The Assault on Gaza

A recent letter responded to the statement of support for the UCSB student protesters who oppose Israel’s war on Gaza, of which I was a co-author. The writer, Rabbi Ira Youdovin, defends the Israeli government of Benjamin Netanyahu, which is also the government of Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich, who are self-described fascists. These officials argue for the ethnic cleansing of all Palestine, including Gaza. (Not that the Israeli “opposition” is much better on this point.)

The rabbi accuses us of minimizing the horrors of October 7, 2023. Our statement condemned that brutal assault. But the Israeli war on Gaza has claimed 30 times the number of murdered victims as the Hamas assault. The rabbi also fails to recognize that the Netanyahu government encouraged and subsidized Hamas’s rule in Gaza for years. He decries the students’ use of the slogan “From the river to the sea,” but does not mention that the same slogan can be found in the program of Netanyahu’s Likud Party.

As a Jew and the child of Holocaust survivors, I share deeply his opposition to anti-Semitism. I disagree, however, with the argument that anti-Zionism is anti-Semitic. The Israeli government and its allies — notably the Anti-Defamation League — have been massively pushing that claim, seeking to distract Americans’ concern about Gaza by launching a moral panic about anti-Semitism. But to suggest that Israel represents the world’s Jews or Judaism is to degrade and trivialize the ethical framework of our ancient religion, harnessing it to an authoritarian and ethnonationalist political program. Indeed, how should religious people think about Israeli policies? Wouldn’t imposing mass starvation make Jesus weep? And Rabbi Hillel, and the Prophet Mohammed, and Mohandas K. Gandhi too. What would Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. say about Israeli policy in Gaza?

This is something that the student movement knows; this is the main reason that the movement includes thousands of Jewish students, professors, and hundreds of rabbi,s too.

The rabbi condescends to student protesters, suggesting that they don’t understand the situation; he echoes New York Mayor Eric Adams, who referred to Columbia and CUNY protestors as “children” while arresting them by the hundreds.

It is the U.S. role of enabling Israeli racism and mass murder, and the investment by U.S. universities in those practices, that the UCSB students properly oppose.

Howard Winant is a UC Santa Barbara Distinguished Professor of Sociology Emeritus.