How Do Young American Jews Define Being Pro-Israel?

 

Thomas Harris
is a Harvard senior majoring in integrated biology (evolutionary biology/ecology) with a focus on environmentalism.

Being pro-Israel on a college campus right now means a bunch of things. For one, it means dealing with antisemitism, but on a smaller scale than the media portrays. Incidentally, I don’t like the word antisemitism because it makes it feel scientific and impersonal; I just say Jewish hate.

“Now it’s just super important to defend Israel and to move it front of mind.”

I’d seen anti-Israel activism at Harvard before October 7, but after that, the sentiments went beyond anti-Zionism into hate speech about Jews, and it made me realize that I’d been living in a time of relative calm. In such “normal” times, being pro-Israel wasn’t such a large part of my Jewish identity. When I think about Judaism, I think about coming together with my family, going to temple, Friday night dinners at Chabad or Hillel—stuff I do as part of a community. But in response to the criticism that my community has gotten, it’s necessitated my connecting being pro-Israel with my identity, and now it’s just super important to defend Israel and to move it front of mind.

It’s important to educate people that Israel isn’t just a bunch of white settler colonialists. Israelis are people who were expelled from their homes, many throughout the Middle East, people who had been persecuted for thousands of years coming together and creating a state to protect themselves. You’re talking about a legitimate democracy in the Middle East.

I’ve been to Israel five or six times in my life (not since October 7), and I want to go back. I probably wouldn’t consider making aliyah in the near future because I want to do land conservation, and there isn’t that much land to conserve in Israel; they’ve done a pretty good job ecologically. Anyway, I think that Jews in the diaspora have a right to defend Israel but also to criticize Israel. And so, I’m pro-Israel in the sense that I support the State of Israel and its continued existence, but I also feel it’s important to be critical of the Israeli government when necessary, just as it’s important to criticize the American government. Being critical of the government, in a constructive way, is one of the most patriotic things you can do.

I also think there are a lot of people who are pro-Israel but wary of Israel’s actions, and they feel somewhat isolated. I don’t necessarily blame the Jewish community for wanting to put out a single message on Israel when hate speech is being thrown at Jews left and right. But when it comes to internal Jewish spaces, it’s really important to hold Israel to the highest of standards.

A friend outside of my Jewish community has Palestinian family who have been affected by Israel’s campaign in Gaza. We’ve discussed the conflict openly, and something I’ve taken away from our discussions, but I don’t think he has, is that we vehemently disagree on the past but not on the future. I firmly believe that almost every instance of violence since 1948 has been a case of Israel defending itself, whereas he would say that Israel was always the aggressor. But when we talk about the future, about having a Jewish state in the region and creating a state for the Palestinian people, the particulars might be slightly different, but wanting peace is a shared sentiment. And yes, people say there’s no room for a two-state solution anymore, because of the settlements and so on. But I still think a two-state solution would be one of the best ways to resolve this conflict.

It’s really important to continue having these conversations, not so much about Israel’s past but about its future.

Amanda P.
is a junior studying human development at a University of California campus. She asked that her last name and school be withheld.

For me, being pro-Israel coincides with the definition of Zionism that holds that the Jewish people have a right to self-determination in the land of Israel, because that’s where our ancestors come from (it’s in the Torah). And also so that we have a place to go if there were to be another Holocaust.

My family has been in the United States since the 1890s. But why? Because we had to escape Europe, escape the pogroms in Austria. So, I think two things can be true: that America has given my family and many other families the opportunity to succeed in life safely and freely (I’m big on patriotism and proud of my American identity); at the same time, I have a cultural tie to Israel that I don’t have to the United States.

“I find it very odd that Jews and Israel aren’t included in anti-hate efforts.”

In 2019, I went to Israel with my synagogue—all my friends and all our families—and it was so amazing to explore our homeland and be in a place where the majority is Jewish, where you can walk around without any fear of antisemitism. But there’s a lot of stigma in the United States around being a Zionist and being pro-Israel. People think it means you’re anti-Palestinian and that you support everything the Israeli government is doing. That’s not the case.

