Re: Gaza, CPH and Zionism 

[
    
      {
        "name": "Top Stories Video Pair",
        "insertPoint": "7",
        "component": "17087298",
        "parentWrapperClass": "fdn-ads-inline-content-block",
        "requiredCountToDisplay": "1"
      }
    
    ]

Editor:

Nan Abrams' letter to the editor in last week's Journal (Mailbox, May 23) allows that «the campus protesters are likely not antisemitic,» but dismisses that as «irrelevant» because, Nan claims, «they are enabling an antisemitic moment.» That›s some really twisted logic. What she is saying, in effect, is exactly what the Israeli government has been espousing — that Palestinian lives are irrelevant because Hamas controls Gaza. Nonsense. It would be just as erroneous to claim such a thing as it would be to blame all Jewish people for the traumatic events the Israeli army has been inflicting upon Palestinian civilians in Gaza every day since Oct. 7.

If Nan Abrams wants to fret about whose actions might be allowing antisemitism the largest opening at the moment, she need look no further than the current Israeli government.

Lamar Hudson, Briceland

Editor:

Early in her letter Ms. Abrams states, "The campus protesters are likely not antisemitic. But that is irrelevant. They are enabling an antisemitic moment."

If Ms. Abrams is correct in her assumption that the pro-Palestinian campus protesters were not antisemites, an assumption I share, her subsequent opinion that their innocence is "irrelevant" begs the question: If not from the campus protesters, whence cometh the antisemitism in that "antisemitic moment?"

Her ensuing five paragraphs provide a potpourri of selective history, abridgement of Jewish persecutions, and whitewash of Zionism's imperialist tendencies, but do not identify the source of the antisemitism she perceives.

Attaining statehood when, in the wake of World War II, Britain and France offshored Europe's "Jewish problem" to Palestine, Zionism went from being a peaceful expression of the national aspirations of the oppressed Jewish people to becoming a heavily armed nation-state with its Zionist might enforcing its Zionist "right" to oppress Palestine. Many, maybe most, past and present nation-states have displayed similar behavior ... indicating "Jewishness" was/is irrelevant in the oppression of Palestine.

But Zionism ... in 1948 and under the guise of the Jewish State of Israel ... started weaponizing the victimhood Jews had endured for millennia to obscure its imperial pretensions. Planning, coordinating and waging oppression on Palestine was requiring ever more vociferous threats of antisemitism to silence bleeding hearts and to minimize empathy and aid for Palestine. Seventy-five years later, antisemitism has become ambient in Zion, trapped in moments whenever, wherever it confronts opposition.

The historical truth of the relentless oppression of Jews does not, cannot and never will legitimize Zionism's fascistic oppression of Palestine and, thereby requires antisemitism to become its body armor.

Alex Ricca, Blue Lake

Editor:

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict has claimed tens of thousands of lives and displaced millions of people while having its roots in a colonial act carried out a century ago. Hamas fighters killed more than 1,200 Israelis in assaults on southern Israel. In response, Israel launched a bombing campaign in the Gaza Strip, killing more than 35,000 Palestinians.

Previously these assaults involved the internationally banned weapon, phosphorus gas. It has mobilized troops along the Gaza border, for a ground attack, finally reaching Rafah (at one point a designated safe zone by the Israeli Occupying Forces). They have announced a "total blockade" of the Gaza Strip, stopping the supply of food, fuel and essentials to the besieged enclave in an act that under international law amounts to war crimes.

In 1917, Britain's then-foreign secretary, Arthur Balfour, wrote a letter to Lionel Walter Rothschild. It committed the British government to "the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people." European powers promised the Zionist movement a country where Palestinian Arabs made up 90 percent of the population.

In April of 1936, the Arab National Committee called on Palestinians to go on strike, withhold tax payments and boycott to protest British colonialism. Even before the British mandate expired, Zionists were destroying Palestinian towns and villages to erase Palestinian history.

The Zionist movement captured 78 percent of historic Palestine. The remaining 22 percent was divided into the occupied West Bank and the besieged Gaza Strip.

In my lifetime, Israel has launched five assaults on Gaza: in 2008, 2012, 2014, 2021 and now 2023. Tens of thousands of Palestinians and children have been killed, thousands of homes, schools and offices have been destroyed. Rebuilding has been next to impossible because the siege prevents construction materials, such as steel and cement, from reaching Gaza.

Allan R Anderson III, Eureka

Editor:

Whatever one thinks of the student demonstrations at Cal Poly Humboldt and around the globe, history will show how they ended nations' self-censorship of the words "apartheid and genocide" suffered by Palestinian civilians.

