Statement from Jewish Rutgers union members: Zionist hegemony must end

“A Jewish state in Palestine in any shape or form cannot but contravene the basic rights of the land’s indigenous Palestinian population and perpetuate a system of racial discrimination that ought to be opposed categorically.” Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) co-founder Omar Barghouti

On November, 25, 2024, the office building of the Rutgers academic unions (representing tenured, contingent, and graduate student educators) was defaced with pro-Israel posters. “Fight Jew-hatred. Before it’s too late,” said one. “STAND UP FOR THE JEWISH STATE,” demanded another. 

As Jewish educators at Rutgers we categorically reject the slanderous insinuation that our unions–led by Jewish presidents and vice presidents–are blind to or bastions of antisemitism. At the same time, we affirm our opposition to all ethnosupremacist states–including the apartheid Israeli state. 

The defacement immediately preceded the unions’ membership vote on a groundbreaking “Joint Resolution on Divestment from Genocide in Palestine,” which, we are proud to say, passed by more than 20-point margins in both unions on Friday, December 13.

The resolution mirrors an undergraduate motion that overwhelmingly passed last spring, and aligns with an urgent solidarity appeal from Palestinian trade unions. It calls on Rutgers University to suspend its 2021 memorandum of agreement with Tel Aviv University and disallow any future collaboration on Israeli military or intelligence technology, immediately divest from assets and companies that profit from Israeli apartheid, and terminate investments supporting Israel’s genocide. 

Crucially, the union resolution acknowledges the Nakba (“catastrophe” in Arabic), the violent ethnic cleansing of over 750,000 Palestinians that began in 1948 and continues to this day. The decades-long “unrelenting ordeal” of the Nakba, explains Palestinian human rights lawyer and legal scholar Rabea Eghbariah, “encapsulate[s] the ongoing structure of subjugation in Palestine.” 

Palestinian resistance is the predictable response to the consequences of the Nakba, just as the current annihilation in Gaza is a predictable expression of the settler-colonial drive to remove, replace, and ultimately erase the indigenous population. As the BDS National Committee wrote in the wake of October 7, 2023, “Since oppression is the root cause of violence, to end all violence — the initial and ongoing violence of the oppressor and the reactive resistance of the oppressed — we must act to end oppression.”  

To say these things is not anti-Jewish. It is not “hate speech.” It threatens the safety of no one at Rutgers. It is to simply speak the truth, however disturbing it may be for some to hear.

Indeed, it is those willing to speak the truth, especially Palestinian and other BIPOC students, faculty, and staff, who find their safety threatened by the campaign to muzzle the call for Palestinian liberation. The threat manifests in multiple ways, including institutional crackdowns on and police suppression of student and faculty Palestine advocacy, legislation–often authored by Israeli-funded advocacy groups–that inhibits the constitutionally protected right to boycott, and the crusade to conflate anti-Zionism with Jew-hatred through the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s (IHRA) “working definition of antisemitism.” This campaign intersects with the broader Trumpist project to purge higher education of all political and cultural “enemies.”

To justify this ever-expanding assault on our rights, and unable to answer for or conceal Israel’s crimes against humanity, Israel supporters in government, corporate media, and higher education peddle the cynical lie that growing campus Palestine activism amounts to pervasive antisemitism. This lie is also a ploy to hide the obvious: it is not Palestinian demands for justice that put Jews around the world at risk, but a genocidal state claiming to act in their name; it is not the call for one state with equal rights for all that imperils Jewish safety, it is the growing ideological alliance between the Zionist establishment and antisemitic white nationalists around the world.

The incident at our union house reflects the near-total impunity afforded Zionists, Jewish or otherwise. Israeli leaders affirm their eliminationist intent, and are welcomed to address Congress with rapturous applause. Rep. Josh Gottheimer (D-NJ) can, with a straight face, slander the union divestment resolution as an example of “hatred and antisemitism,” and there are no denunciations of this glaring fabrication from anyone in power. The CEO of the Rutgers chapter of the Zionist campus organization Hillel International can declare, in response to campus Palestine advocacy, that “if you want to know what 1938 Germany looked and felt like, just look around,” and no opinion piece or editorial calls out her unhinged ranting. New York University, eager to placate donors and other powerful actors, issues a new Non-Discrimination and Harassment policy that singles out Zionism for bogus protections under Title VI Civil Rights law–among other harms, opening the door for proponents of other supremacist ideologies to demand similar entitlements–and the mainstream media covers its ears, eyes, and mouth. House Republicans orchestrate a series of McCarthyite witch hunts against pro-Palestine campus activism, and “enlightened” university presidents and chancellors hauled before the committee cravenly accommodate their inquisitors rather than use their platform to shame them.

