the most misunderstood country on earth

How Noa Tishby’s simple guide helped me understand my own Zionism (and Tishby’s connections to Belarusian Jewish history!)

By: Tasha Ackerman 

The first time I travelled to Israel was on a Birthright Trip in 2014. In the small American city where I grew up, the Jewish community is small and I had not been raised to be an active member of it – my family did not belong to a synagogue and I never attended Hebrew school or went to Jewish summer camp. So apart from the occasional Shabbat dinner at a friend’s house or the occasional annual Passover seder at extended family’s homes, my knowledge of Judaism and Israel was limited. 

On my Birthright trip, we were given a brief lecture on Zionism – teaching me and the 30 other Jewish American participants about the birth of Israel as an independent nation. I left this excursion feeling a mixture of pride and confusion – a triumph for the Jews reclaiming their homeland, but also curiosity: where had the Zionists returned home from? And what about all of the people that were already living in the Mandate of Palestine in 1948? 

A few years later, I participated in a summer fellowship teaching English to students living amongst Israel’s geographic and economic periphery. I had a diverse group of students spanning the secular to religious spectrum whose roots spread across the globe, representing the different waves of immigration throughout Israel’s history. Their individual stories and unique ways of being Jewish broadened my understanding of the complexity and depth of the Israeli identity. 

When I discussed this with a friend while walking to a cafe in Haifa, she stopped me- you need to read Noa Tishby’s book. Noa Tishby? I didn’t recognise the name. My friend explained that she is an Israeli author and actor who wrote a book tackling many of the questions that I found myself wrestling with. In Israel: A Simple Guide to the Most Misunderstood Country on Earth, Tisbhy goes in-depth to explore the historical and political context of Israel, which is all woven together through her personal stories. After that summer in Israel, I returned home to Minneapolis and dived into the book. 

First off: Who is Noa Tishby?

Noa Tishby is an Israeli actor and advocate whose family’s roots are ingrained with the establishment of the State of Israel. Her grandparents and great-grandparents were involved in Zionist movements that included co-founding one of the first kibbutzim in Israel, creating a youth-Zionist movement in Belarus and involvement in the political sphere during the formation of the state of Israel. Tishby started acting in her youth before doing her mandatory IDF service. She continued her career in the entertainment industry, eventually establishing her career in the film and TV industry in The United States. In 2022, the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs appointed her as the first-ever Special Envoy for Combating Antisemitism and Delegitimization.

Photo credit Noa Tishby.com

What does “Israel: A Simple Guide to the Most Misunderstood Country on Earth” teach us about Israel, Zionism, and Belarus? 

Tishby writes: “There has been a lot of chatter about Zionism recently, and even more talk about anti-Zionism… after thousands of conversations with highly educated people, I have come to realise that most people don’t know what this word means.” To explain this concept, Tishby transports us back in time to the Russian empire, where in 1791, Catherine the Great, created the Pale of Settlement in the western region of Russia where Jews were permitted to reside in segregated areas, thus making it forbidden to reside outside them. This region encompasses the area that is now modern-day Belarus, Moldova, and parts of Lithuania, Ukraine, and Poland, as well as other countries with fluctuating borders over time.  In the Pale of Settlement, Jews faced discriminatory rules – such as enforcing double taxation and stripping them of citizenship. With generations, the discrimination became worse, eventually leading to the organised pogroms and mass murder of Jews, particularly from 1881-1883 and 1903-1906.

Israel A Simple Guide to the Most Misunderstood Country on Earth

In her book, Tishby goes into this history in much more detail while still using a conversational, storytelling style. She demonstrates the landscape in which the Zionist movement began. As European values shifted towards liberation and democratic ideology, the Jews who were experiencing poverty and persecution created this movement as a means of survival. She explains: “This, my friends, is the origin of Zionism. The necessity for Jewish safety and self-determination in their ancestral home, a movement of Jewish liberation.” 

Tishby explains about leaders of the Zionist movement: ranging from members of her own family to Prime Minister Menachem Begin – all with roots in Belarus. Begin’s legacy includes his commitment that Israel remains a homeland to all Jews, regardless of their background. During his years in leadership, he paved the way for our young country to be a land where Jews across the diaspora belonged: from former Soviet states to those exiled from countries throughout the Middle East. This belief extended to Jews in every corner of the world and believed Jews of all backgrounds would form a new shared identity. By providing the historical and geographical context in her book, I was finding answers to the questions I had at that Zionist lecture seven years prior during my Birthright trip. 

