Protesting Israel isn’t antisemitic

Re “Why a protester’s taunt, ‘Go back to Poland,’ is grotesque,” Opinion, May 7

Don’t invoke, as Seth Greenland does, solemn Holocaust remembrance to tar the college protesters as antisemitic and privileged.

Rather, acknowledge the difference between 1,200 Israeli victims of Hamas terror on Oct. 7 and the more than 34,000 dead Palestinians in Gaza since then. Remember the Israeli bombardment underway in Rafah, a final killing field in what had been the last refuge for Palestinians fleeing the destroyed north.

Student protesters see war crimes happening in Gaza instigated by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his rightwing cabinet — on whose watch the Hamas attack happened.

Student protesters want the United States to end our annual gifts to Israel’s military. Students want their universities to divest from companies doing business with an Israeli state hostile to Palestinian rights.

Students want America to stand with the wretched and the poor — on the right side of history, not with criminals.

Frances O’Neill

Zimmerman La Jolla

I am the child of a Holocaust survivor. I am also a retired psychologist. These difficult days, with some protesters telling Jews to “go back to Poland,” I experience California as filled with casual hate.

The news is filled with a normalization of lies. A near-total absence of a sense of common community pervades the environment here, with everyone shouting at the same time.

These are the ingredients of the total chaos I experience in the world at large these days. My own inner world is as peachy as it’s been in a long time. A tad lonely, but mostly content.

But the world outside seems to be in an accelerating process of disintegration.

I can’t do much about it. I write and try to educate when I think I can add something useful. Sometimes I challenge the most egregious untruths that I cannot avoid. But it feels like shooting randomly into a vast open sky.

America feels ever smaller and less safe every day. I see my son more often and talk to my mom. I keep refocusing on what makes me feel grateful.

The island of safety feels smaller every day. Here, I will make my stand. Steven Tenenbaum

Berkeley

Greenland makes several good points showing that most protesters supporting Gaza do not know or appreciate the impacts of the Holocaust. It’s “ancient history” to them.

What is also “ancient history” to Greenland is the real history of Zionism. It is more than his belief that “Jews deserve a state where they can be safe.”

In 1925, an early Zionist leader, Ze’ev Jabotinsky, wrote that “Zionism is a colonizing venture and, therefore, it stands or falls on the question of armed forces.” That is how Zionists were able to form the state of Israel in 1948 and displace Arab Palestinians.

Who invited these refugees to negotiate their futures? How did the United Nations defend their rights? The Palestinians deserve recognition as their own state without asking Israel’s permission to get it.

Peter Zschiesche San Diego