I’m an Israeli Columbia student. I never thought I’d be afraid to invite my parents to my graduation
Rhetoric around campus protests is a gift to Israeli and Palestinian extremists alike
Pro-Palestinian protestors hold a rally outside of Columbia University on April 30. Photo by Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images
Update: On May 6, Columbia University announced that it would cancel its main graduation ceremony.
“You can come to New York to celebrate my graduation, but I won’t bring you to campus” I wrote to my parents earlier this week, the morning after protesters occupied Columbia University’s Hamilton Hall.
I’m an Israeli Journalism M.S. candidate at Columbia, where I also earned my B.A. in Sociology and Theater Studies. The university has been my home for several years now, but living here hasn’t always been comfortable. As a humanities student, it was always clear that being from Israel was, to say the least, not cool.
But it was never dangerous, until now.
Over the last two weeks, the not-so-secret anti-Israel undercurrents on campus have swelled into a flood. Israeli students, many of them my friends, have been called Nazis. Crowds have chanted “we don’t want no two states, we want all of it” and “we don’t want no Zionists here.” A protest leader was revealed to have previously said on Instagram live that Zionists don’t deserve to live.
I’m not the first person in my family to have antisemitism abruptly interfere with my education. My paternal grandmother dreamed of academia from her youngest days. But the rise of the Nazis saw her expelled from high school for being Jewish. She was rendered a refugee shortly thereafter, and while she survived the Holocaust, she never got even her high school diploma.
In 2017, I moved to New York City with the intent of living the dream life denied her. I wore a ring that used to belong to her at my college graduation, and wished she were still around to see my sisters and myself strive toward the dreams she cherished.
After all that, it was so agonizing to me to ask my father — her son — to not attend my graduation.
But given that Columbia’s president has asked police to remain on campus until after graduation, there seems good reason to expect further violence. I cannot put my parents at that kind of risk.
And even if there is no violence, my parents should not come all the way from Israel to attend a graduation ceremony drowned by calls for their murder. Those who chant “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” are engaging in a whitewashed version of an Arabic slogan that explicitly calls for an end to the Jewish presence in Israel: “From water to water Palestine shall be Arab” — which was also chanted in its Arabic original on campus.
To be sure, Columbia protesters have repeatedly claimed that they’re anti-Zionists, not antisemitic, pointing for evidence to the Jewish students taking active part in the movement. And there’s a legitimate argument against equating antisemitism with anti-Zionism: not all Jews see Israel as a part of their identity, and Jews must be free to demand divestment without being painted as self-hating Jews or traitors.
But the mere presence of Jewish students at a protest doesn’t mean the protest movement at large hasn’t dangerously blurred the line between anti-Zionism and antisemitism.
A flat villanization of Zionism creates a rhetorical barrier of entry for Jewish safety — it is as if protesters are demanding Jews either renounce their connection to Israel, or get out. With untold generations of our ancestors praying for “next year in a rebuilt Jerusalem,” that’s a connection that many, if not most, Jewish people see as intrinsic to their identities. Why should we be forced to choose between our heritage and support of Palestine?
There are so many Israelis, some of whom are students at Columbia, who yearn for space to protest the Israeli government’s extremism, the expansion of the occupation, fatal settler violence and the current bloodshed in Gaza. But they cannot do so in a hostile place where the ideology of “by all means necessary” was readily adopted and where protesters are reluctant to condemn the Oct. 7 massacre — some even praise it — or call for the return of hostages.
Imagine if, instead of unilaterally condemning everyone who harbors some Zionist inclinations, the organizers of these campus protests set up areas for Israeli and Jewish students to engage in productive dialogue with Palestinian students and their supporters. Many of us can imagine — and deeply wish for — a future in which the movement of Jewish self-determination can co-exist with the Palestinian movement for self-determination.
What if there were a student group of Israeli and Palestinian students who protested against extreme forces on both sides of the fence, and worked together to cultivate a shared narrative of accountability for past violence, acknowledging each other’s trauma? What extreme factions among Israelis and Palestinians fear the most is not hate and violence, but peaceful leaders. The rhetoric we’ve heard on campus since October is a gift for them both.
The Columbia encampment featured signs with slogans like “whoever is in solidarity with our corpses but not our rockets is a hypocrite and not one of us.” Solidarity with Hamas’ rockets means unconditional support for the political agenda these rockets serve: per Hamas’s own 1988 covenant, which the organization adjusted but has never refuted, Zionism cannot be separated from world Jewry. And so all Jews, everywhere, are legitimate targets for violence.
How then, could even the most avidly anti-Zionist Jewish students regard such signs as anything less than a demand for their blood?
Usually, I’m a staunch supporter of student protests. My maternal grandfather risked his student visa to protest Vietnam on the UC Berkeley campus. I was raised to believe that student dissent is crucial for democracy.
But what we’ve seen at Columbia isn’t dissent. It’s protesting against one genocide by calling for another. As a Jewish student, the lack of nuance in this movement prevents me from believing it’s exclusively an expression of care for Palestine and Palestinians. Hatred of the Jewish state is baked into every action the protesters have taken; at what point must we admit that hatred for Jews is part of what’s driving this movement? The hate speech we’ve heard cannot be accepted into the sacred realm of free speech.
I, like many of my friends, feel an absolute rage toward the Israeli government for its brutal ideology of prioritizing land expansion over prevention of bloodshed. But the hate we are encountering, has forced many of us into an existential mode of defense; it has made us less able to speak out for the principles we do share with the protesters.
But I don’t have the privilege to lose hope. Instead, I must show my grandmother, watching over me, just how much strength she passed down. I’ll continue pressing the world to learn that Palestinians and Israelis both deserve to be safe and protected, and not victimized for their identities; I’ll keep insisting that we must learn to live together, or we will all die together. This is the only way to keep alive the hope that one day I will sit at my grandchild’s graduation, next to a Palestinian grandmother just like me, and that we will greet each other with pride and joy rather than hate and animosity.
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