BDS - a Jewish Civil War on American campuses

The truth is as Peter Beinart, a liberal Zionist admits, the BDS campaign on American campuses is driven by Jewish students sickened by what is done in their name

Ever since Jeremy Corbyn was seen as in with a chance of winning the leadership of the Labour Party there has been a concerted attempt by the neo-liberal wing of the Labour Party, together with the Guardian, Daily Mail and the Zionist movement to paint Jeremy Corbyn either as an anti-Semite or soft on anti-Semitism.

The EDL attack Birmingham PSC's stall - Israeli flag in one hand and giving a Hitler salute with the other!  The real anti-Semites have always been supportive of Zionism

In today's Guardian there is the usual dishonest, cliched and frankly boring article  by Jonathan Freedland on 'anti-Semitism' on the left of the Labour Party and amongst Corbyn's supporters.  What is lacks in originality it  makes up for in its virulence.  See 

As part of what is a systematic campaign the Jewish Chronicle this week devotes pages 1-3 on 'anti-Semitism' in the Labour Party and has a guest contribution by the junk academic from Goldsmith's College David Hirsh. Its is nothing if not original, titled Jew hate and today’s Left.  I won't copy it but the link's here if you want to bore yourself with Hirsh's tedium. 

However I have just picked up on an unusually excellent article in Israel's Ha'aretz by a liberal Zionist Peter Beinart, who makes a habit of saying what his fellow Zionists prefer not to hear.  I've copied it below because of Ha'aretz's pay wall but it bears close scrutiny because it admits what the Zionist's claque of propagandists dare not admit, which is that the BDS campaign in the United States isn't being driven by 'anti-Semites'.  It isn't even being driven by Palestinian or Arabs.  It's motor is Jewish students who have fallen out of love with a racist and murderous 'Jewish' state.

The traditional anti-Semitic imagery which the Jewish Chronicle tries to associate with Boycotting Israel

Contrary to anti-Semites like Gilad Atzmon, for whom being Jewish is to be a Zionist, see his 'NOT IN MY NAME’ – An analysis of Jewish righteousness it is Jewish students who are the motor of the BDS campaign in the USA and to a lesser extent in Britain too.

When the Fight Over BDS is a Jewish Civil War

It’s not anti-Semitism that makes pro-Israel Jewish students at Vassar feel uncomfortable, it’s anti-Zionism, sometimes championed by fellow Jews.

Peter Beinart Mar 08, 2016 1:54 PM

Marchers cheer as they pass along a barricade separating them from anti-BDS movement protestors during the Celebrate Israel Parade in New York, June 1, 2014. Credit AP

Vassar, according to one conservative website, is among the ten most anti-Semitic colleges in America. Last month, an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal declared that, “Anti-Israel sentiment mixed with age-old anti-Semitism has reached a fever pitch” there. So it was with some anxiety that I travelled last week to the 155-year old former women’s college at the invitation of the local chapter of J Street U.

I went looking for anti-Semitism. What I found was more interesting.

I asked roughly a dozen Jewish students whether they thought anti-Semitism was prevalent on campus. They all said no, but admitted that they sometimes feel uncomfortable. When I asked what made them uncomfortable, they cited the intensely anti-Zionist climate. (At Vassar, J Street represents the right edge of the Israel debate).

Last December, for instance, the Vassar Student Council delayed approving a J Street U request for funds to attend the HaaretzQ conference in New York because some anti-Israel activists argued that even the left-leaning Haaretz, being a Zionist newspaper, supports a racist ideology. This February, a Rutgers Professor named Jasbir Puar gave a speech on campus in which she repeated absurd and incendiary claims that in late 2015 Israel had kept the bodies of dead Palestinians so they could be “mined for organs for scientific research.”

For establishment Jewish organizations, this kind of anti-Zionism is prima facie evidence of bigotry. As former Anti-Defamation League head Abe Foxman declared in 2014, “Anti-Zionism 99 percent of the time is a euphemism for anti-Semitism.”

