Jewish
Student Alienated By Daniel Neumans Letter
To
the Editors:
As
a Jew I was alienated by Daniel Neumans letter to the editor
and felt that I had to respond. I am Jewish. I am anti-Zionist.
I am Jewish because three quarters of my ancestors were. I have
a Jewish identity that I for the most part learned from my mother
and a secular Yiddishkite after-school program that I attended instead
of Hebrew school. Neither my mother nor my Yiddish school required
me to love Israel to be a Jew. Am I somehow less Jewish because
I do not have the Jewish identity prescribed by Daniel Neumans?
Jewish identity will never be reliant on Zionist identity.
I am not a Zionist because my Jewish identity is not based on any
form of Zionism. I am anti-Zionist only in the context of the unjust
acts committed by Zionist movements in recent history. Both Zionism
and Judaism are often understood in very narrow ways. Zionism can
mean many different things, from a general cultural rebirth of Jews
in the Diaspora to a fanatic investment in creating a state of only
Jews in all of Palestine. Almost always the popular Zionism we know
falls closer to the latter understanding. In recent history it is
hard to see Zionism in this complexity. The state of Israel has
come to speak for all Zionist sentiment in much of the worlds
eyes. A distinction needs to be made. The state of Israel, not Zionism,
is a racist and imperialist project that has displaced and oppressed
the Palestinian people for over half a decade now. Any state that
displaces a lands current inhabitants is unjust.
Daniel writes: The right Palestinians have to a homeland of
their own must be afforded to the Jews as well.
We have to look at Daniel Neumans point in the context of
the actual land that Israel is claiming for itself and the bits
it is reluctantly offering to the Palestinians. The land of Palestine
is the homeland of both Palestinians and Jews. Both peoples have
bled into the soil. Just as Jewish settlers see much of the West
Bank and the Gaza Strip as part of their homeland, Palestinians
see all of the homes and towns that they were driven out of in 1948
as their homeland. To segregate the two peoples into two states
would be to remove them from the respective homelands to which they
are attached. The byroads that run through the West Bank and the
Gaza strip used by Israeli settlers and the Israeli military to
travel between their illegal settlements carve the small fragmented
pieces of land that the Israeli state has allowed the Palestinians
to claim as their homeland into an open-air jail rather than a politically
viable state.
Paul Gargagliano
College junior
|