Palestine Tet – 59 – Tom Mayer’s Letter to the Editor in the Boulder Daily Camera

Boulder Colorado – 2003. Long history of Palestinian Solidarity. Ida Audeh speaking. In the background Joel Edelstein and Juliette Wittman. If I recall properly – not sure – we were mourning the death of U.S. peace activist, Rachel Corrie. Tom Mayer has been a part of the mix all these years. 

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As a passionate antizionist Jew I am outraged by House Resolution 894 which equates antizionism with antisemitism.  This is an appalling canard intended to demonize any advocacy of Palestinian rights.  In reality, Jewish antizionism  exemplifies the most attractive features of Jewish culture: universalism, rationality, egalitarianism, and concern for justice. It follows a longstanding Jewish social tradition epitomized by Baruch Spinoza, Heinrich Heine, Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud, Leon Trotsky, Rosa Luxemburg, Albert Einstein, Isaac Deutscher, and Noam Chomsky among others.

 The history of my own family makes me deeply conscious of the menace of antisemitism.  I was born in Germany in 1937.  My father was much involved in the struggle against burgeoning Nazism and was eventually clapped into the Buchenwald concentration camp.  He managed to get out alive and my parents and I were able to exit Germany very shortly before the start of World War Two.  However, my grandmother and many other relatives died in Auschwitz.

In the United States my father eventually became the director of a large Jewish agency for troubled young people.  But my parents never lost their concern for human rights and social justice.  They taught me that the holocaust was a calamity that was not unique to Jews but could happen to any human population subject to racism and colonial oppression.  One of my tasks in life, they convinced me, was doing everything possible to prevent another holocaust no matter who the victims might be.

 It is with this cultural heritage and family tradition that I have become an ardent antizionist and a zealous advocate of Palestinian rights.  I think Zionism embodies some of the least attractive elements of Jewish culture: exclusionary particularism, xenophobic nationalism, and archaic dogmatism.  If anyone is responsible for a resurgence of antisemitism it is fanatic Zionism as revealed by the current massacre of Palestinian children and adults in Gaza. Fanatic Zionism makes many people think Jews are a self-centered people unconcerned with justice, equality, human rights, or democracy.

 As a committed antizionist, I keenly desire that Jews and Palestinians live together in freedom, peace, and harmony in the entire region between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea.  But this is only possible if Israel/Palestine becomes a truly democratic secular state with absolutely equal rights for all its inhabitants.

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Tom Mayer is a retired Sociology professor who taught for many, many decades at the University of Colorado – Boulder. He has worked and written for social justice as long as I can remember. Currently he spearheads the Global Peace Collective of the Rocky Mountain Peace and Justice Center in Boulder. He is a long time friend and companero.