In Our Name: A Message from Jewish Students at Columbia University

[No War, but the War on Christmas]

I'm neither a zionist nor an anti-zionist, and I do agree with Brittain above that millions of Jewish people and families have built lives in the State of Israel so that any idea of them going anywhere is completely unjustifiable, no matter ones opinion on how the creation of Israel was handled.

Furthermore, if anyone was possibly in need of a homeland due to persecution, it certainly would be Jews.

That being said, I often recognize similar patterns of fundamentalism between the evangelical culture I grew up in and extremely ardent zionists, and I won't pretend to have any respect for that. It's obviously been said before but going back a thousand + years to support your claim to any land is extremely problematic for plenty of reasons.

These students are just as much ideologues as they purport to claim the 'tokenized' Jews who support the protests are, so this op-ed is certainly taken with a massive grain of salt in any case... Especially the super off-putting 'In Our Name' as the title.

[No War, but the War on Christmas]

I can completely understand and agree with the notion that Jews have a right to a homeland, and that it is not my place to dispute if Jewish people say that their religion requires Israel to be their homeland. While at the same time, I can also understand and sympathize with people who find it hard to accept that someone else's religion requires what they perceive to be their homeland to be violently taken away, and to resist that. In essence, both sides have a defensible position in theory, and this is why the issue is so hard.

The problem is that Zionism as a theory was resolved 75 years ago with Israel defeating Arab armies and securing its viability except for what settlers are doing in the West Bank. Israel is a country with 7 million Jews who were mostly born there or arrived as refugees from ethnic cleansing and either it stays a country with 7 million Jews or else “Palestine is free from the river to the sea” and the Jews disappear. If the argument is over Zionism as a justification for settlements in the West Bank, well I’m a Zionist and I think that’s indefensible and bad and should stop.

I am not sure what is meant by the highlighted phrase. It sounds like an omninous euphemism, but it is so vague that it doesn't really shed much light.

At one point early in the conflict, I seem to remember that almost everyone on the Forum agreed that Israel should be a secular, democratic state with equal rights for Jews, Christians, and Arabs. What struck me at that time was, that is exactly the demand of those who cry "Palestine shall be free, from the river to the sea", except that the name of the state would be 'Palestine' instead of 'Israel'. In such a state, the 7 million Jews would live there. No one, to my knowledge, has called for an Arab ethnostate.

Well I have good news for you then, Israel is already just that.

The democratic part is waning, but secular? Not even Israeli’s would claim that title I would think.

Edit; Like, as far as I know people basically must claim a religion in Israel to even get married, even if just for civic reasons that isn't a very 'secular' country in any regard, in possibly has led to much of what we see today growing amongst the (former) fringes.