Batya Ungar-Sargon asked students not to protest Ruth Wisse at Bard because she’s a Holocaust survivor, giving her a pass for anti-Arab racism. The panel she did want the students to protest featured Ungar-Sargon and a black Jew, Shahanna McKinney-Baldon, who now seeks an apology for Ungar-Sargon’s error-laden account of the event.
Many Jews have kept their silence about Israel, knowing that a critique of Israeli policies (not to mention Zionism) can get you labeled as a “self-hater” and have detrimental consequences to reputation and career. I know such people, and I don’t blame them. But it appears that this climate is beginning to change.
Zionism’s adherents see the ideology as a kind of ‘essence of life’, essential to the survival of Jews. Therefore the person who breaks with the ideology has betrayed a social contract, and by citing liberal values, has offended Zionists and made them feel lesser, Jonathan Ofir explains. No wonder the person who breaks often is socially ostracized or regarded with great mistrust.
Gideon Levy has described Zionism as “Israel’s fundamentalist religion.” But what happens to those Israelis who reject it? Jonathan Ofir describes his journey away from Zionism, and the societal exclusion that befalls those who drift away from the ethos.
“How do I reconcile us reclaiming a land of empty swamps and deserts and making them bloom with the fact that 700,000 Palestinians had become refugees? Where had these people lived?”