"The organized American Jewish community has for many decades now wielded a lot of influence over the terms of debate on Israel, been able to circumscribe those debates—circumscribe those debates in ways that I have been criticizing for much of my adult life.... And now something radically new is being born in progressive circles, and I think increasingly inside the Democratic party, in which those debates will not be circumscribed by the American Jewish establishment in the way that they were....
"I think this [student] movement is a tremendous opportunity. And for the Jewish community to ally itself with the Elise Stephaniks and Mike Johnsons and Donald Trumps, who want to crush this movement because they want to crush America’s universities, because they fear universities as places that produce critical thinking, and as places that can be a challenge to white Christian supremacist authoritarianism, it would be a terrible, terrible mistake to join forces with those people as they try to crush freedom of speech and freedom of expression....
"The core of this movement is the demand to end university and American governmental complicity with Israel’s system of oppression, which is now culminated in this horrifying slaughter of people in Gaza. This complicity must end. It must end because, among other things, it puts Jews in danger. We must see the lie that you can construct a system of Jewish safety on the destruction and brutalization of another people....
"Systems of violence ultimately endanger everybody. And this system of group oppression, a system that has held millions of Palestinians in the West Bank without the most basic of human rights for more than a half century, without the right to vote, without the right to be a citizen of the country in which you live, without free movement, which has held Palestinians since 2017 under a suffocating blockade that Human Rights Watch calls an open air prison, and the UN says is unlivable. And organized American Jewish organizations want to pretend that those things are untrue.... It’s only because we don’t want to face these things, and we want to believe that our safety can be bought at the expense of Palestinians. And that is a lie in the long term....
"The only way they can be truly safe is if Palestinians are truly safe. And the only way that Palestinians can be truly safe is if Palestinians are free. And so, I would urge people who find this movement frightening to not only look at those frightening videos, but to watch the videos that we saw from Columbia of students at that encampment: Muslims praying, and Jews praying; of Jews holding Kabbalat Shabbat and Passover Seders, being protected alongside people of every different background and race and religion. And see this as a vision of hope, the vision of hope that we desperately, desperately need....
"From this movement could come not just Palestinian liberation, but Jewish liberation as well."
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