My solidarity goes to those #Jewish / #Israeli students who genuinely feel unsafe, threatened or subject to prejudice. Nobody deserves it.
But I couldn't care less about those who just feel uncomfortable because the protests are about something bad that their country is doing.
When Putin started his unforgivable war in Ukraine, and protests sprawled around the world, there wasn't much talk about shutting down the protests because they would make Russians abroad feel uncomfortable. So why do we have to treat Israelis and Jewish as exceptional snowflakes? Just because they keep stubbornly playing the antisemitism card whenever you criticize them?
#Safety and #comfort aren't the same thing. People have an inalienable right to feel safe and not subject to prejudice. But their ideas and dogmas don't have the same rights. They aren't people. I shouldn't refrain from protesting against ideas and acts that I perceive as wrong just because my protest may make somebody else feel uncomfortable. Pulling people out of their comfort zone and creating awareness is the whole point of a protest, after all.
And universities are exactly meant to be those factories of ideas where different sensibilities meet and come up with a better view of the world, without fear of retaliation.
If you don't feel comfortable about it, if you feel like criticism against your ideology is criticism against you as a person, then probably you just don't belong to a university in the first place.
And if you keep calling out as an antisemitic anyone who criticizes the acts of #Netanyahu's government, thus advancing the fascist theory that the ideology of a government is part of the identity of the nation, and thus political criticism is personal criticism against all of its the citizens, then you're just an idiot, or someone who benefits from this simplification.
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