BlueTruth

CSU to reinstate study abroad program to Israel?

2011-11-12T10:28:00.000-08:00

Not if David Klein can help it.
He's been passing around this open letter to CSU Chancellor instead. David hates Israel so much, he devotes part of his CSU Northridge Website to Israel bashing. From David's website, hosted on the CSU server: "Israel is the most racist state in the world at this time". Yes, David's website includes the gratutious dead baby photos, along with BDS resources. Nice. Really nice
He teaches math, incidentally

MY comments are BOLD

An Open Letter to CSU Chancellor Charles Reed Regarding the CSU-Israel Study Abroad Program

Dear Chancellor Reed;

The CSU system has recently taken steps to reinstate the Israel Study Abroad Program. It was suspended in 2002 because of costs and because of the U.S. State Department travel warning on travel to Israel.

The second intifada led to thousands of casualties from acts of Palestinian terror. In 2002 alone, 2,348 Israelis were wounded in terror attacks, with 220 dead from suicide bombings alone. These numbers have greatly decreased, due in part to the security barrier, which according to some reports, has reduced casualties by 90%

We strongly urge you not to reinstate the CSU Israel Study Abroad Program.

The signers of this letter, CSU faculty, staff, students, and administrators, represent a wide range of views and political perspectives, but each one of us shares that conclusion along with some or all of the following concerns:

As of Nov 12, all SIX of them

1) The original reasons, from 2002, for suspending the program remain valid, and may, in some respects, be even more compelling. The CSU is facing unprecedented funding cuts, and programs serving greater numbers of students than this program may be more deserving of the limited available funds. The State Department travel warning also remains in effect

If funding is really the issue, why are you only targeting study abroad to Israel?

2) Additional dangers to U.S. citizens, not described in the State Department travel warning, deserve consideration. There have been multiple instances of U.S. citizens, including students, who have been severely injured, and in some cases killed by Israeli military forces. For example, in 2010, Emily Henochowicz, a 21-year-old Jewish American art student, lost an eye when Israeli soldiers shot her in the head with a high velocity tear gas canister. She had joined protests against Israel's attack on the humanitarian aid flotilla, during which Furkan Dogan, aged 19, another U.S. citizen, was killed by Israeli troops. Other young Americans killed or injured by Israeli forces include Rachel Corrie, Brian Avery, and Tristan Anderson.

Yes, David Klein, CSU Northridge math instructor is creating a moral equivalence here- acquainting those hurt while obstructing operations in a closed military zone, with those targetted simply because they were Jews in a Jewish state. Davis Klein dares equate the death of UC Berkeley graduate Marla Bennett, murdered while eating lunch in the Hebrew University cafeteria with the death of Rachel Corrie, dead while guarding smuggling tunnels in Gaza. David Klein, math professor dares to compare the death of Daniel Wultz, age 16, murdered while eating lunch with his dad with Furkan Dogan. Turkish member of the IHH, who ambushed and assaulted Israeli soldiers in international waters

3) If the Israel Study Abroad Program is reinstated, participating CSU students could face discriminatory treatment, based on race and ethnicity. According to a U.S. State Department document:

"U.S. citizens with Arabic or Muslim names, those born in Muslim or Middle Eastern countries, those who have been involved in missionary or activist activity, those who ask that Israeli stamps not be entered into their passport, and other U.S. citizen travelers have been delayed and subjected to close scrutiny by Israeli border authorities, and on occasion they have been given a “Palestinian Authority only” stamp in their passport which prohibits entry into "Green Line" Israel. U.S. citizens have been detained and/or arrested at the airport and at other border crossings on suspicion of security-related offenses. Members of religious groups have been monitored, arrested, and deported for suspicion of intent to proselytize in Israel. In some cases, Israeli authorities have denied U.S. citizens access to U.S. consular officers, lawyers, and even family members during temporary detention."

"Palestinian-American dual citizens living in the West Bank can be detained or arrested by the IDF. In such instances, the Government of Israel may not recognize the U.S. citizenship and will instead consider the arrested person a Palestinian. In such cases the U.S. Consulate General may not be notified."

If Palestinian America students wanted to study in Israel, and had no ties to terror or plans on proselytizing, this would not be an issue

4) During its October 2011 meeting, the Academic and Fiscal Affairs Committee of the CSU Statewide Academic Senate made a recommendation as follows:

"The AFAC recommends in light of the developments of the past 10 years, and in order to provide a more inclusive perspective on the Israeli/Palestinian issue that priority and effort be given to exploring new partnerships such as: Birzeit University, Arab American University in Jenin."

Reinstating a CSU Study Abroad Program in conjunction with Israeli universities without similar programs in cooperation with Palestinian universities would be one-sided.

The same man who just wrote "The CSU is facing unprecedented funding cuts, and programs serving greater numbers of students than this program may be more deserving of the limited available funds." is now proposing new programs.

5) To restart the CSU International program in Israel at this time would not reflect well on the CSU's commitment to the universal right to education. Israel has consistently violated its obligation under Article 50 of the Fourth Geneva Convention, which requires the Occupying Power to facilitate the proper functioning of educational institutions in occupied territories. Israel remains the Occupying Power because it retains effective control in all these areas, and exercises this control by making education difficult or impossible for Palestinians in a variety of ways: blockading, besieging and bombing schools and universities; suspending delivery of books and educational supplies; restricting or barring the movement of students, teachers and researchers to their institutions of learning, as well as to travel abroad for educational purposes. Because of these actions, Israel has deprived hundreds of thousands of Palestinians of their right to education.

Mr. Klein forgets that Arab students at Israeli colleges on average are about 12 percent of the student population. And he ignores that in Israel's years as "occupying power"

"... during the two decades preceding the intifada of the late 1980's, the number of schoolchildren in the territories grew by 102 percent, and the number of classes by 99 percent, though the population itself had grown by only 28 percent. Even more dramatic was the progress in higher education. At the time of the Israeli occupation of Gaza and the West Bank, not a single university existed in these territories. By the early 1990's, there were seven such institutions, boasting some 16,500 students. Illiteracy rates dropped to 14 percent of adults over age 15, compared with 69 percent in Morocco, 61 percent in Egypt, 45 percent in Tunisia, and 44 percent in Syria."

6) Recognized leaders and prominent intellectuals have compared Israel's treatment of Palestinians to Apartheid in South Africa. Among these are Nobel Peace Prize Laureates, Jimmy Carter, Nelson Mandela, Desmond Tutu, and Mairead Maguire [4]. John Dugard, a South African professor of international law, has served as Judge ad hoc on the International Court of Justice and as a Special Rapporteur for both the former United Nations Commission on Human Rights and the International Law Commission.

Logical fallacy, Mt. Klein.
Appeal to Authority

Description of Appeal to Authority
An Appeal to Authority is a fallacy with the following form:

Person A is (claimed to be) an authority on subject S.
Person A makes claim C about subject S.
Therefore, C is true.

Affiliations of the signatories are included for identification purposes only.

CSU Faculty, Staff, and Administrator Endorsements

David Klein
Department of Mathematics
CSU Northridge

Ian Barnard
Department of English/Queer Studies Program
CSU Northridge

Harry Hellenbrand, Provost
CSU Northridge

Edie Pistolesi
Department of Art
CSU Northridge

Jerry Rosen
Department of Mathematics
CSU Northridge

Vida Samiian, Dean
College of Arts and Humanities
CSU Fresno

UC Davis Jewish Studies Program Presents the Anti-Israel Narrative and Censors Questions

2011-11-06T21:06:00.000-08:00

This is the report of a speaker event at the University of California at Davis, hosted not by an anti-Israel group but by the Jewish Studies Program. It was written by Gail Rubin J.D., co-chair of StandWithUs Davis. Please e-mail your concerns and comments to the Jewish Studies Program at jst@ucdavis.edu and to their funders: the Koret Foundation , the Osher Foundation , the Taube Foundation (info@taubephilanthropies.org), and the Posen Foundation (info@culturaljudaism.org).

A WAR OF NARRATIVES AT UC DAVIS JEWISH STUDIES PROGRAM

Some UC Jewish Studies programs seem to be part of the growing problem of anti-Israel and anti-Zionist bias on UC campuses. Consider the lecture sponsored by the UC Davis [UCD] Jewish Studies Program on October 21^st.

The lecturer was University of London professor Gilbert Achcar, author of the controversial book, “The Arabs and the Holocaust: The Arab-Israeli War of Narratives.” He was introduced by Diane Wolf, current chair of the UCD program, Professor Susan Miller, and founding chair, David Biale. Professor Miller praised Achcar and called his scholarship “courageous.”

Achcar may have been courageous in acknowledging the Holocaust was a uniquely horrifying event directed at Jews and that Palestinian leader Haj Amin al-Husseini’s anti-Semitism and collaboration with Hitler were deplorable. But after these observations, he careened into anti-Zionist, anti-Israel charges and distortions. Despite ample evidence to the contrary, he argued that the Mufti’s Jew-hatred had little influence on Palestinian and Arab hostility to Israel. He dismissed evidence about the cross-fertilization of Muslim anti-Semitism and Nazi-inspired anti-Semitism as hyperbole and charged that Israel exploits the Holocaust and exaggerates the Mufti’s influence only for propaganda purposes.

More disturbingly, he has argued that the rise of Zionism in 1920, not prejudice, spawned Arab Jew-hatred, essentially accusing Jews of causing anti-Semitism. Indeed, in his book, he excuses the current popularity of the Czarist anti-Semitic forgery, “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” in the Arab world, arguing it must be read from an anti-Zionist, not an anti-Semitic, perspective.

Achcar minimized pogroms against and expulsions of Jews in the Arab world after World War II and after Israel’s reestablishment, equating their expulsion with the American internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II. He repeated anti-Israel clichés, denying Israel’s right to exist and referring to it as a “settler colonial project” built on “Arab land,” accusing Zionists of "ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians", and downplaying any suggestion of Pan-Arab racism toward the Jewish people.

Despite these tendentious charges, challenging questions were not welcomed during the Q & A. I was abruptly censored while attempting to establish facts to challenge Mr. Achcar’s skewed conclusion that the Grand Mufti’s anti-Semitism had only a minimal impact on both Jews and Arabs. Professors Miller and Biale angrily told me the questions were insulting and to either stop or leave the room. So much for free speech and scholarly discourse in academia.

Unfortunately, this lecture was not an anomaly. It is symptomatic of attitudes in the UC Davis Jewish Studies Program and elsewhere in the UC system. Approximately 30 Jewish Studies faculty members signed a March 3 letter to the Orange County District Attorney, opposing legal action against the “Irvine 11.” The “Irvine 11” were the Muslim Student Union students who had orchestrated a disruption of a lecture by Israel Ambassador Michael Oren on the UC Irvine campus, in violation of both campus guidelines and the law. The six UCD faculty connected to Jewish/Middle Eastern scholarship who signed that letter are: David Biale; Ari Kelman; Ze’ev Maoz; Susan Miller; Brenda Deen Schildgen; and Diane Wolf.

Yet, these same academics turn a blind eye to campus anti-Semitism. Open letters were submitted to UC President Mark Yudof in June of 2010, highlighting the rise of anti-Semitism throughout the UC system. Some of the signatories included the Simon Wiesenthal Center, CAMERA, StandWithUs, and Scholars for Peace in the Middle East. More than 700 students signed an on-line petition. In September , 2011, more than 5,200 supporters sent another letter to Mr.Yudof, urging him to investigate and take action. Thus far, not one of the UCD professors referenced above has signed on to the letters, nor have they taken action to protect Jewish students from harassment and fear on their own campus. In fact, Emanuel Ringelblum Professor David Biale criticized the decision by the U.S. Office of Civil Rights to extend Title VI protection to Jewish students as “bizarre” because “the Jews are a group with power”.

Blind allegiance to any ideology is dangerous for the free exchange of ideas that is supposed to be the hallmark of a university. It is even more dangerous in the current climate where professors and academic departments encourage anti-Israel, anti-Zionist, and anti- Jewish views and behaviors. Too often, students who express favorable views about Israel are ridiculed and verbally abused. Surely Jewish Studies Departments should ensure that the distortions and misinformation that propel anti-Israel dogmas are exposed and critiqued. People committed to intellectual integrity and the future of Israel and the Jewish people should be concerned about these trends in Jewish Studies Programs.

Do Zionists Help Restore the Tuba-Zangaria Mosque? Yes, Zionists Do

2011-10-09T11:22:00.000-07:00

As many of you know, last week a mosque in the Arab village of Tuba-Zangaria in the Galilee was attacked by arsonists, presumably extremist Jews (because of the "price tag" graffiti left at the site). One suspect has been arrested.

Not only is this act repulsive on many levels (and was immediately condemned in the strongest terms by both Shimon Peres and Benjamin Netanyahu, as well as by Israel's Chief Rabbis), but it also took place in an Arab village whose residents fought alongside the Palmach during Israel's War of Independence, whose young men commonly enlist in the IDF, whose village leaders decided they would not participate in the Arab riots in October 2000, and whose village sports center is named after Yitzhak Rabin.

And just yesterday, Muslim and Christian cemeteries in Jaffa were vandalized with similar graffiti left at the sites of the desecrations.

And while I don't always agree with Bradley Burston, I think his eloquent column in Haaretz about this is completely on the mark.

Those of us who are Jewish have just completed our prayers on the Day of Atonement. The centerpieces of that day's prayers are the community confessionals, the Vi'dui and the Al Het, in which we all request forgiveness for the sins that, though we may not have committed them ourselves, fall upon us because members of our community did commit them. This Yom Kippur, the desecration of the mosque of Tuba Zangaria was prominent in my mind during those prayers.

The "price tag" phenomenon is a dangerous one for Israel in many ways. These acts are those of vigiliantes who openly challenge the rule of law and the authority of the state of Israel. Up until now, these attacks have only taken place on the West Bank. There, they attack not only their neighbors, but also IDF soldiers (on whom, ironically, they depend for their own safety in their West Bank settlements). They undermine the authority of the state, and they feed into the mostly false stereotypes created by anti-Israel activists, of violent settlers attacking peaceful Palestinian villagers who want nothing more than to live in peace; that false impression creates more international pressure to force Israel to withdraw from the very land which the settlers want to keep for their own. When these attacks take place within the state of Israel itself, it challenges one of the fundamentals of Israeli society that we proudly hold up as a response to those who maliciously misrepresent Israel's status as a Jewish state-- that Israel's Arab citizens have full political, civil and religious rights equal to the Jewish citizens, and far better than the rights enjoyed by Arabs anywhere else in the Middle East. If Israel's Arab citizens, especially those who express friendship and support to their Jewish neighbors, are the subject of acts of terror such as this, then it is not only those Arab Israelis who suffer, but the Jews of Israel as well.

We also make the argument that Israel acts more morally than the Palestinian leadership that turns terrorists into heroes, and that broadcasts an incessant stream of venal anti-Semitic propaganda . And we correctly point out that the terrorists of Hamas, al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade and Islamic Jihad openly celebrate the slaughter of children in their bedrooms, because "itbach el-Yahud" ("kill the Jew") has been a rallying cry for Arab rejectionists since the days of the Grand Mufti (and can be heard even on the streets of the San Francisco Bay Area) .

It is therefore vital for those of us who support the existence of a Jewish state of Israel, to stand with what we know is the overwhelming majority of Jews in Israel and in the Diaspora against such vile acts done by an extremist minority in our community; even the leadership of the settler movement condemns these terrorists. Our enemies routinely distort "Zionism" into a hateful caricature; this is an important opportunity for us to stand up for the Zionism that we know and to reclaim it from those who use it as an epithet.

This is not about settlements, nor about borders, nor about negotiations (or lack thereof) between Israel and the Palestinian Authority. This is about standing with the Israeli citizens of Tuba-Zangaria and elsewhere, just as we stand with Jewish Israelis who have been the victims of religious and political acts of hatred.

Israel's Declaration of Independence states:

"WE APPEAL - in the very midst of the onslaught launched against us now for months - to the Arab inhabitants of the State of Israel to preserve peace and participate in the upbuilding of the State on the basis of full and equal citizenship and due representation in all its provisional and permanent institutions."

The people of Tuba-Zangaria answered that appeal in the affirmative. It is time now for us to honor that.

In the spirit of atoning for the sins of others in our community, the Association of Reform Zionists of America, in partnership with the Israel Religious Action Center, is raising funds for the refurbishing of the Tuba mosque. It's the Zionist thing to do. Please join me in donating.

Mondoweiss Lies To Diss StandWithUs

2011-08-27T23:44:00.000-07:00

Those of you who venture out on the 'net to view some of the "truth-optional" sites commenting on Israel and the Middle East have undoubtedly come across Mondoweiss, one of the darlings of the "see, even the Jews hate Israel" set. Like many of these sites, it claims to be a "news" site covering developments from a "progressive Jewish perspective". And like many of those sites, there is no hint of anything except a steady diet of anti-Israel diatribe, as well as links to sites such as If Americans Knew (run by Alison Weir, one of David Duke's favorite Israel haters-- isn't it great how nice progressive Jews can agree with a neo-Nazi about Israel?), Jewish Voice for Peace sites, and even the site of Richard Silverstein, whose method of responding to any challenge to his belief system is to throw a tantrum of ad-hominem attacks.

Now Philip Weiss has chosen to get all verklempt over a quote criticizing Jewish Voice for Peace and the frankly anti-Semitic Sabeel for wrapping their anti-Zionist ideology in feel-good wrappings of "peace". He devotes an entire post to trying to refute the charge that another fake "peace" campaign on transit systems in the San Francisco Bay Area has the underlying goal of the elimination of the Jewish state of Israel. Here was my quote in J Weekly:

"“Though their ads suggest they are in favor of ‘peace,’ their website explicitly calls for the elimination of the state of the Jewish people,” Dr. Mike Harris said on behalf of StandWithUs/S.F. Voice for Israel. “They actually oppose peace between a Jewish state of Israel and an Arab state of Palestine.”

Weiss seems to take great umbrage at the suggestion that JVP and Sabeel want to eliminate the existence of a Jewish state. He quotes extensively from the "Build Peace" site referenced on these ads (which actually redirects to JVP's "Two Peoples One Future" site). He quotes rather quite extensively from that site to justify his position. And conveniently chooses to leave out the two sentences at the crux of the matter.

Under the question of "What would a comprehensive peace between Israel and Palestine look like?" their website repeats the fiction that has been promoted by anti-Zionist groups as a means of ending Jewish rights to national self-determination:

"A comprehensive peace would also include recognition of the right of Palestinian refugees to return to their homes. That starts with Israel’s recognition of its role in the expulsion of refugees and creation of the refugee crisis in 1948, and public acceptance of resolution 194 and the right of refugees to return as it legally agreed at the time Israel joined the United Nations in 1949."

Two big lies, both of which are quite relevant to the statement that they want to eliminate the Jewish state.