What is Tishby’s connection to Belarus? 

Tishby’s safta (grandma) Fania Artzi was born in Bobruisk, which at the time was part of “White Russia,” though now part of Belarus. When the Bolshevik Revolution began in 1917, the town, which was about 70 per cent Jewish, welcomed this change and was excited about the promise of equality. Her grandma shared stories of turning points, where they began to learn that Jews were not considered to be included in this vision of equality. For example, the Belarusian students who requested to learn Belarusian in school were permitted to, whereas a Jewish student who requested to learn Hebrew was exiled to Siberia. At fifteen years old, she created an organisation for younger Jewish Socialists intending to make aliyah to Israel and be part of the socialist Jewish society they dreamed of. Two years later, an informant in her group released the names of several members to the authorities and Bolshevik police searched the homes of Young Pioneer members, including Fania. Fania came out clean, but several other young members were caught and exiled to labour camps in Siberia. In Bobruisk, it was unsafe for her to be both Jewish and a socialist. Her family recognised the danger and sailed from Odessa to Jaffa port in 1925. Fania was passionate about working the land. As did many other Jewish emigrants, she focused on building kibbutzim.

Tisbhy’s great-grandfather, Nachum Tisch was born in the Grodno region in modern-day Belarus. Nachum was educated in Germany and Switzerland and became involved in the exiled Russian socialist movement. He was arrested when he returned to Russia, where being a Zionist meant a fifteen-year sentence in a Siberian work imprisonment. He was released after just six years in custody, and then he made his way to London, where he was recruited by a Zionist organisation to help build the state of Israel by founding the Office of Industry and Trade, allowing him to emigrate to Jerusalem in 1922. He believed that in order to have a functioning Jewish State, a strong Jewish economy would need to be built alongside it, and he worked to build industry where there had been none.   

How can we continue to learn from Tishby?

1. Read her book. 
2. Follow her pages on social media. 

After the attacks on October 7, and as the war between Israel and Hamas unfolded, I was now living in Israel and found myself again at a point of reflection: trying to balance the conflicting narratives I was reading. The kibbutzim that were attacked were built, and functioned, on the same Jewish and socialist values that Tishby’s safta Fania had dreamed of and physically worked to build from nothing. I saw post after post on social media, justifying these attacks against innocent civilians. Again, I felt frustrated. Why can’t other people see the Israel that I see? As I thought of responses to troubling posts I found myself at a loss for words with which to respond. And that’s where Noa Tishby came to my rescue once again. 

Now, Tisbhy has taken to TikTok and other social media sites – addressing misinformation and providing facts about our land. She shares short clips, speaking to a wide span of audiences from political hearings, activists, mental health experts, and celebrities including Debra Messing and Chelsea Handler. In December 2023, she travelled to Israel, bearing witness to the kibbutzim massacres,  using her platform to share the voices of family members awaiting the return of their loved ones taken hostage in Gaza. 

Tishby’s profile on TikTok has almost 147.2K followers, with several videos receiving up to over a hundred thousand views.  Her speech at the FIDF National NY Gala has 1.9 million views on TikTok. Through this platform, she continues to challenge the narrative- to address the rhetoric used to dismantle Israel’s story and who she is. In the speech, Tishby states: “If you hide behind words like militants, it’s complicated, well…but the occupation, resistance, or decolonisation… If you cant unequivocally condemn rape, beheading, or torture of innocent and the kidnapping of grandmothers, and some Holocaust survivors from their sick beds, then you are witless pawns in a propaganda machine you don’t even know you’re being played by.” 

I think of my great-grandparents, born in the Pale of Settlement who immigrated to America in 1905 before Israel had her statehood. These stories within my family history are lost, so while I have no idea what ultimately convinced them to uproot their lives and move to America, I wonder if  they had had the choice to move to a Jewish state would they have made that choice? I don’t know, but I do know that their story, whatever it may be, is ingrained in me and woven into my journey to make aliyah to Israel. So, I continue to read story after story from our complex and beautiful land, and I continue to use Tishby’s Simple Guide as context to understand her history and continue to learn the language to stand up for her as well. 

In addition to Israel: A Simple Guide to the Most Misunderstood Country on Earth, Tishby’s new book: Uncomfortable Conversations with a Jew, co-written with Emmanuel Acho is now available for pre-sale. You can also find her on social media sites such as TikTok and Instagram @noatishby.