Being afraid does not mean you're under attack
Being afraid does not mean you're under attack
On those condemning anti-genocide protests, but not genocide
Almost three years ago, in May 2021, I found myself at an pro-Palestine protest in New York City. We were at the Israeli Consulate, thousands of people, rallying against the repeated attacks on the East Jerusalem neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah. In Palestine, protests were happening as well, folks resisting displacement and ethnic cleansing and the attempt to force Palestinians out of the neighborhood. That spring the call to action from the people of Sheikh Jarrah became a rallying cry heard around the world. In New York, we responded again and again.
But this particular day, I got scared. I distinctly remember being on the corner opposite the consulate building, in a group of protesters chanting. As I’ve written about before, I grew up in a Jewish community generally saturated with Zionism. It was just a fact of life that our people had an inalienable right to live in what is now the state of Israel. By the time of this protest three years ago I had unlearned a good deal of that; I was certainly on the side waving Palestinian flags. But I learned, that day, that I hadn’t unlearned everything.
The group I was in the middle of started chanting, “Intifada, intifada, long live the Intifada” and something happened to me: I got scared. A fear seized my chest and I was frozen there, for a moment, unmoving. But as I stood there, listening and afraid, I tried to think. No one there wanted to hurt me, no one was even looking at me. The idea from my childhood that intifada means terrorism against Jews was not being realized in that moment. I had protested with many of these people before, and there were Jews around me as well as Muslims and Christians and others. I knew that we were all there because the actions of the Zionist regime sickened us, hurt us, made us enraged that our government was supporting ethnic cleansing. So as my body began to loosen up, I joined in the chants I felt comfortable with, I found the friends and people I knew in that crowd, and I kept protesting the abuses of the Israeli regime.
In the following days I did a little reading, and reflecting. For one, it turns out Intifada is an Arabic word that literally means “shaking off,” and in the Palestinian context it is understood to mean a civil uprising. In other words, it turns out that the childhood biases and fears I was taught weren't quite accurate, which is the case with most of what I learned about Israel, Palestine, and Palestinians growing up. So I realized, quickly, that there was nothing antisemitic about the protest I went to that day, and the same is true of the ones before and since. My fear was real, as is the fear of many other Jews, but that fear had been motivated not by a threat to my safety but by my warped knowledge and inaccurate perception. And in learning the truth I was able to no longer be afraid, and was able to further disentangle Zionism from my Jewish identity.
Campus Protests
Right now everyone from the President of the United States to the Mayor of New York to the State of Israel is calling campus protesters antisemitic. Countless publications are drumming up fear that Jewish students are under threat at Columbia University in particular, and that the student protesters themselves are being rabid antisemites. Every accusation of this nature is accompanied by no evidence, but the accusations continue to echo through the channels of the powerful. The establishment is scared of this new wave of student protest — and of the way it’s spreading like wildfire from campus to campus. What sparked this rapid growth of Gaza solidarity encampments across the country was the utterly uncalled for and violent crackdown that Columbia ushered in upon their own students by calling the NYPD onto their campus to arrest protesters peacefully encamped at the school. The cops arrested dozens of Jewish students in addition to their Muslim, Christian, and atheist peers.
This wave, not just of campus protest but of encampments in solidarity with Gaza demanding that these institutions divest their billions of the Israeli apartheid regime, has spread to Yale (who called the cops on their students this morning), UNC, multiple schools in Boston, the New School, Washington University, and to NYU and the University of Michigan today as well. Thus far the response from administrators, politicians, and media outlets has been a wildly skewed and singularly focused effort to stop these protests for divestment and against genocide, not a good-faith effort to combat antisemitism. The perfect example, unfortunately, comes from the White House:
I won’t dive into Biden’s statement, or the statements of other powerful people. Suffice it to say they focus again and again on unsubstantiated accusations of antisemitism, not even attempting to provide examples, without even mentioning Palestinians, Palestine, or Israel’s genocidal attack on Gaza. And, as countless students have made clear, their movement is aimed at getting their institutions to divest from Israel because of its genocide and apartheid status.
