As scholars of Jewish Studies and Israel Studies based in various universities, departments, and disciplines, we condemn the state violence that the Israeli government and its security forces have been carrying out in Gaza; their evictions of Palestinian residents of Sheikh Jarrah and other neighborhoods of East Jerusalem; and their suppression of civilian protests in the West Bank, East Jerusalem, Jewish-Arab cities, and Palestinian towns and villages in Israel. We express profound sadness at the recurrence of intercommunal violence between Jewish and Palestinian citizens of Israel and anger at the impunity enjoyed by most Jewish attackers.
We share and hold the pain of Gazans, who have lost and are losing family members, homes, property, businesses, cultural institutions, medical facilities, and civilian infrastructure to Israeli bombings and of Palestinians in the West Bank who have lost loved ones in shootings by security forces. We affirm the pain, fear, and anger of Israeli Jews and Palestinian citizens of Israel who have lost loved ones and homes to unjustifiable and indiscriminate Hamas rockets.
As such, we stand with our Israeli, Palestinian, American (including American Jewish), European (including European Jewish), and other international colleagues who are working towards a process of structural change that would bring equality and justice in Israel/Palestine, a systemically unequal space that, nonetheless and inescapably, has a common history and future. We also denounce expressions of antisemitism or Islamophobia in connection with ongoing events in Israel/Palestine.
We are committed to scholarship, teaching, and learning about Jewish history, Zionism, and Israel in their global contexts and as shaped by historical and ongoing ideological trends, economic pressures, and waves of antisemitism, including antisemitic violence in our own times. We also understand the State of Israel as a site of substantial Jewish diversity, ideological contention, and cultural flourishing, including among Sephardi and Mizrahi Jews, immigrants from the former USSR, Ethiopian Jews, and Jews displaced by the Holocaust and the violent spasms of modern nationalism. We value the work of our fellow Jewish Studies colleagues who are breaking new ground in the study of these topics and we understand how profoundly personal and emotion-laden these topics are for many Jews.
We also acknowledge that the Zionist movement, a diverse set of linked ethnonationalist ideologies, also was and is still shaped by settler colonial paradigms that saw land settlement as a virtuous means of solving political, economic, or cultural problems, as well as modern European Enlightenment discourses that assumed a hierarchy of civilizations and adopted the premise that technological progress and development of an ‘underdeveloped’ territory would be an unqualified good. These paradigms, as implemented by the Zionist movement and the state of Israel in twentieth-century Palestine, have brought real benefit to many Jews, but they have also contributed to unjust, enduring, and unsustainable systems of Jewish supremacy, ethnonational segregation, discrimination, and violence against Palestinians that have been forcefully condemned, including by Jews, Israeli citizens, and Israeli human rights groups such as B’Tselem. Israeli culture, society, and politics, moreover, continue to unfold on land whose majority Palestinian population the state displaced, whose lands it confiscated, and whose return it prevented during and after the 1948 war, and on lands that it has occupied and settled since 1967.
Israel is not the only state that must reckon with a history of land settlement and its enduring structural impacts on native or racialized populations. However, Israel, and those who study it or care about it, must do so even while recalling the challenges and limitations of applying a settler colonial paradigm to the Zionist case, the unique historical Jewish connection to and presence in the Land of Israel, and the modern desperation and victimization that has propelled Jewish and Zionist settlement.
We commit to exploring and engaging critically with these realities in our scholarly practice. As people who, by virtue of the work we do, focus on Jews and their experiences, we hold it imperative to also listen to, amplify, and support our Palestinian and other colleagues whose scholarship details aspects of these histories and links Palestinians within Israel/Palestine to a broader Palestinian diaspora, to the Arab world, to Israeli and global Jewish communities, and to a variety of international communities. We understand the importance of continuing to reflect on the place of Palestine in Jewish Studies more broadly.
Recent events have reminded us that Palestinian citizens of Israel and Palestinian residents of the West Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem, who have a variety of different legal statuses, are neither disconnected from one another nor external to the ongoing history of Israel. They, alongside the country’s many Jewish communities, have been, are, and will continue to be integral to the political, cultural, social, and economic history of Israel/Palestine. They deserve to have their full human rights and collective rights acknowledged and respected, as do all Jews, all Palestinians, and all people.
We recognize the diverse communities invested in these interlinked stories, and the asymmetries of power and influence not only between but also within ethnic, national, and religious communities, including the Jewish community. Finally, we assert our commitment to upholding student and faculty free speech and academic freedom. This includes our colleagues’ right, if they choose to do so, to respond to ongoing events through non-violent protest, including in the form of boycott or other organized economic pressure on Israel. We are committed to continuing our engaged conversation around these questions with our colleagues in multiple departments and programs as well as with members of the public, both those who support this statement and those who do not.