Certainly for descendants of the refugees created by the Arab war on the Jews of Palestine, no such right exists. Anti-Zionists try to point to UN Resolution 194 as justifying their statement-- yet resolution 194 (a nonbinding resolution of the General Assembly in 1948) states the following about refugees:

"Resolves that the refugees wishing to return to their homes and live at peace with their neighbours should be permitted to do so at the earliest practicable date, and that compensation should be paid for the property of those choosing not to return and for loss of or damage to property which, under principles of international law or in equity, should be made good by the Governments or authorities responsible.

Instructs the Conciliation Commission to facilitate the repatriation, resettlement and economic and social rehabilitation of the refugees and the payment of compensation, and to maintain close relations with the Director of the United Nations Relief for Palestine Refugees and, through him, with the appropriate organs and agencies of the United Nations;"

Nothing about "rights", and absolutely nothing to justify the exceptional status given the descendants of Palestinian refugees by the UN, which allows all descendants of the 1947-8 Arab refugees to claim refugee status and live off the international community forever. By contrast, the equal number of Jews who became refugees from Arab countries, as a result of the decision of their governments to expel and persecute them, were given virtually no assistance at all.

The lie perpetuated about Israel's admission to the UN-- that it required Israel to repatriate the population that had made war upon it-- disintegrates upon reading the text of the resolution admitting Israel to the UN:

Having received the report of the Security Council on the application of Israel for membership in the United Nations,Noting that, in the judgment of the Security Council, Israel is a peace-loving State and is able and willing to carry out the obligations contained in the Charter,
Noting that the Security Council has recommended to the General Assembly that it admit Israel to membership in the United Nations,
Noting furthermore the declaration by the State of Israel that it "unreservedly accepts the obligations of the United Nations Charter and undertakes to honour them from the day when it becomes a Member of the United Nations",
Recalling its resolutions of 29 November 1947 and 11 December 1948 and taking note of the declarations and explanations made by the representatives of the Government of Israel before the Ad Hoc Political Committee in respect of the implementation of the said resolutions,
The General AssemblyActing in discharge of its functions under Article 4 of the Charter and rule 125 of its rules of procedure,
1. Decides that Israel is a peace-loving State which accepts the obligations contained in the Charter and is able and willing to carry out those obligations;
2. Decides to admit Israel to membership in the United Nations.

Yes, the resolution RECALLS Resolution 194 (adopted on 11 December 1948); and it notes the explanations of the Government of Israel, and therefore decides that Israel is admitted. No contingencies, no amendments, no probationary period. Period.

Why is this, indeed, the heart of the issue? Because the Arabs have recognized for decades that the refugees were useful as a political weapon against the right of the Jewish people to national self-determination. Nasser recognized this back in 1961: "If the refugees return to Israel, Israel will cease to exist." The demand for the "right" of 4th generation descendants of these refugees to return is no different now than it was then. Calling for that is calling for the end of Israel as a Jewish state.

I don't know why Weiss is so concerned about this; after all, I haven't seen anything he's written that actually supports Israel as the state of the Jewish people. So I don't know why he'd be upset at the claim that his anti-Israel friends at JVP or Sabeel are being misrepresented. Of course, Mondoweiss also published a post last month claiming that they needed to raise funds because their website was "under Israeli attack", then after their fraud was exposed, deleted pages holding both the fraud and their admission of it. So their veracity is questionable in any case.

Therefore, allow me to issue a simple invitation. If any of the leadership of JVP or Sabeel want to refute my statement, and endorse a true "two state solution"-- peace between a Jewish state of Israel and an Arab state of Palestine-- please feel free to send a comment. I'll post it. Philip Weiss can even link to it.

Ami Isseroff

2011-07-10T21:42:00.000-07:00

This site has been quiet for the past few months. In part that's because of lack of time on my part; in part it's a major hat tip to the folks over at Pro Israel Bay Bloggers who have been so timely (and so effective) in posting commentary about our little hub of delegitimization that there wasn't anything for me to add.

But I learned last week of the death of Ami Isseroff, and his life and work should be memorialized. Many of you have never heard of Ami. But in his own way, this physically small man has left a giant impression on many of us who advocate for Israel online.

I made his acquaintance when, shortly after this blog was launched, we received an e-mail from Ami who had found our new site online. Ami was trying to organize a network of pro-Israel bloggers, and also trying to teach us how to be more effective in setting up our blogs to be more visible online. I learned about search engine optimization, about how and why to set up links to other sites, and also about Ami's brand of proud Zionism-- he loved his country, he wanted peace but was realistic about the attitudes of the Palestinian leadership, and he didn't tolerate extremists whether on our side or theirs. He also didn't tolerate sloppy thinking and in our online discussion group was not hesitant to critique his own government's policies and inadequate (too often inept) public relations, not to mention our own contributions to the discussion if he felt they were unsound.

But Ami's achievement was what he left behind-- a veritable online encyclopedia of Israel and Zionism, zionism-israel.com . It has been an invaluable resource to me-- every time I needed information on any topic related to the history of modern Zionism or the state of Israel, it was there. In better times, he had also created mideastweb.org, a site organized by Arabs and Jews committed to peaceful coexistence. And he wrote, with amazing frequency and clarity, distributing his posts (as well as mine and others from our worldwide network) on the Yahoo group ZNN (which stood for Zionist News Network, something our enemies would accuse almost any US news outlet of being).

I met Ami in 2009 on my most recent trip to Israel. His poor health, due to a congenital heart defect, prevented him from traveling easily so I came to Rehovot to meet him. Ami in person was quite different from Ami online. Though an Israeli for decades, he still retained the accent (and attitude) of his New York area upbringing, not hesitating to be profane when the topic under discussion justified it. We spent most of an afternoon talking about how to be effective in activism and advocacy.

Ami never lived to see his ultimate goal-- peace between Palestinians and a Jewish state of Israel. Those of us who learned from, and were inspired by, Ami will continue our efforts with our eyes on that prize. And if we live to see that day ourselves, I know that we will be thinking of Ami.

Ami Isseroff z"l, 1946-2011

Goldstone Recants; Who's Next?

2011-04-04T20:24:00.000-07:00

It seemed like an April Fool's Day hoax at first: Richard Goldstone admitted in print that the most serious charge in the UN Report that bears his name was false-- the IDF, he now admits, did not have a policy of targeting civilians in Gaza during Operation Cast Lead. He also, in an understatement of mammoth proportions, noted that "asking Hamas to investigate [itself] may have been a mistaken enterprise". He blithely apologizes for taking the word of Hamas at face value in making the determination that Israel deliberately attacked civilians in Gaza, claiming "We had no evidence on which to draw any other reasonable conclusion."

I don't know whether Goldstone's conscience finally caught up to him, or what else motivated him to recognize what Israel's supporters had known from the start-- that the entire process was going to be about as honest as a game of 3 Card Monte; that his colleagues on the commission had determined the verdict before the "investigation" even started; that the very concept that he could conduct an impartial inquiry of Hamas in Gaza was ludicrous; and-- of course-- that Israel was not targeting civilians in Gaza, while Hamas was attempting to commit acts of mass murder against Israeli civilians. Perhaps in his recent speaking tour of the US he encountered enough people who used the report as a weapon to delegitimize "apartheid Israel" , or to support the BDS movement whose goal is the end of Jewish statehood.

But it got me to thinking-- what if this admission by Goldstone sets off a chain reaction of other conscience-clearing retractions, and admissions that Israel was right all along? Imagine the stories (unfortunately, these are, for the moment, still fictional):

Jewish Voice for Peace Retracts Its Excuses for Palestinian Terror

"We really thought that the occupation was a legitimate excuse for stabbing children through the hearts and slitting their throats. And we thought that we really shouldn't hold the Palestinian extremists subject to our own culturally-biased standards, because as a population under occupation they can't be expected to have any shred of human decency whatsoever. We had no evidence to draw any other reasonable conclusion."

President Obama Admits That Apartments Are Not The Main Obstacle to Peace

"If I had known then what I know now, I would not have insisted publicly that Israel freeze all building across the Green Line as a precondition for negotiations. I thought that if Israel would stop building apartments in Jerusalem, then the Palestinian Authority would be willing to stop its media broadcasts that demonize Jews, glorify terror, incite murder, and reject the existence of Israel entirely. I had no evidence on which to draw any other reasonable conclusion."

Palestinian Authority Retracts Its Statements Denying Jewish History in the Land of Israel

Palestinian Authority Deputy Minister of Information Almutawaqel Taha said "Nobody had ever suggested to us that the Jews came from this land. I mean, it's not like they have any historical tradition of ties to Jerusalem, which we have been revering as our historic capital for at least, oh, 30 or 40 years. Or any museums with ancient artifacts such as coins or tablets, or any holy sites-- UNESCO said they were all mosques, so how were we to know differently? We had no evidence on which to draw any other reasonable conclusion."

Of course, not all of the possible acknowledgements might be positive, but at least they would add clarity:

Ahmedinejad Admits He Wants A Nuclear Weapon and To Start a Second Holocaust

"Sure, I can admit it now. I know the international community won't treat me the way they did that dog Gaddafi. They're even afraid to speak up about my lackey-- er, loyal ally-- Assad in Syria. As long as you're willing to murder your own people in cold blood at ground level rather than bomb them from the air, the West will steer clear.

The Americans and Europeans make noise about trying to stop me, but they're not willing to do what is necessary. I have no evidence on which to draw any other reasonable conclusion."

DrMike

Itamar: a Poem by Matt White

2011-03-19T21:31:00.001-07:00

Matt White, a student in Tikvah; The Zionist Voice at UC Berkeley wrote this poem . It debuted March16 at a candlelight vigil in memory of murdered Fogel family of Itamar, Israel. We are honored and humbled to re-print it here.

ITAMAR

Blessings
and
thank you to Suheir Hammad for your words to inspire me
Sweet and acidic like a perfect grapefruit
like
a blood orange

Gentlemen, let us bless
“May it be your will, Hashem, our G-d,
that there be no distress, grief,
or lament
on this day
of our contentment”

Red rooftop white wall blind sunlight bright
soft skies in haze on Shomron
hilltops and pine groves dot this
village cautious advanced upon by shrubs and bushes
fennel, sage, thistle, za’atar
shimmy in a circle around Itamar
cactus soldiers in a wild common battalion
fragrant handful clutch soil realization belonging
Homeland herbs

Desert wind you carry the spices of Solomon
Desert sand you twirl and strangle
Desert veil you shroud a beloved
Desert eyes made now of glass

Shabbat queen
Shabbat mother Shabbat bride
Her garments torn on jujube thorn
Her gullet roars no sound to mourn
Dare break the silence day seven shorn

Children are dead no hero was born
Massacre you shalom ’aleikhem
Butcher you yedid nefesh
Shabbat woman
Cannot wail cannot tear her hair
Her sleep was robbed her bed invaded her joy drained of fluid her

Prayers jewels treasures nightmares
Sleep is robbed of Shabbat woman she cannot
Sleep again cannot give herself in
To rest cannot
Sleep no more
Crystal shrapnel on challah cover

How can she seek to give comfort
because Jew father
in bed with Zionist entity baby girl
Her purple tiny custom-made hoodie embraces his
blue jacket with white striped sleeves
trying to sleep
Because in her three months she
could but cry out that she
demanded to grow
can never say a first word because
slashed throats don’t speak
they only bleed
only bleed

Shabbat woman how can she seek to give comfort
mother is cut open on the bathroom floor
because she hid her hair in her tikhel for the world to not see
her grace
just as in Ramallah
a doppelganger hides her hair in her
hijab for the world to not see
her beauty

because sour iron ruby pool surrounds and soaks this crumpled kippah
because preteen boy child is slapped down on his back
with holes in his flesh
a criminal for being indigenous
did you know that a heart can boil

did you know that doves have dirty infected wings
that three year old has a knife enter his heart twice to stop it
that three year old neck must be racist
because it was designed white
that three year old neck was hacked apart
because
vocal cords already
know how to dare speak
"am yisrael khai”

because it ain’t no disgusting accident
ain’t no human shield
ain’t no clear and present danger
ain’t no violent threat
ain’t no combatant in a war which has sides
ain’t no terrorist with bombs as a breastplate

Shabbat woman what power have you
against Gush Katif evacuation catastrophe
against orange groves being chopped down and used as space for
Hamas rocket launchers
against a retreat with hands held steady above our heads
that translated into metal rain for a decade in the life of southern Israel
that introduced civilians to the words Katyusha, Kassam, Grad
what power have you to weep
when refugees from ethnic cleansing
find themselves converted to corpses in the wilderness of Itamar

Shabbat woman please try to caress the face of
the survivor Yishai
because he’s two years old
and he has blood caked and spattered on his legs
and he screams for his parents to wake up
because he screams and cannot be quieted
try to caress his face
because his mother will never again be able to do just that

tell Tamar and Roi that there is no justification for terrorism
that their lives are a miracle
that were they found they would have been murdered too

one
two
eight
a family of Jews

Dalaal al-Mughrabi
hijacks a bus in the second week of March 1978 Israel
murders thirty seven
murders from them thirteen children
murders credibility to the Palestinian cause

and in the second week of March 2011 Israel
while Itamar weeps until salt claws at its eyelids
al-Bireh devotes
its largest town square
to Dalaal al-Mughrabi
to her name
to her memory
to her hate
and the children of the family Fogel
are stabbed in the heart again and again

Salam Fayyad
Mahmoud Abbas
you whisper in my ear that you want peace
you tell me on your government-controlled TV idiot box bullshit that you want peace
My peace has no knives
My peace has no shrouding of the map of Israel
My peace has no networks broadcasting glorifying a previous batch of Itamar murderers
My peace has no political party of my own design claiming responsibility for murder
My peace has no Fatah lies
My peace gauges no party as moderate just because the alternative is worse
My peace has no incitement to murder
My peace has no terrorists

To the people the world has sent into damnation such to be “settlers”
who CNN and Al-Jazeera would rather call “settlers” than human beings
who Western media can’t see as innocent victims in their homeland but rather the fact that they had it coming to them
that this was an “alleged” terror attack

People who stand in defiance to a world that no longer cares about slaughtered Jews

I dare you to live

And I shriek out to the lone few of you who
pour tar and kerosene and feces on peace negotiations
and you’re craven enough to do it
in the name of Judaism and Israel and Zionism

I shriek out to you
My Judaism has no reprisal attacks
My Israel has no threatening the lives of innocent Palestinian townsfolk
My Zionism has no smashing car windshields
No invasion of property to throw stones in a third racist intifada
No demonstrations with signs saying “death to Arabs”
My Zionism burns with pride and kisses the cheek of the
Civilian in the neighboring town of Awarta
who speaks in Arabic
and declares the injustice of killing babies

Give me your hand as I look into your eyes I don’t care what color they are because to me they are beautiful they are gorgeous because they and I thirst to be loved my Muslim Christian agnostic atheist Arab raceless brothers and sisters

Palestinian people I want to dance to the beat of your darbuka
I beg you to listen when I say
My peace has no pastries and candy passed out on the streets of Rafah
To celebrate an infant having the breath sliced out of her

Hamas of Gaza your candy tastes like Iranian warheads
Your candy tastes like shells and mortars
Your candy tastes like a crown of thorns
Your candy tastes like charred bones and howling blood
Your candy tastes like the murder of my people
And your residents tell me joy is a “natural response” to the murder of Israelis

I’m sick I’m so sick I want to vomit I surf on waves of nausea I
spill my words like Tishbi wine into internationally deaf ears I
can’t process my thoughts when the United Nations is controlled by maniacs I
feel so abandoned when evil tyranny anti-Semitism can thrive

I light my candle for Rabbi Udi
for Ruti
because they now have no tikhel no blue jacket with white striped sleeves
because they now are clothed in black and white tallitot

I light my candle for Yoav
for Elad
for baby Hadas
because there are three tiny coffins in Givat Shaul
that the world doesn’t give a fuck to see

I light my candle because nobody is going to do it for me

I don’t want no houses built in their honor

I don’t want martyrdom to be answered with human growth I don’t want martyrdom to be used for political purposes even if it makes us seem weak maybe we don’t always have to have muscles maybe the desiccated byproduct of a jihadist genocidal mentality can’t be in dialogue with concrete maybe I want their souls done tangible justice I’ve given up on humans for the time being I want to see olive trees and rotem flower bloom in their name I want to see pomegranates fresh fragrant in their memory I want to see lemon blossoms sticky with nectar in their love I want to see the children in Nablus and Jenin given books explaining with truth how we’re cousins in genes and phantasms all of us and how resplendent this friendship alone on our ship our ship bamidbar in the wilderness of our land isolated vessel how children have futures in medicine art healing for all the times they were told to strap magazines pregnant with bullets across their small frail chests and denied life to others and in so doing were abused denied dreams themselves because knife tangible knife silver blade cutting throats equals knife invisible indoctrination hungry devouring brains intellect hope future washed away in milk in chalk in plasma screen violets scream in suicide

I hold gingerly between fingers limp a natural growth
With a drop of blood
A white cyclamen
With a drop of blood
I’m scrubbing I’m scrubbing oh G-d they’re trying to make out of me
Lady Macbeth
I scrub and scrub until my hands fall off and I go insane

The dolls children left on the floor and did not tidy up
Are frozen with their beatific smiles
They cannot play without a partner

Shabbat queen
Shabbat mother Shabbat bride
Shabbat woman
close
your eyes
because next Shabbat
I want peace

What Is It Really About, Israel or Human Rights?

2011-02-18T11:57:00.000-08:00

(cross posted here)

Anti-Israel activists often frame their arguments around phrases such as “the universal application of human rights.” And if you oppose their definition of human rights, then you are obviously not someone who should be tolerated in civil society.

But it doesn’t take much scratching below the surface to discover the ugly reality under this patina of progressivism. Take, for example, the current anti-Israel road show called “Never Again for Anyone”. As you could guess from the name, it attempts to conflate the current situation of Hamas-ruled Gaza with that of the Jews of Europe during the Holocaust. They have even found a Jewish survivor of Auschwitz whose anti-Zionism is so deep that he is the headliner for this circus. Reports from Rutgers and DePaul Universities document that this event featured denial of Jewish ties to the land of Israel, praise of Hamas, and opposition to any peace between Israel and the Palestinians. Any reader of this site has seen films of the Holocaust. And while nobody should claim that life in Hamas-stan is peaceful and easy, we also keep hearing from the extremists that Hamas was the democratically elected government of the Palestinians. So perhaps those who voted Hamas have discovered that their choices have consequences. After all, Hamas’ platform is jihad against Israel, now and forever. And Israel has the right to take steps, such as a naval blockade, to prevent Hamas from freely importing long range rockets (and worse) from its Iranian patrons to carry out that jihad. Despite that, I don’t think we saw scenes like this from Auschwitz:

On campuses, it’s a similar story. Once again, the Hamas position of elimination of Israel is supported as a “human rights” campaign of boycotts, divestment and sanctions against Israel and only Israel. Yet if it was about human rights, then common sense would indicate that those concerned about human rights attack the worst violators first. China's use of forced labor and the abrogation of human rights of its own citizens on a scale measuring into the tens of millions doesn't register for these "human rights activists”. Saudi Arabia's treatment of women as less than second class citizens, not to mention the utter lack of any political or religious freedom, is irrelevant. (US-Chna trade was 15 times more than US-Israel trade in 2010; US-Saudi trade was 35% more). And so on, ad nauseum, around the world.

