Criticism of Israel is legitimate

New Hyde Park, L.I.: I take issue with many points raised by Isaac de Castro in his piece, “Can a college student back Israel?” (op-ed, March 29). Firstly, de Castro claimed that a Cornell University student was threatened with being outed as gay if he didn’t vote in favor of a pro-BDS resolution. This specific claim appears to have originated in a Jan. 14 tweet by Jewish on Campus and didn’t receive firsthand coverage by any news outlet. Did the Daily News ask de Castro for the student’s name so that you could reach out and fact-check his statement?

Secondly, de Castro branded a referendum at Tufts University that would have banned its police force from training with Israeli military and police as “unquestionably anti-Semitic.” I hate to question the unquestionable, but how did he come to this conclusion? Police seeing their neighborhoods as war zones and the people they’re sworn to protect as enemy combatants is already a systemic problem in American policing; it doesn’t need to be reinforced by training with those who consider it a best practice.

It may be difficult for de Castro to accept, but not everyone who criticizes the actions of Israel’s government or otherwise challenges his far-right beliefs is a mustache-twirling anti-Semite, and using the term so cavalierly robs it of its meaning and provides cover to those actually motivated by bigotry. Matthew Zeidman