In seventh grade, my Hebrew school teacher was talking to us about Israel and issues like the BDS movement and why it was bad, and then he said, “When you guys go to college, something big is going to happen.” We all thought he sounded like a crazy doomsdayer, and then that something literally happened with October 7. We had an [anti-Israel/pro-Palestinian] encampment at our school pretty much all of spring quarter. It was on the quad in the middle of campus, and anytime someone would walk by wearing anything remotely Jewish, even just a Star of David or a yellow ribbon for the hostages, people in the encampment would run up and call them out. It was almost militant how they carried walkie-talkies to relay messages like “They’re on the perimeter” or “They’re coming this way.”

There’s nothing wrong with peaceful protest, and you can have your own opinions, but I don’t think you should be allowed to promote violent rhetoric, such as yelling “Death to Jews!” and “Globalize the Intifada!” And while it’s case by case, if someone who’s been given the opportunity to come to our country and study is being violent, taking over buildings and causing mass disruption, they should be deported. Because that’s not what America stands for.

People in California tend to be more progressive, especially on a campus, where in addition to chanting “Free Palestine,” they’re also opposing anti-Asian hate, anti-Black hate. And we 100 percent need those movements. But I find it very odd that Jews and Israel aren’t included in anti-hate efforts. There’s this perception of Jews as all white Ashkenazi oppressors. And so it is difficult.

Still, I’m more hopeful for Israel’s future than scared. Very hopeful. President Trump likes to say that if he’d been in power on October 7, the attack by Hamas wouldn’t have happened. I think it’s very self-absorbed to think that, but like it or not, Trump is a very extreme person, and I think he’s a person who follows through on what he says. His is the first administration in a long time that’s had a truly hands-on approach and is fully on deck to support democracy for all in the region. (Hamas is not a democracy. Hamas is a terrorist organization.) Does the Trump administration need to be in charge of the whole redoing of Gaza? Probably not. And I probably wouldn’t have gone about promoting the idea the way Trump did, such as sharing the absolutely comical “Trump Gaza” AI video. (I don’t know how you’re supposed to take that seriously. Like, why is there a shot of Trump and Bibi shirtless at a beachside pool? No one needs to see that!) But there can’t be a free Palestine with Hamas in power.

Even before Trump came back into office, I had no fear that Hamas would survive—it was just a question of how long it would take to eradicate them and how many innocent lives that would claim, which is horrible. It’s challenging, because Hamas has brainwashed its citizens into being antisemitic and being anti-Israel. I think that says more about Hamas than the Palestinian people. Is part of being pro-Israel to acknowledge the suffering on the other side? Yes and no. I think in Jewish spaces, as a Jewish person, I can promote things that are pro-Israel without always giving a recognition statement that I’m sorry for the innocent lives lost on both sides. I don’t think I should have to say that, because it’s just basic humanity. I think it’s just understood.

Zahava Feldstein
has a master’s in divinity from the University of Chicago. Last year she left Stanford, where she was pursuing a PhD in education with a concentration in Jewish studies. Today she is a director at the Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism and Policy.

I’m not sure what pro-Israel means. Pro the country? Pro its policies? Pro the idea of a Jewish state? It’s an interesting choice not to use the word Zionist instead.

I grew up a rabbi’s daughter attending Jewish day school, BBYO and Jewish summer camp, then teaching at a Hebrew school. So, deeply invested in the Zionist Jewish-American educational program. And then I went to Scripps College in California, where the worst thing you could be was a Zionist. As an American studies major, I was learning a framework for understanding the world where everything is about systems of power, where the residue of imperialism, colonialism and racism covers every facet of our society. Under those paradigms, it made sense that no Western country had the “right” to exist. But what my classmates and professors demanded of me, as a Jewish student, was more than that. They needed me to denounce not just the right of a Jewish state to exist but the need for a Jewish state to exist.

