As Windham County Jews - some of us members of the Brattleboro Area Jewish Community (BAJC), and all of us belonging to Jewish Voice for Peace Vermont/New Hampshire - we were saddened and upset to read this letter from BAJC.
It was so disappointing because it values fear of antisemitism more highly than it does the very real 23,000 Palestinian lives that have been taken by Israel's genocide. We, too, want the war to stop, no caveats.
The letter represents a saddening white fragility in our relatively safe community. To hear "from the river to the sea" as an antisemitic "threat of annihilation" is uncomfortably similar to the way some white people feel threatened by hearing "Black Lives Matter."
Asserting that "Israel became [the Jews'] only refuge" after the Holocaust ignores that the opposite happened for the people of Palestine, 750,000 of whom were violently expelled from their homes by Jewish militias.
Jewish Voice For Peace Vermont/New Hampshire is horrified and appalled by the shooting of three Palestinian students that occurred on the evening of Nov. 25 in Burlington. We are in solidarity with the students, their families, and all those affected by this clear act of hate. We are in...