Mark Hammel, Ph.D.
Bringing new perspective to the issues surrounding Israelism, equality and humanity through words and music
Mark Hammel is a psychologist and a member of Combatants for Peace and Jewish Voice for Peace. He is a former Zionist born in the United States into an intensely Labor Zionist milieu. He’s a former kibbutz member, IDF veteran of the 1973 Yom Kippur War and occupation of Palestine. Mark repatriated to the U.S. to study and practice psychology. His specialty is in PTSD. Mark is a public speaker (especially since October 7, 2023) on Palestine and Israel and its history of settler colonialism and the war on Palestine.
Mark and I talked about the milieu of the Zionism of Mark’s youth — the original ideals and idealism of nationalism to create a world of freedom via the establishment of nation-states (that is the milieu and the irony, the tragedy of the history of Zionism, and the martyrdom of Palestine.
Mark submitted some incredibly moving music that was relevant to our conversation.
“Each of these [songs] has a story that is a piece of my life,” says Mark.
“Rozhinkas mit Mandlen” (Raisons and Almonds),” Yiddish lullaby sung by Trudie Richman, Smithsonian Folkways Recordings, 2004.
Mark describes the song: “This is a beautiful representation of the Yiddish culture that was obliterated during the Holocaust. From my earliest memories, there’s always an overlay of grief and loss in my consciousness as a Jew of the loss of that great culture and millions and millions of my brothers and sisters in the Yiddish world. And it’s through that sense of grief that I connect with Palestine with an obliterated polity, civilization and culture that, much to the chagrin of the Zionists, refuses to go away.”
Recently, I saw Mark was at a local Jewish Voice for Peace meeting. He mentioned a book by Palestinian scholar Nur Masalha titled, “Palestine: A Four Thousand Year History.” The theme is that Palestine and the Palestinian people have a very long, continuous history. I highly recommend it.
Mark says: “Over the course of 3,500 years, except for references in the Hebrew Bible, there is virtually no reference to a place called the land of Israel. It’s all Palestine, down through thousands of years. It’s important also to remember that, though for Zionists and in Israel the Jewish Bible is taught as history. But it’s not history. It’s sacred myth… even though today it’s taught today in Israel as though it’s history.”
Mark continues: “The Jewish, Israelite or Judean presence in Palestine is not the major presence throughout history. There are many, many other national groups and ethnicities that were present all along in that land of Palestine. The fact that somehow this particular sacred myth lasted all these millennia doesn’t give it any legal pride of place. The fact that it has pride of place in certain parts of Western culture — that’s fine — but that shouldn’t give it any great weight that that somehow the Jews, the people of that book, of that sacred myth, have something they can hold over the heads of the people who lived there, and say ‘this is ours, it’s not yours, you are interlopers.’”
Another book that Mark mentioned was “The Lobbying for Zionism” by Ilan Pappé, which makes it clear that “Zionism didn’t originate with Jews. It originated in Great Britain and in the US as Christian Zionism,” says Mark.
To give this some context for readers, the Jewish Zionist interpretation of the Hebrew Bible is similar to Christians in the U.S. who take the Bible as historical fact. That’s very common in this country. It’s a fact that there are more Christian Zionists in the US than there are Jewish Zionists in the U.S.
Mark says: “In order to fulfill the Messianic prophecies of the New Testament, the fulfillment of the Jewish Messianism — the end of days for Jews — was referred to as the Redemption, the return of Jews to Zion (to the land Israel). That carried great weight in Great Britain and the US decades prior to Jewish-European Zionism, which happened in the late 19th century. Ironically, it found its way into English literature. A number of years ago, when I read “Daniel Deronda,” the last great novel of English novelist George Elliot, I was taken aback about how firmly Zionist it was, and that it was such a very important part of British culture and made Great Britain fertile ground for its political adoption of Zionism in the early part of the 20th century.”
To provide further context to this era, it also is worth remembering that the Balfour Declaration of 1917 was a public statement issued by the British government during WWI announcing its support for the establishment of a national homeland for the Jewish people in Palestine, which at the time had a small minority Jewish population.
Mark says: “It’s noteworthy that Lord Balfour who was a great proponent of British Christian Zionism was actually a fairly well known anti-Semite. The great reservoir of Jews in Europe at the time was in Eastern Europe. The British had a population of Anglo-Jews who had been established there in Great Britain for hundreds of years, some were even titled aristocracy. They together with Christian Zionists, the last thing they wanted was large numbers of Eastern European Jews to be flooding Great Britain, which was similar to the U.S., which had a tidal wave of Jewish immigration but that led to a backlash and the racist immigration law of 1924, which kept further Jewish mass immigration to the US from materializing. The British got a jump on that and stopped it as much as they could.”
Mark continues: “Ironically, there had been a fairly large working class Jewish population, most of whose roots were in Eastern Europe in Great Britain, and the Zionists, who were strongly affected by Socialist Zionism, found a lot of popularity among the Socialist Party in Great Britain, as well, that added to support for the 1917 Balfour Declaration. So, there was both right-wing and left-wing support for Zionism in Great Britain.”