The source of this impunity is no mystery. For decades, Israel has functioned as a vital watchdog for U.S. imperial interests. To protect this asset, a bipartisan political consensus has drilled into popular consciousness the fallacy that Zionism is indissolubly linked to Jewish identity. This linkage is then weaponized to pathologize any references to 77 years of systemic Israeli oppression of Palestinians, and to Israel’s intermittent, murderous forays into Lebanon and Syria, as “antisemitism.” The ultimate proof of this tactic’s success is the West’s appalling support for a genocide that continues unabated.

The legacy of antisemitism in Europe that triggered the emergence of Zionism must neither be ignored nor minimized. Nonetheless, Zionism is a settler-colonial political ideology historically rooted in racist Western obsessions with “blood and soil” nationalism, not an inherent ethnic or religious marker. As such, a Jewish supremacist state in Palestine is no more intrinsic to Jewish identity than the Islamic State in the Levant is intrinsic to Islam or the Modi regime is intrinsic to Hinduism.

Enabling Zionism to masquerade as a foundational pillar of Jewishness has had increasingly dire–and intended–consequences for domestic advocates for justice in Palestine, especially in higher education. At Harvard, hedge fund billionaire Bill Ackman called for pro-Palestine Harvard students to be put on a public blacklist so they are never “inadvertently” hired. At Columbia University, long-serving law professor Katherine Franke was effectively terminated for expressing concern about the safety of Palestinian students and their allies who faced violent harassment from former IDF soldiers-turned-Columbia students. Jewish tenured Muhlenberg College professor Maura Finkelstein shared an anti-Zionist post on Instagram and was summarily fired for allegedly violating the university’s equal opportunity and nondiscrimination policy. Other harrowing examples abound. In the face of such persecution, is it any wonder many who want to speak out feel that to do so they have to choose between their conscience and their career and security?

Lost in the wave of false antisemitism accusations is a morbid irony: the more Israeli brutality and domination are seen as fulfilling the collective goals of Jewish people–that is, the more the world takes Zionists at their word–the more likely Jewish people around the world will be seen as the culpable party, putting them in greater danger. 

Those outraged by the world’s first live-streamed genocide and the ongoing Nakba must urgently work to undermine the hegemonic position Zionism occupies in public discourse and policy. That means unshackling Zionism from Jewish identity, a task Jewish allies should assume rather than displacing that burden onto Palestinians and others more vulnerable to baseless smears of antisemitism. This is one of the most important contributions Jews, in the U.S. and elsewhere, can make to Palestine solidarity.

2024 was the year of Gaza encampments, and the passage of historic student, faculty union, and institutional divestment resolutions. Let 2025 be the year we break, once and for all, the Zionist establishment’s chokehold on the movement for a free Palestine–“a new shared society, free from all colonial subjugation and discrimination”–from the river to the sea.

Signed,

Derek Baron, Rutgers AAUP-AFT
Mark Bray, Rutgers AAUP-AFT
Jordan Bridges, Rutgers AAUP-AFT
Belinda Davis, Rutgers AAUP-AFT
Margaret Goldman, Rutgers AAUP-AFT
Hank Kalet Rutgers, PTLFC-AAUP-AFT
Liana Katz Rutgers, AAUP-AFT
David Kurnick, Rutgers, AAUP-AFT  
Elaine LaFay, Rutgers AAUP-AFT  
David Letwin, Rutgers PTLFC-AAUP-AFT  
Alexander Liebman, Rutgers AAUP-AFT
David Love, Rutgers AAUP-AFT  
Emily Marker, Rutgers AAUP-AFT
Bryan  Sacks, Rutgers PTLFC-AAUP-AFT
Erin Santana, Rutgers AAUP-AFT
Troy Shinbrot, Rutgers AAUP-AFT
Michael Terilli, Rutgers AAUP-AFT
Karen Thompson, Rutgers AAUP-AFT