Sam Law is a graduate student of Anthropology at the University of Texas and has been a part of recent protests against Israel’s war in Gaza. I interviewed him when I was in Austin researching a story on how Texas campuses are participating in the student movements going on worldwide. The following is an excerpt from our conversation. It has been edited for length and clarity. 

Craig Nash:
I’m curious about pro-Palestinian protesters who come from a Jewish or evangelical background. Could you tell me about your faith tradition and how it informs what you are doing out here today? 

Sam Law:
I grew up in a progressive Jewish household. Judaism has lots of stories about our history as a stateless people and of resistance. Right now, it is actually Passover, and the Passover tells the story of liberation from bondage. It is really the story of the creation of the Jewish people and is the story of resistance against oppression. 

And [I was also raised on] lessons like “you support the stranger because you once were a stranger in a strange land.”

And there is this ethical tradition as well. Members of my extended family were killed in concentration camps, and so there was always this thing that was always told to me: that there are people in the world who are disempowered, who are victimized by powerful state actors, by people fueled by hate. And since we have a connection to this history, it’s our responsibility to stand for justice.

But also, my temple was a conservative Jewish denomination. It was a Zionist temple. We had an Israeli flag. We prayed for our troops. 

Still, I was 11 or 12 years old when the Iraq war started. I am from upstate New York, and I remember I went to a couple of anti-war protests with my parents because they are Americans, and, you know, the safest place in history for Jews, I think, is the United States. So they weren’t, you know, like anti-Zionist, but they took me to these Iraq war protests because they were against the Iraq war. 

And then there was this sort of cognitive dissonance, and I was at the age where you’re just starting to understand the world and starting to question things, and I was like, “Why am I going to these anti-war protests but praying for the troops of another country?”

And at some of these anti-war protests, I saw Palestinian flags, and I started sort of asking [questions.] At some point, I just sort of was learning more about it, and I [began thinking], “I live in a country. I don’t need a [Jewish] state to make me safe.” And the reason I stayed in the United States is because we’re a pluralistic society that respects religious difference, that you don’t have to be a specific religion to have citizenship. 

It is deeply unjust that I, as a Jewish American, if I wanted to tomorrow, could fly to Jerusalem, and I would get citizenship, and they would pay me to live there. But a fellow student on campus who is Palestinian, whose family left during the Nakba, who lived in refugee camps for decades and came to UT, doesn’t have the same ability to return to their ancestral homeland. I mean, my family has been in Europe or the United States for at least 2000 years, so I don’t have a particularly strong personal connection to Israel.

I’ve been concerned with what’s been happening in Palestine for a long time, but the past couple of months have been truly horrific, and doubly so. One reason is that this is being done, allegedly, in the name of my safety. I don’t think that’s true. I don’t think killing people ever makes anyone more safe. 

But also, I think that killing a defenseless population that you have basically kept besieged in an open-air prison for decades is even less so. They are being killed in my name as a Jew, but also with weapons manufactured and paid for by the country that I live in. [For these reasons] I felt sort of like ethically called to come out and just see what the students are doing. 

CN:
Are you connected to a Jewish community here in Austin? 

SL:
It has been hard for me to be a Jew in Austin. I think it’s hard, in particular, because of my anti-Zionism. It is very hard for me to be in a religious Jewish space that isn’t committed to the same sort of understanding of justice as I am.

I’ve mainly been able to practice my Judaism by hosting a small Seder with my friends or, every couple of weeks, a Shabbat. When I lived in Chicago or New York, I was able to find really more politically aligned Jewish communities.

These religious traditions are repositories of human wisdom and lessons about how to take care of each other. When these things are intertwined with our struggles for justice, I think they become stronger…And a lot of younger [U.S. Jews] are not supportive of the state of Israel or, at least, believe in a two-state solution. Many of them have had the same experience as me. We were raised watching the Iraq war and with this cognitive dissonance. We are against imperialism, but wondering why we support this settler colonial project. 

But what has happened is the Zionists have cynically manipulated fears of antisemitism and created a false equivalence between antisemitism and anti-Zionism to repress movements on campus. So, at these protests, I’ve been very open. I carry a sign that says “Jews against genocide,” and not once has anyone said anything antisemitic to me, and I am highly attentive to antisemitism. 

But [some] Israeli students say they don’t feel safe. I’ve seen tons of Israeli students just walking through [the protest area] chatting. They have their IDF dog tags and are draped in Israeli flags with provocative signs, and I haven’t seen any altercations. 

And I don’t I really don’t think that this claim that this student movement is antisemitic has any legs. I think it is anti-Zionist. I can imagine the two could be conflated for someone who believes all Jews are Zionists, but that hasn’t been my experience.