says.

THE BIGGEST OF THOSE BLIND SPOTS was around the right to return, meaning the right of Palestinian refugees who were living in what’s now Israel in 1948 to return to their cities, towns, and lives there. The right to return is a key issue, and one of the most contentious elements in an extraordinarily contentious conflict. The return of up to 5 million Palestinian refugees to a country of 10 million Jews could dramatically and permanently change the demographics and politics of the state.

Sucharov realized that while she’d always opposed the occupation, and was comfortable calling for an active peace process and a two-state solution, she’d never really thought through the issue of the right to return. “I wasn’t willing to face the implications of the Nakba and what needed to be done to make that right,” she says. The word Nakba means “catastrophe” in Arabic, and refers to the creation of the state of Israel in 1948 and the attendant displacement and (some say) ethnic cleansing of the Arab inhabitants there.

At that point, says Sucharov, she began to feel that the term “liberal Zionist” no longer conveyed a clear meaning. Eventually she concluded that she supports what she calls a “confederal approach,” as laid out through the organization A Land for All, whose motto is “Two States, One Homeland.”

It’s an interesting concept, one that separates citizenship from residence. Palestinian refugees could return as residents of Israel and citizens of a new Palestinian state; they would vote in local and municipal elections in Israel if they lived there, and in national elections in the Palestinian state. Israeli settlers could stay in the West Bank as residents of the Palestinian state, voting in local Palestinian elections and in national Israeli ones.

“It’s a way of honoring the attachment that both peoples have to the whole entire land,” says Sucharov. As a secular Jew, she feels little connection to, say, the holy sites in Eastern Jerusalem, and she says she has no sympathy for the settlers in the West Bank. But she recognizes that other people hold different attachments, and thinks those should be honored.

She’s gotten quite a bit of pushback for her views, much of it from other Jews. “I’ve been called a self-hating Jew, a Jew in name only, an enabler of anti-Semitism,” she says. “A lot of hateful stuff from my own community.”

That pushback inspired her in 2021 to start a Facebook group called Drachim—A New Path Forward for Israel/Palestine. Drachim is a Hebrew word meaning “roads” or “paths.” The group has more than 1,400 members. (Full disclosure: I am a member.) The group’s About page reads, in part, “This group is for those committed to Palestine solidarity principles who also feel an emotional connection to Israel, especially through language and culture and related expressions. It was founded in 2021 to fill an important gap. Many Israeli-connected groups deny Palestinian rights including refugee return. And many Palestine solidarity groups don’t create a nurturing environment for those who care about Israel, especially in a cultural sense.”

Like other Jews in the diaspora, Sucharov has had to wrestle with the complexities of balancing an attachment to a culture, a place, and a people with a painful political situation. Take her stance on BDS, for instance. BDS—which stands for Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions—calls for the world to pressure Israel through these economic tools as well as through political avenues. BDS says don’t buy Israeli products, don’t visit Israel, don’t support Israeli academics in any way. It’s become a flashpoint in the ongoing war of opinions around the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and a key talking point among Palestinian supporters.

Sucharov says she no longer supports groups that protest BDS, though she herself doesn’t subscribe to it . “It just doesn’t feel right to me for emotional reasons,” she says. “And partly for strategic reasons, so I can maintain my access to Israel in a way that I need, for myself, for my emotional needs, and for my research.”

She compares her feelings about Israel to her feelings about Canada, her homeland. She feels connected to aspects of the culture in Canada but believes the country needs to address how indigenous people are and have been treated there.

Similarly, she believes Israel needs to make profound changes in how it operates and governs. At the same time, she’s excited to visit the country, to watch Israeli movies and listen to Israeli music. “It’s just in me from a very tender age,” she says. “It doesn’t mean I don’t have serious political critique.”