Noa Tishby, Israel, and the Erasure of Palestinian Reality

Before responding to a few of Noa Tishby’s claims, it is important to clarify that our concern for Palestinians stems not from politics, but from a fundamental commitment to human dignity. We, as an organized group of Amherst Students and allies of the people of Palestine, are not willing to treat this crisis — this 77-year-long purging of an indigenous group of fellow human beings — like a double-sided war or a debate. We care about Palestinians for the same reason we care about anyone whose basic rights, safety, and dignity are denied. We care because people are dying, starving, grieving; because families are being torn apart. We care because oppression somewhere deserves attention everywhere. We care because our own government is funding and fueling this injustice.

We respond to Tishby not because she is our adversary but because her framework obscures what is happening to Palestinians in real time. 

When Noa Tishby visited campus, she offered what was framed as clarity: to “set the facts straight.” But what appeared on the surface as a confident narrative unraveled into sweeping generalizations and ahistorical ones that collapse entire peoples into oversimplified political categories of her choosing. There are many claims in her talk that demand scrutiny — claims that undermine efforts to have serious, good-faith conversations — far more than can be responsibly addressed in a single article. When these narratives are delivered with authority on a college campus, students deserve the right to parse them critically, especially when students like us are called ignorant and accused of “not knowing the history.”

In her talk on Nov. 17 at the college, Noa Tishby claimed Israel is racially and ethnically diverse (which it is), yet repeatedly reduced the country to a single, undifferentiated “Jewish” identity. This contradiction allows her to present criticism of Israeli policies as an attack on all Jews, while erasing the diversity of the people who live there.

This is why she invoked the phrase “every color of the rainbow” to refer to Israel — a phrase that sounds inclusive on its face but collapses under minimal scrutiny. Israel cannot simultaneously be a multiracial democracy and also a state that speaks solely in the name of a singular, undifferentiated Jewish people. It includes Palestinians and others who do not fit neatly into Tishby’s parade of carefully curated identities. But these groups disappear whenever they complicate the narrative she is selling.

Instead of recognizing that people shape their state, Tishby inverts the relationship: The state becomes the defining essence of the people. Israel is not made up of individuals with differing views, lives, and political commitments — it is an abstraction that dictates what its citizens must mean, must feel, must represent. She positions the state as the ultimate expression of Jewish identity, and any deviation — especially from Jews who dissent — is treated as a betrayal rather than a legitimate political stance.

In this frame, the existence of anti-Zionist Jews becomes impossible. The history of Jewish anti-Zionism, from European Orthodox communities to American socialists to contemporary diasporic activists, must be denied or dismissed because it punctures the fantasy of a singular Jewish will embodied in the Israeli state. The only way Tishby’s logic holds is if she treats Jewishness not as a plural, lived, evolving set of cultures and traditions, but as a consolidated political bloc whose natural, even inevitable endpoint is Zionism.

By collapsing a people into a state, Tishby collapses criticism of that state into hatred of that people. And that collapse undergirds the rest of her arguments — especially the claim that anti-Zionism is antisemitism. You cannot defend that conflation unless you first erase the diversity of Jewish political thought, unless you erase Palestinians’ presence entirely, and unless you assume that the Israeli government speaks for — and is coterminous with — “the Jews.”

There is a rich, well-documented Jewish tradition of anti-Zionism that predates Israel’s founding and continues to this day. Jewish historian Zachary Foster has compiled an extensive record of Jewish anti-Zionist thought for Palestine Nexus, showing that opposition to Zionism has been expressed by Jews across the political, geographic, and theological spectrum — from ultra-Orthodox communities who believed diaspora was a sacred condition, to leftist Jewish labor movements who opposed ethnic nationalism, to liberal and secular Jews who feared that a nation-state built on Jewish supremacy would endanger, not protect, Jewish people. The historical tradition of Jewish resistance to Zionism belies any ridiculous notion that criticism of a state is equivalent to the hatred of a people. Tishby’s conflation of Zionism with Jewish existence erases the voices of Jews who have fought, and continue to fight, against ethno-nationalism in their name.

Criticizing a state is not the same thing as hating a people. No one believes that opposing Putin means hating Russians, that opposing the Saudi monarchy means hating Arabs, or that opposing U.S. foreign policy means hating Americans. But Tishby asks us to suspend that basic logic the moment Israel enters the conversation. That tactic works by constructing a top-down narrative in which Israelis (‘and/or Jews’, since they’re synonymous to her) are the sum of a nation, not the other way around. Israel becomes the ultimate expression of Jewish identity, and Zionism becomes the prerequisite for belonging. In this framework, Palestinians who critique the state are cast as existential threats. And Jewish students who do not subscribe to Zionism, who want to exist in Jewishness without nationalism, suddenly find themselves outside the boundaries of communal legitimacy.

