What Does Jewish Safety Mean?
Safety for who?
How does the deportation of a Palestinian graduate student make Jews safer? How does a protest where anti-zionists (Jews and non-Jews alike) conduct teach-ins, chant slogans, hold signs, and wear keffiyeh threaten Jewish safety?
The answer is, of course, it doesn’t threaten Jewish safety. Protesting and agitating for ceasefire and an end to the ongoing genocide does absolutely nothing to hurt Jews. Jews who feel threatened by this are 1) out of their minds 1.5) racist as hell 2) deeply embedded in an embarrassing but highly effective propaganda campaign rolled out by Israeli media, aided by the U.S. and organizations like AIPAC and Betar that continue to conflate antisemitism with anti-zionism and 3) are unbelievably coddled and conceited, narcissistic beyond bounds, and damaging genuine Jewish safety. Call me a self-hating Jew for saying this, I promise it will be the absolutely first time. Antisemitism doesn’t mean what it did, and that is deliberate. Antisemitism has been deliberately and meticulously weaponized to mean “anti Israel.” It is about Palestine. Jewish safety is used as a flimsy pretext to quell righteous and thoroughly needed dissent about the most harrowing and devastating social crises of our time. Do you want this to be your legacy? Allowing the worst people in the world to use our safety as a pretext for killing others?
“On Friday, March 7, the Trump administration announced it was freezing $400 million in funding that had been awarded to Columbia University over what it claimed was a failure to combat antisemitism on campus,” the Nation reports. “The next day, agents of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) came to the university-owned apartment of Mahmoud Khalil, a recent graduate and a legal resident of the United States who was a leader in Columbia’s pro-Palestine protests in 2024. The agents arrested Khalil in front of his pregnant wife and spirited him off to Louisiana, where he remains behind bars despite the White House openly admitting that he has broken no laws.”
And from Defector: “This violation of civil liberties clearly stems from Khalil's pro-Palestine activism, and on Sunday, Secretary of State Marco Rubio made the connection explicit, disparaging Khalil as a "Hamas supporter." Last week, Rubio started a new "Catch and Revoke" effort, with "AI-assisted reviews of tens of thousands of student visa holders' social media accounts," to cancel the visas of anyone deemed to be supporting Hamas.”
The irony, because of course this is riddled with irony, is that normalization of being an outright Nazi is more accepted than ever. Do these organizations that are supposed watch-dogs for antisemitism care? No, not in the least. Does Marco Rubio care? No he cares about the evangelical Christian link to Israel. The ADL–the Anti-Defamation League-is a major player in the continuing conflation between anti-zionism and antisemitism, though among other evils the ADL was quick to defend Elon Musk throwing up a Sieg Heil, calling it “awkward.” Jonathan Greenblatt, head of the ADL, has in the past compared the keffiyeh to the swastika. That false equivalency is at the heart of this all: your expression of culture feels the same as a symbol long equated with actual Jewish hate. These two are not the same. But if you tell yourself and your sycophants over and over again that they are, sure. Words don’t matter, neither does intention. Just feelings. Jews feeling unsafe at the protest? It doesn’t matter what the facts are–the university, and the government, will use your “safety” as a means to continue to send aid to Israel, use their technology, continue to be bed buddies in the swift transition to increasingly authoritarian and fascist regimes.
Minority leader Chuck Schumer is on the case though, so no one worry:
I don’t know who this is for, because I am assuming most of my readers are anti-zionist. But if you aren’t, or want to send this to somebody who isn’t, I’ll ask: Aren’t you ashamed that your history, identity, and safety are being used as a flimsy pretext in which to continue the ongoing extermination of an entire peoples, to overreach into American universities and threaten deportation of students who have rightfully protested the war, and their schools complicity in it? If you are not ashamed, you should be. You should be embarrassed to show your face. You have been shaped and shifted by narratives far bigger than you, narratives that are wrong, that are toxic, that you truly believe Jewish safety rests in having an ethnostate, that it is contingent on Palestinian extermination. Oh you have been hoodwinked, fooled, thrown astray by one of the most highly technical propaganda machines in the world. Jews are not unsafe because of Palestinains. Jews are unsafe because of zionists. Jews are unsafe because Israel exists.
Look at what zionists are posting about this moment:
Zionist Jews, who often discuss the dangers of putting (Jewish) people on lists, have done exactly that in their continued campaign of doxxing and harassing those who speak openly about the ongoing Israeli genocide, including anti-zionist Jews.
“What would you have done during the Holocaust?” is a thought question often tossed around. And I think: your ancestors didn’t survive the Holocaust for you to cheer on another one. And yet this is what is happening. If you are a Jew and you feel unsafe, I would like to ask you to pull your head out of your ass. Coddled, insulated, deeply out of touch with the world, inventing an enemy when you need only look in the mirror. I refuse to let our religion be conflated with a fascist project, to let them use our supposed safety as a pretext for further genocide. Will you?