The safety and security of Palestinians and Jews are interdependent, so we should use language carefully
In reporting on the encampments springing up on college campuses across the US, the media seem to have convened a terminology confab and agreed on two descriptions: “pro-Palestinian” and “anti-Israel”.These labels oversimplify Americans’ opinions on Israel’s onslaught against Gaza, which marked its 200th day on Tuesday with no end in sight. But the error is worse than semantic.
“Universities Struggle as Pro-Palestinian Demonstrations Grow,” says the New York Times. “Colleges Struggle to Contain Intensifying Pro-Palestinian Protests,” reports the Wall Street Journal. In Minneapolis, the Star Tribune has the local news that the “University of Minnesota police arrest nine after pro-Palestinian encampment set up on campus”. Some publications less shy about displaying their political biases take the opposite tack. A headline in the right-leaning New York Post, for instance, exaggerated the literally incendiary nature of the demonstrators’ tactics: “Anti-Israel protesters carry flares to march on NYPD HQ after over 130 arrested at NYU.” The accompanying video is cast in red. Ever evenhanded, CBS does both: “Pro-Palestinian, pro-Israel protesters gather outside Columbia University.”
Yes, for some, the phrase “from the river to the sea” signals a wish to exterminate the other side, whether that means Palestinians, Jews or the state of Israel. At demonstrations aflutter with Palestinian flags, chants may be heard calling for repeat performances of the atrocities of 7 October.
For most people, particularly Jews, in the movement to end the annihilation of Gaza, the feelings are complex, even when the moral stance is uncompromising and the demands straightforward: stop funding genocide, let Gaza live. There are ways to describe where people stand that more accurately represent these complexities.
First, support for Palestinian liberation is not synonymous with support for Hamas. “The contemporary left-wing slide into Hamas apologism is not only abhorrent, but not aligned with the goals of Palestinian liberation,” wrote Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib, a Gaza native and US citizen, in the Forward in March. “If contemporary activists truly grappled with the horror Hamas inflicted on October 7 and understood Hamas’s history of corruption and exploitation of the Gazan people, they would see that Hamas must be abandoned entirely for pro-Palestine activism to actually progress.”
While one term seems to refer to people and the other to the state, the terms pro-Palestinian and anti- (or pro-) Israel blur the distinction between governments and people. To be for Palestinian liberation is not necessarily to endorse Palestinian nationalism or a future Arab-supremacist nation. As the feminist legal scholar Aya Gruber noted on X: “During Vietnam there were ‘antiwar’ and ‘peace’ protesters, not ‘pro-Vietnam’ & ‘anti-US’ protesters.” She adds that the “irresponsible” media do not refer to elected officials who vote to fund the bombs that are killing tens of thousands of people and decimating homes, hospitals and schools as “anti-Palestinian”.
Nor does opposition to Israeli policy mean indifference to the Jewish residents of Israel. The journalist (and seriously observant Jew) Peter Beinart, formerly a prominent spokesperson for liberal Zionism, has since renounced his support for a Jewish ethno-state in the Middle East and now advocates for a single, secular, multinational state, with equal rights for all. While consistently foregrounding the cataclysm in Gaza, Beinart rarely fails to mention the hostages still being held by Hamas. Yet, as he recently told the Harvard Crimson, his condemnation of Israel does not “reflect a lack of concern for the welfare of Jews in Israel and Jews around the world, but are actually my best effort to take positions that I believe will lead to greater safety for us”. He frequently points to data showing that escalations of Israeli violence against Palestinians are correlated with increased antisemitic acts elsewhere the world.
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The left is increasingly anti-Zionist. At the “emergency seder in the streets” in Brooklyn on the second night of Passover, the Canadian socialist and climate justice activist Naomi Klein called Zionism “a false idol that takes our most profound biblical stories of justice and emancipation from slavery – the story of Passover itself – and turns them into brutalist weapons of colonial land theft, roadmaps for ethnic cleansing and genocide”.
But if you see Zionism as a movement of refuge, not of genocide, you can be Zionist and oppose the violence perpetrated by Israeli authorities against Palestinian civilians. The Jewish anti-occupation and antiwar organization IfNotNow comprises “Zionists, anti-Zionists, non-Zionists, post-Zionists, and many people who don’t know what they’d call themselves”, wrote Alex Langer, a New York member of the group, in Haaretz, in 2018. “The Zionists within IfNotNow have shown that not everyone who believes in a Jewish nation-state in Israel seeks a system of endless bloodshed and oppression, that there are Zionists who are willing to put their voices and sometimes bodies on the line for freedom and dignity for all.”
Of course, the most noxious – and incorrect – characterization of a political stance toward Israel-Palestine is the conflation of “anti-Israel” with antisemitism. The useful cynicism of that maneuver is currently on view at the hearings run by Elise Stefanik, the New York Republican representative, whose goal is not to eradicate antisemitism but rather to undermine academic freedom and the credibility of intellectuals generally. “Two groups conflate Zionism and Judaism,” said Yaakov Shapiro, the anti-Zionist Orthodox rabbi. “Zionists, who want to legitimize Zionism by pretending it is Judaism; and antisemites, who want to de-legitimize Judaism by pretending it is Zionism.”
Most people in the movement to end Israeli apartheid have come to understand that whatever the solution – one state or two – the safety and security of Jews and Palestinians are interdependent. That makes the misrepresentation of the spectrum of beliefs more than an insult to language. The terms “pro-Palestinian” and “pro-Israel” – and their implicit mutual exclusion – reproduce and perpetuate the nationalist antagonisms that fuel the forever war between Jews and Palestinians.
If ceasing to use them will not magically produce a solution, it would help create the atmosphere necessary to imagine a peaceful future for Palestinians and Jews in the Middle East and the diaspora. In fact, the college encampments are rehearsals of that future. On MSNBC, Isra Hirsi, daughter of the progressive Democratic US representative Ilhan Omar, told an interviewer that far from being a threat to public safety, the Columbia University encampment was a “beautiful” embodiment “of solidarity”. Before the police broke up the camp and arrested students including Hirsi, participants of all faiths and none sang, prayed and celebrated Shabbat together. On the first night of Passover at Yale and the University of Michigan, students held seders amid the tents. The outdoor rituals demonstrated that a person can be openly, fearlessly Jewish on these campuses.
At the seder in the streets, a friend and I looked around at the many attendants in keffiyehs and noted that the black-and-white Palestinian scarf could be easily interchanged with a tallit, or Jewish prayer shawl. A few minutes later, a Palestinian-American speaker just returned from the West Bank called for liberation for everyone “between every river and every sea”.
Judith Levine is a Brooklyn journalist and essayist, a contributing writer to the Intercept and the author of five books