Now if you approach the faux “human rights” activists with this, they will immediately claim that you are changing the subject. That depends. Is the subject Israel, or is the subject human rights? If the subject is Israel, and only Israel, and the object is its elimination, then what does that say about “human rights”? If the subject is human rights and only Israel is under scrutiny.... well, it says the same thing. And what it says is quite ugly.

You can see this ugliness displayed at colleges when Israeli speakers—and only Israeli speakers-- come to campus. Last year, the Muslim Student Union at UC Irvine orchestrated interruptions of Israeli Ambassador Michael Oren—and the leaders of this now face charges.

Last month, an Israeli who had served in the IDF, speaking as an individual, was subjected to the same treatment at Hampshire College;

(Read a full report on this event from Citizen Wald) I should note that in both cases the administrations of these institutions thoroughly condemned this behavior; at Irvine, the MSU was subjected to a penalty as well, though many felt that they should have been banned from campus for much longer than one semester.

In Scotland earlier this month, Ishmail Khaldi, an Israeli Arab who is an advisor to Foreign Minister Lieberman and who was formerly Deputy Consul General for the State of Israel in the San Francisco consulate, attempted to speak at Edinburgh University in Scotland; anti-Israel thugs took over the meeting and prevented him from speaking. Can anyone recall similar treatment of Chinese or Saudi speakers on campuses?

In the end, though, it comes down to one simple question: do you support peace between a Jewish state of Israel and an Arab state of Palestine? All 3 of those speakers answer yes to that question. Those who prevented them from speaking, and those who put on obscenities such as “Never Again for Anyone”, will answer “no”. They insist that of all the peoples in the world, the only one that is not to be allowed to exercise the right of national self-determination in its indigenous homeland is the Jewish people.

Human rights, anyone?

Egypt: Where Is It Taking Us?

2011-02-09T20:56:00.000-08:00

(originally published at TheJewishNewsPlace.com)

The road that Egypt has embarked upon is not well marked, there are potholes, dead ends, and more than a few wrong turns that could plunge all of us down into an abyss. I’m not going to try to replicate the analyses that others with much more expertise, such as Barry Rubin and Yossi Klein Halevi, have already published elsewhere. But the situation in Egypt confronts supporters of Israel with a conundrum—what if elections lead to the establishment of a hostile Islamist state in Egypt? On the other hand, don’t we need to support democracy for the Egyptian people?

Democracy isn’t just a “one man (or woman, though not often in the Arab world), one vote” system of elections. It is a system where the losers respect the results, and the winners don’t take advantage of their victory to change the system (“one man, one vote, once”—see “Nazi Germany”, “Hamas” and soon to be “Lebanon” as well). It’s a system where competing political parties don’t have their own independent armed forces; where children are educated in a system that promotes civic values; where a free press allows competing ideas to be debated in the public square; and where one’s religious values can be part of civil society, rather than calling for its supersession by a theocracy.

Any election in which Islamist parties take part without first accepting the above ground rules (at a bare minimum) is a recipe for disaster. We’ve seen this movie before (once again, Hamas and Lebanon). It doesn’t end well, not just for Israel but also for the people who end up on the wrong side of such elections.

There are those who will say that if only Israel were to withdraw from the West Bank and allow the creation of a Palestinian state there, that this would defuse that threat. The reactions from Islamist groups in the Middle East-- and from their fellow travelers around the world-- to al-Jazeera’s “Palestinian Papers”, provides the answer. Any “peace” agreement that does not force Israel to accept millions of descendants of Arab refugees from the 1947-8 war, and thereby end its existence as a Jewish state, is unacceptable to them. So anyone who states that these groups will be satisfied with a Palestinian state in the West Bank is either deceiving themselves or deceiving others.

But what if actual “free and fair” elections reflect the will of the people, and that the Egyptians actually favor jihad against Israel over peace (and over the foreign aid from the US that would disappear if the Islamists take control)? Most Americans and Europeans should be very afraid of this outcome, because radical Islam is very clear that not only Jews but also Christians are to be treated as dhimmi populations to be subjugated. While the Copts in Egypt have been the victims of persecution and acts of terror already, they only need to look at Gaza and Iraq to see what the Muslim Brotherhood has in store for them.

Yet there is one political group in America that doesn’t seem worried about this —the radical left. In demonstrations in New York, the rejectionist group al-Awda carried signs supporting the “Egyptian intifada”; I don’t know whether they mean that Egyptian suicide bombers should attack buses and restaurants, or if that tactic is only acceptable to them when used against Jews. In the Bay Area, International ANSWER, which has openly celebrated Hamas and Hezbollah, rallied to support “the Egyptian people”. They were joined by their usual partner, Jewish Voice for Peace, which still seems unconcerned about partnering with a group that openly supports genocidal terrorism against Jews.Yet these groups were oddly silent when the people of Iran attempted to rise up against their own Islamist thugocracy last year. Draw your own conclusions.

As for the rest of us, we have to put our faith in the fact that when people have control over their own lives and their own futures, they usually aren’t going to go to war unless that very control is the issue at stake. For years, the Arab despots, whether secular dictatorships such as Syria and Egypt or religious monarchies on the Arabian peninsula, have used Israel and the “Palestinian cause” to both distract their population and deflect blame for their lack of freedom. Now we might get to see whether the Egyptian people can move beyond that.

Democracy isn’t easy to establish—it took decades across Latin America, and is still not the system of government in much of Africa and Asia. American politics can debase into shrill partisan dialogue, even without the heavily armed insane turning shopping centers into shooting galleries. Even our neighbors to the north had to navigate the challenge of a separatist movement in Quebec. It will take a great deal of help to make sure that the transition in Egypt resembles Eastern Europe in 1989 rather than Iran in 1979. We can only hope that people of good will in Egypt will heed the sentiments expressed, quite presciently, by Pete Townshend of The Who back in 1972 :

“There's nothing in the street

Looks any different to me

And the slogans are replaced, by-the-bye

And the parting on the left

Is now the parting on the right

And the beards have all grown longer overnight

I'll tip my hat to the new constitution

Take a bow for the new revolution

Smile and grin at the change all around me

Pick up my guitar and play

Just like yesterday

Then I'll get on my knees and pray

We don't get fooled again….”

Rutgers: Never Again for Anyone Tour: Blatant Discrimination Against Jews

2011-01-31T09:49:00.000-08:00

Some 400 pro-Israel Jewish students and their supporters gathered Saturday night to attend "Never Again for Anyone" program at Rutgers University which had been advertised through Facebook and Craiglist as "free and open for all".

The talk was hosted by BAKA - Students United for Middle Eastern Justice, and sponsored by the International Jewish Anti-Zionist Network, Americans Muslims for Palestine and the Middle East Children's Alliance. The "Never Again for Anyone" tour was founded by Dr. Hatem Bazian, a UC Berkeley lecturer and chairman of the American Muslims for Palestine. Bazian is well known for his call for "intifada" in America. His organization, American Muslims for Palestine recently circulated an article accusing Israel of creating unusually fierce and aggressive dogs that terrorize the West bank. Auschwitz survivor Dr. Hajo Meyer was also on the panel . When the Jewish students and their supporters arrived, they were shocked at what transpired.

According to Rutgers student Aaron Marcus, it looked like "those in anti-Israel apparel, keffiyahs and hijabs were taken aside, given green wristbands, labeled as 'staff' and given free entrance." Other sources reported that students wearing kippas were banned from the event.

Sara Kershnar of the the International Jewish Anti-Zionist Network who has been arrested in the past for interrupting Jewish community events , claimed: "The accusation that anyone was excluded from this event due to his or her ethnicity or political views is a complete fabrication.". She claimed the fees were made mandatory after they learned there would be protests at the event

But student protesters witnessed that the sign reading free admission was taken down as they approached the venue.

Stand With us, a grassroots Israel advocacy group immediately released a statement condemning the discriminatory practice
“We deplore the blatant anti-Jewish discrimination that occurred at Rutgers University’s anti-Zionist event ‘Never Again for Anyone’ on Saturday night, January 30,” said StandWithUs CEO Roz Rothstein. “Apparently the organizers are afraid of anyone who might expose their lies and prejudice. We hope Rutgers University will investigate and take proper measures to ensure that such essentially anti-Semitic events don’t recur. But we applaud the pro-Israel students and community members who came out in droves, who chanted and sang Jewish songs in the lobby when they were barred entry into the event itself.”

The event was well documented. Watch the videos of the event at Challah Hu Akbar

This anti-Semitic exploitation of the holocaust is coming to a city near you. Please take a lesson from the students of Rutgers. Its time to fight back, and to document your efforts. When we fight back, we win.

The Never Again for Anyone" schedule follows:
Toronto, Canada: Feb 1, 2011
Milwaukee: Feb 3, 2011
Chicago: Feb 4, 2011
Chicago: Feb 5, 2011
Detroit: Feb 6, 2011
Twin Cities: Feb 8, 2011
Atlanta: Feb 10, 2011
New Orleans: Feb 13, 2011
Sacramento: Feb 16, 2011
SF Bay Area: Feb 17, 2011
Los Angeles: Feb 19, 2011

Bay Area Anti-Zionists Ignore Dr. King's Message

2011-01-17T22:40:00.000-08:00

Today was Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Day in the United States. In San Francisco, as in many other cities around the country, commemorative marches occurred. In San Francisco, perhaps unlike in many other cities, an anti-Israel group decided that it would try to hijack the parade to its "river to the sea" agenda.

It was a stunning and arrogant display. Not because they handed out fliers advertising the anti-Israel posters in BART put up by Jewish Voice for Peace and Sabeel, not because they attempted (without success) to start anti-Israel chants among the marchers, but they because did it in willful disregard of Dr. King's own position on Israel.

Dr. King stood for peace. And he understood that peace for Israel was impossible in the context of ongoing attacks and threats of destruction, so that Israel needed to ensure its security first--even after the Six Day War, which occurred 10 months before he said:

"Peace for Israel means security, and we must stand with all our might to protect her right to exist, its territorial integrity, and the right to use whatever sea lanes it needs. Israel is one of the great outposts of democracy in the world, and a marvelous example of what can be done, how desert land can be transformed into an oasis of brotherhood and democracy. Peace for Israel means security, and that security must be a reality."

(http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Quote/kingsecurity.html)

And Dr. King understood that, far too often, attacks on Israel were a more politically acceptable expression of anti-Semitism.

"When people criticize Zionists, they mean Jews, you are talking anti-Semitism."

(http://www.camera.org/index.asp?x_context=7&x_issue=21&x_article=370)

Yet Bay Area Women in Black, which is supposedly a Jewish women's group but was led for much of march by Hassan Fouda, decided to ignore Dr. King's own sentiments and make this march about what THEY wanted, not what Dr. King wanted.

(And who, you may ask, is Hassan Fouda? A man whose association with anti-Semitism has left a trail from his previous residence in Connecticut to the Bay Area, and has also included an attempt to bring outdated medications and old unusable equipment-- and a group of Turkish jihadists-- to Gaza earlier this year. Though he is not the man in this picture!)

Of course, those of us who knew this was going to happen didn't let it go unchallenged. And no better way to do it than with Dr King's own words (thanks to BlueStarPR).

My teenaged daughter who came along to photograph the scene was incensed that they would attempt to force this issue into the march commemorating Dr. King. Of course, this is a standard tactic for anti-Israel groups: International ANSWER's overt support of Hamas and Hezbollah drove any political leader with an ounce of sanity far away from their rallies against the Iraq war, and the San Francisco Pride Parade is always treated to the sight of groups demonstrating against the only country in the Middle East where LGBT individuals can live freely. Maybe their insistence on making everything part of their war against Israel also has something to do with narcissism-- after all, who better than a teenaged girl to recognize someone trying to say "It's all about MEEEEEEEE!!!!"

DrMike

Destructive 'agnosticism' : Missing from JVP pronouncements are any critiques of the BDS movement’s goal of dismantling Israel.

2010-11-26T09:05:00.000-08:00

Not only does JVP defend pro-BDS groups, it partners with them.

written by Yitzhak Santis for Haaretz

Mr. Santis asserts that the demise of Israel is the ultimate goal of BDS:

The leaders of BDS certainly speak plainly about their goals. Omar Barghouti, a founding member of the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel, spoke last March at a church in the San Francisco Bay area, and declared that for the BDS movement the 1967 occupation is "not the most important" issue. Instead, he said, the "foremost" demand of BDS is the right of return. The same Barghouti has also said, "If the refugees were to return you would not have a two-state solution; you'll have a Palestine next to a Palestine rather than a Palestine next to an Israel."

Other BDS advocates are equally explicit. "BDS represents three words that will help bring about the defeat of Zionist Israel and victory for Palestine," said Ronnie Kasrils, the veteran South African political figure and advocate for the Palestinian cause. And Palestinian-American journalist Ahmed Moor writes, "Ending the occupation doesn't mean anything if it doesn't mean upending the Jewish state itself ... BDS does mean the end of the Jewish state."

Some may try to dismiss these comments as merely individual opinions. But that is just more obfuscation. The sum of the BDS movement's central demands (as outlined in its manifesto, the "Palestinian United Call for BDS against Israel" ) - especially the demand for a "right of return" - make it clear that BDS seeks to disassemble the State of Israel. Or, as Barghouti envisions it, a "Palestine next to a Palestine" and no Israel.

And what is JVP's role in this, besides being an enabler and fellow traveller of hate and anti-Semitism? He continues:

JVP's website declares: "Our mission statement endorses neither a one-state solution, nor a two-state solution ... we have members and supporters on both sides of this question, as well as many others who, like the organization as a whole, are agnostic about it."

In the face of the annihilationist and overtly anti-Semitic ideologies motivating Hamas, Hezbollah and their state sponsor Iran, this agnosticism coming from a Jewish group with respect to Israel's existence, and thus the safety of millions of Israeli Jews, represents a gross moral failure.

JVP's website also states, "JVP defends activists' right to use the full range of BDS tactics without being persecuted or demonized." Missing from this statement, and from any JVP public pronouncements, are any critiques of the BDS movement's explicit goal of dismantling Israel. Further, JVP not only defends pro-BDS groups, it also partners with them. Based in the San Francisco Bay area, JVP for years has repeatedly co-sponsored scores of events and demonstrations with anti-Israel and explicitly anti-Zionist organizations that overtly support the full range of BDS. These include the Al Awda Palestinian Right to Return Coalition, International Jewish Anti-Zionist Network, Students for Justice in Palestine, Sabeel, Bay Area Campaign to End Israeli Apartheid and the International Solidarity Movement, among many others.

Read the full article here

"The Movement for One Democratic State in Palestine"

2010-11-13T10:16:00.001-08:00

Cross-posted here:

Having failing in their attempt to drive the Jews into the sea, the usual assortment of haters are trying a new tactic. Cynically and manipulatively drawing on the language of the civil rights movements, they call their movement “One Democratic State in Palestine” . Their conference was held Oct 23-24 2001 in Dallas,Texas.

The stated objectives of the One Democratic State in Palestine Movement follow, in bold:
*The creation of a unified one democratic state in Mandate Palestine.

How are they going to break the news to Jordan?

*Repudiate Zionism and eliminate all forms of discrimination and segregation and end violence, militarism, and warfare.
Hmmmm . The Palestinian authority executes Arabs that sell land to Jews. Hamas remains a theocratic homophobic, misogynist regime. Any idea how to convince them to embrace democracy and equality? Any idea why the "One democratic state" organization does not repudiate the racist xenophobic Hamas charter?

*Unify Jewish Israelis and Palestinians in a shared non-ethnic democratic state in Palestine.
The question remains, how will you convince Hamas that this is a worthy goal? After all their very charter states:
"The Islamic Resistance Movement believes that the land of Palestine is an Islamic Waqf consecrated for future Muslim generations until Judgement Day. It, or any part of it, should not be squandered: it, or any part of it, should not be given up. " Not very democratic. The use of the term "non-ethnic" is also curious. Does this give them free reign to establish a religious, Islamic state in this region? After all, "Islam" isn't an ethnic identity, is it?

*Restore Palestinian inalienable rights in Palestine and to compensate Palestinians for their pain and suffering.
Reminder : UN resolution 194 mentions “the refugees”. That means ALL the refugees. There were 850,000 Jews refugees from Arab lands displaced at this time. When will their inalienable rights be acknowledged? When will they be compensated? Why does the "One Democratic state" group seem to think that only Palestinians are entitled to "human rights?

*Establish an international solidarity movement,composed of individuals and organizations, to organize and spearhead efforts to realize the objectives of one democratic state in Palestine.
They aren't off to a very good start. The speakers at this conference included several notorious anti-Semites, including Gilad Atzmon, a man so far off the grid that Tony Greenstein, UK Marxist anti-Zionist has even renounced him. Atzmon is so racist that sweet gentle Berkeley Unitarians left his talk in tears after his appearance in the Fellowship in 2009.

Lenni Brenner, author of Zionism in the Age of the Dictators also addressed the conference- A favorite of neo-nazis of all stripes, Brenner maintains that "Zionists" were in league with the Nazis during World War II and that this alliance was based on a desire by the Zionists to bring about a Zionist state by exploiting anti-Semitism in Europe.

"The Movement for One Democratic State in Palestine" is simply another wolf in sheep's clothing, using the rhetoric of civil and human rights to deny the Jewish people the right to self determination in their ancient homeland. But with the likes of Atzmon and Brenner in their corner, they won't be fooling anyone.

Potholes on J Street

2010-10-25T16:34:00.000-07:00

I attended two J Street events last month, because everything I have ever read (or written) about them has been without the benefit of firsthand experience. Not that I thought I'd hear anything unexpected in the presentations, but perhaps the Q&A sessions would be more interesting.

Unfortunately, the impression I was left with is that of an organization which is making significant missteps, both in its political decision-making and in its public relations. I don't disagree with the premise of J Street-- a pro-Israel organization which can speak to liberals, especially university students, in language which resonates for them-- or with their stated political position. They claim to promote a vision of peace between a Jewish state of Israel and an Arab state of Palestine, with final borders resulting from adjustments to the pre-1967 lines and evacuation of settlements beyond those lines. That isn't significantly different from that of the last four Prime Ministers of Israel and is identical with the current policy of the United States. With the small but increasing divide in American politics between Republicans and Democrats when it comes to Israel, a group that arises from the liberal Democratic camp and supports Israel vigorously can play a valuable role. The problem is that too much of what J Street has said and done casts doubt on their claim to be "pro-Israel."

Even before they recently revealed their significant financial support from George Soros, there were warning signs: their funding from Arab and Muslim sources; last year's officially-not-part-of-the-conference-but-we're-providing-rooms-and-staff meeting of anti-Israel bloggers at the first J Street conference in Washington DC, which featured hard core anti-Israel blogger Richard Silverstein ordering J Street staff to eject a paid attendee who was quietly filming the event (as were others); and the endorsement by J Street of the staging of Seven Jewish Children at the Jewish Community Center in Washington.

