Thread by @blakeflayton

I went to college with the intent of styling a career in progressive politics. I had never been to Israel before. I didn’t know what the word “Zionist” meant, and when all of my peers told me it was a dirty word, I believed them, until a series of events happened that would lead to me making Aliyah.

1. A student was filmed saying “We’re going to bomb Israel, you Jewish pieces of shit,” and after this, my friends, heavily involved in the social justice space, didn’t really care. They even took their social media pages to condemn the JEWISH students for being upset, writing: “Why are we standing up for this community, when this community does nothing to stand up for others?”

2. At a rally organized by the Progressive Student Union to call for higher wages for the school’s janitorial staff, students from Students for Justice in Palestine spoke about how deeply the issue of low pay at an American university was connected to the oppression of Palestinians by “Zionists”

3. The sexual assault and harassment support group on my campus published a document accusing Israel of being a state sponsor of violence against women and reiterated that “Zionists” would not be welcome in their space.

4. An LGBT pride March in Washington banned the display of a rainbow flag during the march if it had a Star of David in the middle, as this was a “nationalist symbol.” When Jews showed up to the march with their flags, the organizers refused to let us enter (until the media showed up.)

There were more troubling cases. As I started to learn more and began confronting my friends about their language regarding Israel, that it was offensive to ban Zionists from organizations and that Israel was not a “white supremacist colony,” I was called terrible names, and saw even more terrible insults in left-wing group chats on campus.

When I published an essay in the New York Times about what I had experienced as a left-wing Jew on campus, I probably still could have been convinced that I was wrong or overreacting. But the reaction afterward affirmed that I was correct to write the piece. In contrast to when other minority groups expressed grievance with campus culture, there were no emails from the administration, there were no DEI workshops, there was no town hall to address the scandal, there were only statements from left-wing organizations that decried the “silencing of criticism of Israel.”

All this to say, after graduating college, I realized there was no place in the American left for me anymore, and I packed my bags. I’ve been living in Israel for almost three years, and couldn’t be happier with the choice.

For the people on this app who constantly criticize me for still disapproving of Trump and conservative politics after all I’ve experienced, you seriously underestimate the attachment my family and many American secular Jews have to liberalism. It was easier for me to fight for these values in the Jewish state than it was to switch parties in the country that raised me. One option strengthened my Jewish identity greatly, the other challenged it.