"First, let me be clear. Neither the word holocaust nor the word genocide was invented to describe the loss of Jewish or European life. Both of these words mean what they mean whether the victim is Jewish or not." - June Jordan, October 10, 1982
Last weekend, in a commencement speech at the University of Michigan, Professor Derek Peterson said that a university’s greatness does not rest on the accomplishments of student-athletes, but on the courage and conviction of student-activists who push the university down the path towards justice.
As a former college athlete, I absolutely love this. Especially since university administrations spend so much money, time and energy making sports a life-and-death endeavor and scapegoat any sort of activism that actually engages with matters of life-and-death.
Dr. Peterson mentioned Moritz Levi, Michigan's first Jewish professor, the students of the Black Action Movement, and the pro-Palestinian students “who have over these past two years opened our hearts to the injustice and inhumanity of Israel’s war in Gaza.”
The president of the University of Michigan issued an apology afterwards, calling Peterson’s remarks “hurtful,” “insensitive,” and “inappropriate.” The president said that commencement is a time for celebration, recognition and unity. He said that Peterson’s speech was supposed to be congratulatory, not a platform for personal or political expression.
Of course, many of those condemning the professor’s comments are conservatives, like former governor and GOP presidential candidate Nikki Haley, who said that campus protests have repeatedly “crossed the line” and that universities have “deep culture problems” that must be addressed.
I expect these kinds of reactions from right-wing politicians. After all, Nikki Haley traveled to Israel to sign bombs headed for Gaza in the wake of October 7.
I do expect more from the liberals who have also lined up to condemn the professor.
They claim that Israel and Jewish people are being singled out. They wonder why Israel does not have the right to defend itself just like every other country. They lament that the professor didn’t tell the whole story and that he’s supporting a terrorist organization.
Reading comments like these – and many others – hit me a little bit harder this week.
On the day before the professor's commencement speech at UMich, Israeli forces murdered more than forty people in Southern Lebanon.
During a ceasefire.
Right next door to us in Dearborn, the mayor Abdullah Hammoud is mourning fourteen cousins who have been killed.
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If the professor’s words were hurtful and insensitive to the feelings of Jewish students and their families, what adjectives should be used to describe what the u.s. and Israel have been doing to the land, homes, schools, businesses, bodies, water supply, lives and livelihoods of Palestinians and Lebanese for decades?
What adjectives should be used to describe the UMich administration, its Board of Regents and the liberal Zionists who passionately weigh in, swearing up and down that all this death and destruction is desperately needed in order to protect Jewish people – and their feelings?
Again, the liberal Zionist antics in this whole equation are particularly repugnant. Their stance on this genocidal situation is not progressive. It is not even neutral. It can only be described with the word that they contemptibly hurl at Trump. It is fascist.
I have found that there is one variable that the liberal Zionists consistently insert into conversations, email correspondence and social media commenting. In the middle of a long, defensive rant against anything uttered that is pro-Palestine, they will inevitably say or write something like this:
This is not to say I condone everything the state of Israel does or has done - I don't.
The word that almost always follows this is “but.”
After the “but,” they unleash something about October 7 or Hamas or the rise of antisemitism. They do not contextualize Palestinian violence. They talk about it like it is something programmed into Palestinians, or a flaw in their DNA, not an inevitable response to eighty years of Israeli state terrorism backed by Western governments.
Liberal Zionists will not contextualize Palestinian violence. They cannot. Because if they put this issue into historical context, all the way back to 1948 and 1967 and 1982 and 2014 and 2025 - and every year in between - their edifice of justification would crumble.
Liberal Zionists rarely specify what they do not condone about what Israel does or has done.
Liberal Zionists rarely specify what they are actually saying or doing to stop it.
They only offer disclaimers about Israel or Netanyahu – mid-argument – which are designed to acquit them of supporting land theft, occupation, apartheid, ethnic cleansing, genocide and a vicious terrorist settlement expansion that is using synagogues in places like New York, New Jersey, LA, Toronto and Montreal to illegally sell land in the West Bank to Jewish-Americans.
The assumption is that we must be like them, disagreeing in our heads with some of the most egregious things that Israel is doing on the ground, in real time, while also supporting Israel’s right to defend itself (whatever that means). Because at the end of the day - they say -this is the only way that Jewish people can be safe.
This liberal Zionist tactic is not just worse than worthless. It is emotionally abusive.
Liberal Zionists are losing control of the narrative. It is now obvious that most ordinary, everyday people are seeing right through the propaganda. So they say (scripted) things like this:
Israelis and Zionist Jews have now become the punching bag of “woke America.”
What's weird is that the punching bag is still protected by every powerful institution in the u.s., including university administrations, school districts, corporate media outlets, social media algorithms, both major political parties, every current candidate for governor of California (except Butch Ware, of course), the Pentagon, the police, the non-profit industrial complex, and almost every single Jewish synagogue and Christian denomination.
The University of Michigan has a $17.9 billion endowment. For the past thirty months, students on campus have creatively, non-violently petitioned the Board of Regents to divest from weapons manufacturers profiting off of the violent occupation of Palestinian territories.