It’s hard not to feel like just about every single response to these student protesters labeling them violent antisemites for peacefully protesting is disingenuous. Not only are many of the students Jewish, but simply put people who refuse to condemn genocide, and yet spend their time condemning students who protest genocide are difficult to take seriously. It’s difficult to believe in their sincerity and moral compass. And when they latch onto random online footage of isolated protesters, often filming incidents they themselves have drummed up or provoked, but ignore the students’ repeated statements and the vast majority of what happening at these encampments, the critiques appear to be in bad faith. For those who don’t know, here is how drummed up incidents often work:
Quillette and the Free Beacon are both right-wing rags that publish open fascists and advocate for fascism. And yet a provocateur from that cesspool is given instant legitimacy, as Gabe spells out above. At best, this is immense naivete on the part of countless observers. At worst, these dishonest attacks on student protesters are attempts to weaponize antisemitism to distract from the genocide Israel is perpetrating, as the IDF attacks 1.2 million displaced people in Rafah. The focus on these protests, and the rare incidents of alleged antisemitism that are falsely being warped into the defining traits of a student movement full of anti-Zionist Jews, serves, among other things, to distract from the very real massacres Israel is perpetrating in Gaza, the massacres our government is helping fund and enable.
This mass murder is what students are protesting, make no mistake about it. But Americans are susceptible to Islamophobia, which has been cultivated for as long as I can remember, and when bad actors like Columbia professor and former IDF soldier Shai Davidai film Muslim students protesting, and then go on to call them terrorists, far too many people seem to be susceptible to that too. The language in multiple official statements certainly seems closer to calling students terrorists than it does to acknowledging the reality that these students are nobly protesting a genocide. Because to acknowledge that reality would be to acknowledge that our government is funding and arming a genocidal state.
And that is why Jews must speak out. We must reject our identity being weaponized to support genocide, and help to disarm the slanted, twisted narrative calling brave and fully justified student protesters antisemites. This isn’t about antisemitism. I know antisemitism is real, and I know it happens in New York; I know it has occurred in the past at Columbia. But that is not what these protests are about, and attempting to portray them that way is a cynical move by the powerful to reinforce support for Israel with no red lines. This move uses Jewish fear to distract from horrendous actions, like sending billions to a regime dead set on genocide, dead set on attacking the millions of people they’ve displaced. This is a genocidal apartheid regime that is bombing the tents of people who are only living in tents because their homes were bombed first. This is what our fear is being used to enable. As I wrote last fall:
“Part of generating the mass movement to put a stop to these atrocities is addressing the way antisemitism is being dishonestly weaponized at this moment. Israel and Zionists continually try to turn antisemitism into both a cudgel and a shield, one they hide their atrocities behind to devastating effect. And Jews are uniquely positioned to disarm this cudgel and expose what lies behind the shield.”
Right now, we’re seeing both the cudgel and the shield. The cudgel is the endless, unfounded accusations of antisemitism as college students bravely protest across the country, demanding that the institutions they attend divest their millions and millions of dollars from the apartheid state of Israel. The cudgel is the endless attacks on these students, which is simultaneously a shield used to hide and protect Israel’s atrocities by shifting the discourse away from Israel’s actions and towards the morality of campus protest. This shift also sets up a false equivalence where Zionists and mass media pretend that incidents on college campuses are somehow comparable to the mass murder of tens of thousands of Palestinians.
Right now Jews have a choice. Right now everyone has a choice. We can choose to not legitimize a debate that frames a few isolated antisemitic events on college campuses as the defining aspect of a massive student protest movement clearly calling for a divestment from genocide. We can also choose to not engage with those who pretend that college protests are more of a moral litmus test than where we stand on Israel’s atrocities. We can choose to unlearn our biases, we can choose to understand that being afraid doesn’t mean we’re in danger, and we can choose to focus on stopping Israel’s genocide in Gaza. Each day we have these choices, and each day we can choose to advance the fight for justice forward, inch by inch, rather than working to drag it backwards. It takes both internal work and the external work of organizing with others, but day by day we, all of us, can try our best to grow into people who are better equipped to advance the cause of liberation, and to opt out of the war mongering, fear mongering, and violence of the status quo. I hope you’ll choose to move towards peace and justice today.