Jewish Student Alienated By Daniel Neuman’s Letter

To the Editors:

As a Jew I was alienated by Daniel Neuman’s 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 Neuman’s? 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 world’s 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 land’s 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 Neuman’s 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