Tikva Honig-Parnass (, 1929-2025)Rance, Roland.Tikva Honig-Parnass 1929-2025. International Viewpoint. 4 March 2025. was an Israeli anti-Zionist activist.
Honig-Parnass grew up in a secular Zionist milieu in Mandate Palestine, reading Marx and Rosa Luxemburg as a teenager. During the 1948 Palestine war she served in the Haganah and then the Palmach, where she served in the Harel Brigade. By her account, Honig-Parnass saw depopulated Palestinian villages (such as Qalunya) during the 1948 war. In retrospect she describes herself as having been "brainwashed"France, Steve. ‘The land will sink beneath your feet’ — a century of Jews wrestling with Zionism. Mondoweiss. December 13, 2020. by her Zionist education: “The position we internalised pretended that we were not dealing with the development of a military force that was waiting for an opportune time to realise the Zionist plan for the conquest of the land and the dispossession of its Palestinian inhabitants, but rather a ‘revolutionary army’ of the oppressed.”
A Marxist since adolescence, Honig-Parnass worked as the Knesset secretary for Mapam in 1954-55.
Honig-Parnass came to view Zionism as a colonial enterprise in the early 1960s, through her involvement with Matzpen.
In the 1970s and 1980s she was involved with various Israeli left-wing groups, including the Bir Zeit University Solidarity Committee and Dai la Kibush (End the Occupation). In 1987 she joined the Alternative Information Center, whose English-language publication, News from Within, she edited for 13 years. Over the course of the 1990s Honig-Parnass grew increasingly critical of the AIC's political line, and she was fired in 2000. With a former colleague, Toufic Haddad, she founded a new English-language journal, Between the Lines, which shut down in 2003 due to lack of funding. In 2007 Haymarket Books published a selection of articles from Between the Lines, including contributions from Marwan Barghouti, Azmi Bishara, Ilan Pappé and others.
In 2011 Honig-Parnass published another book with Haymarket, False Prophets of Peace: Liberal Zionism and the Struggle for Palestine.
Honig-Parnass appeared in the 2013 documentary On the Side of the Road, where she discusses her experiences in the 1948 war.Levy, Sarah. “Delegitimize Zionism,” says Israeli filmmaker. The Electronic Intifada. November 6, 2014.
Honig-Parnass was a supporter of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement.
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