I grew up believing that I had a birthright to a place 7,605 miles away. That place—yes, that place—was mine. I was told that I could take a knife to a map, carve out an entire section, and smear it with words like trauma, safety, and Jew. I am a daughter of Abraham and a successor to barbed-wire ghettos—so not only is this place mine, but it is my father’s, it is my mother’s, and it is my brother’s. This vindication seeped into my gut and the ground on which I stood—that ground which was scarred with the imprint of a mother’s and daughter’s feet, a child’s blanket, and roofing tiles of those exiled from their home to an unbeknown 25-mile strip for the sake of my vindication.

I also grew up believing that Judaism outlaws vengeance. I’ve known vengeance. I saw a swastika carved into my synagogue’s door the week before Yom Kippur. I’ve seen swastikas written for fun on school desks or drawn into the red dirt at the park, and I’ve heard calls home from my brothers describing antisemitic posters pasted around their college campus. And at every corner, I turn my cheek to hatred because I am a daughter of Abraham and I was raised to know the cost of absorbing vengeance through the pores of my skin; the humanity of letting it go with forgiveness. To me and to those who raised me, this is strength. 

So don’t say ‘This is for all Jews’ when you fence two million Palestinians in Gaza—mothers, fathers, and children—like cattle for the sake of ‘protection’ and ‘justice’. Don’t say ‘This is for all Jews’ to justify the unimaginable when you fire missiles at maternity wards, homes, and borders. Don’t say ‘It’s for all Jews.’ Say land, say oil, say money, say power, but do not invoke my religion and my history to take vengeance against Gaza and Gazans. I’ve had the luxury of calling a place foreign to myself a homeland. I can say this and put my head to rest where I actually live and have lived my entire life, 7,605 miles away, in Los Angeles. We cannot take a population’s home because someone erased ours. That, too, is vengeance disguised as justice.

I’ve been asked why Palestinian liberation is of unique importance to me. I’ve been asked, “Why aren’t you giving the same attention to the genocide of Armenians in Nagorno-Karabakh, or the Uyghur Muslims in China?” Countless injustices occur around the world every day. Instead of spreading ourselves thin, advocates must decide where our passion lies and where we can help most. If you are upset that my attention is not predominantly focused on the Uyghur Muslims in China or the Armenian genocide, then by all means, bring awareness to those issues. But do not use this as a means to dismiss my passion for the Palestinian cause.

I’ve been told that the “Free Palestine” movement has been given greater attention simply because everyone hates the idea of a Jewish state. But there is a difference between hating the concept of a Jewish state and contesting this Jewish state. I pay close attention to this issue because I am Jewish, and because I take issue with the weaponization of my religion to erase an entire culture and collective of people. I take issue with a manufactured Jewish utopia, granted to us not by God but by the 1948 United Nations General Assembly—a fabricated utopia responsible for a painfully real Palestinian dystopia. I take issue with friends calling me antisemitic for criticizing and acknowledging Israel as an apartheid state. It boils my blood that an apartheid government is so closely associated with my religion that criticism of one becomes a criticism of the other.

I will no longer accept passivity and an overcomplication of plain, simple, and overt injustice. If you believe that you’ve educated yourself on Israel and Palestine and still reject Palestinian self-determination, then I will unapologetically demand that you try harder. I demand that you unravel the narrative that has been fed to the general public by the United States, the Israel Defense Forces, and the state of Israel.

Since the Hamas attack on October 7, Israel has killed 32,916 and injured 75,494 Palestinians. If you had asked my views on Israel and Palestine before October 7, I would have called it a conflict. I would have regurgitated the same weak answers that I’ve been fed and happily swallowed from birth by Western media and politicians. But the horrors that ensued in Gaza after October 7 turned my stomach—no, they didn’t just turn my stomach, they turned it inside out, they brought stomach acid up to my throat and into my eyes. It dawned on me to ask, this whole time, have I been on the side of the oppressor? I decided to actually educate myself. I learned about the Nakba where over 750,000 Palestinians were forcibly removed from their homes by Israeli militants, I learned about restrictive housing access for Palestinians residing in Israel and countless other discriminatory laws and a long history and continuation of overt apartheid policy.

I used to be a Zionist. I used to be complicit in genocide. I used to agree blindly that the Middle East was ‘just complicated.’ Then, I challenged myself to question what I thought to be true; I challenged myself to sit with the shame and discomfort of admitting my complicity through silence and ignorance. I felt confused, nauseous, isolated, and guilty. I reckoned with my participation in a lie and lack of courage to challenge it. And afterward, I felt ready to embrace a new set of beliefs and stand on the side of justice. 

Eliana Goldstein can be reached at egoldstein02@wesleyan.edu.