Now, of course, the issue of funding--not only, to nobody's surprise, from George "I am not a Zionist" Soros but also over $800,000 from Consolacion Ediscul, a virtually unknown woman living in Hong Kong-- has caught up with J Street, as has its role in reaching out to members of Congress about meeting with Judge Richard Goldstone. So I thought these would be interesting opportunities to hear, directly from J Street's leaders, their answers to hard questions. I was to be sadly disappointed.

The first event featured Molly Freeman (Bay Area local chair of J Street) and Gordon Gladstone, J Street Northwest Regional Director. After the usual stock speeches about J Street's support of Israel came the question period. In response to the inevitable question about Soros and his statement that "I am not a Zionist", Gladstone responded that since Soros had also stated that he has a "deep concern for the survival of Israel", he must be a Zionist, and his previous statement can be excused because English is not his first language. Reading the original article in which Soros made that statement shows that this excuse is insulting--not only to the questioner but also to Soros himself, who is certainly able to use English to express his thoughts quite precisely. Gladstone also said that any phone contacts made by J Street staff to Congressional offices regarding potential meetings with Goldstone were "purely hypothetical"-- though of course these meetings did end up taking place in reality. He was also asked about the statement made at an al-Jazeera forum earlier this year by Daniel Levy, one of J Street's founders and advisory board members, that the creation of Israel was "an act that was wrong." Gladstone stated that he was unfamiliar with that statement so could not comment on it. Finally, a question was raised about J Street PAC and its endorsement process. Earlier this year, Congressman Brian Baird from Washington State, endorsed by J Street PAC in 2008, publicly called for the United States to use military force to break the blockade of Gaza to deliver "badly needed supplies." Gladstone stated that as J Street PAC was separate from J Street, he could not answer that question. He even seemed unaware of what J Street was promoting in Congress ("I don't know what our lobbyists are saying right now."). Freeman did not volunteer any answers to these questions. A subsequent e-mail to Gladstone, including the links to Levy's remarks, remains unanswered.

There would be another chance to get answers-- J Street's founder and executive director, Jeremy Ben-Ami, came to town. Several hundred people crowded into the auditorium at the Berkeley-Richmond Jewish Community Center; many of them were clearly J Street supporters but many others appeared skeptical; applause for Ben-Ami was not universal.

Nonetheless, I found myself in agreement with about 95% of what Ben-Ami said. He even bluntly declared that J Street was not a pacifist organization, and that he supported Israel's right to defend itself with military force. Of course, I differ with him that "the most urgent threat to Israel is failure to solve the conflict" with the Palestinians-- Iran, Hamas and the BDS movement have all declared that nothing short of elimination of a Jewish state will solve the conflict. But unfortunately, any chance for an interesting evening evaporated when it was announced that questions would have to be submitted on index cards-- and Molly Freeman was going to decide which questions were read. And it should have been no surprise to anyone that the only questions that were read were of the gentle, unchallenging variety. the entirety of the controversies noted above was condensed into "Please comment on Soros and Goldstone." Ben-Ami's answer about Soros was only admitting his lack of clarity about Soros' funding, not explaining why Soros would add them to his collection of funded organizations which includes Human Rights Watch. He also failed to address J Street's role in Goldstone's Congressional meetings, as he only commented on the UN report for which Goldstone bears the major responsibility. The only mildly critical question asked why J Street didn't criticize the Palestinian leadership, only Israel, which gave Ben Ami the chance to demonstrate his pro-Israel bona fides by criticizing the 60+ year history of Palestinian rejectionism.

Here is what I would have asked had there actually been open time for questions. These were also sent to J Street's national office via e-mail, but there has been no response to them either.

1. Why did J Street get involved, in any capacity at all, with contacts with Congress on behalf of Goldstone?

2. What is the process that J Street PAC uses to vet candidates for possible support? How will Congressman Baird's recent statements cause you to change the process or the criteria that you use?

I'm not sure that J Street PAC was paying attention closely this time around, either. Only 12 House members out of 435 cast a vote against the Iran Sanctions Act-- and J Street PAC endorsed 5 of them in the recently conducted election. Perhaps that's because J Street initially opposed sanctions on Iran and only came around to supporting a watered-down bill after it was clear that it would pass through Congress. A number of other members of Congress refused to support a Congressional resolution in January 2009 supporting exactly what Ben Ami says he does: it supported Israel's right to defend itself from attacks AND also explicitly supported the goal of an independent Palestinian state living beside a Jewish state of Israel. Only 22 members voted "present" instead of supporting it, and 10 of those were on J Street's endorsement list.

J Street has taken some positions that are important coming from the left: they support a two state solution and they oppose the BDS movement. But their demonstrated lack of transparency as to their funding, their curious and indefensible involvement with Goldstone, and their endorsement of members of Congress who vote against what J Street itself claims to support, continue to raise concerns that their leadership doesn't seem eager to dispel.

The California BDS Initiative-- Anti-Peace and Unjust

2010-10-02T09:40:00.000-07:00

The BDS movement is attempting to take its jihad-in-human-rights-clothing program to the California electorate sometime next year. Taking advantage of California's initiative process, they are trying to gather enough signatures to qualify an Israel divestment initiative for one of 2011's statewide elections.

The initiative itself is standard BDS text-- the language of "human rights" and "international law", including the ever-present reference to UN Resolution 194 and the false claim that this resolution gives descendants of Arab refugees from the 1947-8 war the "right" to force Israel to repatriate them.

We know this initiative, even if it qualifies for the ballot, won't pass. Even the organizers know it won't pass. But they have learned quite well about the "Big Lie", and they are eager for the chance to bring it to the big stage.

Who is behind this? A resident of Sacramento named Chris Yatooma and his group, the Sacramento BDS organization. A casual look at their website tells you everything you need to know about them They link to all of the usual players in the anti-Israel movement: the Free Gaza movement that wants to allow the Hamas regime to import Iranian missiles without interference; to the If Americans Knew website of Alison Weir, whose assocation with neo-Nazis alarm neither her nor her friends in the BDS movement; to Sabeel, the Arab Christian group that promotes an anti-Semitic "replacement theology"-- that its form of Christianity has essentially replaced Judaism, and it's just the stubbornness of Jews that insist on their own nationhood that stands in the way of peace; to the fringe extremists of Jewish Voice for P eace ,which long ago abandoned the fig-leaf that they don't take any position for or against a state for the Jewish people and has repeatedly participated in anti-Israel demonstrations in the Bay Area; and of course to the International Solidarity Movement, which recruits naive young adults to help shelter terrorist groups (and possibly worse, as multiple reports of rape of young women volunteers in the West Bank have surfaced). In short, not a single group that supports peace between a Jewish state of Israel and an Arab state of Palestine. Yet their pitch to get people to sign the petition is "Can you spare 15 seconds to support peace in the Middle East?"

As to the initiative itself, the clause that would be enacted states as follows:

"The CalPERS Board of Administration and the CalSTRS Teachers Retirement Board shall examine their respective investment funds within six months of passage of this initiative. Upon completion of this six month period, they shall publicly identify and list any investments in companies that provide products or services that contribute to the construction or maintenance of Israeli settlements and/or the Separation Wall in the Palestinian Territories or provide military supplies, equipment and services to the State of Israel. "

(emphasis mine)

There is no provision that states that this would then become inoperative upon the signing of a peace agreement between Israel and the leadership of the Palestinian Authority, or upon a unilateral Israeli withdrawal to the June 1967 lines. Any company that provides any item used by the Israel Defense Forces is the target for divestment. Presumably this could also include companies such as Domino's Pizza and Coca Cola that provide food to IDF soldiers. So, just as the BDS movement insists that BDS activities must continue until a Jewish state allows itself to be demographically eliminated by the forced repatriation of descendants of Palestinian refugees, the BDS initiative requires that divestment be targeted at any military self-defense of the Jewish state--forever.

[Note that in California's Divest from Iran law, the language includes a sunset clause:

m) This section shall cease to be operative if both of the following apply:

(1) Iran is removed from the United States Department of State’s list of countries that have been determined to repeatedly provide support for acts of international terrorism.

(2) Pursuant to Public Law 104-172, as amended, the President of the United States determines and certifies to the appropriate committee of the Congress of the United States that Iran has ceased its efforts to design, develop, manufacture, or acquire a nuclear explosive device or related materials and technology."]

Yatooma and his BDS group have been trying to get attention and validation for this extremist effort by asking the Sacramento Jewish Community Relations Council for a debate on the initiative as well as the proposed anti-Israel boycott at the Sacramento Food Cooperative. Barry Broad, the chair of the Sacramento JCRC, had a very straightforward response which I am happy to share with his permission:

"Mr. Yatooma:

Representatives of your group, the “Sacramento BDS Working Group,” publicly stated on more than one occasion in testimony before the Coop Board that “Jewish money controls the government and media.” Another one of your activists, Dan Bacher, has posted a “historical revisionist” (as in Neo-Nazi) rant on a Democratic Party website (to the extreme consternation of the Democratic Party). Such statements are pure anti-Semitism and a central feature of historical anti-Semitism going back to the nineteenth century—if not further. That your group makes no effort to restrain, much less repudiate, openly anti-Semitic remarks made by your own chosen spokespersons indicates that anti-Semitism is a core value of your organization.

In short, we don’t debate racists. We fight them, whether their hatred is aimed at us or any other racial or ethnic minority. As such, we look forward to defeating the BDS effort at the Coop."

Agreed. We don't legitimize the anti-Semitism at the core of the BDS movement. So what, then, should we do about this?

We educate the public-- we show up where they will be gathering signatures and talk about what this initiative is really about. Our community organizations need to do outreach via interfaith groups, to educate those who our partners in other ventures. At the same time, we should tell those churches who support this contemptible project that we will not be able to work with them in other arenas.

We educate our political leaders-- we meet with them to ensure that they understand the intent of this measure and that they don't add their names in support. We show them that the entire political spectrum of the Jewish community (aside from fringe extremists like JVP) opposes divestment-- even left-wing groups such as J Street and the New Israel Fund.

And, of course, we buy Israeli goods.

Part 3--The BDS Movement at UC Berkeley: How It Failed and Lessons Learned

2010-09-06T21:21:00.000-07:00

This is the 3rd and final installment of the report on the political battle launched by the BDS movement at the University of California at Berkeley this past spring, written by Ariel Kaplan, who graduated from Cal this past spring. Part 1 is at http://www.bluetruth.net/2010/09/bds-movement-at-uc-berkeley-how-it.html and part 2 is at http://www.bluetruth.net/2010/09/part-2-bds-movement-at-uc-berkeley-how.html.

Ariel can be contacted at zanakus@gmail.com.

____________________________________________________________________

7. Community support and how to find it

Another thing which helped me and my anti-divestment bill allies was community support; we couldn’t have won the divestment bill battle alone. The first point to note here is that, as pro-Israel activists, we naturally were up against an opponent with a high level of community support - after all, we were in Berkeley, a community with far more than its share of extremist politics. The entire San Francisco Bay Area was named by the Reut Institute as one of five “hubs” of delegitimization of Israel in the world today (the others being London, Toronto, Madrid and Brussels). This may not be as much of a problem in other areas, but communities with colleges and universities are generally going to be politically aligned with so-called “peace and justice” movements. As a result of this it can take some effort to network and get strong community representation, but this can be a pivotal factor, and in fact is probably necessary to winning wars against anti-Israel campus groups, at least on campuses in cities which are generally anti-Israel themselves, or which have a strong and outspoken anti-Israel community. But beyond the necessity of getting community support in order not to look more marginal than the anti-Israel forces, Jewish community support can provide invaluable help in speaking out for the Jewish community in America or even just locally; SJP made a point of bringing in numerous area Jews who are anti-Israel, in order to give the Senate the impression that a great number of Jews, generally, are anti-Israel. The best way to counter this tactic is to bring in powerful and prominent Jewish voices to lend support for Israel and against those who wish to destroy the Jewish state.

A great example of the way community support can help win battles against BDS is the example of the local Bay Area Jewish group representatives who showed up to the later divestment bill meetings, stayed all night and openly spoke out on behalf of their organizations against the bill while using downtime during the meetings to help us in Tikvah strategize. SJP, as has been touched upon, brought in dozens – hundreds? – of local community Jews to the divestment bill meetings. These individuals wore, of course, ‘I am a Jew and I support divestment’ stickers on their shirts, and a fair number of them spoke before the Senate about the ‘necessity’ of passing the divestment bill. However, even a hundred local community Jews who happen to be anti-Zionist look trivial and lose their effectiveness as a fifth column claiming to stand for a great number of Bay Area Jews when placed up against representatives of major Bay Area Jewish organizations.

Individuals from groups such as the San Francisco Jewish Community Relations Council (JCRC) and San Francisco Voice for Israel (the San Francisco chapter of the influential and prominent pro-Israel organization Stand With Us), showed up and spoke eloquently and powerfully on behalf of their organizations against divestment, showing the Senate (and everyone else in the room) that a small number of disgruntled and rabid Jews, mostly from Berkeley, supporting divestment from Israel can’t be taken as representative of Bay Area Jewry. In addition, Adam Naftalin-Kelman (as I have mentioned), Executive Director of Berkeley Hillel, and even Akiva Tor, Consul General of Israel for the Pacific Northwest region of the United States, spoke out at the meeting against the divestment bill. Numerous Rabbis from the Bay Area spoke as well. In addition, a coalition of local and national groups published a letter in the Daily Californian condemning the divestment bill. This letter was supported not only by the groups that one would expect, such as the ADL, the Jewish Community Federation of San Francisco, the Jewish Community Relations Council, and StandWithUs, but was also signed by the New Israel Fund and J Street. Those last two groups are known within the pro-Israel community for their often outspoken criticism of Israel. But the divestment movement, with its overt delegitimization of Israel, was something all of these groups could unite against.

All of this sent the message that the 200,000-member Bay Area Jewish community cannot be taken to be represented by several dozen anti-Israel fanatics. Indeed, the presence and support of local leaders in the Bay Area Jewish community was invaluable, I think, to our success in keeping the divestment bill from passing.

It is worth noting that pro-Israel community members living in the city where one’s university is located and in neighboring areas, both those working professionally for Jewish organizations and those with non-Jewish-related jobs, will often be better informed on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and better and more experienced public speakers on this issue than college Israel advocates, and this can be a great boon. In many ways, many of the community Jews of the area in which one goes to college can be seen as the ‘big brothers’ of members of groups such as Tikvah. These people have had decades of experience fighting anti-Israel forces, are more well read on the Arab/Israeli conflict and the PR war which is currently raging, and often are former members of campus pro-Israel groups themselves. Moreover, community members sympathetic to one’s cause, especially when the cause is one as bitterly fought as our own cause of Israel advocacy, often will, in my experience, go out of their way to help university students. Finding community Israel advocates and bringing them to speak on campus is a very useful thing to do as a campus Israel advocate.

Which brings me to my next point: How one should, and can, network with local pro-Israel and Jewish groups and individuals.

Meeting and collaborating with community members is actually very easy, daunting though it may seem to a college student (and it certainly felt daunting to me at first). For one thing, major cities and areas in the United States often have branches of pro-Israel organizations, such as AIPAC or Stand With Us; contacting these local branches is an excellent idea, and is very easy and helpful, especially since these professional advocacy groups consider it part of their own agenda to reach out to offer support to college students ‘in the trenches’. Numerous pro-Israel organizations in America as a matter of fact will organize yearly conferences or trips, which can take place either in America or in Israel, designed to educate college Israel advocates on the history of Israel and the Arabs and on advocacy techniques; I probably learned half of what I know about how to do Israel advocacy from attending the yearly Stand With Us Israel advocacy conference in the Fall of 2007. But simply contacting local groups for assistance is very easy; sending an email usually does the trick.

Aside from local pro-Israel groups, which can often offer financial assistance as well as assistance with putting on campus events, another good resource can be local synagogues. For one thing, Jewish professors on one’s university, or those who are even mildly religiously active, will likely go to a synagogue near the campus, so going to synagogues is one way to meet these professors and network with them in an informal environment. However, not all synagogues choose to get involved in such issues, and there are even some synagogues whose communities are far from a pro-Israel alignment. The best way to get access to Israel activists in a synagogue is to contact the office and ask for the name and contact information for their Israel Action Committee chair (note: if they don’t have one, that’s not a good sign!). That individual will not only know others in that congregation who are active on behalf of Israel, but likely in other local synagogues as well, and can also recruit them to help you. Indeed, dozens of our pro-Israel friends and allies, some of them on behalf of local Jewish and pro-Israel groups, from the Bay Area attended the various divestment bill meetings, and many of them spoke very eloquently and convincingly on behalf of our side of the divestment bill debate. Networking, indeed, is essential to success in business, and also in Israel advocacy.

Professors on campus can be extremely helpful allies as well. It’s no secret that academia in our country (and indeed in other countries, notably England) is home to many of the worst anti-Israel personalities in the country: Noam Chomsky is the most famous example, but others abound, such as recently disgraced and fired DePaul professor (and professional Israel hater) Norman Finkelstein. As a result of the fact that anti-Israel groups on campus can and do appeal to professors on ‘their side’ for help, it’s critical that pro-Israel groups and students do the same. And while many pro-Israel professors, in my experience, are somewhat hesitant to get involved in campus student politics and activism, if one looks they can find (usually Jewish) pro-Israel professors who aren’t afraid to speak out. Indeed, when the Chair of the Jewish Studies program at Berkeley, Professor Ronald Hendel, published a letter in the Daily Californian, the campus newspaper, exposing the divestment bill effort as plainly an anti-Israel effort, and not one which had to do with opposing war crimes in the world as the bill’s authors tried to claim, was extremely helpful to Tikvah and to the greater effort to oppose the bill.

8. Networking on campus

There is one last thing I’d like to mention. Much as reaching out to community members and groups sympathetic to the cause of Israel advocacy is important to being successful in keeping anti-Israel bills from getting passed in one’s student government, reaching out to students and student groups on campus for help is very important too.

The most obvious students and student groups to appeal to for help are, of course, the Jewish ones. The fact that the anti-divestment-bill effort on campus saw most of the Jewish groups at Berkeley unite together against the bill was absolutely essential to seeing this bill fail. The clearest display of this fact was when sixteen Jewish groups on campus, most of whom never engage in real Israel advocacy, came together, reportedly under the leadership of Berkeley Hillel, to sign a statement opposing the divestment bill. During the course of the divestment bill fight (not long after the bill was initially vetoed), SJP published a letter in the Daily Californian student campus newspaper titled “We Are Jews and We Support Divestment” which had hundreds of campus and community signers, including some Berkeley graduates and professors. This letter was read by thousands on campus. As I noted earlier, this illustrates the tactic SJP and other anti-Israel groups use, assembling as many anti-Israel Jews as possible and bringing them out in force in an attempt to convince bystanders that American (and local) Jewry is in fact divided heavily when it comes to Israel matters.