Two years ago, Lindsay and I drove to Ann Arbor on a Friday afternoon to see the Gaza encampment for ourselves. We attended a Shabbat service led by two Jewish students who were openly grappling with the concept of “Israel.” They said that Jewish people coined the term four millennia ago as the title for the community of God committed to being a moral and spiritual light to the world.
These student-leaders from Jewish Voice for Peace lamented that, over the past eighty years, Zionists have turned “Israel” into an apartheid nation-state built on the oppression of Palestinian people.
They said they will not use the word "Israel" around Palestinians because of the trauma inextricably tied to it.
Last month, I heard Salma Hamamy speak on Michigan’s campus. She was one of the student-protestors that Dr. Peterson praised in his commencement speech. Salma said that she was constantly surveilled and doxxed by the administration. She even had an undercover cop in her criminology class. When she graduated last year, a drone followed her from her dorm to the ceremony.
When Salma was an undergrad at Michigan, a classmate of hers was one of the leaders of Hillel, an international Jewish organization that offers summer volunteer programs that sends college students to Israel to provide logistical support on military bases. Salma told us that she overheard her classmate bragging that she had the President of Michigan on speed dial.
Liberal Zionists have consistently responded to these brilliant student-organizers with fascism. Because even though their arguments are easily deconstructed by love, moral logic and international law, Zionists do have all of the wealth and power on their side.
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When you publicly stand up and speak out for Palestinian liberation, you are unequivocably proclaiming that when Palestine is free, everyone will be free.
This unabashedly means everyone.
Black people. Indigenous communities. Queer folks. Women. The working poor. The undocumented. The unhoused. Arabs. Muslims. Jews.
Palestine is the intersectional litmus test for collective liberation.
This is what I've noticed over and over again for the past thirty months.
But I noticed Something Else this week too.
Liberal Zionists are justifying the muzzling of those protesting genocidal policies in Palestine in the exact same way that Republicans are justifying racist gerrymandering in Tennessee.
Liberal Zionists say they must press the mute button on free (and moral) speech to protect Jewish feelings. MAGA says they must carve up the only Black-majority congressional district in the state to protect the Constitution.
Fascists always make it sound like their profane policies are desperately needed to protect something sacred.
This week, Jim Crow in Israel and Jim Crow in America sent me right back to Dr. King’s Letter from a Birmingham Jail.
Remember, MLK wrote his long letter to liberal Christians and Jews who were dragging their feet on supporting the Black freedom struggle. He called them out for being committed to a peace defined by the absence of tension instead of a peace animated by the presence of justice.
This week, Jim Crow also had me meditating on the letter that June Jordan wrote to Adrienne Rich in the early 80’s, right after Israel’s genocidal attacks on the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps in Lebanon.
June Jordan was a Black poet and professor who was canceled by The New York Times and other liberal media outlets after she started speaking and writing and organizing for Palestinian liberation.
Adrienne Rich was a “progressive” Jewish-American poet and professor who was teaching at UC Santa Cruz.
Even though they were colleagues and friends, Jordan wrote this letter to Rich, calling her out for signing a public statement supporting Israel, even as Rich stayed silent on contemporary issues like South African apartheid, El Salvador, Nicaragua, nuclear armaments, ten percent American unemployment and police violence in Black communities.
In the scathing letter, Jordan came to this conclusion:
To Adrienne, I make this public reply: Your evident definition of feminism leaves you indistinguishable from the white men threatening the planet with extinction.
Jordan sent the letter to Audre Lorde and Barbara Smith who refused to publish it because they feared it would promote division between Black and Jewish feminists.
Few knew that the letter even existed until September 2024, when it was unearthed from Lorde’s archives at Spelman University and published online.
Four years after she wrote the letter, June Jordan approached Adrienne Rich at an anti-apartheid poetry reading and told her this to her face:
I completely and absolutely detest your views on Israel and I love you.
June Jordan was angry. But she did not cancel Adrienne Rich. She was just trying to keep her accountable to the dictates of love, moral logic and the rule of law.
Eventually, Adrienne Rich came around to an anti-Zionist position.
Thank God. Thank June Jordan.
Like June Jordan, I am angry. Because like June Jordan, I have seen the carnage and listened to the testimonies of those who are here, in Jim Crow America, only because their ancestors were displaced – and their cousins are being killed.
My anger arises from a lack of peace that is only possible in the presence of justice. Liberal Zionists are uncomfortable with my anger. Because they are committed to a peace aligned with the absence of tension.
As long as these are the conditions for peace, Palestine will continue to be a serious problem.
I have deep love for the liberal Zionists in my life. They are friends, former students and colleagues, and even family members. They are not MAGA. But when it comes to the humanity and dignity of Palestinians and the Lebanese, they sure are acting like they are.
Why? Some of them are traumatized. All of them are propagandized.
These are deep problems that I must grapple with too - if I want to get free.
In Jim Crow America, we all have this in common.
