Culture Shock: Refusing the weaponization of Jewish identity

On April 2, Hillel at the University of Connecticut began “Israel Fest” in celebration of the State of Israel and roughly coinciding with the anniversary of Israel’s formation. A month later in May, Israelis and Zionists will celebrate Israeli Independence Day while Palestinians commemorate the Nakba. The Nakba, occurring in 1948 as a result of the creation of Israel, saw the forced displacement and dispossession of over 700,000 Palestinians and the massacre of thousands more by Zionist militias that would become the Israeli Defense Forces.  

While UConn Hillel is commonly understood as a Jewish religious and cultural organization, its own mission states that it also aims to encourage Jewish students to make “enduring commitments” to the State of Israel. To fulfill this mission, Hillel hosts an “Israel Fellow” from the Jewish Agency for Israel, whose job it is to be the “face of Israel” and “[promote] Israel advocacy,” and is required to have served in the Israeli military. Students associated with Huskies for Israel and Students Supporting Israel, two nationalist political organizations, worked closely with Israeli Defense Forces veterans and the “Israel Fellow” from Hillel to orchestrate “Israel Fest.”  

As part of the festivities, Hillel also hosted Charlotte Korchak, a professional apologist for the State of Israel and long-time employee of Stand With Us, an anti-Palestinian hate organization that denies the Nakba. The Israeli newspaper Haaretz describes Stand With Us as “rightist,” and a partner of far-right antisemitic hate groups such as Christians United for Israel, whose leader John Hagee once stated that “God sent Adolf Hitler to help Jews reach the promised land.” Stand With Us receives funding (sometimes covertly) from the far-right, openly racist government of Benjamin Netanyahu to toe the government line, and worked with the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs to publish a video defending Israel’s illegal settlements in the occupied Palestinian West Bank. Korchak also recently went viral in far-right segments of the internet for berating an anti-Zionist Jew who attended one of her speaking events. The list of Stand With Us’ anti-Palestinian and antisemitic actions and connections could go on, but suffice to say they are a hateful, nationalist, political advocacy organization — not a Jewish religious or cultural organization. 

I was one of several dozen students — including Palestinian refugees and Jews — peacefully protesting both the display on Fairfield Way and the Korchak event. Signs held by the protesters included statements such as “Israel killed my family” and “13,000+ children killed.” Several protesters explicitly stated they were protesting the uncritical celebration of the State of Israel amidst its genocide of the Palestinian people — which has killed upwards of 35,000 Palestinians, over 13,000 of them children — not against Jewish people, culture or religion. Despite this, UConn Hillel released a statement April 12 on their Instagram story claiming that the protests were “fundamentally antisemitic”. 

Their reasoning? “Israel is a critical part of [Jewish students’] religious, cultural, and ethnic identity that goes back thousands of years.” Regardless of the fact that the State of Israel has only existed for 75 years, and that Zionism, the political ideology behind the state, has existed for less than 150, the modern state of Israel is not an inherent part of Jewish identity — certainly not for this Jew. It is true that Jews have lived in the region for thousands of years, that many Jewish religious and cultural traditions have their basis in the local ecology and neighboring cultures as a result and that many locations are religiously and historically significant. None of this is rooted in Zionism or requires support for the State of Israel, which is an ethno-nationalist apartheid state. Nor could this ever justify the 1948 Nakba, 1967 Nakba, ongoing genocide and the “second Nakba” in Gaza or recent spree of pogroms in the West Bank, all perpetuated by the State of Israel against the Palestinian people. 

No Jew should feel coerced into supporting Zionism, the State of Israel or its actions. The conflation of Jewish identity with the state of Israel and its (at times fascistic) actions is dangerous and antisemitic, laying blame for them on Jewish people as a whole. Contrary to Zionist assertions, Zionism is far from a settled issue in the Jewish community. Jewish anti-Zionism stretches back ​​​over a century​ and spans the political and religious spectrum, from secular socialists to Hasidic dynasties. Jewish anti-Zionist communities are growing locally, too, from Wesleyan University’s Judaism On Our Own Terms to New Haven’s Mending Minyan. It is not the fault of Palestinians that the state which oppresses and kills them claims to do so in the name of the Jewish people, and activists at UConn correctly differentiate between that state and the Jewish people, even when Zionists do not.  

The statement released by Hillel further perpetuates this antisemitic conflation, fosters a dangerous environment for Jewish students, and alienates Jewish students who do not share in Hillel’s celebration of Israel. The efforts of Zionists to conflate Judaism with Zionism erase large swathes of the Jewish past and present and foreclose on countless possibilities in the Jewish future. Furthermore, this latest statement is part of a continuing pattern of UConn Hillel attacking Palestinian, Arab and Muslim students and their supporters at a time when those same students have been receiving racist and Islamophobic hate mail and death threats. Hillel’s statement uses Jewish identity as a cudgel against Palestinian students and their supporters, chills free speech and silences legitimate criticism of Israel and Zionism, even at the expense of Jewish students. I reject the fundamentally anti-Palestinian assertion that the well-being of the Jewish people is incompatible with a liberated Palestine from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea. I reject the fundamentally antisemitic assertion that Israel and its actions are synonymous with the Jewish people. I refuse to have my Jewish identity weaponized against my Palestinian siblings or superseded by Zionism.