What kept the SJP letter from being a runaway success for the anti-Israel movement on campus was that shortly after its publication, another letter would be published in the Daily Californian, a letter urging that the Berkeley student Senate uphold President Smelko’s veto of the divestment bill. This letter was signed by the aforementioned sixteen Jewish groups I mentioned, from the Jewish Business Association to the Berkeley Bayit Jewish cooperative student house to, of course, Tikvah: Students for Israel. (It is perhaps not surprising that Kesher Enoshi refused to sign this letter.) The truth is, the voices of a dozen campus anti-Israel Jews and a couple hundred like-minded community Jews pale next to the voice of the entire organized Jewish community on campus, and any pretense SJP’s letter had to representing a considerable proportion of Jews on campus was immediately killed upon the publication of the campus Jewish community’s letter which came shortly after, as well as the previously noted letter signed by a wide range of American Jewish organizations

Bringing the Jewish community together on campus against divestment was essential to killing the divestment bill. However, one area which Tikvah, in my estimation, needs to improve at in order to continue gaining strength on campus (and therefore, in order to ensure that no future divestment bills or bills of that nature pass at Berkeley) is in befriending non-Jews and non-Jewish student groups. SJP and similar groups often are very successful in recruiting non-Arabs and individuals who do not have any immediately apparent reason to be invested in the Israeli/Palestinian issue, to their cause as advocates of their side and outspoken activists; unfortunately, the same cannot be said for pro-Israel groups, which, both on campus and more nationally from what I can tell, are nearly exclusively made up of Jews (a pleasing exception is the 200,000-member American organization Christians United for Israel - www.cufi.org). This is a major problem because when it comes to the PR battle on campus, bystanders will immediately associate greater credence with the anti-Israel side of the debate if it has more diversity in its ranks – both because this makes the group look pluralistic and inclusive and non-racist (values college students hold very dear), and because it leads bystanders to think “If that group has so many different kinds of folks in it, they must have something convincing and ‘right’ to say…maybe being pro-Israel is just a Jewish thing, maybe Jews are religiously compelled to defend and support the state of Israel.” (That Jews who support Israel generally do so due to theological beliefs is a lie often spread by groups such as SJP.) As one might imagine, this image is extremely damaging, especially since groups like SJP already take the time to spread the notion that pro-Israel students on campus are only pro-Israel because they’re Jewish (including the implication that Jews are somehow racist for supporting Israel, the Jewish, ‘white’ state). Pro-Israel groups need to reach out to non-Jews as much or more than to Jews; for while one can count on getting some Jewish members (Jews are more likely to be informed on the Middle East, and therefore are more likely to know that the pro-Israel side of the debate is right) to join pro-Israel groups, it takes more effort to reach out to non-Jewish students, who likely are intimidated by the Middle East debate to begin with. Recruitment efforts by university and college pro-Israel groups therefore should not be based around giving arguments Jews care about but others wouldn’t care so much about, and pro-Israel groups should be careful to make their arguments for their side of the Middle East debate arguments which ordinary Americans could relate to and which deal with issues non-Jewish Americans care about (“Israel’s enemies are obsessive, racist, hate Jews and are linked heavily with terror”, not “Israel is home to more Holocaust survivors than any other state”).

It is also extremely important to network with and form allegiances with non-Jewish campus student organizations. There are several very clear advantages this brings. For one, it is a given, I take it, that on any major college campus, SJP or whomever happens to be the resident anti-Israel group on campus is well situated in campus politics and has many allies and allied groups. Touching on the point I just made above, this means that SJP or whomever is more likely to be seen by bystanders as credible than a lone, largely Jewish pro-Israel group would be. Even a pro-Israel group which is allied with many Jewish groups will not look as credible as an anti-Israel group which is allied with many student groups which deal with issues unrelated to the Middle East.

Another reason it is very important to network and make allies with other student communities and student groups is that it gives a political advantage: On Berkeley, SJP had a plethora of allied groups and communities which could be counted on to vote for SJP members running for Senate (and who could be counted on to support the divestment bill). At Berkeley SJP became very powerful by making many allies in other student communities – the African Americans, the Hispanics, the gay rights and women’s rights groups and environmentalist groups. Were it not for the fact that one of the two major political parties at Berkeley has many Jews, and by extension a good amount of pro-Israel sentiment within its ranks, Tikvah would not have had an easy time, in my estimation, convincing too many others (read: non-Jews) to oppose the divestment bill At campuses where student government is organized based on political parties as at UC Berkeley, making alliances can be important in just getting people elected who won’t allow the student government to be hijacked by the BDS movement.

Strength is in numbers, and, at colleges, in diversity within one’s ranks.

Incidentally, networking and making allies with other student communities is much easier than one might suspect. Many student groups want to reach out and learn about other student groups, and so scheduling a mixer between one’s own pro-Israel group and, say, a Christian group or an Indian group isn’t hard and can be very rewarding. It’s especially easy if members of one’s own group are good friends with members of another group. Frankly, mixers are especially good to do because they lead to friendships being made, and one student community will be willing to go to bat for another when they have good friends in the other community. There is no substitute for personal connections. And of course, all of this advice concerning networking with non-Jewish student groups and communities can be applied more generally, seeing as networking and making friends with non-Jewish off-campus groups obviously can help immensely too.

Politically, there are certain groups that are worth approaching as allies: LGBT groups, environmental groups, Indian students and Armenian students. The first two are relatively obvious, though LGBT groups have far too often allied themselves with anti-Israel groups that support extremely homophobic and hateful entities such as Hamas. India and Israel have strong ties and both see themselves as targets of radical Islamic terror groups (in India’s case, from Pakistan); in fact several prominent representatives of the Indian-American student community on campus spoke out against the divestment bill and helped the Jewish community and Tikvah in its struggle against that bill. Armenian students, in the current political climate of Turkish anti-Israel activism, may also be receptive, though wary because of Israel’s previous close ties with Turkey; Armenian students also, in my experience, can relate to Jewish students, as they see the Armenian genocide of the 1910s as akin to the Nazi Holocaust, and therefore see themselves as brethren to the Jewish people.

This goes along with a more general point, that it’s important to be politically involved and to take the time to get to know the ‘power players’ on one’s campus. Getting a person from one’s own student group elected to student government is the most prized possession, and leads to a number of positive things – visibility for one’s student group, an ability to help shape campus rules and discourse, one guaranteed ‘no’ vote on anti-Israel bills in the student Senate – with the relatively minor downside that with a student government official in office from one’s group, it’s very important for the student group itself to act maturely on campus and to comport itself well (lest the group have a harder time electing another member in the future). But even just networking with student government officials is a good idea, since many of them, in my experience, genuinely care to hear what their constituents (read: students at their university) think, and are willing to hear out one’s opinions on matters on campus (for instance, things like anti-Israel bills). It’s best to do this networking before things like anti-Israel bills come up; at that point, Senators are likely to be paying attention to their personal friends, as well as their party leaders and colleagues. It is worth noting, on a side note, that anti-Israel groups, at least at California universities, are, more and more, planning to take over university student governments more generally these days, for the purpose of having the power to pass whatever bills they so desire.

In sum, we in Tikvah: Students for Israel and in the organized Jewish community at UC Berkeley defeated the effort to pass an Israel divestment bill on campus through a number of strategies and with the benefit of knowing the character and tactics of the anti-Israel community on campus. We worked, with our allies in the Student Action political party on campus, to portray the often radical CalSERVE party which supported the bill as more concerned with grandstanding on international issues than with passing bills concerned with the campus and student life on campus. We helped undermine the anti-Israel effort by portraying its main pushers in Students for Justice in Palestine as fanatics obsessed with damaging Israel (even if we should have done more of this). We knew how the anti-Israel cabal on campus operates, and made use of that knowledge to tactically fight it in the ‘courtroom’ which was the Senate meeting room. We contacted and secured the help of Bay Area Jewish and pro-Israel organizations, and came together as a unified Jewish community on campus as well. There are many things we should have done better, and in my opinion our battle would have gone more smoothly if we’d spent more time revealing the backers of the divestment bill as the villains they are, as well as networking more with non-Jewish student communities on campus. But we ultimately – with more than a little help from ASUC President Will Smelko, the pivotal player in the divestment bill fight – succeeded in keeping the bill from passing, and came out with our heads and shoulders raised high, in a position of strength after the divestment bill war. I hope that the lessons and tactics suggested in this article will be inspiring to readers from other colleges, for I am certain that they are the right ones.

Ariel Kaplan

B.A., Philosophy, 2010

UC Berkeley

Part 2--The BDS Movement at UC Berkeley: How It Failed and Lessons Learned

2010-09-06T11:10:00.000-07:00

(This is the second installment of the report on the political battle launched by the BDS movement at the University of California at Berkeley this past spring, written by Ariel Kaplan, who graduated from Cal this past spring. Part 1 is at http://www.bluetruth.net/2010/09/bds-movement-at-uc-berkeley-how-it.html. The third and final part will be posted tomorrow.)

3. How SJP recruits Jewish students

Students for Justice in Palestine has managed to make itself look Jew-friendly, like a home for Jews, in part by actively and aggressively recruiting and employing Jews and, notably, Israelis. SJP at Berkeley boasts many prominent Jewish and Israeli members, and flaunts this fact, often having these members represent the public face of the group: writing op-eds on behalf of SJP in the campus newspaper, speaking to the campus media on behalf of SJP regularly, etc. In having Jewish and Israeli members often represent the face of the group, SJP has managed to look credible as a commentator on Israeli-Palestinian issues and also ‘diverse’, inclusive and friendly to Jews and Judaism. It is worth noting, of course, that Berkeley’s SJP is hardly alone in aggressively recruiting and employing Jews and Israelis; in my experience, this is a tactic of anti-Israel groups in America more generally. In order to fully illustrate the depth of the problem of Jewish and Israeli membership in SJP at Berkeley, it’s worth noting that SJP has more, and more dedicated, Israelis within its ranks than the pro-Israel contingent on campus does.
It must, however, be noted that the overwhelming majority of Israelis, whether living in Israel or abroad, are Zionist--they support the right of the Jewish people to national self-determination in their historic homeland. The shocking number of virulent anti-Zionist Israelis in Berkeley’s SJP, and in the anti-Israel movement worldwide, should not be taken to suggest that Israelis are generally anti-Zionist or that Israeli youth is anti-Zionist today. Indeed, the anti-Zionist Israelis who can be found in SJP and similar groups are an aberration—they comprise an extreme minority in Israeli society, just as those who call for an overthrow of the American government are an extremist fringe group in this country. Nonetheless, the anti-Zionist Jews and Israelis in Berkeley’s SJP and in similar groups make it their mission to attack Israel as savagely as possible: “I lived in Israel for ten years, everything SJP says about the country is true” is a powerful statement when its hearers don’t know much about Israel to begin with. It would not be rash to say that SJP and groups like it each have a small army of Jews, many of whom are Israeli, ready to leap forward and attack Israel whenever called on; and this ‘army’ is large enough and speaks passionately enough that it often succeeds at making non-Jewish bystanders (such as the aforementioned ASUC Senator) think that Jews must be more generally divided on questions like Israel’s right to exist, than would otherwise be assumed. A cautionary word: the great majority of Jews and Israelis at Berkeley, and, I take it, on similar campuses are pro-Israel but are not politically engaged on campus, or engaged in campus politics or in student activism. This, of course, works in SJP’s favor: if there are relatively few politically engaged openly Jewish Jews on campus, and many of the most passionate of these are anti-Israel, this makes it look to bystanders as though a sizable percentage of Jewry is anti-Israel today.

The second thing to note concerning SJP’s fight to look Jewish and gain acceptance in its ‘Jewishness’ or status as an almost ‘Jewish’ student group, is that SJP at Berkeley – and, from what I hear, this is something groups like SJP are starting to try to do at colleges nationwide, more generally – has managed to successfully infiltrate Berkeley Hillel, the “center for Jewish life on campus”. This is how it manages to spread its venom from the inside of the organized student Jewish community and is part of the reason it manages to gain Jewish and Israeli recruits. The way SJP has managed to do this is quite simple: an ‘Israeli’ student group, Kesher Enoshi, was founded several years ago at Berkeley, according to its (Israeli) founders with the intent to raise discussion on campus and among Jews concerning social problems within Israel that need to be fixed. This is certainly a noble goal, if perhaps one with possible negative consequences (SJP and its allies love to blur the distinction between Israelis and Jews constructively critical of some of Israel’s actions, and Israel-haters like themselves). Whatever the initial plan or philosophy of Kesher Enoshi was, it quickly devolved into an Israeli and Jewish anti-Israel group, a group which claims not to take a stand on issues of the Arab-Israeli conflict, or even to be ‘Pro-Israel’, but which helps SJP organize anti-Israel events, interfaces with SJP generally, is very close with the SJP leadership and membership, and is essentially at this point ‘the gateway drug to SJP’ for Jews [1]. One of Kesher Enoshi’s founders is now running an anti-Israel blog/website called Borderline Crimes with two of SJP’s biggest leaders, one past, one present; another Kesher Enoshi founder is now working, after college, for Breaking The Silence, a nonprofit which is devoted to spreading awareness of Israeli ‘war crimes’. Both of these individuals are Israeli Jews. Disturbingly, to all appearances many or most young Jews who join Kesher Enoshi seem to end up SJP members or at least anti-Israel fanatics quickly, and the divestment bill meetings were full of Kesher Enoshi members parroting the same anti-Israel tropes as were being put forth by their friends in SJP. It is incumbent to note here that the reason so many Israelis and Jews begin to adopt anti-Israel beliefs and attitudes after joining Kesher Enoshi is not because Kesher Enoshi’s claims or arguments are correct (they aren’t), but because that group uses effective and extreme rhetoric and an anti-Israel narrative of the history of Israel and the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, much as SJP does, and relies on the fact that most Jews and even Israelis who are coming to Berkeley are relatively ignorant of the pro-Israel point of view, and thus are easily suckered into believing anti-Israel propaganda, without knowing anything of what the other side of the Israel debate has to say. (Most politically active Israeli undergraduates I’ve met at Berkeley moved to America at a young age, typically in their preteen years.)

I will not make any pronouncements on whether or not ‘Kesher Enoshi’ was always a plan designed to infiltrate the Jewish community. But the fact remains that the Jewish establishment on campus – certainly at Hillel - is reticent to ‘exclude’ any Jews, for fear of making some Jews on campus feel uncomfortable or unwelcome as Jews in the Jewish community on campus. Hillel sees their mission as being that of bringing in all Jews, of all opinions and stripes, in a glorious and harmonious ‘big tent’ (that this is impossible seems to me to be obvious). This sees them, perhaps with some discomfort, allow Kesher Enoshi not only to make their presence known in Hillel but even to do recruiting and put on events in the Hillel building itself, which are often attended by SJP members among others. The anti-Israel forces have therefore found an ‘in’ into advertising directly to Jews, from within the Jewish community. Thankfully, I have heard things recently which suggest that Hillel International may be changing their policy somewhat in order to ensure that anti-Israel groups are kept outside of Hillels on college campuses; I hope this is true.

4. How to counter SJP?

We now reach the pivotal question: In light of all of SJP’s successes, how did we at Berkeley blunt their advance and keep the divestment bill from passing? (The bill didn’t fail only on account of the student government President’s veto of it; had more Senators been for the bill, the veto would have been overriden.) Also: How can students at other universities and colleges successfully fight bills of this nature in their own student governments?

I have written at great length concerning SJP’s strengths; the key to defeating them and BDS efforts within student governments is, in my opinion, to openly highlight the ‘dark side’ of groups like SJP: their sinister agendas, their propensity to hate speech, their carefully hidden anti-Semitism. Students who are unbiased concerning the Middle East, students who are not anti-Israel to begin with, will not want to support any group with as many skeletons in its closet, as many ill motives, as SJP.

It’s no secret that many members and supporters of anti-Israel groups, including college anti-Israel groups like SJP, are fanatics who hide their extremist goals and support of terrorism in the rhetoric of terms such as “peace and justice”. Many assume – and this is the intuitive, natural response to attacks on Israel, I think – that the best way to do Israel advocacy and to fight BDS efforts is to ‘defend Israel’, that is, to refute claims made about it and to try to portray it in a positive light so as to counteract the image of it painted by its detractors. I think that this ‘defend Israel’ approach, while well-intended, is not the most effective approach to Israel advocacy, not least because it’s typically not even done well; a friend of mine coined the term ‘Cellphone Zionism’ to describe that school of thought in Israel advocacy which is very prominent, which holds that the natural and correct response to demonization, delegitimization and double standards when it comes to Israel (Natan Sharansky’s “Three D’s” which identify when legitimate criticism of Israel crosses the line into anti-Semitism) is to respond by asserting Israel’s accomplishments or strengths: “But Israel invented cell phones!” I think it’s evident that responses such as this, or similar responses like “Israel is the most environmentally conscious country in the world” and “Israel has great minority/LGBT rights” do not even challenge the central claim made by BDS and anti-Zionist advocates: that Israel is, in addition to being illegitimate in its very existence (the “Occupation started in 1948” claim that SJP and others openly espouse), so morally odious as a state that supporting it makes one a supporter of apartheid and genocide. When the bad guys bring out the big guns, when they paint Israel as a country so evil that immediate boycott, divestment and sanctions are morally necessary, when they attack Israel’s very right to exist, we must bring out our own howitzers, too. For to a bystander, even a state which treats its own minorities (LGBT and black and Arab, for instance), far better than its Arab neighboring states do, and which does great things like design innovative and useful technology and advance the cause of environmentalism, cannot be supported if it oppresses indigenous peoples and commits genocide.

Now what are the aforementioned ‘big guns’ our side, the side of Israel advocacy, can use in the BDS debate? Well, one need look no further than the apparent and odious nature of our opposition. The truth is, the anti-Israel movement is so thoroughly saturated with hate, with anti-Semitism, with terror apologetics, that it is exceedingly easy to point this out to an impartial audience – the ‘jury’ which is the student senate, if you will – and thereby rightfully discredit and disgrace the anti-Israel crowd. Debates about history (“Did Israel really expel Arabs en masse in 1948?”) are too technical and dry to work very well as a stand-alone technique for fighting anti-Israel rhetoric and claims, and the aforementioned ‘defending Israel’ school is also not a good standalone technique either, since attack trumps defense: if two men are arguing and one is accusing the other of myriad terrible actions, with a vigor and conviction and passion, and the other is responding, panicked, “none of this is true, I swear!”, who are bystanders more likely to believe? (Hint: the bystander’s response could be “Well, at least some of the claims made about this man must be true.”) But the fact is that it is both intellectually honest and extremely easy to point out the anti-Israel crowd for what it is: a group of radicals, many of whom support -- at least implicitly - things no one likes such as terrorism; many of whom have beliefs (“the American government committed the 9/11 attacks”, for instance) which would be shocking and odious to most Americans (and make no mistake, many or most college students, including those in student government, count under ‘most Americans’ here), and all of whom have an obsession with Israel, and only Israel, which suggests something both powerful and true: that they are, far from being charitable advocates for world ‘peace and justice’, part of the worldwide movement which has been in place for decades to see Israel destroyed.

