May 9, 2024 | OPINION | By Anonymous Contributor
Disclosure: The Catalyst made the decision to grant the writer of this piece anonymity. The reasons for granting anonymity include the writer’s fear of personal, social and physical retribution on campus. The Catalyst has recently made changes to our anonymity standards in response to student hesitancy to speak with The Catalyst on record, in part due to the silencing effects of potential disciplinary retaliation. The Catalyst will not be extending this anonymity to other op-ed writers outside of other extraordinary circumstances. The opinions represented in this article do not reflect those of anyone other than the author themself.
In light of the Columbia protests, Angela Davis’s speech at Shove Chapel and Ilhan Omar’s comments on Columbia protesters, the overarching message to some Jewish students from liberal institutions can sometimes feel like the only good Jew is an anti-Zionist Jew. Statistically, however, the majority of Jews are Zionists. I consider myself a Zionist, as do most Jewish people I know. What mainstream discourse forgets is that Zionism simply means to support the existence of a state of Israel.
To me, Zionism does not mean supporting the settlements. Zionism does not mean denying the pain and suffering that the founding and current state of Israel has caused Palestinians, and Zionism does not mean supporting the war, or the assault on Gaza.
Some Jews on campus, from professors to students, feel isolated and uncomfortable. The outgoing message to some Jews seems to be that the only “good” Jew is an anti-Zionist Jew, and many of my peers have felt uncomfortable or scared to speak out.
What Zionism usually means to some Jewish individuals is that we have family in Israel — family that were forced to flee to Israel, for the most part; and family that believes that Israel needs to exist for Jewish safety, as a haven for persecuted Jews, in case anything happens.
I have a friend who calls this belief held by Jewish families Judeo-pessimism, and the “anti-Zionist” Jewish perspective, Judeo-optimism.
Judeo-pessimism is the school of thought my father, who grew up under an antisemitic military regime, where his mother who survived the Holocaust had friends who were “disappeared,” falls under.
He subscribes to the idea that, inevitably, when times turn rough, antisemitism will increase — in the form of mainstream media spreading disinformation about ‘Jewish space lasers,’ genetic COVID-resistance and Jewish communists who will betray the countries we were born in while simultaneously controlling the banks. The Judeo-pessimist view believes this antisemitism will turn violent, and inevitably, like the past four generations of my family have experienced, force Jewish families to flee.
The alternative to this thought, that some of my Jewish peers seem to hold, is Judeo-optimism, the idea that through liberal democracy, things like the Bund and allying Jewish safety with other movements for ‘freedom’ across the world, will secure Jewish safety. They believe Israel is endangering us, and hurts so many others, and therefore, should not exist.
I don’t know if both schools of thought can coexist. My parents, who met in Israel, would argue heavily in favor of Israel needing to exist and having its military for Judeo safety. They, and most other Jewish adults I know, would fall into the former ideology.
Jews who are part of movements like Jewish Voices for Peace and If Not Now would fall into the latter ideology.
I think the consensus from most Jews I have spoken to, including myself, is we find ourselves somewhere in the middle. Most of us are matrilineal or fully Jewish, grew up in religiously reformed or conservative households, where it was about cultural Judaism, not the religious part. A lot of us grew up with families who had to flee to Israel, parents with emotional connections there, and we heard Rabbis and Hebrew school teachers extolling our innate connection to Israel as Jews.
Being half-American Jewish, and having a Jewish father from Latin America, I have heard a lot about how dangerous it is to be Jewish outside of the United States and what it looks like when a government decides Jews are evil.
My mom’s side of the family is American-Jewish and, to an extent, seems torn on the idea of Zionism. Over 100 years of being relatively safe, being able to make money and save it, taking part in democracy (for the most part as liberal advocates of progressive causes), creating art, and simply being American, has allowed them to feel safe without Israel. Still, much of my family is still financially and intrinsically connected to Israel.
Jewish friends, peers and I have tried to sort through everything we have seen in the news and social media. I have tried talking to my parents and siblings about it, though those conversations usually end in screaming.
One friend, who is half-Israeli and grew up visiting family there, seemed to lean anti-Zionist when I first met them, but then they started sending me screenshots of antisemitic posts they saw on Instagram or Yik Yak, and expressed to me how the antisemitism is pushing them further and further towards supporting an Israeli state.
Another close friend, who has an American-Jewish mother, grew up slightly removed from cultural and religious practices, and while they have been refinding them in college, they did not realize how pro-Israel their family is. They seem disappointed by this, and tend to lean more towards movements like JVP.
Some Jews I have spoken to think the idea of any Jew supporting Israel is abhorrent, regardless of familial or past-visit ties they may have.
Overall, though, speaking to my Jewish neighbors, friends, fellow attendants of Hillel, and some of my professors, I would say I have found most of them to be in the middle — and some feel like they can’t speak out. They don’t want to be called ‘Zionist pigs,’ as I have, by classmates, peers, friends, professors, or even family members.
