Since the Oct. 7 massacre, during which Hamas militants brutally murdered children and Holocaust survivors because they were Jewish, some Oberlin students have attempted to delegitimize Israel, refusing “peace on stolen land” and demanding that Israelis “end the occupation.”
Shortly after Oct. 7, I saw posters claiming that “pink blood” in pictures was fake and that the massacre was a hoax. I saw “f**k Israel,” “from the river to the sea,” and “this is the Holocaust of Palestinians” written in Tappan Square. Denying that Israeli children were shot and burned to death on Oct. 7 and implying that the Israel Defense Forces is doing to the Palestinians what the Nazis did to the Jews is beyond disrespectful to the Jewish people in its invalidation of Jewish history and tragedy. Over half a year later, hostages, including one-year-old Kfir Bibas and multiple foreign nationals, are still in Gaza. The recitation of anti-Zionist talking points that imply babies’ complicity in a nonexistent genocide continues unabated.
Zionism is the Jewish people’s movement for self determination and establishing a Jewish homeland — full stop. As such, anti-Zionism is intertwined with antisemitism. So, when Oberlin’s Jewish students are bombarded by calls for an “intifada revolution” to destroy the only country that will always welcome us unconditionally, many of us feel scared and isolated because we hear a rejection of Jewish sovereignty.
Zionists are portrayed as colonizers, but Israel cannot be a colonial state if a continuous Jewish population has existed in the area for millennia. Oberlin’s student activists fail to acknowledge the Jewish connection to the land, which extends back to biblical times. Some Jewish families today can trace their history in Israel to the Second Temple Period — 530 BCE–70 CE. Jews survived there despite Roman occupation, incursions by Crusaders, and Ottoman rule.
People with somewhere to return to establish colonies; until the establishment of Israel, Jews had no homeland. First emerging as a Jewish political response to calls to assimilate during the Haskalah (Jewish enlightenment) and the various nationalist movements in 19th-century Europe, Zionism quickly became, according to Anita Shapira, professor emeritus of Jewish History at Tel Aviv University, a survival response for European Jews and later for Jews around the world. Jews in the Pale of Settlement were excluded from higher education and employment, and pogroms from 1881–82 convinced many Eastern European Jews to flee Europe; later, the Holocaust caused European Jews to flee to what would become Israel in even greater numbers.
One government did not organize migration to Israel; people migrated in waves from at least 60 countries as refugees. In addition to European Jews, many Middle Eastern and North African Jews, including 650,000 of the approximately 850,000 expelled from Arab countries in the Middle East from 1920–1970, settled in Israel.
Antisemitism increased in Muslim majority countries during the 20th century as animosity toward Jewish immigration and Zionist protocols grew. In the first decades after Israel’s establishment, Jews in many Arab countries experienced severe persecution and economic strangulation by those countries’ governments, eventually forcing them to flee. Jews in Egypt had their possessions sequestered and held for ransom and Syrian Jews’ financial assets were seized by the government. According to the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, entrepreneurs in Libya and Tunisia were obliged to have Muslim partners, ousting them from ownership of their own companies. Jews were also prohibited from working in Libyan petroleum companies. Egyptian law mandated that 75 percent of all companies’ employees be “real” Egyptians — Arabs or Muslims —, forcing Jews from their jobs.
Most dangerous, however, were the — often state-sanctioned — pogroms, riots, and mass arrests that MENA Jews endured during these decades. The Farhud pogrom in Baghdad, — June 1–2, 1941 — left 780 Jews dead and 1,000 injured. In 1945, a riot in Libya’s former Tripolitania region killed over 140 Jews. After Israel’s establishment on May 14, 1948, 300 Jews were arrested by Egyptian authorities because of their previous ties to Zionist organizations.
When the Jews finally fled, many arrived in Israel destitute — many MENA countries confiscated their possessions. According to the JCPA, Libya’s Law #6, passed in 1961, decreed that the possessions of Jews leaving for Israel be sequestered. From 1958 to 1961, Jews leaving Syria had to transfer their possessions to the Syrian state and pay significant departure expenses.
Today, the majority of Israelis are Jews, of whom 44.9 percent are Mizrahi — of North African and Middle Eastern/Asian descent — and only 31.8 percent of whom are Ashkenazi — descendants of European Jews. We at Obies for Israel denounce the claim that Israel is a “racist” European colony.
Zionism’s primary goal is that Jews have their own country where they can be safe, and it’s presumptuous of non-Jews to say otherwise. Israel has been a sanctuary for Jews forced out of their home countries in Europe, MENA, and all around the world. The vast majority of Jews believe that Israel should exist, including younger Jews who feel more distant from the story of the country’s establishment; Jews at Oberlin should feel comfortable expressing such opinions.
Making divisive claims that spread misinformation while silencing Zionist — Jewish — perspectives isolates Jews on campus. What would happen if a Jewish student walked across Tappan Square with an Israeli flag? Oberlin’s Jewish students should be allowed to be openly proud of their nation.
I chose to attend Oberlin partly because of students’ tolerance for and discussion of different perspectives. Additionally, I take comfort in the fact that almost a quarter of the student body is Jewish. Despite Oberlin’s spirit of dialogue and the large Jewish presence on campus, however, I do not feel safe being outwardly Zionist. The events of Oct. 7 were a massive shock to the Jewish community, especially to those — such as myself — with family in Israel, yet Oberlin’s Jewish students are not allowed to grieve our losses unless we renounce our homeland. The campus climate, which scares Jewish and Israeli students from mourning, disheartens me, and I believe that all students’ feelings and perspectives must be given the attention they deserve.