“Banks of Marble,” Pete Seeger, Gazette, Folkways Records, 1958
Mark’s thoughts on the song: “In the really intense indoctrination in labor Zionist summer camp WAS summer camp. I started going the summer when I turned 11 years old in 1959 and went all through 1966. I went all the way through as a camper and counselor. The camp was based on Socialist principles. So, all week long we had Zionism, Hebrew singing and dancing, discussion groups, to indoctrination into Zionist ideology. On Saturday nights we had a campfire and the guitars and banjos came out. We sang union songs, protest songs and songs about the Spanish Civil War and that’s where I learned the song that I know from recordings and from the campfire singing at summer camp.
This is “Banks of Marble.” This is what turned us into Socialists. This is what turned us into young people who believed very, very deeply in social justice. This is really one of the songs that I grew up with that plays in my head all the time and is part and parcel of my Zionist upbringing — the Socialist part. The Zionist part didn’t stick but the Socialist part has stuck!”
Mark says: “I didn’t leave Israel because of the racism; I had grown up in a racist country (the US). That wasn’t enough to get me to leave Israel. The really pivotal experience for me was in the late 80s and early 90s when a series of histories were published by Israeli authors based on declassified documents of the 1947-1949 period, the establishment of the State of Israel, the end of the British Mandate, and the terrible tragedy for Palestine (the Nakba, the catastrophe). Those histories revealed that we had been massively lied to. This great accomplishment/victory was from the Israeli point of view was a great victory but it came at a horrific price; and it was something I was brought up to venerate. But I have learned that it was a war of ethnic cleansing.
By no means, as it was presented to us, was it a war of desperation, that Israel was in danger of being wiped out by the five Arab armies. That’s a myth. It wasn’t true. Israel had more forces under arms than all the Arab armies combined. When independence was declared in May 1948 at the end of the British Mandate, Ben-Gurion, the leader and the military and civil leadership of the Zionist settlement, they weren’t rolling the dice, they weren’t playing Russian roulette, they knew they were going to win. They had subverted the major Arab leader, King Abdullah of Transjordan. They basically bribed him to make sure that the Arab army invasion was doomed to failure. First, they paid him money. Second, they said you can come in, you’re the King of Transjordan, you can cross the Jordan and take over the Palestinian area and then become the King of the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan. That’s how Jordan came into being and transformed. So, it was divided between the two. That was a fait accompli. Learning this really made me see the whole thing in a new light. That was the pivotal moment [for me].”
Mark continues: “That was what really turned me around. All these years of feeling close to Palestine and really seeing my family’s experience (especially my father’s) in Nazi Germany, seeing those experiences in a light that equated those experiences with the suffering of Palestine and opened my arc to Palestine in a way that had never been opened before.”
My family background is purely British. I was brought up to think of Britain as this wonderful place — the literature, history and the rest of it. To find out that the empire that I came from was quite brutal, cruel and despotic in many ways was a similar transition. So, I can identify on a certain level with Mark’s transformation.
Mark says: “All of the ideals that had been instilled in us and that were the founding, foundational principles of the kibbutz were there to be defied in obvious ways. It was a very drab existence. I really learned a lot about hypocrisy. A community that defines itself in glowing terms is fertile ground for hypocrisy because no matter what you do you think it’s for the greater good. That goes for the kibbutz, it goes for Israel, it goes for the town of Woodstock, where I live where I’ve seen a lot of hypocrisy (it defines itself as ‘peace and love’). It’s everywhere to be seen where people think they are fulfilling a great ideal. I have no doubt that was the truth in the Nazi Germany that my family barely escaped from. Young Nazis didn’t wake up and say, “How can I commit a crime against humanity?” They woke up in the morning and said, “How can I make the world a better place?” So, I think most mass atrocities and genocides occur this way.”
Mark continues: “My specialty [as a psychologist for many years] has been with post-traumatic stress disorder. Each individual victim of trauma is a world until itself, a world of horror unto itself. I don’t diminish the horror and suffering of the victims and their families but this is the end game of the Zionists, to tear itself to pieces. Israel is tearing itself to pieces. What the outcome will be. Who knows?”
There are some who say — journalists and thinkers alike, such as Ilan Pappé — that this will be the undoing of Israel in the long run partly for a reason that I wrote about in an earlier Substack. All nations require a myth or mythology to exist. America has its mythology. Israel has depended upon its own mythology for a long time. But that mythology seems to be eroding before our eyes, and I don’t see how a country can exist without that mythology.
Mark concludes: Maybe we’re seeing the final paroxysm of that myth of inheriting the land and taking possession of it at the expense of its Palestinian citizens. But there’s going to be a lot of suffering along the way.”
“We Shall Not be Moved,” Pete Seeger – The Song Swappers. 2004 Smithsonian Folkways Recordings / 1995 Folkways Records
Mark gives his thoughts on the final song on his playlist. “’We Shall Not be Moved’” is really the Palestinian philosophy of sumud, of steadfastness, of not moving, making every single inch of Palestine a difficult accomplishment for Israel to accomplish. So, it fits with Palestinian idea of sumud, steadfastness.”
We’re coming up on almost a year of this great tragedy that is unfolding every day before our eyes. It seems to me there’s no end in sight and the only thing we can hold out for is the idea that “We Shall Not be Moved.”
Listen to the full interview on Radio Kingston WKNY 1490 AM/107.9 FM here.