BRATTLEBORO-As local and global understanding of Israeli genocide against Palestinians has grown over the past eight months, and opposition to the actions of Israel builds, there have been many words printed in these pages expressing a feeling of Jewish unsafety.
One writer objects to hearing the term "the Zionist project" - a term long used by historians to describe the modern political and demographic movement that created the Jewish-majority state of Israel - as antisemitic, and somehow "trickling down" to encourage displays of swastikas.
In another column, a writer sees a causality between the rhetoric used to oppose Israeli violence in Gaza, leading to recent threats of violence against a Jewish synagogue in Massachusetts.
Most recently, one writer bluntly (and erroneously) asserts that "most of your Jewish neighbors experience these protests [against Israel] as an emerging form of Nazism," and claim that protesters have "hijacked the cause of social justice."
These writers belong to a well-entrenched liberal tradition of supporting a message of peace while refusing to hear how we are complicit in the war. They object to language that doesn't adhere to their anodyne playbook of appropriate ways to criticize Israel, plead against using terms that cause them to be uncomfortable, and warn against phraseology that they view as creeping too close to an opaquely defined line into "extremism."
They argue that such language, however "well intentioned," can be "misconstrued to justify hate."
We Jews are well-grounded in the realities of being hated in the modern era. From the pogroms to the Holocaust, we know from marginalization. For white Jews like myself, we also know from privilege.
The tendency of white people to prioritize and center our own mixture of feelings when discussing racism is so common that it has a name: white fragility. It is marked by a defensiveness or guilt about our own role in systems that oppress or disadvantage people of color, and a focus on the hardships we have ourselves faced in a capitalist, classist, misogynist culture.
These emotions are truthfully normal, and they are rooted in the indisputable ways in which white people are both complicit and harmed by a dehumanized and dehumanizing society.
What makes it fragile, however, is when it comes only in reaction to being shown and asked to acknowledge the specific violence and harm faced by marginalized communities.
Millions of us are fighting to stop the intentional violent militarized aggression, forced starvation, ethnic cleansing, and cultural demolition of the people of Gaza and all Palestinians by the Israeli state. To witness opposition to violence against Palestinians, and then to speak loudest only about threats to Jewish safety betrays the same fragility.
Believing that antisemites are inspired by language in support of Palestinian safety, but somehow immune to the genocidal actions of Israel, a self-described Jewish state, whose tanks sport the Star of David, is logic that is hardly worth treating with any dignity.
No Jew is made safer by Israel, because no Palestinian is made safer by Israel.
I, too, am threatened by seeing a swastika spray-painted on a local mural, and terrified by someone who would seek to punish all Jews for the actions of Israel.
To those who fear for Jewish safety, know that I stand beside you to fight antisemitism. I expect that you would also share my horror at the Palestinian genocide and fight with me just as hard to end it.
These two goals are inseparable. They are, in fact, indistinguishable.
Matt Dricker
Brattleboro
This letter to the editor was submitted to The Commons.
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