A letter written by a Professor who teaches biblical studies at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada. Dear Students, I have spent the last 25 years showing you the beauty of all of the literary, cultural, philosophical, & artistic heights of the human spirit over the course of human history. Teaching you has been the most wonderful & satisfying of callings. I never wanted to do anything other than meet with you, discuss ideas with you, discover & rediscover human insights, truths, & wonders. I never regretted my career path, never hated my job, & never doubted my legacy. I felt privileged & honoured to show you how to analyse, to think critically, to weigh evidence, & to understand people & ideas, contexts & complexity, deeply & thoroughly. I thought my work was helping to make the world a better, more humane, more thoughtful place. You have broken my heart. No: shattered it, irreparably. I don’t know how I will ever set foot in a classroom again. I don’t know how I will ever see you the same way. I know now that I was deluding myself that I ever had any impact, would ever leave any positive legacy, that my work ever made any difference. I watch you all on social media, in the streets & the quads, marching in solidarity with a movement that seeks only to wipe me out. To exterminate me, my children, my parents, my entire family & community. I know, some of you think you’re trying to help the oppressed. You think that my kind is the white colonialist racist kind that you hate. But I thought I taught you how to evaluate arguments. I thought I taught you the importance of understanding context, both historical & rhetorical. I thought that I taught you that the world did not operate according to dichotomies, like black & white, oppressor & oppressed, villain and victim. I thought I taught you about complexity, about judgment, & to examine your sources & not to take anyone’s statements at face value. Zionism is the Jewish right to self-determination in our ancestral homeland. Israel is that ancestral homeland. Jews are the indigenous peoples of that land; not the only indigenous peoples of that land, to be sure. But Israel is the only land to which we are indigenous. After 2000 years of longing, the result of the Holocaust – a Nazi movement which sought to ethnically cleanse the world of Jews by systematically exterminating us – was that the international community granted us a sliver of that ancestral homeland. It was to be shared, partitioned into a Jewish state & an Arab state. The Arabs rejected the partition & attacked the Jews when they declared the state of Israel in 1948. The Jews won. Arabs who remained in Israel became citizens with full rights & freedoms. 20% of Israel’s population today is Arab. They fight in the army, they are doctors, lawyers, members of Parliament & supreme court judges. There is no apartheid. Israel’s Jewish population consists of Jews from Arab lands, whose parents or grandparents were kicked out when the state of Israel was formed, & of descendants of refugees from Eastern Europe, Holocaust survivors who had no homes to return to. Some are more recent refugees from Europe, Russia, & the Americas who either returned to Israel for religious reasons or because the Jew-hatred in their communities grew too excessive & they decided to emigrate, to head for the one place in the world Jews can go if their neighbours or governments turn against them.