To the Editor:
I have read with great interest the special statement printed in the Oberlin Review of May 3, 1996 and signed by many members of the African-American Studies Department and others. This statement has helped me better understand how much Mr. Ture has meant to members of the Black community and others who applaud his many significant contributions to the Civil Rights Movement. It is, therefore, all the more regrettable that his visit was connected to the issue of anti-Zionism. As a result, what should have been an excellent opportunity to better acquaint our community with Pan-Africanism was eclipsed by an event that not only directly offended and threatened the Jewish community, but also needlessly fomented discord between Blacks and Jews on campus. If the linking of the issue of anti-Zionism to the Ture visit was unfortunate, a subsequent event sponsored by many of the same individuals can only be characterized as reprehensible. In this case, the organizers enthusiastically championed a speaker whose unprincipled and racist discrimination against the Jewish people was blatant and terrifying. I cannot view such development as "positive for the campus."
As for the distinction between anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism that was offered in the statement, in the interest of contributing dialogue, I would like to point out the following. If anti-Zionism is defined as "the principled opposition to the notion that the land of Palestine was given by God to the Jews, and that no one else has the right to occupy it," it would follow that the vast majority of Zionists would themselves be anti-Zionists. For while there were a great many Zionist positions concerning the type of state that should exist in the Land of Israel, virtually all of them recognize the right of non-Jews to reside there. In fact, the present Zionist State of Israel includes Druse, Circassian, Beduin, and other non-Jewish communities. Even Jabotinsky, the ideological mentor of the nationalist Likud party envisioned a State in which Arabs would play an important role. The only so-called Zionist position of recent memory that called for the exclusion of non-Jews, was expressed by ultra-extremists and repudiated by all mainstream Zionist parties and the government of Israel. In fact, one proponent of this objectionable view, the late Meir Kahane, was jailed under Israeli law for fomenting racism!
What unites all Zionists, whether they come from Morocco, Iraq, Iran, India, Ethiopia, Afghanistan, Kurdistan, Turkey, Ukraine or Poland is not the claim that only Jews have a right to occupy their homeland. Rather, it is the conviction that the dispersed and oppressed Jewish people of the world must have a safe space of their own in the one place that they might have viewed as holy for more than the past 3000 years, the Land of Israel. Thus anti-Zionism (in contrast to the legitimate expression of opposition to specific Israeli policies or advocacy of Palestinian interests) is a denial of the very right of the Jewish people to self-determination that ought to be extended to all peoples. It is for this reason that so many Zionists feel that anti-Zionism is essentially unprincipled discrimination against Jews.
Finally, as one of our students so well expressed in the April 26 issue, the State of Israel is a reality as is the need of the Palestinians for their own state. It now appears that an unprecedented opportunity truly exists for all sides to create a peace in the Middle East that until recently seemed all but unattainable. Let us all hope that such a peace will be successful and enduring and that it will bring inestimable benefits to all peoples of the region.
Copyright © 1996, The Oberlin Review.
Volume 124, Number 24; May 10, 1996
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