In my sophomore year of undergrad, I took a class called Palestinian Ethnography. On the first day, the professor said to each student: Tell us about yourself, what you know about this topic and why you’re here. I said I’d gone to a Jewish school for 16 years but knew nothing about Palestinian ethnography because I hadn’t heard the word Palestinian much growing up. I would come to realize that I actually knew a lot; names like the Six-Day War and the Yom Kippur War were just different—strategic namings, as I was taught in that class.

“Why do I have to go out of my way to denounce Israel or Zionism or Jewish day school before you’ll say I can speak in your space?”

During this time, I found a journal I’d kept from a high school trip to Israel and Poland. It had a blue tie-dye cover (which my teenage self thought symbolic). Our tour guide had taken us to the Golan Heights and told us about Eli Cohen, the Israeli spy who had collected intelligence there. He was eventually caught and publicly hanged in Damascus in 1965. The guide told us that Cohen’s body had never been returned to Israel and that he was a national hero, encouraging us all to make a pledge to the Jewish state. And so I wrote in this journal, in huge letters, “I pledge that if the State of Israel goes into an all-out war in my lifetime, I will fight. There are so many Muslim nations in this world, there sure as hell better be a Jewish one.”

Reading this as a sophomore in college, I cried. How could I have been so indoctrinated into this terrible, violent ideology? I was now fully in the anti-Zionist framework, and what I was giving up was my community. I was resenting my upbringing and setting aside my Jewish epistemologies in order to say, yeah, your understanding of the Jew is better than my study and my lived experience.

This is what’s happening on college campuses right now: Around the idea of “Nobody’s free until everybody’s free,” other marginalized groups get to define what their liberation looks like, while Jewish students have to say, you—non-Jewish classmate, professor, administrator—you have the right to define what liberation looks like for me.

I went to Stanford to get a PhD because I wanted to be a scholar. I wanted to write my dissertation on the ethnic studies mandate in California and whether or not Jews should or could be included in it. Then I walked into the ethnic studies classrooms and got the answer: You don’t belong here. I became an expert on campus antisemitism not just because I was studying it, but because I was living it as well.

In one class, we were talking about Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed. He has this line where he says that the only way for the oppressed to become emancipated from their oppression is to learn their own history, to stop letting the oppressor teach them their own history. Elsewhere Freire says that the oppressed, once liberated, are bound to recreate the same systems that once oppressed them. So we read this, and my classmates say, that sounds like the Jews. In these situations I struggled with the analytical and historical arguments to throw back and instead sat with questions: How come I’m not allowed to feel pain? Why can’t there be any complexity to my experience, and why do I have to go out of my way to denounce Israel or Zionism or Jewish day school before you’ll say I can speak in your space?

So to me, being pro-Israel sounds like a response, an antagonism to being anti-Israel. But if someone asks me if I’m a Zionist, I also hesitate, because everyone’s definitions are different. I never said I was pro-Israel to my Stanford classmates. In fact, I went out of my way to show that I was trying to be in solidarity with them and that I was trying to have nuanced conversations, considering complexity and counterfactual information. But even bringing scholarship or Jewish identity into the classroom made me a target for their anti-Zionist activism.

For so long, my Judaism was wholly entangled with Zionism, and so the past few years have been a process of trying to find a way to Judaism that doesn’t fundamentally depend on the concept of a modern political nation-state. I believe that Jews have the right to determine how to ensure our safety and continued existence (of course different Jews have different opinions on that), but I hesitate to use the term pro-Israel to describe myself. When people ask me where I’m from and then follow up by asking me if I’m a Zionist or how I feel about what’s going on in the Middle East, they’re not asking me because I’ve studied it in graduate school—they’re asking me because I’m a Jew. Usually, they just want to fight me on it.

Having existed in American Jewish establishment spaces and in radical leftist political spaces, which fundamentally disagree with each other on definitions and on history, I now inhabit a very nuanced complexity, where I struggle to speak and make sense of things in ways that are empathetic. It’s terrible. And if anyone thinks they have all the answers and knows all the details, they are not thinking deeply enough.