We, concerned Duke alumni who are Jewish, are responding to Duke Students Supporting Israel’s Dec. 7 guest column. We share their abhorrence toward the October Hamas attack on Israel and with antisemitism in general, but we respectfully wish to offer some other valid interpretations of certain circumstances. We hope our guest column can enhance this important conversation — both within the Jewish community and externally. Ongoing civil discourse regarding current Israel-Palestine events is crucial and has become increasingly fraught. We try here to identify areas of disagreement with the student organization’s statement, placing these disagreements within an inclusive historical and contemporary context.
Context: Multiple conflicting narratives
This context considers and incorporates multiple conflicting narratives regarding the Israel-Palestine conflict. These narratives typically center around three separate but interacting themes: tribalism, historical trauma and victimhood, as put in Raja G. Khouri and Jeffrey J. Wilkinson’s The Wall Between: What Jews and Palestinians Don’t Want to Know About Each Other. We suggest that the current students’ statement fails to consider these often tragic, conflicting narratives as legitimate truths. That perspective can reinforce a binary “us vs. them” paradigm, which can become mere self-justification. Rather, we desperately need to struggle — perhaps very uncomfortably at times — against these dichotomies that imply we are right and you are wrong.
Cases in point: SSI’s statement mentions several antisemitic acts, domestic and international, evidencing rising antisemitism. However, they appear premature in one of their examples. Detroit law enforcement has not connected the man arrested in synagogue leader Samantha Woll’s stabbing death with antisemitism.
Antisemitism, like any ethnic and/or religious hatred, is inherently repulsive, but SSI’s statement fails to mention the Chicago suburbs murder of a six-year-old Muslim boy or the recent near-fatal attack against three Palestinian students in Vermont as well as other Islamophobic acts. Why exclude these equally detestable acts of hatred, when they are part of the same relational fabric?
Similarly, the ancestral claim to the land of Israel is only one people’s claim. Historically and biblically, it was never “a land without a people.” It was, in fact, “peopled” — by different tribes before and then alongside the Israelites. Those tribes and kingdoms rose and fell, as did the Jews’. No exclusive — or superior — divine or historical claim on the land exists. To assert this claim for Jews is to engage in Jewish supremacy, which is extremely problematic. Yes, the chant “from the river to the sea” now evokes for Jews further trauma and revives deeply troubling Holocaust memories. Yet the Duke students’ statement excludes similar declarations by Jews — from the Likud party platform to West Bank settler-extremists’ religious fanaticism and violence.
We Jews are not the only ones experiencing existential threat.
Apartheid?
Regarding apartheid, much debate exists — but when the major Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem issues a detailed account outlining apartheid, we should carefully and critically listen, rather than stridently and reflexively reject it. Even Israeli security experts agree. On Sept. 6, a month before Hamas attacked, former Mossad head Tamir Pardo acknowledged that Israel enforces apartheid in the West Bank.
Furthermore, a Jewish state that defines its citizenship’s privileges based solely on ethno-religious membership would have to engage in some form of apartheid for those members not meeting the citizenship requirements. We would argue Israel’s imperfect democracy (with its recently demonstrated fractures) is not extended to the Occupied Territories, which include the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. Israel controls the former through the Palestinian Authority. This control has imposed a system of walls, roadblocks and checkpoints, differential ID cards and differential infrastructure. Nathan Thrall’s 2021 essay “A Day in the Life of Abed Salama” offers a compelling and in-depth analysis of the differential treatment of Palestinians in the West Bank and the tragedy it entails.
We don’t advocate for either a “one-state” or “two-state” solution. But given the demographics of the territory between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea, a one-state solution with full democratic rights for all would ultimately doom any notion of an identifiably Jewish State of Israel.
The central issue is that Zionism — the ideology that eventually led to post-Holocaust Jewish self-determination and the state of Israel as a safe haven for all Jews — underscores all these aforementioned themes. Zionism emerged during the age of European colonialism and imperialism. Zionism and Arab nationalism gave rise to Jews’ and Palestinians’ conflicting aspirations for a nation each could call their own. Zionism is thus in large part a product of its history, inextricably bound to the dispossession and displacement of another people.
Scholar Sara Roy, a child of Holocaust survivors, articulated this issue eloquently when she wrote: “But in the post-Holocaust world, Jewish memory has failed in one critical respect: It has excluded the reality of Palestinian suffering and Jewish culpability therein. As a people, we have been unable to link the creation of Israel with the displacement of the Palestinians. We have been unwilling to see, let alone remember, that finding our place meant the loss of theirs.”