But the J Street U students I interviewed disagreed. Many admitted that they found the anti-Zionist atmosphere on campus disquieting, which wasn’t surprising given that many either had Israeli parents, had attended Jewish day school or had participated in Zionist youth movements. But they were reluctant to equate Vassar’s anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism. One big reason: Many of the loudest anti-Zionists at Vassar are other Jews.

At Vassar, the movement to boycott Israel is not led by Palestinian or even Arab or Muslim students. It is led by a group of left-wing activists, several of whom are Jewish. One of the most prominent BDS student activists sits on the board of Vassar’s Jewish Student Union.

This isn’t unique to Vassar. Yousef Munayyer, executive director of the US Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation, told me that in recent years he has seen striking growth in the number of Jewish students involved in the BDS movement.

According to its media coordinator, Naomi Dann, Jewish Voice for Peace, which supports BDS, has established 14 new campus chapters in the last two years. Jews don’t dominate the BDS movement on America’s campuses but they have become an indispensable part of it. Which helps explain why the Jewish students I talked to at Vassar described the campus struggle over Zionism less as an anti-Semitic assault than an intra-Jewish civil war.

The intra-Jewish debate over Israel at Vassar looks very different than the debate among older American Jews. Older American Jews are divided too, sometimes bitterly. But what divides them is the propriety of publicly criticizing Israel, not Zionism itself. Older American Jews largely take Zionism for granted, as did their parents, because they believe the lesson of the Holocaust is that the world needs a Jewish state of refuge in case parts of the Diaspora ever become unsafe again.

American Jewish millennials, however, have never seen any large-scale migration by Jews fleeing anti-Semitic persecution. Even the Soviet and Ethiopian exoduses of the 1980s occurred before they were born. They have grown up taking for granted that the vast majority of Diaspora Jews live in liberal democracies where they enjoy equality under the law. And they themselves have generally experienced little anti-Semitism. So when they grow alienated from Israel’s policies, they are more willing to challenge the very notion of a state created along religious and ethnic lines. A 2007 study by the Bronfman philanthropies found that American Jews under the age of 35 were 27 points less likely than American Jews over the age of 65 to declare themselves “comfortable with the idea of a Jewish State.”

To be sure, there are still plenty of young American Jews who agree with AIPAC, especially in the Orthodox community. But since Orthodox Jews tend to cluster in a few campuses, that leaves plenty of secular, liberal arts colleges like Vassar where the intra-Jewish debate isn’t about the legitimacy of criticizing Israel. It’s about the legitimacy of a Jewish state.

To the degree that establishment Jewish leaders acknowledge this rising Jewish anti-Zionism, they chalk it up to self-hatred. But when you talk to Jewish students in the BDS movement, as I have at campuses across the country, you quickly discover that being Jewish is precious to them. What they consider precious, however, is their conception of Jewish ethical ideals, ideals that they conflate with their left-wing politics. What they generally lack is the tribal allegiance that might make them compromise those ideals in the name of Jewish solidarity. The liberal Zionists at a place like Vassar are torn between Jewishness as universal morality and Jewishness as communal loyalty. The anti-Zionists see the latter as something to disdain.

The millions of dollars currently being spent to fight BDS will prove useless against these kids. They will prove useless because the Israeli government and the American Jewish establishment see anti-Zionism as merely a political challenge. But what the rising generation of Jewish anti-Zionists really pose is an intellectual challenge, an intellectual challenge that American Jews haven’t faced since the days when Jewish intellectuals like Hannah Arendt, Judah Magnes and Henrietta Szold championed a bi-national state.

There are answers to this challenge. They can be found in books like Chaim Gans' A Just Zionism and Alexander Yakobson and Amnon Rubinstein’s Israel and the Family of Nations. But formulating the answers requires taking anti-Zionist arguments seriously. And that’s difficult for an American Jewish establishment that, while financially and politically strong, is intellectually weak.

