A recent Maroon article mentioned that I called into question a speaker’s rejection of an exclusively Jewish state.

While I certainly called into question Ali Abunimah’s rejection of a Jewish state, I never said or implied that that state should be exclusively Jewish. Israel is the state of the Jewish people, but it is not a state only for the Jewish people. Twenty percent of Israel’s population is Arab-Israeli, and they have all the same rights as Israel’s Jews, including seats in the Israeli parliament. Israel is home to the world headquarters of the Baha’i faith. Israel is the only country in the Middle East where the Christian population is growing rather than shrinking. All of that makes me proud of Israel.

My question was actually as follows: “Why do you support the rights of the Palestinians to a state while denying it to the Jews? Furthermore, considering the fact that Hamas has fired 13,000 rockets at Israeli civilians in the past 12 years and in its charter calls for genocide against the Jews, and considering the attitude that led Palestinian National Authority President Mahmoud Abbas to say that not a single Jew would be allowed to remain in a state of Palestine, how do you expect the rights of Jews to be respected in a majority Arab Muslim state?”

I did not receive an answer.

If you call for one state between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea, and if—like Abunimah and UChicago’s SJP—you call for a Palestinian “right of return” that would guarantee that any such state has an Arab Muslim majority, then you owe the six million Jews currently living in Israel an answer to that question.

Rebecca Abrams, Class of 2016