Two conflicting views of the Israeli War of Independence and what Palestinians call the Nakba (meaning “catastrophe”) interpret the same historical events from very different perspectives. Our effort to recognize these events’ complexity is an effort to humanize the “Other.” If we do not struggle with this reality, we condemn ourselves to either continually reinforcing our victimhood or attempting the ongoing manifestation of military omnipotence and its corollary, dehumanization.
Anti-Zionism is antisemitism?
Insisting that anti-Zionism is categorically antisemitism is a profound injustice to the interwoven Israel-Palestine narratives. Palestinian nationalists are not all Hamas members. Anti-Zionism may or may not be antisemitic. Political Zionism has been aligned and practically synonymous with Jewish statehood. Zionism’s history, however, is multifaceted and includes those who initially argued against statehood: Judah Magnes, Martin Buber, a majority of the American Reform movement, and so on. Were they all antisemitic? Anti-Zionist? To complicate matters further, some Jewish ultra-Orthodox groups both in Israel and elsewhere are anti-Zionist, including Neturei Karta. (Some, like Agudath Israel, which opposed Zionism in the past are now part of the Israeli coalition.)
One could also assert that the argument for a Palestinian confederation or a bi-national state is anti-Zionist. It is hardly antisemitic.
Our point? We fear that the “Anti-Zionism is antisemitism” slogan serves a very different purpose: weaponizing antisemitism to undermine criticism of Israel and what we believe is a much more compelling perspective on Israel-Palestine.
What now?
We do not dispute the Oct. 7 events were horrific, in particular the unimaginable crimes against Israeli women. Most of us have one or two degrees of separation from either having family or knowing someone who suffered from Hamas’ barbarism. While there is no love lost by most Israeli Jews for the Netanyahu government, the military response in Gaza has also been barbaric — with reports now of around 23,000 Palestinians killed at the time of this writing, most of them young adults or children, medical care collapsing and up to 85% of the population uprooted, displaced and homeless. Is this grossly asymmetrical death toll evidence of Israel defending itself? We are reminded of the U.S. military in Vietnam: “Destroying a village in order to save it” became a slogan identifying U.S. military strategy. How much is enough?
In light of our view that there is no military solution to the Israel-Gaza War, we understand the calls for an immediate cease-fire. What is needed, however, is a fundamentally different discourse — one that recognizes the multiple conflicting truths and complexities that inextricably bind us as Israeli and Diaspora Jews and Palestinians, one which accounts for Israeli and Palestinian power differentials and which does not engage in arguments about moral equivalence and “what-aboutism.”
Organizations like Standing Together and Parent Circle-Families Forum both comprising Israeli Jews and Palestinians, offer an alternative to end the madness and violence. They insist on affirming others’ humanity, sharing values of peace, equality and co-existence. They have the moral courage to share their own — and listen deeply to others' — history of pain, trauma and existential fear and to acknowledge the shared yearning for freedom and safety. They are committed to this very hard work. They believe that is how to begin to build trust and that lasting peaceful solutions can only emerge from the foundation of earned trust. That is where we should direct our hope and energies.
Signed on behalf of concerned alumni at Duke University,
Jeffrey Gold, ‘72, Mark I. Pinsky (former staffer for The Chronicle), ‘70, and Douglas Schocken, M.D., ‘70 and ‘74
Additional signatories below:
Jewish alumni
Andrew Berlin, ‘72
Bill Boyarsky, ‘69 (former staffer for The Chronicle)
Sarah (Sallie) Brown, ‘71
Howard Gillis, ‘72
Arnie Katz, ‘68
Lawrence (Dick) Landerman, ‘67, ‘75
Andrew Parker, ‘72
Barry Sharoff, ‘68
Alan Shusterman, ‘70 (former staffer for The Chronicle)
Clay Steinman, ‘71 (former editor-in-chief of The Chronicle)
Gale Touger, ‘72
Allied concerned alumni
Ninian Beall, ‘68
Julia Borbely-Brown, ‘70
Harry Boyte, ‘67
Tom Campbell, ‘70 (former editor-in-chief of The Chronicle)
Karlana Carpen, ‘76
Robert Creamer, ‘69
Christian Dame, ‘68
Joan Dickinson Walker, ‘71
Robert Dunn, ‘72
Sara Evans, ‘66
Elizabeth Falk Jones, ‘66 (former editor-in-chief of The Chronicle)
Sally Farmer, ‘70
Wib Gulley, ‘70
Elmer Hall, ‘67
Ed Harrison, ‘72, ‘76
David Henderson, ‘68
Donna Hicks, ‘69
James Kruidenier, ‘72
William Maier, ‘72
W. Cary McMullen, M.A. ‘89
Andy Moursund, ‘67
Peggy Payne, ‘70
Nancy Richardson, M.Div. ‘69
Margaret Small, ‘68
Other supporters
Bruce Coville
M. Richard Cramer, retired UNC faculty
Milo Pyne
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