To the editor: Do not invoke, as Seth Greenland does, the solemn commemoration of the Holocaust to brand university protesters as anti-Semitic and privileged.
Rather, recognize the difference between the 1,200 Israeli victims of Hamas terrorism on October 7 and the more than 34,000 Palestinians killed in Gaza since then. Remember the Israeli bombing of Rafah, a last death camp in what had been the last refuge for Palestinians fleeing the destroyed north.
Student protesters see war crimes being committed in Gaza instigated by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his right-wing cabinet, under whose watch the Hamas attack occurred.
Protesting students want the United States to end our annual gifts to Israel's military. Students want their universities to divest from companies that do business with an Israeli state hostile to Palestinian rights.
Students want America to stand with the unfortunate and the poor, on the right side of history, not with the criminals.
Frances O'Neill Zimmerman, La Jolla
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To the editor: I am the son of a Holocaust survivor. I am also a retired psychologist. In these difficult days, when some protesters tell Jews to “go back to Poland,” I feel like California is full of casual hatred.
The news is full of a normalization of lies. An almost complete absence of a sense of common community permeates the atmosphere here, with everyone shouting at the same time.
My own inner world is as rosy as it has been in a long time. A little lonely, but above all happy. But the outside world seems to be in an accelerated process of disintegration.
I can't do much about it. I write and try to educate when I think I can add something useful. Sometimes I question the most egregious falsehoods that I cannot avoid. But it feels like taking a pot shot into a vast open sky.
America feels smaller and less safe every day. I see my son more often and talk to my mom. I continue to focus on what makes me grateful.
The island of security seems smaller every day. Here I am going to defend myself.
Steven Tenenbaum, Berkeley
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To the editor: Greenland makes several positive comments showing that the majority of protesters supporting Gaza do not know or appreciate the impacts of the Holocaust. For them it is “ancient history.”
What is also “ancient history” for Greenland is the true history of Zionism. It is more than his belief that “Jews deserve a state where they can be safe.”
In 1925, one of the early Zionist leaders, Ze'ev Jabotinsky, wrote that “Zionism is a colonizing enterprise and therefore depends or fails on the question of armed forces.” This is how the Zionists were able to form the State of Israel in 1948 and displace the Palestinian Arabs.
Who invited these refugees to negotiate their future? How did the United Nations defend your rights? The Palestinians deserve recognition as their own state without asking Israel for permission to achieve it.
Peter Zschiesche, San Diego