5. Exposing the links between SJP and radical Islamists

The strongest point of attack, then, against anti-Israel advocates is to expose these people and their ideology for what they are. It doesn’t take much digging up to find out that, for instance, the Muslim Student Association (MSA), whose Berkeley chapter works hand-in-hand with SJP in putting on anti-Israel programming on campus, was founded by members of the Muslim Brotherhood, the same group Hamas was born out of, and an organization whose founder, Hassan al-Banna, was a devout admirer of Adolf Hitler and the Nazi regime; nor is it difficult to point out the disturbing nature of the Hitleresque speeches made by anti-Israel advocates. I found, without looking too hard, that Emiliano Huet-Vaughn is a prominent member of the terror-linked International Solidarity Movement, a ‘pro-Palestinian’ group which brings American college students to the Territories in order to attend anti-Israel conferences and take part in actions such as disrupting Israeli military counterterrorism efforts [2]. The ISM itself has links to terrorist groups and activities in the Middle East, as the Anti-Defamation League has noted; Huwaida Arraf, one of the ISM’s co-founders, has admitted that the ISM cooperates with Hamas, among other groups. ISM conferences in the Middle East also are home to terrorists in the West Bank who, as part of the program, socialize with conference attendees [3]. The whole anti-Israel movement is rife with extremely dangerous, hateful people, people who not only turn a blind eye to terror acts committed intentionally against Israeli civilians, but, in many cases, personally know terrorists and engage and socialize with them.

Americans are by and large not fond of radical Islamic terror; given how easy it is to point out the links between college groups like SJP, their members, and terror, I see no good reason why this strategy is not taken more often.

Another note on this topic: Portraying, correctly, the Jewish people as one historically hunted and discriminated against, and now, in their own land, still being hunted, is to portray a moving and accurate story. The anti-Israel forces have liked to portray the Palestinians as the hunted underdog, but the Jews, as historical perspective shows, have been history’s hated underdog, and remain the underdog in the Middle East today—far outnumbered by nations who desire to see them violently removed from the region, constantly facing terrorism on a level no other country in the world has to deal with, at the mercy of a world addicted to oil and which is in the pockets of powerful dictatorial Middle Eastern regimes who, behind the scenes, funnel much oil money into terrorism and the spread of anti-Israel propaganda. One cannot fail to move a crowd of impartial Americans by correctly pointing out what’s going on – the same Jews who’ve always been, consistently, the world’s scapegoat and undesired minority are now, upon finally living in their own land, away from the European anti-Semitism which plagued them for millennia, finding themselves attacked again, by a worldwide propaganda and terror movement which has an obsession with seeing their state fall. The campaign of anti-Israel propaganda which has taken hold on so many American college campuses is, of course, merely the newest tactic of a relentless, bloodthirsty Arab enemy, after conventional wars have failed to see Israel eradicated [4]. Our enemies are hateful, obsessive, and committed to our state’s destruction at any cost, a goal they and their forbears have pursued since the very creation of Israel. We in Israel advocacy need to spread a pro-Israel narrative that appeals to the same language used by the Left: we, the Jews, are more the indigenous peoples of Israel than are the Arabs, who arrived from Arabia less than 1500 years ago, and we’re being targeted by a PR war, as well as literal terrorism, financed by extremely wealthy, corrupt capitalists who have essentially bought the world’s allegiance through selling oil, who have bought allegiance against the hunted victim in the Middle East: Israel.

SJP and similar groups are trying to force student governments, like at Berkeley, to convict an entire nation (the state of Israel) of numerous and varied felonies in the absence of evidence; instead, SJP relies on what essentially amounts to hearsay evidence: “Human Rights Watch says it’s true, so it must be true!” And what’s more, the ‘witnesses’ SJP brings to the stand (SJP members and others who spout out anti-Israel rhetoric at senate meetings discussing BDS bills) can be found, with only a little bit of digging, to be part of an organized, worldwide cabal devoted specifically to seeing this nation convicted. Americans, with their sense of justice, will not stand for this once the BDS debate is rightly framed this way. For wouldn’t a series of witnesses in a court, shown to all have an intense hatred of the criminal suspect (Israel) and a desire to see him or her fall, and shown to have links with individuals and groups designed to bring down this suspect at all costs regardless of the truth (groups like the ISM, for instance), be excused, removed from court, with their ‘testimony’ stricken from the record? Those who speak out against Israel at divestment bill meetings are universally individuals with a deep-seated, personal hatred of the state; they are not impartial commentators, nor trustworthy ones worthy of serious consideration. Moreover, these ‘witnesses’ never actually bring up solid evidence of any kind. A law professor sympathetic to Tikvah’s side of the divestment bill debate spoke at one of the divestment bill meetings: Is it not inherently unjust to convict a suspect in the absence of real evidence that he or she has committed the crimes he or she is accused of, in a very quick ‘trial’, on an issue that world organizations and governments find complex and worthy of serious study and longterm discussion before pronouncing an opinion?

So I feel that the best way to counter BDS offensives is to launch a counteroffensive and expose the BDS effort and its perpetrators for what they are. And there was some of this – but not as much as there should have been - going on in the midst of the BDS debate on campus. I would like now to draw attention to several other things which can help fight BDS on campuses.

6. Making the student government responsible to the student body

One thing that the anti-divestment bill side of the debate on campus used to great effect was making the point that ‘our side’ promoted the philosophy that the student government on campus should be used to pass bills and pronouncements relating to campus matters rather than those abroad, and that the pro-divestment CalSERVE party cared more for passing this divestment bill and tying up the senate in that debate than for dealing with pressing on-campus matters which directly affect students. Moreover, we noted that the CalSERVErs, as it were, had no problem making a mere plurality of 20 senators, voted on only by a low proportion of Berkeley students, the spokespeople for the university’s 35,000-member student body at large by promoting BDS in the name of the entire student body. We also noted that none of the serving senators had campaigned on a platform of divesting from Israel, or of opposing Israel at all; rather they, as elected representatives, were weighing in on an issue far from the minds of many student voters, an issue they could not reasonably and honestly say they represented campus opinion on. It is inherently undemocratic to feed a small governing representative body of a larger body of individuals (the Berkeley student body, in this case) propaganda intended to get them to vote a certain desired way on an issue which a great many of the voters who appointed the representatives care and know little about, and to then declare that the vote represents the opinion of that student body. We also noted that to support divestment would be to support a bill that would inevitably alienate, at the very least, the great majority of the thousands of Jewish students on campus, and make our campus a hostile atmosphere for these students and their like-minded friends– an action directly counter to the ethos of campus inclusiveness that Berkeley students, and especially CalSERVE officials and senators claim to support and deeply value. In fact, Rabbi Adam Naftalin-Kelman, Executive Director of Berkeley Hillel, suggested to the ASUC in a speech that were this bill passed over the ASUC President’s veto, it is likely Jewish enrollment at Berkeley would decrease in future years – a result counter to the progressive notion of campus inclusiveness. By noting that our political opposition felt an apparent need to bring in extremely charged political issues to the table of campus student politics, whatever the cost, we successfully and honestly portrayed our enemies as fanatics who put the desire to weigh in on complex international affairs ahead of the need to pass campus reforms which would directly impact all students for the better.

The tactical decision to brand our enemies in SJP, and in the CalSERVE party more generally, as being content to ruin the Cal experience for thousands of Jewish students by making controversial pronouncements on murky issues totally unrelated to the campus and the campus experience, was an extremely important decision –it was why we secured many students’ support for our stance on the divestment bill. The enemies of Israel see every issue in daily life as somehow related to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and react violently and virulently whenever this topic comes up. Given this, it’s all too easy – so easy that not to do this would be criminal, I think – to take advantage of this fact and use it in the PR war which debates like the divestment bill debate ultimately boil down to. Our enemies – the anti-Israel fanatics – are rabid in their demand that those who support Israel be seen as utterly inhumane; not to respond to this charge would be political suicide, and the easiest response is to throw their rhetoric right back at them: “Our enemies are fanatics, obsessed with this particular world conflict, narcissists who care not for anyone else’s feelings or the fallout of their drafted resolutions on campus or elsewhere and who demand that their whims to make grandstanding pronouncements on complicated, arcane conflicts thousands of miles away take precedence over the university issues the school Senate was designed to reckon with.” It is worth noting that the majority of anti-divestment bill students were probably less concerned with stopping divestment from Israel than with stopping CalSERVE and its efforts to turn the ASUC into a forum for discussion and grandstanding on international politics and conflicts; relatively few Berkeley students want their student government to be devoted to pronouncing on issues which do not affect the campus but which instead only satisfy the egos and hysteria of political radicals more concerned with promoting their own hateful, twisted views on campus than with the welfare of Berkeley students. Jon Haber at Divest This! has noted that it is standard for anti-Israel BDS activists to try to turn forums for discussion unrelated to the Middle East into Israel bashing centers, and that it is also standard for the great majority of individuals associated with these forums (in this case, Berkeley students) to be opposed to this subversion of their organization.

[1] As a colleague of mine in Tikvah: Students for Israel memorably put it.

[2] Pictures of Huet-Vaughn at an ISM conference can be found in Lee Kaplan’s great article “The ISM-Terror Connection”, which recounts in depth the proceedings of an ISM conference in 2006 in East Jerusalem (and recounts, as part of that, Huet-Vaughn’s involvement).

[3]Kaplan’s aforementioned article, largely a recounting of an ISM infiltrator’s experiences at the 2006 conference, points this out (with the aid of pictures, no less).

[4] I am not suggesting that Arabs are inherently or generally anti-Israel or anti-Semitic, by the way.

The BDS Movement at UC Berkeley: How It Failed and Lessons Learned (Part 1)

2010-09-05T13:07:00.000-07:00

BlueTruth is proud to publish this report from the front lines of the divestment battle at the University of California at Berkeley (known locally as "Cal"). Ariel Kaplan, who graduated from Cal this past spring, is one of the founders of Tikvah: Students for Israel, the pro-Israel student group at Cal. This is his analysis of what happened this spring when the BDS movement unsuccessfully attempted to get the ASUC (the student government at Cal) to endorse a one sided anti-Israel resolution. We hope this will be useful for students at other campuses, and community members who support them, in resisting attempts by the BDS (boycott, divestment, sanctions) movement to hijack student government organizations in support of their agenda of unending war against the existence of Israel.

Some of you may ask why we would want to openly publish a document that will include strategic advice for students. The answer is that once the situation is described, the strategies are relatively obvious and in large part simply utilize the same methods that the other side already uses. This story will also expose some of the vulnerabilites of the BDS advocates on campus-- but as those are an integral part of who they are and what they stand for, they will not be able to remedy them. Having this story openly available ensures that all those who need to see it will be able to access it easily.

What was initially going to be a short writeup became a 20 page paper. Therefore, we are posting this in several parts over the next few days.

Ariel's opinions and suggestions are his own. There are many approaches to such situations, but few have been written by someone who has as been personally involved as Ariel.

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The Story of the Divestment Resolution

1. What Happened

In the Spring of 2010, anti-Israel activists nearly managed to get an anti-Israel bill passed in UC Berkeley’s student government. This bill, if passed, would have given anti-Israel activists worldwide the opportunity to claim that Berkeley’s student body is in support of divestment from Israel. The story of how this bill came about, what the battle over it was like, and how I and my colleagues in the pro-Israel community managed to see the bill defeated is an important one, and I’d like to explain this story. I also would like to offer commentary and advice to current and future college students on how to fight and defeat anti-Israel measures in their own student governments.

It began when I heard through the grapevine that a divestment bill was being proposed in Berkeley’s student government, the ASUC (Associated Students of the University of California).

My student group, Tikvah: Students for Israel (I was an executive member of the group in Spring 2010, and had been one of the group’s first members, helping shape the group’s ideology and methods, during the group’s inception back in the Fall of 2007), only heard about this at the last minute, and so several of us went to the Senate committee meetings which would determine whether this divestment bill would make it on to the general floor, with the intent of trying to stop that from happening.

It was useless; as a friend of mine in the ASUC, a Jewish student senator, told us: “There’s nothing we can really do to stop this from getting through and on to the general floor.” People’s – the Senators’ (or those Senators who were in the relevant committees) – minds had already been made up by the time we got to the committee meetings. I write “meetings” plural: Students for Justice in Palestine, the notorious, vehement anti-Israel group on campus, had actually written up two bills of nearly identical text in order that if one failed (didn’t get through the Senate committee it was being brought up at), the other, proposed at a different committee, might yet pass and get on to the general floor. As it would turn out, one of these bills did make it through.

The bills had both been written by two particularly inflammatory members of the Berkeley chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine: one, Tom Pessah, is an Israeli expatriate who seemingly has made it his personal mission to spread hatred for his own state as wide as possible in Northern California; the other, Emiliano Huet-Vaughn, was a newcomer to Berkeley, a new graduate student who had a track record of stirring up anti-Israel sentiment abroad at the London School of Economics and attempting (once successfully) to pass divestment there. (Huet-Vaughn’s past was even more sinister than that, I would soon find.) These two Berkeley graduate students had done ‘meticulous research’ and written up the two essentially identical bills, both extended diatribes against the state of Israel tossing in all the language typical of rejectionist anti-Israel propaganda (‘illegal occupation’, ‘war crimes’, ‘disregard for human rights’, ‘laying siege to the citizens of Gaza’, etc.). Their bill was loaded with citations from organizations which Israel advocates know to be either horrendously biased, or simply hateful and generally not credible: Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, in particular, belonging to the former category. (Concerning the latter group: It is worth noting that Robert Bernstein, founder of Human Rights Watch, had only recently publicly disowned his own organization, on the basis of its having become obsessively anti-Israel. His opinion piece in the New York Times can be found here)

The bill which ended up making it to the general floor (and which I will henceforth refer to as the ‘divestment bill’) was voted on very promptly and passed. This led to a flood of over ten thousand emails sent from around the world to ASUC members and officials, as well as to campus officials, variously praising and disapproving of the passage of the bill. Anti-Israel partisans, unsurprisingly, wrote of the ‘moral fortitude’ and ‘courage’ expressed by the Senate for approving divestment; pro-Israel individuals wrote of their shock and disgust that the only even reasonably moral state in the Middle East was being singled out for criticism and was publicly being tried and convicted, in the absence of any clear evidence, of all manner of atrocities.

The divestment bill was then vetoed by the conscientious ASUC President, Will Smelko (see here for an interview concerning his feelings on the Berkeley divestment bill and why he didn’t support it); and then was unsuccessfully resuscitated twice in attempts to see the President’s veto overridden (the second time, through all manner of political trickery). Both resuscitation attempts failed, though both meetings where the attempts occurred lasted all night – one went, all told, from around 7 PM to 7 AM the next morning, on a weeknight (the first four or so hours were devoted to finding a suitable venue for the rapidly expanding group of spectators and guest speakers on the bill) – and were filled with a shockingly obscene level of vitriol and animus, including hate speech almost entirely emanating from the mouths of the hundreds of anti-Israel students and community activists who attended the meetings. It is worth noting that the frenzy of the anti-Israel activists, which I saw in the massive ballroom where the latter two Senate meetings were held on those fateful meeting nights, was unlike anything I’d ever seen in person before – a mass of hundreds of individuals wearing identical green ‘I am a ___ [Jew, Christian, UC Berkeley Student, Pastor, etc.] and I support divestment’ shirts, whooping loudly when people on ‘their side’ would speak and openly mocking and laughing at those of us on the ‘other side’ when we would speak, as well as shouting hateful things and curse words (at least one pro-Israel speaker was called “Nazi”) and, occasionally, anti-Semitic tropes such as ‘the Jews are Christ killers’, ‘Zionists control politics, even on this campus’, ‘the Israel lobby is yet again stifling all voices counter to it’. I remember solemnly having to assent to a pro-Israel student colleague’s observation, at the end of the very first divestment bill meeting, where the bill had passed, that the ‘other side’ of the room had cheered extremely loudly, whooped and grinned and laughed at us after their ‘victory’, not to celebrate their own ‘victory’ so much as to make us feel as bad and weak as possible – naked sadism. And I also remember feeling queasy upon the realization that the rhetorical tactics being used by the anti-Israel speakers at the various divestment bill Senate meetings were strikingly reminiscent of those used by Hitler in his infamous speeches of the 1930s: wearing a ‘uniform’ (aforementioned green ‘I support divestment’ shirt, keffiyeh) and starting off speaking slowly and calmly, but with an intensity and composure, before slowly raising the pitch of one’s voice and, ultimately, ranting at high pitch and full volume while gesticulating wildly, with passion and anger and intensity and hatred, a cacophony of hate designed to gain ‘followers’, to enthrall the audience to join the speaker in his or her hatred of his or her preferred target (in this case, we pro-Israel advocates and students, as well as the state of Israel herself). At the second Senate attempt to override the veto, these speakers, not content with having been granted a 2:1 ratio on the speakers list (in the grounds that there were more of them in attendance than us) even signed up for our speaking slots to make the scene even more one sided. Fortunately, the Senate parliamentarian caught on to this deceitful tactic fairly quickly.

Ultimately, again, we won the day, managing to convince (with a little help from the aforementioned thousands of pro-Israel individuals who emailed the Senators to protest the initial passage of the divestment bill) three more Senators after the initial four who had opposed the divestment bill not to vote for it, and thereby keeping the pro-divestment vote stuck at 13 out of 20 Senators, one less than is necessary to override a Presidential veto.

2. Students for Justice in Palestine and how they operate

The questions I would like to examine are: “How did we win?”; and, “How can college students at other campuses learn from what we at Berkeley experienced, so they can keep anti-Israel bills from passing at their university student governments?” Indeed, it would seem miraculous, I think, to consider that in spite of spending many thousands of dollars on trying to get the bill passed (from buying the hundreds of green ‘I support divestment’ shirts which were used, to flying worldwide-known anti-Israel activists such as Hedy Epstein into the Bay Area for the event), getting thousands of emails sent to Senators approving of their (the Senators’) initial passage of the bill and urging an upholding of that passage of the bill, and getting international celebrities like Noam Chomsky and Desmond Tutu to write letters of support for the Berkeley divestment bill (letters prominently put up around campus), the anti-Israel community at Berkeley and worldwide failed to pass a divestment bill in a student senate with only three Jewish senators (one of whom is vocally anti-Israel), the student senate of the most notoriously politically radical (and therefore, as far as current politics go, anti-Israel) campus in the U.S. if not the world.

The divestment bill war raged for about half of this past Spring semester and dominated campus news and discourse. The lessons learned here will, I hope, help those who face similar challenges at their own universities.

The first matter which needs to be discussed is how anti-Israel campus groups operate – how, that is, the bill gained so much traction so quickly as it did, and how it gained such support within the student senate that if it hadn’t been for the President’s fateful (and unexpected) decision to veto it, it would have passed.

Having been one among the founding class of Tikvah: Students for Israel at Berkeley some two and a half years before this divestment bill was put forth in the student senate, I’d already learned a great deal about how the anti-Israel campus cabal operates, and I’d like to share that.

Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), whose Berkeley chapter was, again, the primary group behind the divestment bill, is one of several prominent, nationwide college student organizations which dedicates itself to delegitimizing Israel and spreading lies about the Jewish state. (There are other prominent anti-Israel groups on campuses in America – the Muslim Student Association, the Muslim Student Union, and various groups opposing ‘Israeli Apartheid’ – but SJP is the most prominent one at Berkeley, indeed the campus where SJP was founded in 2001) [1].The obvious question one would have is why anyone listens to them on campus, especially in light of their extremely impassioned rhetoric, often thuggish behavior and clearly one-sided view of a conflict which most Americans see as complex and multifaceted.

The answer to this question is really pretty simple: groups like SJP exist and thrive on college campuses, and specifically at college campuses, because the student culture at universities (especially at the most elite universities in America) is usually overwhelmingly progressive and left-leaning, and it’s not hard for groups like SJP to distort the history and events of the Middle Eastern conflict in order to frame it in terms that progressive-minded students can relate to [2].Specifically, the narrative of the history of the Arab-Israeli conflict which groups like SJP sell to the student body and to specific student groups (more on this later) is one of Western imperialism vs. an indigenous, peaceful people: the history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, SJP members insist, is a history of white European Jews having been illegitimately given the land of innocent Arab (i.e., Brown) indigenous peoples in the Middle East by colonial European powers, and then forcibly seizing this land, displacing the peaceful indigenous residents and fostering a culture (in Israel) of racism toward the Arabs while simultaneously neglecting to respect the human rights of those helpless Arabs living right next door to Israel in unspeakable squalor.

That this narrative bears very little relation to what actually happened with the founding of Israel and what has happened since then is obvious to anyone with an even casual understanding of 20^th century Middle Eastern history, and refuting it is beyond the scope of this article [3].The reason I bring up the narrative is to illustrate how easy it is to deceive great masses of conscientious, morals-minded people committed to justice – most university students fit this description – by feeding them calculated stories which bear almost no relation to reality; Hitler famously wrote that while the masses may well question small lies and wonder if they might be lies, it is so inconceivable to most that people would manufacture and sell the public completely outrageous ‘big lies’ in a coordinated manner that no one really fathoms this possibility or takes it seriously.

Since its inception in 2001, SJP at Berkeley has taken great care to ally itself with the great coalition of progressive groups on campus: the African American student groups, the Hispanic student groups, the LGBT student groups, the women’s rights student groups, the environmentalist student groups. [4] These efforts have been very successful, to the point where SJP’s interests steer the ship of one of the two major political parties in the UC Berkeley student government as much as any other group’s interests do: it’s seemingly impossible to find even one member of the powerful far-left CalSERVE party who isn’t anti-Israel by any standard definition of that term, or at least in sympathy with SJP. As Jon Haber, a pro-Israel blogger who documents BDS (boycott, divestment and sanctions against Israel) activities in America at Divest This! , has noted, it is a standard, tried-and-true tactic of the anti-Israel movement to market itself such that it ends up seizing political control of organizations such as churches, unions, student governments and food cooperatives, finally using them to write and pass resolutions directed against Israel. One major reason the divestment bill at Berkeley was so immediately successful was because CalSERVE and its allies had a plurality in the Senate to begin with last year, and therefore over half the Senate votes were already guaranteed to go for divestment before discussion on the bill even started.

So SJP and similar groups market themselves as champions of justice, supporting indigenous oppressed peoples against the White Man, and manage to gain tremendous political power and influence on student campuses as a result, by allying themselves with all the other progressive and far left groups and gaining prominence in those circles. That’s one reason divestment, and SJP, nearly succeeded.

Incidentally, before moving on, I would like to bring up briefly what SJP’s ballyhooing about human rights is a smokescreen for: terrorism apologetics. Students for Justice in Palestine and groups like it routinely oppose Israel’s ‘occupation’ of ‘Palestinian lands’ and allege that the Jewish state commits human rights violations on a level perhaps unrivaled in the world today. What, then, is SJP’s solution for ending this ‘occupation’ and the ‘crimes’ committed by the state of Israel associated with it? What SJP calls ‘ending the occupation’ more rightly could be called ‘destroying Israel’: a salient and often missed detail in SJP’s outspoken goals is reversing the ‘Nakba’, the ‘catastrophe’ (how the Arabic word is usually translated) which occurred with the resolution of the 1948 Israeli War of Independence and the founding of Israel and the creation of the ‘Palestinian refugee crisis’. SJP, indeed, refers to ‘occupation of Palestinian lands by Israel’ as having taken place since 1948. 1948 was the year Israel was founded. SJP wants Israel to cease to exist. [5]To this end, SJP never puts on events criticizing Palestinian or Arab violent terrorism, instead framing terrorist acts such as mass murder of Israeli civilians as at least an understandable –if not completely justified – response to ‘occupation’.

Another reason why SJP is such a force on campus is that SJP itself – again, this applies in other universities, where there are other student groups dedicated to the same anti-Israel end – is chock full of what are essentially ‘professional students’ (the aforementioned Tom Pessah is one), graduate students who are taking seemingly forever (more than a decade, for instance) to finish up their studies in part as a smokescreen for being able to continue to have influence on campus and feed anti-Israel propaganda to students. SJP and the anti-Israel movement worldwide know that in order to convince college students of a point, their representatives should ideally be college students themselves, so we find various cases of 35 year old graduate students who seem to spend more time doing anti-Israel advocacy on campus than graduate work. At least several students who fit this description are among the leaders of SJP at Berkeley, and their status as graduate students (especially in fields which would lend apparent credibility to their pronouncements on the Middle East, fields such as Middle Eastern Studies, Law and, regrettably, my own field of Philosophy) lends them credibility in the eyes of impressionable undergraduates on campus who care about justice and are concerned and curious about the ongoing conflicts in the Middle East.

A third reason SJP is so powerful on campus, and reaches so many students, is that it seems never to lack resources: every event they put on is guaranteed a hundred or more loyal, regular attendees (many of whom though are not college students but adults who live around the Berkeley area), SJP prints hundreds of fliers for their events, buys hundreds of t-shirts. In the case of the divestment bill fight, again, SJP even flew in worldwide anti-Israel activists. The question of where college anti-Israel groups get their money is a very important one which more research needs to be done into, especially in light of recent events such as the revelation that the Muslim Student Union at UC Irvine may have funneled donation money to Hamas in 2009 [6].I do not believe it would be premature to raise the question of where SJP’s money comes from, and if any of it may come from nefarious and sinister sources (one place to start poking around would be the International Solidarity Movement, an international anti-Israel group which works closely with college students and anti-Israel student groups, as I’ll go into more later). The bottom line is that SJP seems never to lack money when they need it, and can be seen to spend much more extravagantly than other student groups on campus, in general, when they put on events.

Fourth, and most shockingly, SJP at Berkeley has managed to look Jew-friendly, even Jewish itself, to the point where one pro-divestment Senator memorably told me when she and I got lunch during the divestment bill war on campus, “I know some Jews, many Jews, are against divestment, and many Jews are for it, too”, in response to my informing her that nearly all of American Jewry, the overwhelming majority, would be not only against divestment from Israel but horrified at the very notion of it. There are several ways in which SJP has successfully managed to portray itself almost as a rival Jewish group, a home for Jewish students who ‘conscientiously object to the occupation of Palestine’, and the fact of SJP’s success in selling itself to college students as representative of many American and Israeli Jews is probably the fact most worth noting of any I mention in this article.

(part 2 tomorrow: how SJP infiltrated the UC Berkeley Hillel, and some of the key arguments used to help change several Senators' votes)

[1] I do not mean to suggest that Muslims are naturally or generally anti-Israel. Unfortunately, student groups who claim to represent Muslim students on American college campuses often are.

[2] Note that I am not saying that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is a Left or Right issue, since I don’t believe that it is. For whatever it’s worth, I myself am left-leaning. I merely believe that anti-Israel activists and propagandists tend to frame the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as a Leftist issue in order to sell their viewpoint on it to avowed progressives and hard leftists, such as the majority of politically engaged students at campuses like Berkeley.

[3] Though many good books, as well as many websites and articles available for free online, do a good job refuting it. I personally would chiefly recommend Samuel Katz’s book Battleground: Fact and Fantasy in Palestine; another good place to start is Myths and Facts online, available for free at http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/myths/mftoc.html.

[4]Of course, it is supremely ironic that SJP, who subtly champion or at least ally themselves strongly with regimes and cultures which feature institutionalized racism, sexism and great discrimination toward homosexuals, and no regard for the well-being of the environment, would be a member of a coalition of student groups championing every one of those social causes. I am not the first to notice this.

[5]The group often says that it doesn’t want Israel to cease to exist, only to cease being a Jewish state. SJP’s spoken desire is to see Israel become a ‘binational state’ and absorb all of the Palestinians, as well as dropping its own identity as a Jewish state. This would, of course, bring about an Arab-majority state like the 22 others in the Middle East, end Israel as a concept, and seriously endanger the Jewish residents of this new ‘Israel’ with mass murder through the influx of thousands of armed terrorists bent on killing Israelis. I think it’s clear that demanding Israel cease being a Jewish state is akin to demanding that France cease being a French state, or England cease being an English state, and become a state ‘open to all peoples’, not one based on the concept of being run by and for Frenchmen/Englishmen/etc. The Jews are a people like any other, and their having a state of their own is no different, in my mind, than Spaniards as a people having a state of their own.

[6]The university has since brought it to the attention of the US Department of Justice: http://www.zoa.org/sitedocuments/pressrelease_view.asp?pressreleaseID=1715. The question is this: If anti-Israel groups fundraise for terrorist groups in the Middle East, who’s to say the relationship doesn’t go two ways? And even if money doesn’t come directly from terrorists, who’s to say it might not come from Arab oil money, the same source of funds terrorism in the Middle East draws from?

"There is no free speech in Berkeley if you speak outside the dominant paradigm." Anti- Semitism in the feminist movement

2010-09-05T09:25:00.000-07:00

Cross posted here:

The Yale Initiative for the Interdisciplinary Study of Antisemitism (YIISA) is dedicated to research of the origins and manifestations associated with antisemitism and other forms of prejudice globally. YIISA's inaugurral conference "Global Antisemitism: A Crisis of Modernity" was held August 23, 2010 - 25, 2010, and featured such speakers as Irwin Cotler, Ruth Wisse, David Hirsh, Deborah Lipstadt, and Richard Landes. Also speaking was our friend, Thyme Seigal, who delievered this address:

YALE TALK --- PANEL : 'AN UNCERTAIN SISTERHOOD- WOMEN AND ANTISEMITISM',

By Thyme S. Siegel

I tossed like a dreamer through my life in America, daughter of Yiddish speakers, daughter of the back woods of NJ. I was sleep walking. Incubating. Even though 20 years ago, I researched and taught Jewish Womens History , and published an article called “Anti-Jewish Oppression in Progressive Movements”, I did not feel a sense of personal threat. Except when I thought about Israel. I was afraid to go. Israel was too precious and too vulnerable. Finally Pesach week '09, I went to Israel. Enchanted, I wrote a story of my adventure called “3 Weeks in the Holyland”. It is the best story I have ever written. I loved the little Jewish nation, a whole country of my extended family. But when I arrived back in northern California, old friends of the decades, people, women mostly, who were always warm and supportive of me and my writing, did not approve of my joy and did not want to read my adventure.

I went to dinner at the home of an old high school friend, a well-published talmudic scholar also considered a feminist for his writings. Even tho he owes his career to Israel, he felt Israel had no right to defend itself against rockets from Hamas. His response to my questioning this: “For a few rockets? Its lies, all lies.” I said that there were many many reports of thousands of rockets. “Its lies, all lies”. But I know someone whose relatives have a half a second to get into a bomb shelter in Ashkelon” He shrugged contemptuously... He scoffs at the notion of contemporary anti-Semitism. He poo pood the problem of Jews having to flee Europe again.” Highly overblown”. He compared the Israelis to Nazis in public at an University of California Berkeley Associated Students meeting debating a divestment BDS issue.(not bondage and discipline) He called Israeli's effective airline security procedures “racism” When I pointed out it might save his life someday, he said “I don't care.” This is what someone called “jewicide”. The embedded agenda that trumps the facts. Yet he has been able to indoctrinate several generations of students now. In academia there are a lot more Jews like him. And non-Jews.

I feel threatened by this kind of thinking, personally threatened. It has stirred up my survival instincts. The Hamas charter calls for the annihilation of the Jewish people and has done so all along, but it did not impact my fear level. I am now more motivated than I ever have been in my life.

I am motivated to speak out, impelled by a sense of insecurity, not only for Israel, but for America. After returning from Israel I researched global jihad and the predicament Israel is really in. I read Eurabia about Europe and Infiltration about the United States.

I have undergone a transformation, woken up my survival instincts and my appreciation. I appreciate the life Ive gotten to live in America, a life of fantastic freedom of choice and opportunity for creativity. I never thought I would do this, but I stand on the street with a pro- Israel group, holding an Israeli or American flag ----to counter those demonstrating that anti zionism really is antisemitism, in case there was any doubt.

The flotillistas shout ugly slogans: “Go back to Auschwitz” and “Intifada! Intifada!” chanted by hundreds of demonstrators held back only by the good will of the police can stimulate your survival instincts--- if you want to wake up your whole being ---and not just comprehend all this intellectually. Hear The shouts of From the River to the Sea. Meaning they dont want a 2 state solution, they want it all. Hear: Khaybar! Khaybar!, a reference to Mohammad's 7th c. massacre of a tribe of Jews. The hamasniks shout “Smash the Jewish State”, “target all Jewish businesses”, “Every zionist is a target”, blood thirsty, monster....shame shame shame”. I am not ashamed.

The local flotilla leader in the bay area openly solicits funding for new flotilla--- without worry about getting indicted by the federal attorney--- for aiding a terrorist organization.This does not seem to alarm my long time women and men friends, Jewish and non-Jewish. Hard core pacifists are ready to overlook all facts on the ground. They do not want to believe that no matter what they say or do, they have deadly and determined enemies. Patiently I explain why the Israels got themselves in a position of needing to have a blockade. There is no memory, even of the most recent history.

I live in Berkeley, California, where I pioneered women’s studies in 1970, enabled by a faculty advisor who, 40 years later, now signs petitions to boycott Israel. The topic of jew hatred, of Israel and Jewish history did not arise for me until I researched and taught Jewish Women’s History in the early 1990’s. I was part of a generational bubble. We could have lives of great inter-cultural cross-over, lives which explored our freedom.

In the 1970’s I lived in a matriarchal village of Eugene Ore, ( I call it “matriarchial” because I wrote a story with that name, no one else called it that.) We were against patriarchy, all patriarchies. By the 1980's it seemed we had ceded our global vision to the larger left. No longer concerned with the fate of women in islam, I started hearing condemnations of Israel with no mention of the surrounding toxic patriarchies. The original ideals of global sisterhood disintegrated into a shocking rhetoric of obsessive Israel blaming. We were of course against war, all war. Later our slogans merged with the larger anti-war left: “Another world is possible”,” and the larger New Age spirituality movement: Be the change you want to see”, and “We refuse to be enemies” or, “There are no enemies anywhere”.

There is no free speech in Berkeley if you speak outside the dominant paradigm. Nonie Darwish, an x muslim who is an Egyptian American, who wrote Now They Call Me Infidel, and an expose of sharia law called Cruel and Usual Punishment came to speak at the UC campus. She was interrupted so intensely at her campus speech in Wheeler Hall that she had to leave the stage, speech unfinished, with inadequate security. Public education is not easy. Darwish has to live with a body guard and death threats.

The women's movement in this country has drifted off the rails. Not finding Israel perfect, and not finding our own American relatives perfect, some women in the movement started down a long slippery slope, thinking they were climbing the high moral ground, shouting “hypocrites, murderers”, at their own relatives and ancestors, while claiming a universal identity. The blame Israel always for everything obsession picked up speed. The Israeli government always held in contempt as dominated by right wing militarists instead of being perceived as led by the duly elected leaders who were chosen as the best to maintain security.

An old friend from our women's writing group, claimed recently that “Israel has the most right wing militarist government in its history”. She always made huge confident claims in a quiet calm manner.I believed in her confidence. my friend of 35 years. I always craved her approval. I suddenly heard instead ignorant arrogance. I asked her, “How would you feel if you and your extended family were targeted for mass extermination by the ideology of millions of people? She replied:”First, I would ask myself if it was true. We could try to figure out how to know better what the truth is. What form does that target for death take? . Tell me why you feel your life is in danger of death from those you know and are in physical proximity to”. She said, “Maybe this seems like a stupid question. I’m asking it because we have to find solid ground to stand on before we get to the more difficult questions. So tell me if you feel this.” She is a person I have shared my feelings with for 35 years but I shut down, unable to share more with her. She refuses to read the sources that have convinced me of the nature of the anti-Semitism we are facing. Her continued obtuseness indicates to me she is an adherent who refuses to give credence to any development that does not fit the narrative to which she is committed. A well known visionary author, earth activist, anti-globalization and wicca leader in the bay area, goes on English language tours of Gaza. After I returned from Israel, I had questions for her, a Jewish witch tourist in Gaza. By email, I asked her if she could monitor al Jezeera in Arabic? I asked if she would ask some questions suggested by Tawfiq Hamid, an x-muslim, to define political islam. He asks muslims and muslim institutions to clearly unambiguously and publically denounce fighting and killing Jews, calling Jews Pigs and monkeys, killing apostates, beating and stoning women for any reason, and gay killing. Her response was to say that radical judaism needed to denounce those concepts Also. Then she rattled off a list of horrendous things that Israeli soldiers and settlers have allegedly done to the Palestinians. She signed it, “Thyme, your radical consciousness and lifelong commitment to justice is better than this, love”. Yes she signed it love, As she shifted the blame back to Jews and changed the subject. A couple Weeks later she sent me a forwarded message, introducing it by saying “This is a far more eloquent response to Your questions than anything I could write. ” then below in caps:WORTH YOUR TIME TO READ!!!!It was not reference to my questions, but a total blaming of muslim women's predicament on---- Israel and western imperialism. Nothing about the inculcated jew hatred. I responded by asking her again if she could monitor al Jezeera in Arabic, but it was useless as she’d blocked my email. I was shocked, no dialog was possible.

There are familiar patterns. Blaming everything on US imperialism, colonialism. Blaming Israel and Jews right back into that familiar groove. Ah, and then there is blaming everything on patriarchy, all patriarchies, not differentiating. A goddess priestess , who produces a well-distributed very successful women's astrological calendar, mentored me in the 1970’s.... the voice of the old anti-patriarchal spirit…When I tried to update her on the world today, she responded: “in the alternative non patriarchal world we are creating… Without men who are so much more stuck in the old adversarial ways of patriarchy.”I notice the WE WE of it, the world we are creating, because we do create our own reality, right? But then she updates herself and writes that “getting beyond duality is the only game” she wants to play.”We all need to grow up and take responsibility for our lives. Fight the enemy within, as a necessary pre-condition to fighting what appears to be the enemies “out there”. This is a time of human evolution that will either do us in or force us to change in fundamental ways”. . She is envisioning “the shift” that the bumper stickers proclaim , the shift that happens. I imagine a shift also, that our survival instinct wakes up, that we come to appreciate our deepest most important values and are inspired to defend them. The motivation for this shift will entail feeling personally threatened.

