I grew up in a very religious, insular community where if you didn’t agree with everyone’s opinions you were labeled a sinner and ostracized. When I left, everyone congratulated me for being able to think for myself. At Smith College, I thought it would be different. I thought having perspectives informed by varied life experiences would be valued. But the climate feels remarkably similar — there are also extreme social consequences for expressing a different opinion here.
I speak five languages, including Hebrew and Arabic, and I have traveled to more than 35 countries. I’m a government major and I’m primarily interested in diplomacy and conflict resolution, so much so that I am dedicating my entire career to it. This is why I understand what makes people find the messaging of groups like Students for Justice in Palestine appealing. Everyone wants to stop wars and end violence. I do too.
Most students, however, are missing something that nobody has taught them. There are no lectures at Smith about how antisemitism works or how to recognize it, even though we study many other forms of hate and bias across the curriculum. I don’t blame people for not understanding what they are participating in. I just want to try to explain.
You know how racism and misogyny work in ways that are insidious even to people who think they’re aware of their impact? Even at a historically women’s college, I sometimes hear ideas that repeat the most patriarchal concepts. Because we grew up surrounded by these biases, we have to work hard to remove them, especially the ones that don’t affect us directly. Antisemitism works similarly, except it works in ways that are almost opposite to what people are trained to look for.
Most forms of hate present themselves as punching down, while antisemitism has always presented itself as punching up. Jews were named both as vermin and as powerful overlords who would destroy you in the same breath. Because of this framing, attacking Jewish people has always presented itself as social justice, like fighting back against an oppressor. Even Adolf Hitler said in a 1920 speech, “We do not believe that there could ever exist a state with lasting inner health if it is not built on internal social justice.” In case it’s not clear, the social justice he was referring to was the removal of Jewish “parasites” from German society.
This is not just ancient history, this is a pattern that keeps repeating itself. When I see “resistance is justified” signs on campus and students holding up Hamas red triangles, a symbol used to mark Jewish people and institutions as targets for violence, I am not seeing something new or revolutionary or anti-establishment. I am simply seeing the wheel being reinvented. When SJP calls their encampment the “Student Intifada,” I wonder if they have thought about how Jewish students feel when we walk past signs justifying the murder of our loved ones at music festivals and bus stops and restaurants.
Here is the pattern I think most people are unaware of: Early Christianity blamed the Jews for killing Jesus. This created a framework where Jews were always morally guilty. Throughout the past several millennia and around the world, Jewish communities were associated with evil, corruption and murder. So whenever a society had to confront something dark about its own behavior, it projected that darkness onto Jewish people instead. The worst thing in any given era always became associated with Jewish communities. During the Black Plague, it was poisoning wells. Then, when the Russian Empire was failing, they forged a document called the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, convincing millions that Jews secretly controlled the world. Then it was capitalism. Then communism. Then globalism. The content changes every time. The structure does not.
In today’s American discourse, the greatest evil is colonialism. Racism. Oppression. So now Jews and Israel get mapped onto that framework. The Jewish community and by extension, the state of Israel, became associated with whiteness, power and control. And this projection serves a very specific purpose. It lets Americans avoid contending with their own guilt about colonizing this continent, their own imperialism, and their own countless wars that have killed millions. By exporting that guilt thousands of miles away, they perpetuate the violence they claim to oppose. Criticizing the government in a country is more than okay, it is an imperative and Israelis do it all the time. But framing Jewish people or Israel as uniquely evil is not criticism, it is simply the same old structure doing what it has always done and is deeply harmful.
You can see this happening in real-time on our campus. Smith’s Students for Justice in Palestine (SSJP) hosted an event called “Gaza, ICE, and the Imperial Boomerang” which framed the Israel Defense Forces as the source of American police violence. They also posted that “colonialism turns colonizers into instruments of domination” and drew direct connections between what is happening in Gaza and ICE violence in the United States. As if the origins of Western colonization trace back to the Middle East. As if American police violence doesn’t predate the state of Israel by centuries. This framing is not just dishonest. It is the projection mechanism working exactly as it always has. It allows Americans to locate the source of their own colonial violence somewhere else. Somewhere far away. On someone else.
My Arabic/Jewish family is from Damascus, Beirut and Tsfat, which since the 1940s are now in Syria, Lebanon and Israel, respectively. There is nothing I want more than for all of those countries to be safe and equal for anyone of any ethnicity, background or religion. The people who will bring us closer to that future are the ones who know how to hold conflicting and nuanced views at the same time. They are not the ones on our campus giving lectures on the fallacy of peace (an actual lecture on April 24 on Chapin Lawn) and screaming for violence under the guise of justice.
The harassment and marginalization of Jewish students under the guise of anti-Zionism or Palestinian human rights is not groundbreaking. It is not revolutionary. It is the oldest form of hatred doing what it has always done: presenting itself as righteousness.
Currently, synagogues are being firebombed, and according to data aggregated by Open data NYC, hate crimes against Jews in NYC are so high that they eclipse the hate crimes against all other groups combined, including those targeting all other minority communities. Many of my Jewish friends hide being Jewish in public, including at Smith where Jewish students have been followed, ostracized from friend groups and shut out of conversations. Our mezuzot have been stolen. We are unable to speak up in class or mourn without being shouted over.
The violence in the Middle East is profoundly upsetting and the urge to pick a “side” and do something about it is entirely understandable. But continuing the cycle of violence helps no one achieve a safer life in the long term. Here, all that accomplishes is making students like me, coming from diverse and frequently misunderstood backgrounds, feel unwelcome and unsafe at Smith.
We can disagree on many things, but I think some things are universal. What humanizes people is good. What dehumanizes them is not. I hope that is a principle simple enough for everyone on this campus to agree with.
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