This is more than sloppy thinking — it is dangerous. It transforms real, documented antisemitism — hatred and violence against Jews as Jews — into a political shield wielded by a state. And it turns Palestinian resistance, even peaceful advocacy, into a form of racial hatred no matter how clearly it is aimed at structures of domination, dispossession, or occupation. When antisemitism is defined so broadly that it includes any critique of Zionism, the term loses meaning. Real antisemitism — neo-Nazism, white supremacist violence, far-right conspiracism — gets obscured beneath a mountain of politically convenient accusations. What Tishby offers is not a defense of antisemitism, but a dilution of it. By stretching the term to cover any political objection to the Israeli state, she weakens the very concept that is meant to protect Jewish people from genuine documented harm. From this, the moral vocabulary used to identify oppression becomes muddied, its clarity eroded by strategic misuse. When everything is antisemitism, nothing is — and the ability to name and confront actual antisemetic violence becomes harder, not easier. This rhetorical inflation does not safeguard Jews; it endangers them by masking real threats behind a smokescreen of politicized outrage. 

One of Tishby’s most startling claims — startling not because it is persuasive, but because it is delivered with such unearned confidence — is her assertion that “Israel is the greatest Land Back project.” The phrase is deeply rooted in Indigenous struggle. But in Tishby’s telling, it becomes a way to hijack the language of decolonization to justify a project whose own founders described it in explicitly colonial terms.

The “proclaimed founder” of modern Zionism, Theodor Herzl, wrote an imploring letter to notorious racist imperialist Cecil Rhodes (who helped establish apartheid in what is now Zimbabwe) to obtain funding for the creation of the state of Israel in 1902: “You are being invited to help make history. It doesn’t involve Africa, but a piece of Asia Minor; not Englishmen but Jews … How, then, do I happen to turn to you since this is an out-of-the-way matter for you? How indeed? Because it is something colonial.” As famed Palestinian scholar Rashid Khalidi notes in the introduction of “The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine,” Herzl consistently ignored the fact that Palestine had an indigenous population, claiming instead that colonization would benefit Arabs. According to Khalidi, he language that Herzl used (with terms such as describing the hypothetical Israeli state as “an outpost of civilization against barbarism”), echoed the language used by early colonialists writing to denigrate native people and justify the creation of their state.

Zionist leader Chaim Weizmann (who was elected as and who Khalidi describes as Herzl’s “successor”) told the U.S. Secretary of State Robert Lansing in 1919 that  “what the French could do in Tunisia, the Jews would be able to do in Palestine” (Weizmann was elected as the first president of Israel in 1949). 

In 1923, another Zionist leader, Ze’ev Jabotinsky, similarly wrote unabashedly of colonization as “necessary” for the establishment of the state of Israel in his work “The Iron Wall (We and the Arabs).” “Zionism is a colonizing venture,” he wrote in 1925. “And therefore, it stands or falls on the question of armed forces.”

The first prime minister of Israel, David Ben Gurion, was similarly far more transparent about Zionism’s colonial and violent nature. “We must expel the Arabs and take their place,” he wrote in 1937. The mass expulsion of 750,000-1,000,000 Palestinians from the new state of Israel in 1947-9 (referred to as the “Nakba,” which means “catastrophe” in Arabic) was the fulfillment of such cumulative colonialist ideology. Such brutal settler colonialism has continued to oppress Palestinians, with former Israeli prime minister Golda Meir infamously denying that Palestinians have ever even existed — an “elimination of the native” taken to its most obvious and literal epitome. When Noa Tishby says that “there has never been a Palestine,” she repeats this rhetoric. This kind of erasure is not incidental; it is a well-documented colonial strategy. 

Throughout history, colonial projects have justified domination by denying the existence, history, or political identity of the people they displace. By framing Palestinians as a people without a past, Tishby’s narrative seeks to naturalize the present conditions of dispossession and to foreclose the possibility that a harmed population has legitimate claims to land, rights, or self-determination. In this rhetorical framework, the violence of displacement becomes retroactively sanitized: If there was never a Palestine, then nothing was taken; if there was no people, then no people can be wronged. This narrative does not merely normalize the existing occupation — it works to justify its most extreme consequences by insisting that the Palestinians whose lives are at stake have no history worth defending in the first place.

