a commonplace book

Do not allow yourselves to stoop to the level of antisemitism. This harms not only Jewish people, but Palestinians as well. The atrocities committed by the State of Israel are not attributable to all Jewish people. Likewise, violence committed by the religious extremists in Hamas does not reflect on every Palestinian Muslim.

Judaism is not the problem. The problem is the Israeli settler colonialist project, of which not every Jew supports. Zionist Jews are opposed by both secular and religious Jews in Israel and abroad for many reasons. The conflation between Zionism and Judaism only serves the interests of right-wing extremists on either side of the conflict. Do not allow far-right Zionists and antisemites to conflate Zionism with Judaism. Antisemitism is inexcusable.

Israel—an exclusionary, militaristic ethnostate—will never deliver diaspora Jews from violence. It will never make our communities safer. It will not save us from antisemitism.

Within its borders, ethnic minorities such as Mizrahi Jews, Africans, and others are second-class citizens. The IDF has committed acts of brutality and cruelty that go unmatched in modern states. Gaza is an open-air prison in which 2 million people suffer needlessly without water, healthcare, food, or basic human rights. Daily, Palestinian homes are bought and stolen, dispensed like candy to foreign settlers with no respect for the native people they displace.

I mourn for the Israeli civilians who were killed, as no human being deserves to have their life shattered by war.

But I mourn deeply, as I always have, the millions of human beings in Palestine who are crushed underfoot, without second thought, by a bloodthirsty war machine.

We have no right to that land. We have no right to raze its people and its homes.