A debt of gratitude is due Cal Poly Humboldt students and the NCJ coverage of their protests.

Law-enforcement's militarized response merits significant reform, as well as, the university administrations that called them, both largely sharing military backgrounds and thus, the military's zealous intolerance for disobedience to authority, often against their own interests, for example, when ordered to beat other veterans that occupied the White House lawn demanding the G.I. Bill.

NCJ letters (Mailbox, May 23) bicker over which side is more "indigenous," Palestinians or Israeli Zionists, distracting from the 14,000 Palestinian children killed by U.S. and German weapons (hundreds or thousands more buried under rubble and mass graves).

Recent rulings against Israel by the International Court of Justice and the International Criminal Court were free from any delusion that an atrocity merits genocide.

South Africa (ICJ complainant against Israel) reminds us of Apartheid's 1980 "Bantustans," where black escapees killed as many whites as they could find; North Vietnamese escaped their "strategic hamlets" to do the same or Nat Turner's slave rebellion and Native American Red Cloud escaping the reservation.

Every society organized to advantage privileged individuals builds walls to protect against the revenges of poverty and oppression, walls that grow commensurate with the institutionalized corruption of public policy by oligarchs, monarchs, dictators and petty tyrants, even though collapse is the fate of every walled civilization in human history.

Altering a self-destructive trajectory as old as "civilization" begins with a simple unasked question in every community. Which local multimillion dollar investments of public and private capital contribute to, or reverse today's socio-economic walls destined for collapse?

George Clark, Eureka

Editor:

Netanyahu and one letter writer cite the "Jewish state" and that Israel is "reclaiming" their ancestral promised land. This letter writer uses the standard race card of "white colonizers" and claims Jewish populations that never ever occupied the land.

Arab semites and Jewish semites (they are both semites) alternately occupied the land. Arabs cite Ishmael as the first son of Abraham, and Jews cite Isaic as the first "legitimate" son.  Both claim that God said they are the "chosen people."

Israel's intentions are clear. Netanyahu's October Amalek "our Holy Bible" citation exhorts Israel to kill every man. Every woman, every child, every baby. Israel's military head refers to Palestinians as "human animals" and to "mowing the lawn."

This is not a war. The Palestinians have no airplanes, no tanks, no bulldozers, no 2,000 pound bombs, no billions of U.S. dollars. Hamas has 100 hostages, Israel has 10,000 (or is it 2,500,000?). This is just a righteous, bloodthirsty slaughter in order to make room for a greater Zion.

Netanyahu and Biden demand that student protests be stopped because they are antisemitic. But the whole world already sees Israel's genocide and has already reacted. If there is antisemitism, the American Jews identifying with Israel are the additional victims of Netanyahu's atrocities.

Charles Wilson, Fortuna

Editor:

Thank you Dr. Schnnurer for your thoughtful and wide-lens reflections regarding the CPH protests ("In Defense of the Occupation of Siemens Hall," May 16). As a fellow faculty member, I share so many of your perceptions of what took place and what was gained from the efforts. To read such nuanced reflections in contrast to Mark Johnson's shallow, law-and-order interview especially resonated deeply ("'False Narratives,'" May 16). May those of us invested in CPH as a place of continuous learning and evolution take this to heart into the coming semesters.

Julie Slater, Arcata

Editor:

If you've been speaking about the encampment that occurred at Cal Poly Humboldt based on reports from administration or things you've seen on social media, then you have been sharing a distorted version of reality. I encourage you to stop speaking, take a walk on campus and listen to the voices of the students and community members who were there. Their stories are powerful and many hold visions for a beautiful world where we are all free from the oppressive forces of state violence. These are leaders willing to put their bodies on the line for the people. Not because they're getting a paycheck to do it, but because they are acting from their hearts.

In contrast, police and CPH admin got paid for this debacle and then misled the public. They stated that there's "$1.7 million in damages and emergency operations costs." But those are two different things. Tell the public the actual price range for the damage alone. Please include a low-cost bid where you let people volunteer to help clean up and paint. Disclose to the public the cost of emergency operations separately. The decision to bring in hundreds of outside agitators (aka police from outside Humboldt County) is on administration. Who's going to pay the bill for their poor decision-making? This whole situation could have been resolved through mediation, but the administration chose to act from fear instead of a grounded respect for the students they serve and the Arcata community in which they live and grow. I request a public apology from Tom Jackson and Mark Johnson for their unethical actions.

The people arrested at CPH on Beltane Eve should be cherished. I pray that the freedom called for in their songs opens hearts throughout our community and the greater world.

Launa Wyrd, Arcata