New LGBTQ antisemitism group
Your January 31 article, "LGBTQ Jews launch initiative to combat antisemitism," heavily quotes ardent Zionists to present the view that there is a need for LGBTQ+ Jews to support Israel in order to combat antisemitism. The article also depends on statistics from the Anti-Defamation League to back up the claim that there is an "unprecedented number" of incidents of antisemitism without exploring the fact that the ADL counts pro-Palestinian Liberation and anti-genocide speech or protests as examples of antisemitism. The ADL, a Zionist organization, recently excused Elon Musk's Heil Hitler salute as an accident while condemning peaceful protests for Palestine as antisemitic. It is not the group to look toward when seeking to fight antisemitism.
Anti-Zionist Jews know that we do have a complicated history, and that the counternarrative to Zionism, for many of us, is our ancestors' history of being socialists who believed that the liberation of Jews and the fight against antisemitism is connected to the liberation of all working and oppressed peoples, and is a deeply anti-colonial movement.
LGBTQ+ liberation is a movement to counter the dominant narrative and to work for an alternative way of seeing the world. Liberation does not mean assimilating into oppressive structures such as the Israeli military. Planting a gay Pride flag on the rubble of Gaza is not liberation and does not make the world safe for Jews or LGBTQ people.
In fighting for LGBTQ liberation and against antisemitism, we, as anti-Zionist Jews, know that we must create bonds through solidarity to stop genocide and forced ethnic cleansing, which is illegal by international law as well as unethical and horrifying. There is nothing complicated about opposing genocide. As Jews we were told (perhaps, falsely) that no one stood by us during the Holocaust in Europe. As LGBTQ+ people seeking our own freedom, we refuse to be silent as we watch every day the growing horrors in Gaza and the West Bank and against all Palestinians who have been denied their homeland. We can stand in solidarity with Palestine and fight for the liberation of all people, including Jews who experience antisemitism.
Carla S. Schick
Oakland, California
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