A petition made the rounds in the past two weeks to stop a training about antisemitism from taking place at Northampton High School. That training, led by Project Shema, happened on Tuesday.

“Shema” means “listening” in Hebrew, and Project Shema’s purpose is to help Jews and allies understand how antisemitism works. Project Shema explicitly rejects the idea that all anti-Zionism is antisemitism, which is the exact opposite of pronouncements by the Anti-Defamation League (ADL). In fact, Project Shema was founded by progressive Jews to be an alternative to the ADL — exactly the opposite of the claims made by the petition.

Project Shema teaches that narratives about antisemitism must not be used to close off feelings of empathy with Palestinians and deny the struggle for justice for Palestinians. But Project Shema also teaches that narratives about the Palestinian struggle for freedom and self-determination should not be used to close off sympathy for Jews, including Jews who identify as Zionist.

As you can tell from this description, the petition outright lied when it claimed that Project Shema was affiliated with the ADL. How sad that the people who started or promoted the petition against the training couldn’t do the few minutes of internet research it would have taken them to find this out.

That includes Jewish Voice for Peace, one of the promoters of the petition that was quoted in a Gazette article about the training last weekend. JVP claims that it could do a better job training about antisemitism. But many Jews, including progressive Jews like myself who agree with many of JVP’s positions, find that JVP frequently endorses statements that cause anti-Jewish harm.

The crux of the problem is whether Zionism must be treated as a dirty word. Because what most Jews mean by Zionism, and what anti-Zionists mean by Zionism, are not the same thing.

Most people are unaware, for example, that among the varieties of Zionism, one branch—the one advocated by people like Martin Buber, the famous philosopher, and Henrietta Szold, the founder of Hadassah—did not even believe there should be a Jewish state, but rather a binational state, founded on absolute equality between Jews and Palestinians.

Even the founder of the most right-wing branch of Zionism, Jabotinsky, believed that in the Jewish state, “in every cabinet where the prime minister is a Jew, the vice-premiership shall be offered to an Arab and vice versa.” In other words, the actual state of Israel is a very far cry from the vision of most of its founders.

But that kind of Zionism — the idea that a state where Jews would be safe and thrive could also be a state where Palestinians would be safe and thrive — is what liberal and progressive Jews, your friends and neighbors, are thinking about when they identify as Zionist.

People who see themselves as anti-Zionist are right to point out that from its very beginning, the nascent state of Israel engaged in ethnic cleansing, driving some Palestinian populations out of their homes during the 1948 war and not letting others return to their homes after the war, contrary to all of these aspirations. That's why cities like Khan Yunis are called refugee camps. But Zionism, for people who identify with that word, is about the aspiration for safety and self-determination in the Holy Land, not an aspiration to oppress.

Obviously, harm is perpetrated against Palestinians when that Jewish aspiration leads someone to deny that the Palestinians are a people, connected to that same land. And it harms Palestinians and humanity itself when the Jewish state uses its power to deprive Palestinians of their freedoms or rights to the land.

But it is similarly antisemitic to deny that the Jewish people has a connection to the land where its culture was born, where Jews have lived continuously (including my own family, which has been there at least since the 15th century after the Spanish expulsion).

That is the reality: complex, painful, and crying out for justice. The petition against Project Shema, by contrast, was a travesty based on deception, a blanket pulled over the eyes of the very petitioners who were trying to stand up for justice for Palestine.

Because there will be no justice or peace if one people’s aspirations depend on shattering or denying the other people’s lived experience. In this week, after the terror of six hostages murdered by Hamas, after a year of tens of thousands of Palestinians killed by Israeli airstrikes, coming up on the anniversary of the Hamas attack of October 7th, let us learn to listen to all the truths. Only then can we imagine a future that would look like actual justice.

Rabbi David Seidenberg, of Northampton, is the creator of neohasid.org, author of the book “Kabbalah and Ecology,” and organizer of Pioneer Valley's Prayground Minyan.