EXCERPT:
If challenges to Zionism are branded antisemitic, then Palestinians are effectively being told they may describe their suffering only in terms palatable to those defending the system that has subjugated and oppressed them for decades.
Human rights advocates are being told they may criticize policies, but not the ideology that produced those policies.
Americans are being told that debate over billions in U.S. military aid, diplomatic cover and complicity in war crimes is somehow off-limits.
That is not democracy; it’s enforced orthodoxy.
A morally serious conversation must hold multiple truths at once.
All life is sacred, including Jewish and Palestinian life. Antisemitism is evil. Apartheid and anti-Palestinian racism are evil.
Jewish trauma does not erase Palestinian dispossession and ethnic cleansing. Palestinian freedom does not require Jewish insecurity.
The path forward isn’t to blur our language until criticism becomes hate speech.
The path forward must be clarity. Antisemitism is hostility to Jews as Jews. Anti-Zionism is opposition to a political ideology and state structure.
The two are not equivalent, and conflating them does not protect Jews. It only protects oppressors and perpetrators of injustice from accountability.
In both the short and long run, no people’s safety can be built on denying another people’s freedom.
Nicole Erin Morse is a Baltimore-based member of the Jewish Voice for Peace Academic Council. Zainab Chaudry is director of the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR) office in Maryland.