Now I am a zionist street warrior, holding an Israeli or American flag, standing across the street to counter the hate and lies of Women In Black. Standing next to me on the street was a lesbian who had also been in the Jewish feminist movement. We knew the same names, the local and national celebrities of our literary sub-culture of the 1970’s. We had read the same authors, gone to the same concerts. We came from old-lefty families. We know the self righteous proclaimers who sign the local anti-Israel petitions. “We are Jews and we support divesting----” kind of thing. What did they know of Jewish history? When finally a petition appeared with a long list of those who opposed the hate and lies about the Jewish state, I did not know any of them, but I had to find them, I had to meet them, I needed them.

I will meet with anyone who supports Jewish Israel. I am not afraid of this surreal situation of being called---horrors, right wing, even tho it is a total obfuscation of the term. “Right wing, racist islamophobic" are words being used to frighten and suppress people with legitimate concerns.

I’m not drinking the Kool Aid. I say, “Hello, Berkeley, your acid sparkled streets, heartland in the production of rhetoric, heartland of resistance: I'm here, I love Israel, I love America, get used to it.

American Friends Service Committee-- We Support BDS But We're Not Anti-Israel

2010-08-10T11:37:00.000-07:00

As any reader of this and similar sites is certainly aware, BDS (Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions) is simply the latest venture of The People Who Hate Israel. The fact that it's packaged in soft pastel colors and bedecked with the flowery language of human rights can't hide the stink that emanates from its core-- the insistence on the elimination of the Jewish state of Israel as a precondition to the exercise of Palestinian national rights. Nothing different than what the PLO was promoting in 1964 (when the West Bank was occupied by Jordan and Gaza by the Egyptians, occupations that did not arouse the ire of the international human rights community). Nothing different than what Hamas and its Iranian masters suggest, though certainly without the more bloodthirsty aspects of their rhetoric.

Some organizations try to straddle the line of this, and claim that they support BDS but aren't really anti-Israel. The American Friends Service Committee office in San Francisco is trying to peddle this line; its director, Allan Solomonow, still publicly denies that AFSC is anti-Israel (see the last letter in the July 29 edition of J Weekly, the Jewish community newspaper in San Francisco).

Yet the Pacific Mountain Region of AFSC (which includes the San Francisco office) has publicly attached its name to a flyer supporting BDS , and in private correspondence with Mr. Solomonow he has consistently refused to dissociate himself and his office from that flyer (though he did state that the national AFSC has not yet taken a position on BDS). If I have misinterpreted our exchange of e-mails, I invite Mr. Solomonow to post a response here.

Proponents of BDS are busily trying to promote the fiction that they aren't anti-Israel (though I have yet to read the "some of my best friends are Israeli" line). Over at DivestThis! one can read comments from some who support the boycott recently enacted by the Olympia Food Cooperative who strongly deny that they, or the boycott movement itself, are anti-Israel-- in fact they consistently claim that they support "peace". Yet none of them suggest in any way that their vision of "peace" would be one between a Jewish state of Israel and its Arab neighbors. And the principal spokespeople for the BDS movement are very, very clear that this is NOT what they are promoting:

BDS is just the same old hate in a new package. Confront those who are selling it and make them reveal what's inside.

The Muslim Student Union at UC Irvine faces the Music. Finally

2010-06-14T12:03:00.000-07:00

(Cross-posted here)

According to the Jewish Federation of Orange County, The University of California at Irvine (UC Irvine) has suspended the Muslim Student Union (MSU) for one year and placed it on disciplinary probation for an additional year. The MSU is also required to collectively complete 50 hours of community service. As a result, it will not be allowed to conduct organized campus events until at least the fall of 2011.

According to a UCI campus document, suspension means that the recognition of the MSU organization has been revoked. No current executive officer listed on the Dean of Students registration application form will be allowed to act as an “authorized signer” for any other student organization at UC Irvine during the suspension. The effective dates pertaining to the suspension are from September 1, 2010 to August 31, 2011.

This action is the direct result of a campaign of hate,incitement and intimidation organized by the MSA against Zionists and Jewish students on campus. According to Roz Rothstein of Stand with Us:

The Muslim Student Union (MSU) and Muslim Student Association (MSA), allied with extremist groups like Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), focus single-mindedly on one goal: demonizing Israel. This is not your normal student activism. MSU and MSA members are obsessively driven by their mission. They are determined, methodical, focused, well-funded and strictly organized. The leaders are usually devout and infuse religious and moral justifications into the movement, making hatred of Israel akin to a religious as well as social justice cause.
The MSU, MSA and SJP groups don’t just plan actions for their own schools. SJP and the 600 MSU/MSA chapters across North America use the Internet to coordinate their anti-Israel strategies and to share their best practices. They exchange anti-Israel propaganda. They share fliers, props and slogans. They analyze what was effective and refine their tactics and execution for the upcoming year.

On February 8, 2010, Israeli Ambassador Michael Oren visited the Orange County, California campus to give a talk to UCI students and community members. During the 90-minute event, Oren was repeatedly interrupted by members of the Muslim Student Union, 11 of whom were arrested. One of those arrested was the president of the MSU at UCI. The investigation of this incident revealed the Muslim Student Union’s organized plot to prevent Oren from delivering his presentation.

The MSU brought fringe speakers to the campus, including Malik Ali,a radical Islamic preacher whose primary goal is the overthrow of the American government and its replacement with an Islamic dictatorship. He declared during a campus speech just steps from the UC Irvine administration building, “Ya’ll (Jews) are the new Nazi’s.” Ali also confirmed his public support for terrorist organizations Hamas, Hezbollah and Islamic Jihad.

The disciplinary action taken involving 11 students arrested was not disclosed because of laws meant to protect their privacy

Read more here

Elvis Costello: What's So Funny About Peace, Love and Understanding?

2010-05-24T21:42:00.001-07:00

I've been a fan of Elvis Costello since 1979. I first saw him in 1981, and I had the privilege of being about 15 feet from the stage at this show .

So it was with sadness that I read about Elvis' decision to cancel a scheduled show in Israel. Other artists, most notably Paul McCartney, Leonard Cohen and Madonna have refused to bow to the anti-Israel boycott movement. Perhaps those artists recognized that those who created the so-called BDS movement didn't do so to help bring about peace between a Jewish state of Israel and an Arab state of Palestine, but rather to call for a replacement of the Jewish state of Israel by a 23rd Arab state.

Now Elvis has the chance to actually see the country and the facts on the ground for himself, rather than relying on the fatally biased coverage of Israel by the BBC and the Guardian. StandWithUs has announced its offer to host Elvis on a tour of Israel when his wife, the jazz musician Diana Krall, plays there in August. Elvis had claimed that his decision was not a political statement, but a matter of "instinct and conscience." Perhaps after making his own observations, he will be able to make a more informed decision.

Many years ago, Elvis sang Nick Lowe's lyrics "What's so funny 'bout peace, love and understanding?" Go to Israel, Elvis. Talk to Israelis who just want peace with their neighbors. Find out why they love their country. And gain some understanding for yourself.

Campus Jihad--In Their Own Words

2010-05-15T16:41:00.000-07:00

Right on the heels of the article in the previous post, the Muslim Student Association groups at UC San Diego and UC Irvine have provided excellent examples of the problem of overt hate speech on many American university campuses.

At UCSD, David Horowitz spoke earlier this week. I'm not a great fan of Horowitz, but this video is worth watching. He is, rather easily, able to get a member of the UCSD Muslim Student Union to admit that she supports the terrorists of Hamas:

(you will note that she does use Horowitz' term "Hitler Youth Week" when noting the activities taking place on the campus as "Israel Apartheid Week"; she may not be familiar with the use of "air quotes". So don't think that there is an actual event called "Hitler Youth Week" at UCSD. I'm not sure about the University of Tehran, though.)

The MSA at UCSD then issued a cleverly worded non-apology which Robert Spencer carefully dissected to show that while they condemn actions taken against "civilians" or those who kill "unjustly", neither one of those terms apply to the deaths of Israeli women, children and senior citizens.

But that's really just the warmup act. The headliner for this week's Excess of Evil roadshow is an hour away up Interstate 405, where the UC Irvine MSA inflicts their annual special guest star Amir Abdel Malik Ali onto the campus community. Malik Ali's hate speech should be completely shunned in any civilized society; yet he is proudly promoted by the MSA at Irvine. In addition to the blood libel staples such as blaming Israel for the September 11 attacks, and blaming Zionists for the two US wars against Iraq (since "the neo-cons are all Zionist Jews"), he was also quoted as telling moderate Muslims that their desire to be liked was turning them into "house slaves in the mansion of a racist, imperialistic and destructive America." But Malik Ali shares the hate-- he also claims that the Matthew Shepard Act (making assault based on sexual orientation or gender identity a hate crime in the same fashion as other hate crimes) is a Jewish plot, and he has pretty much declared the entire non-Islamist world as the enemy: "Sooner or later, Today's Muslim students will be the parents of Muslim children; and they should all be militants."

This week, Malik Ali got confronted--Roz Rothstein, the founder and executive director of StandWithUs , challenged this purveyor of hate speech . In response, Malik Ali gives us the triple play--support for Hamas and Hezbollah, support for jihad, and likening Zionists to Nazis:

Of note, the European Union (not noted for its love of Israel) specifically cites, in its Working Definition of Anti-Semitism , two examples: "Denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination" and "Drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis". Actually, just read that whole document, since Malik Ali has managed to hit most of the definitions provided there. This definition was also cited and adopted by the US State Department in 2008 in its Report on Contemporary Global Anti-Semitism.

Now Malik Ali has the right to spread his poison; the First Amendment protects him. But campuses aren't obliged to give him a space and a microphone, just as newspapers aren't obliged to publish his screeds. And those who wish to give him a forum, using public money that is given to the Associated Students at UCI for student programming, must be held accountable for their choice to invite him--not once, but year after year after year.

Tell the UC Irvine administration that enough is enough. The MSU continues to host hateful speakers on its campus, inciting division and marginalizing Jewish students who support the state of Israel as the "new Nazis" on campus.

Tell the UC Irvine administration that this is dangerous and needs to stop. MSU should be sanctioned and placed on probation because they foment hatred against one specific group on campus: the Jewish group.

Please send the link to the video, and your own note to:
chancellor@uci.edu
mngomez@uci.edu
president@asuci.uci.edu
president@ucop.edu

(Please send a copy to info@standwithus.com)

Facing Hatred on Campus

2010-05-15T14:10:00.000-07:00

(This article originally appeared on JewishJournal.com )

May 11, 2010

Facing Hatred on Campus: You Can’t Fight Fire With Flowers

BY ROZ ROTHSTEIN AND ROBERTA SEID

An increasing number of students report that efforts to demonize Israel have intensified on college campuses. Most recently, the student senates at the University of California, Berkeley, and the University of California, San Diego (UCSD), held marathon debates about anti-Israel divestment resolutions. In May, the annual Hate Israel Week will be held on many campuses yet again.

Bruised by these painful experiences and taken aback by their increasing frequency, many pro-Israel students are concerned about the growing trend. They wonder why each time they douse anti-Israel fires, the flames reignite. They wonder what they are up against.

It’s simple. They face a dedicated anti-Israel movement that is not discouraged by temporary setbacks. The Muslim Student Union (MSU) and Muslim Student Association (MSA), allied with extremist groups like Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), focus single-mindedly on one goal: demonizing Israel. This is not your normal student activism. MSU and MSA members are obsessively driven by their mission. They are determined, methodical, focused, well-funded and strictly organized. The leaders are usually devout and infuse religious and moral justifications into the movement, making hatred of Israel akin to a religious as well as social justice cause.

The MSU, MSA and SJP groups don’t just plan actions for their own schools. SJP and the 600 MSU/MSA chapters across North America use the Internet to coordinate their anti-Israel strategies and to share their best practices. They exchange anti-Israel propaganda. They share fliers, props and slogans. They analyze what was effective and refine their tactics and execution for the upcoming year.

The MSU and MSA also maintain continuity. New leaders are groomed to replace leaders who graduate. Incoming students are actively recruited, welcomed into the supportive fold of the organization, indoctrinated and fired up with zeal. Other methods also ensure continuity. For example, a young man standing at the “apartheid wall” display on a California campus this past April told a reporter for the Daily 49er at California State University, Long Beach, that he is a Muslim missionary who is volunteering for three years to accompany the wall and “educate” students about it.

The methods used by the MSU, MSA and SJP have only one goal — instilling hatred and intolerance against Israel and anyone who dares to defend it and the sincerity of its search for peaceful coexistence. They launch slick campaigns, street theater and campus displays like the “Apartheid Wall.” They orchestrate demonstrations against pro-coexistence speakers and host pseudo-academic panels. They showcase far too many speakers whose only credentials are a Jewish background and a willingness to spew anti-Israel propaganda. They bid for academic credibility by asking professors hostile to Israel to co-sponsor their events. (For example, the programs for UCSD’s May 2010 anti-Israel week are co-sponsored by academic departments.) They form coalitions with campus groups by supporting popular student causes and by claiming they are activists for social justice and human rights, when in fact their only purpose is to vilify Israel, and they ignore the serial human rights abuses rampant in other countries. They work to promote their agenda in student government and the student newspaper.

Once they’ve laid this groundwork, the MSU, MSA and SJP move on to bolder measures: recommending punishment for Israel that their new allies will support, such as divestment. Divestment resolution campaigns, in turn, mainstream their anti-Israel message and bring it to an ever-wider circle through debates in student government and media coverage.

All of these tactics are part of a carefully thought-out, well-orchestrated, long-term offensive for turning Israel and its supporters into campus pariahs. This larger movement is at the root of anti-Israel actions on campuses. Most Israel supporters ignore this larger picture, hoping that the fires will burn out and go away. But they are not going away. The movement is becoming more entrenched and more aggressive for two reasons: One is that the zeal of MSU, MSA and SJP membership is growing, fed partially by their successes and by their financial supporters. Even when they don’t win campaigns like divestment resolutions — and in most cases they know in advance that winning is impossible — they consider it a victory that divestment was seriously discussed and that they created a platform to air their propaganda and to put Israel on trial. As divestment leaders commented after losing the vote at Berkeley, “We lost the vote but won the night. We made a statement recorded for posterity and forced everyone to listen and watch.”

The second reason for the growing aggression of MSU, MSA and SJP is their expectation of a disorganized response from Israel’s supporters. Pro-Israel students are focused on other things, like school, their social lives and their futures, as students should be. They did not go to college expecting they would have to defend their identity or Israel. But on too many campuses, they are rudely awakened. Most become involved not because they intended to or have some sense of mission, but out of necessity.

Consequently, pro-Israel students are often caught off guard and unprepared for new anti-Israel ambushes, as happened with the UCSD student senate divestment bill this past April. The bill suddenly appeared on the agenda, and they had only a few days to put together presentations opposing it. Yet the divestment proponents had prepared for a year, recruiting allies and polishing their speeches, slogans and video presentations of Jewish far leftists and anti-Israel activists like Anna Baltzer and Hedy Epstein.

The pro-Israel students cannot be entirely faulted for their inconsistent responses. They are often conflicted about what to do. They are hamstrung by concerns about offending other groups on campus and by often unsupportive or nonconfrontational administrations who give cover to these bigoted campaigns under the umbrella of free speech. Most university systems lack standards that protect the rights of all students, including those who are under attack by hostile campaigns. Pro-Israel students also sincerely believe that reaching out with sympathy and understanding for the other side’s grievances and engaging in reasonable debate will help defuse the situation. Unfortunately, this has rarely been the result.

Pro-Israel students are also taken aback by the other side’s use of half-truths and racist anti-Semitic stereotypes, by their aggressive violation of the usual rules of conduct on campuses, and by some measure of discomfort, intimidation and even outright fear. The 11 MSU students who tried to shout down Ambassador Michael Oren at the University of California, Irvine (UCI), in February violated standards of civil decorum and free speech, and they were arrested. One of those arrested was the president of the MSU at UCI. In the United Kingdom, where, in May, Israel’s deputy ambassador was virtually assaulted by a menacing crowd, the constant intimidation has made Israel’s supporters there fearful of organizing pro-Israel events. At the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, students placed a Palestinian flag on top of a pro-Israel exhibit. When a Jewish student removed the flag, MSU students physically attacked him.

The constant harassment and incitement have made some students fear similar violence will be directed toward them. Some frustrated students are beginning to think that timid administrations are waiting for a pro-Israel student to actually be assaulted and injured so that they can finally take firm disciplinary measures. Still other students wonder if administrations will act only after the divisiveness escalates to a religious war on campus.

It is time for Israel’s supporters to stop operating under the misconception that these attacks are only campus-specific, sporadic or will simply burn themselves out. They cannot keep putting out individual fires without recognizing the arsonist. They must be willing to meet fire with fire, not with flowers. The flowers haven’t worked.

The seriousness of the situation must be recognized. Well-meaning students must absorb the disconcerting fact that the problem they are dealing with is a dedicated, international, orchestrated movement with a long-term battle plan. Judging from the recent divestment campaigns, if pro-Israel students don’t mobilize soon, their voices will be silenced and a false, ugly image of Israel will become the academic norm of North American education.

What’s needed is a coordinated, carefully thought-out, long-term strategy that proactively plans programs and campaigns that are ready in advance to preempt the predictable anti-Israel actions. Coalitions must be built among Jewish and non-Jewish pro-coexistence groups on campuses across the country. Best practices should be identified and kept in place so incoming students can fill the shoes of graduating seniors, just as we see the “other side” doing.

Israel’s supporters should not expect to change the minds of those dedicated to the anti-Israel campaign. Their goal should always be directed at educating and engaging the wider community to affect the hearts and minds of the campus community as a whole.

Concerned students must also be willing to challenge the libelous charges hurled against Israel. Many students fear that debate will offend people or bring unwanted attention and credibility to the accusations, and some Jewish professionals advise them not to respond. But ignoring the charges hasn’t worked. They have grown like a cancer over the past several years.

The anti-Israel groups must be labeled and exposed for what they are: extremists who oppose peaceful coexistence, instill hate and divisiveness, not understanding; who are bent on destruction, not on constructive solutions or compromise; who stand for racism, not human rights. They are not pro-peace or pro-Palestinian, but spoilers of peace who want to perpetuate the conflict.

If the courageous and far-too-often beleaguered pro-Israel students more fully adopt the long-term strategies, determination and coalition-building needed to face the MSU, MSA and SJP, there will be a positive change on campuses. Until then, the anti-Israel fires will continue to flare and Israel will continue to be unjustly marginalized by extremist groups that should have been exposed and marginalized themselves on campuses long ago.

Roz Rothstein is the co-founder and CEO of StandWithUs, and Roberta Seid is director,
research-education, StandWithUs.