Content warning: mentions of violence
The events of the past week in Palestine have been horrifying. Israel has brought its full force to bear on the millions of people it has trapped within the Gaza Strip. Meanwhile, Israeli politicians have, either explicitly or implicitly, declared their intent to commit ethnic cleansing and genocide in Gaza.
As Jews, in whose names genocide is purportedly being committed, we emphatically oppose Zionism. This opposition means full support for Palestinians’ right to self-determination and resistance, the belief in the legitimacy of Palestinians’ claim to their land and unequivocal rejection of Israel’s illegitimate “right to defend itself,” which is used to justify its atrocities.
Alongside the Israeli government’s horrific slaughter of Palestinians in Gaza this past week, the major powers of the West have been engaging in an all-out information war, spreading unsubstantiated claims and rhetorically dehumanizing Palestinians to provide cover for their genocide. One of the key features of this information war is the weaponization of anti-racism rhetoric against Palestinians and their supporters. Those standing in solidarity with Palestine and against Israeli colonization of their land have long been incorrectly labeled antisemitic. Arab and Muslim students supporting Palestine face severe harassment — and are consequently pushed toward speaking out anonymously — while Jews are labeled “traitors” or “kapos.” In our time at the University of Michigan, some of us have received hate mail, gotten doxxed and even been threatened with termination from our positions at the University for speaking out in support of Palestine.
The “Palestine exception to free speech” is a well-documented phenomenon that the University is hardly immune to. The most glaring example of this on our campus was the University punishing a professor for denying a letter of recommendation to a student seeking to study at an Israeli institution, in accordance with the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions movement. Now more than ever, it is crucial that we reject these lies and articulate the truth: Opposition to Israeli apartheid is not antisemitic, but is a stance for justice and self-determination of an oppressed people.
Apartheid does not make anyone safer, and a growing number of Jews in the diaspora are starting to recognize that. Though Zionism is often conflated with Judaism, support for Zionism is not a universal Jewish public opinion. A quarter of American Jews correctly recognize Israel for the apartheid state it is. We outright reject the idea that Palestinians and their supporters need to be repressed or condemned in order for Jewish people to be safe. Zionism, an ideology that dehumanizes Palestinians, harms Jews by implicating us in imperialism and engendering violence in the Middle East. Only ending the occupation and instituting equal rights and participation for all will make people safe.
We also reject the idea that Jews should be privileged over non-Jews — the underlying assumption of the Zionist project. This racist logic is evident in all aspects of the illegitimate state of Israel: its formation through settler-colonial theft of Palestinian land in the Nakba, its Jewish supremacist character apparent in its self-definition and its frequent terrorism against the Palestinian population. We have similarly seen the logic of Zionism this past week in the prioritization of Jewish feelings over the voices and lives of Palestinians experiencing genocide, exemplified by bans against protests in solidarity with Palestine.
We must be absolutely clear: The focus of Jews, as well as all people of conscience, must be on condemning Israel’s ongoing crimes and standing with the Palestinian liberation movement in taking action. At the University of Michigan, we must uplift the initiatives of SAFE and other groups, such as condemning University President Santa Ono’s unacceptable statements, holding solidarity actions and calling for divestment from corporations that profit from or sustain Israeli apartheid.
From our perspective, Zionism is incompatible with Judaism. To us, Judaism is rooted in the experience of the diaspora, in being a minority where we live. When faced with the question of what makes someone Jewish, the eminent Polish historian Isaac Deutscher responded as such: “Religion? I am an atheist. Jewish nationalism? I am an internationalist. In neither sense am I therefore a Jew. I am, however, a Jew by force of my unconditional solidarity with the persecuted and exterminated.”
It is the Palestinian people who are being persecuted and exterminated, and it should be clear to anyone with whom Deutscher’s words resonate that Judaism demands our unconditional solidarity with them.
Jared Eno, Amir Fleischmann, Colin Garon, Rosa Glaessner Novak, Max Lahn, Michael Mueller, Lucy Peterson, Ekaterina Shipyatsky, Jeff Horowitz and Annabel Bean are Jewish students at the University of Michigan. They can be reached at jewsagainstgenocide1@gmail.com.