Dear friends,
Almost exactly six months ago, I wrote a post called “time out for peace.” The war in Gaza was just a few weeks old, and already terrifying. The October 7 attacks were still a fresh horror.
On Monday, I had a conversation about anti-semitism with my longest friend. I told her that I was struggling to avoid what-aboutism, the inclination to excuse or ignore one heinous behavior because another appalling abuse is happening at the same time.
It’s usually time for a time out when you’re thinking things that are kind of awful. Yesterday, I read a post that I found helpful.
Bucks wrote about the need to build inclusive movements that embrace other justice-seeking people:
The movement can be too quick to brush aside the perspectives of Jewish activists who offer good faith feedback about why they still don’t [feel] fully safe in protest spaces, often with the justification that they should be more like the Jewish protesters who don’t share those concerns. And I clench up when I read some of the statements from encampments that lean on strident, “if you’re not 100% with us we don’t want your support” red lines. To borrow the words of abolitionist activists Kelly Hayes and Mariame Kaba, I worry that all this serves to make justice spaces more like clubhouses than movements.
I have spent much of my recent protest time with Jewish Voices for Peace and JFREJ, groups that focus on the ideas of solidarity and interdependence.
In the nearly seven months of war, I have tripped over — and joined —numerous street protests that included many factions and featured lots of flags, both Palestinian and Israeli.
I distinguish between the aspirations of unfree people and the nationalism of established states; still, all flags make me a little queasy. At the same time, I try not to insist on being 100 percent comfortable all the time.
Last week, I wrote about my experience on Columbia’s campus on Monday, but not about my experience on Wednesday.
I was back in the encampment talking to some students, when a student leader standing just a few feet away began to chant:
There is only one solution: intifada, revolution!
I did not participate in the call-and-response for that one. I do not believe that there is only one response to any situation and I didn’t care for the word “solution” in this context.
And then, there is the word intifada, which holds layers of meaning. It is the word for struggle, and it refers to the First and Second Intifadas. In each case, the loss of life was primarily on the Palestinian side in the face of overwhelming state power. I have stronger memories of the Second Intifada, with its terrifying spate of bombings.
The chant made me feel a little uncomfortable, but not unsafe. It is pretty clear that Palestinians must engage in a struggle for their freedom.
Today, I read this disturbing account of events from April 21.
“We have Zionists who have entered the camp.”
“Walk and take a step forward,” the leader says, as the students continue to repeat his every utterance, “so that we can start to push them out of the camp.”
The protesters link arms and march in formation toward three Jewish students who have come inside the encampment.
This happened at Columbia, and it understandably rattled the three students who entered the encampment.
“It was really scary because we had like 75 people quickly gathered around, encircling us, doing exactly what he said to do,” Avi Weinberg, one of the Jewish students, said in an interview. He and his friends had gone to see the encampment, not intending to provoke, he said. When it began to feel tense, one of the students started to record the encounter. They are not sure precisely how the protest leader determined they were supportive of Israel.
“Suddenly we are being called ‘the Zionists’ in their encampment,” Mr. Weinberg said. “He put a target on our back.”
It was a low moment, to be sure. As it turned out, the organizer who encouraged the protesters to surround the three students, was Khymani James.
Khymani James is the same Columbia student who said that “Zionists do not deserve to live” in January. He has since repudiated his remarks and provided context.
But, there are problems. One can be anti-Zionist without being antisemitic, but I’m not sure that Mr. James has made the distinction. What did make him identify the three curious students as Zionists? And was it necessary to eject them from the encampment?
The stated goal of surrounding the three students was to protect the community and get them to leave the camp, but it was unclear why their presence was regarded as a threat.
The account in the newspaper does not explain how exactly the April 21 episode ended. And just because the young people whom James identified as Zionists were not physically harmed does not make it okay.
And the siege mentality on campus is undeniably dangerous, while being understandable. There were more mass arrests on many campuses, including Columbia yesterday and today.
Pro-Israel counterprotestors started tearing down @UCLA encampment barriers and screamed "Second nakba!" referring to the mass displacement & dispossession of Palestinians during the 1948 Arab-Israeli war.
As I confront my own icky what-aboutism, I also come up against the terrible double standard that seems to apply to dehumanizing remarks about different groups of people:
Yousef Munayyer, a political analyst and senior fellow at the Arab Center Washington DC, noted that the cost of misspeaking — or having comments misconstrued — on Israel is unparalleled.
“The social and political costs of stepping on the taboos of saying anything that could be even possibly misconstrued as antisemitic are so high,” Munayyer told The Intercept. “And yet the costs of saying things that are undeniably and horrifically dehumanizing toward Palestinians are so low. I don’t know of a double standard as extreme as that on any other issue.
In addition to the fresh example from UCLA’s campus, there was an egregious example in late March, when Michigan Congressman Tim Walberg urged Israel to deal with Gaza like “Hiroshima and Nagasaki.”
Rather than apologize, Walberg explained that he was using a metaphor to suggest the need to end the war quickly. He had, however, spoken out against "spending a dime on humanitarian aid" for Gaza at the time of his Hiroshima remark.
We need a ceasefire and a permanent moratorium from people calling for the annihilation of others.
Yesterday, Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu vowed to proceed with an offensive on the city of Rafah, where more than two million people have sought refuge, insisting that prosecuting the war for “total victory” would not be deterred by talks aiming to achieve a truce.
Netanyahu’s ministers have publicly sparred on whether to go forward with a truce proposal: far right members of his coalition have threatened to quit the government if Israel is seen to “surrender” to Hamas’s demands, while centrists have said they will quit if a hostage deal isn’t struck.
“We can’t tell our people the occupation will stay or the fight will resume after Israel regains its prisoners,” a Palestinian official from a group allied with Hamas told Reuters. “Our people want this aggression to end.”
Netanyahu repeated his determination to proceed with the invasion of Rafah, “with or without a ceasefire deal,” undermining any hope that Hamas would agree to the terms negotiated in Cairo.
The state of the world is exhausting, as is the effort to understand. This anti-war movement will not go away until the war itself ends.
with love,
L