OK, I’m getting emotional and lengthy on this thread, and I’m going to drop it. But I want to share this, just to make it clear where I’m coming from.

This is what happened in 2002, on the San Francisco State campus.

I’d already been a student there one summer in the mid-90s. That was the summer, ‘94, that a mural of Malcolm X was unveiled, and promptly veiled again, that turned out to have stars of David and dollar signs around the border, with the words “African Blood”. The artist claimed it wasn’t anti-Semitic, it just reflected Malcolm’s criticism of Israeli policy.

Then we got this:

indybay.org

I missed it. I was asked if I wanted to come along, but I had some other crap going on that day. I found out about it two days later, at a meeting of JIMENA (that’s Jews Indigenous To The Middle East And North Africa. Sephardi/Mizrahi history awareness group). Nothing quite as fun as hearing about something like this from a man who fled Egypt as a child, and a woman who was nearly burned alive trying to get out of Libya with her family as a young woman. They were there, to speak. The kids from Hillel were terrified. Joe and Regina were totally calm. Shit happens.

Joe, BTW, is Joseph Abdel Wahed, who once said in a lecture, and I’ve always remembered this, speaking of Jews in the eyes of the world, “We are all Zionists, whether we like it or not.”

These are a few of the things that made me acutely aware of how closely identified anti-Israeli sentiment and anti-Semitism are. I do not, contrary to the somewhat timeworn accusation, assume that anyone who criticizes Israel is an anti-Semite, but I pretty much assume that anyone who just hates Israel is, and I haven’t seen anything to prove me wrong.