I occasionally run into another friend and we would just express to each other how glad we are to know someone on the same page as us. We would talk about how frustrated and horrified we are with the Israeli government, and how we don’t concur with the general direction most of our peers have taken.
I have found there is a general abhorrence of Netanyahu’s actions among my community. An acknowledgment that the Israeli government understands that Hamas uses Gazan civilians as human shields and Israel’s assumption that if they keep bombing through them, they will eventually reach Hamas is both morally and strategically terrible. Many of us coming from progressive households, or at least, generationally Democratic households, support anti-racism and anti-discrimination policies and acknowledge that the Israeli state has participated in the active oppression of Palestinians. We mourn and see how many innocent people, especially children, have been killed.
We also acknowledge that Netanyahu’s actions make life for Jews so much worse outside of Israel.
We feel as though Israel needs to conduct itself better, because if it is going to truly protect Jews, the Israeli government needs to understand the way antisemitism works; Jewish people become the scapegoats for everything, including this war. Some Jewish students, especially those of us in this ‘middle place,’ feel scapegoated by our peers. We are heartbroken by the number of people killed, and are looking for a way to stop it, and Jewish students who may identify as Zionist are a great place to shift blame to.
Subsequently, more ‘middle place’ Jewish students break away from pro-Palestinian groups on campus. The common chant “from the river to the sea,” feels like a call to abolish the state of Israel, and being in a place where that is chanted feels threatening for the nine million Jews in Israel, and we feel threatened because so many of our people are being threatened.
There also seems to be a lack of understanding that Judaism is an ethno-religion. Israelis are not exclusively white, colonialist settlers as some people might think. Not all Jews are Ashkenazi, and even of those who are, not all of them are white. There are Jews from Ethiopia to India and beyond, who have been persecuted and had to flee to Israel. Many Europeans also do not consider Ashkenazi Jews white, and across the world, we are told to “go back to Israel.” We have been fleeing for so long because we have not belonged in so many places.
Some of the fellow Jewish students “in the middle” acknowledge that Hamas’s actions in Israel were intended to kill as many people as possible, rape women, take hostages and create distruction, not caring who they killed — including Arab-Israelis. All of this cannot be understated. Neither can Israel’s actions in Gaza — the thousands of people buried under rubble, the mass graves found, attacking hospitals, children being murdered, and allowing for the strip to be starved. It is all atrocious, and should be equally acknowledged, especially the egregious death toll.
Us ‘middle place’ students mourned the loss of life after the Oct. 7 attack, and felt a little disturbed by a campus sit-in advertised in the days after the attack, when many Jews were struggling to process what happened. I think that was the start of the isolation between middle-ground Jews on our campus, far-right ultra-Zionist Jews (Chabad members, typically), and the Jews who chose to join Jewish Voices for Peace or Judaism On Our Own Terms.
I believe the majority of Jews on our small campus fell somewhere in the middle between blindly trusting Israel and calling for its destruction. We have been trying to claw for an opinion we can express, that doesn’t feel like betraying our people or supporting a deadly war.
I think some Jews I have spoken to would join the pro-Palestinian campus movements conditionally. The conditions would be if we felt safe — if we would not feel targeted for supporting the existence of a Jewish state or acknowledging our connections to the nation-state. If the chants were for ceasefires, peace and coexistence, I would join in a heartbeat.
We believe in supporting a safe state of Israel and Palestine at the same time.
Movements like Standing Together in Israel are a good example of a productive organization actively trying to make change. Many of my (non-Jewish/non-Palestinian) peers joining these chants have no familial connections with Israelis or Palestinians. When we have spoken about the movement it feels like a bandwagon, like some of the people who are part of these movements get a lot of their information from social media, and refuse to think critically about the conflict, which is understandably hard to do with the stories and images coming out of Gaza.
Instead, we should be screaming for peace. For togetherness. And not just in Palestine; but from Myanmar to Ukraine to Sudan to Ecuador to Haiti.
I would join a peace movement wholeheartedly — a movement for the survival of both people, a movement of love, kindness and safety. I would scream, fight, and claw for Israel to stop bombing Gaza, because no child should be used as a human shield.
I would not join a movement in which some Jewish students don’t feel safe going to Hillel and feel targeted.
I think most of the Jews I have spoken to would join that too. Since Jews were expelled from Judea, we have fought to survive. Not only that, but we managed to preserve our culture, heritage, beliefs, and values.
There is a common saying about Jewish people; if you have two Jews in a room, you’ll have four different opinions. The beauty of how I perceive being Jewish, especially culturally Jewish, is choosing to be an intellectual, to study, to preserve knowledge instead of material goods, and to stand together, even if we do not agree. We should be fighting for peace, because that is the only way Israel and the nine million Jews there will be able to survive. We also deserve to feel safe on our campuses.