Another staple of Tishby’s talk is her insistence that Israel receives a uniquely intense level of scrutiny — a “disproportionate focus,” as she put it. She framed this as evidence not of Israel’s political actions but of the world’s alleged obsession with Jews. This framing mirrors a broader pattern in her presentation: a refusal to acknowledge the complexity of the issues she invokes, paired with a conspicuous disdain for the intellectual community she was addressing. A recent letter to the editor from concerned Jewish faculty observed that the event itself was orchestrated less as an invitation to dialogue than as a controlled monologue that was securitized, stage managed, and insulated from the very questions a campus audience would naturally pose. Rather than meeting students in the spirit of curiosity, rigor, and good-faith inquiry that Amherst demands, Tishby belittled them. She mocked protesters as naïve, radicalized, or too ignorant, ignoring the fact that many students have studied these histories in depth across multiple departments. 

This pattern matters because it exposes the emptiness of her accusation of “disproportionate scrutiny.” She claims students are irrationally fixated on Israel, but she simultaneously works to delegitimize their capacity for reason altogether. In doing so, she substitutes condescension for engagement — a move that encourages ignorance rather than dispels it. And perhaps most tellingly, she treats skepticism itself as a threat. Yet skepticism is foundational to scholarship; it is the method through which Amherst students are taught to evaluate evidence, challenge assumptions, and seek truth. To belittle skepticism, especially in a political context, is to undermine the very conditions of meaningful learning. Thus, her claim of “disproportionate focus” functions less as an analytic point and more as a rhetorical shield: a way to deflect critical inquiry by pre-emptively casting that inquiry as prejudice. It is not students who are avoiding complexity; it is Tishby, who demands deference rather than dialogue.

First, the idea that Israel is uniquely criticized ignores the reality that states engaged in military occupation, apartheid-like systems, or severe human rights abuses routinely attract intense international attention. South Africa did. Russia does. The United States does. Saudi Arabia does. China does. The fact that Israel faces comparable levels of critique is not evidence of fixation — it is evidence that the situation in Palestine is a major geopolitical crisis involving occupation, displacement, and systematic inequality. Second, Israel receives sustained attention because it is deeply entangled with U.S. political and financial power. The U.S. provides billions in unconditional military aid every year, uses its veto power to protect Israel in the UN Security Council, and incorporates Israel into its broader strategic architecture in the Middle East. When American students, activists, or journalists, like us, criticize Israel, they are not scrutinizing a random foreign state — they are scrutinizing a state their own country materially supports. Democratic accountability demands that. It is not “obsession;" it is responsibility. 

Next, the Israeli government actively markets itself as “the only democracy in the Middle East,” a Western-aligned, technologically advanced, moral actor whose military conduct should be viewed as a model of restraint. If Israel insists on being seen as a beacon, it cannot then claim unfairness when people examine the facts. 

Finally, it is worth pointing out that in many contexts, Israel is not scrutinized enough. Major news outlets regularly downplay Palestinian casualties, erase the realities of occupation, or frame Palestinian resistance solely through the lens of Israeli security. U.S. political elites offer reflexive support with minimal debate. And on college campuses, Palestinian perspectives have historically been marginalized far more than they have been centered.  If anything, the “disproportionate focus” claim discourages the very inquiry necessary to understand one of the most enduring and consequential conflicts of the past century. It deflects rather than illuminates, framing moral concern as a form of prejudice and public scrutiny as a kind of harassment.

If we are going to have honest conversations on this campus — conversations about antisemitism, colonialism, liberation, and the profound suffering occurring every day in Palestine — we have to insist on accuracy. Not because accuracy wins debates, but because as long as the conversation remains trapped in Tishby’s invented binaries and strategic distortions, we are talking about terminology instead of lives. And lives — not arguments — are what matter.

We, Amherst for Palestine, want to make it clear that this is not about playing “gotcha” with public figures or treating a humanitarian catastrophe like an intellectual puzzle. Our priorities are, first and foremost, the lives and well-being of the Palestinian people, who, at this moment, are being slaughtered with no remorse. This is the truth we risk losing sight of when public figures like Tishby turn political critique into a morality play. It shifts attention away from people who are starving, displaced, thirsty, grieving, and exhausted — and onto the sensitivities of those who speak on behalf of a state.

Accuracy matters because the stakes are not theoretical. As Palestinian activist Mohammed El-Kurd reminds us, “there is no room for side conversations in the presence of burning flesh.”