The American Jewish establishment does not want to rebut anti-Zionist arguments. It would rather call them anti-Semitic and thus shut the entire discussion down. But, as I saw at Vassar, the debate is coming, not only within the United States at large, but within American Jewry. It’s going to make a lot of people uncomfortable. Yet the longer American Jewish leaders evade it, the more likely they’ll ultimately lose.

Peter Beinart

Palestinian American Boy Beaten Up by Israeli Police Testifies at Congressional Meeting

Abukhdeir is the cousin of Muhammad  Abu Khudair, who was burnt alive by Israeli settlers last year in Jerusalem.  They poured petroleum down his throat and set him alight in an action whose barbarity recalls that of Isis and the Jordanian pilot.

So far Israel seems to have done nothing about his murderers, who will almost certainly receive a light sentence.  Israeli Police have already tried to suggest that Abu Khudair was killed by his own family as some kind of ‘honour’ killing.

Abukhdeir, who is an American citizen, was viciously beaten up by the Israeli Police and but for his US citizenship would still be languishing in an Israeli prison accused, no doubt, having attacked his attackers.

There are two videos below recording the meeting held at the US Congress.

Tony Greenstein

Israeli Police Thugs Beat Up a Child - noone has paid

 Palestinian American teen recounts Israeli assault to packed room on Capitol Hill

Nora Barrows-Friedman The Electronic Intifada Podcast 11 June 2015

“If there wasn’t a video of me, I would be in jail and no one would believe what they did to me,” Palestinian American Tariq Abukhdeir, 16, stated during a US congressional briefing in Washington, DC on 2 June.

In July 2014, Abukhdeir was beaten unconscious by Israeli police in Shufat, a neighborhood in occupied East Jerusalem. The vicious assault was captured on video.

After attacking him, Israeli forces arrested and detained Abukhdeir and five other youths without charge. Police prevented Abukhdeir from receiving medical treatment for five hours. Abukhdeir’s cousin, Muhammad Abu Khudair, 16, was kidnapped and burned alive by Israeli extremists just days before.

“Where are these soldiers now? Are they doing this to another Palestinian child? I want to go back this summer and be with my family and put this behind me,” the teenager told a packed room in the US capitol nearly a year after he was beaten. ”But I know that for me to put this behind me, these soldiers have to be held accountable.”

Abukhdeir’s testimony at the congressional briefing was part of a three-day series of advocacy events in early June organized by Defence for Children International-Palestine (DCI-Palestine), the American Friends Service Committee and the US Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation to raise awareness of Israel’s mistreatment of Palestinian children in military detention. More than 100 people, including staff from 36 congressional offices, attended the briefing.

Visibly upset

Brad Parker, attorney and advocacy officer with DCI-Palestine, accompanied Abukhdeir and his family to the congressional briefing along with Jennifer Bing, director of the American Friends Service Committee’s Middle East Program in Chicago. The rights groups are part of the No Way to Treat a Child campaign, which includes a broad coalition of groups.

Abukhdeir’s highly visible case helped bring attention to the plight of countless other Palestinian children in Israeli military detention who aren’t afforded access to the US State Department, which helped procure the Florida teen’s release from Israeli detention last summer.

The campaign aims to “target our own members of Congress, raise the issue, make it local and get people involved in demanding respect for Palestinian children’s rights,” Parker said.

Many government staffers were shocked to hear the specifics of Israel’s violations of children’s rights.

“You could see them visibly becoming upset,” Bing said, “as Brad [Parker] in particular was able to share with them the process of what happens during night raids, the kind of interrogations, the impact that it has on families.”

Part of a video series of the briefing is below, featuring Brad Parker, Tariq Abukhdeir and his mother Suha Abukhdeir.

Thousands of children arrested

DCI-Palestine states that “Israel is the only country in the world that automatically prosecutes children in military courts that lack basic and fundamental fair trial guarantees. Since 2000, at least 8,000 Palestinian children have been arrested and prosecuted in an Israeli military detention system notorious for the systematic ill-treatment and torture of Palestinian children.”

Last summer, more than 550 children were killed during Israel’s 51-day attack on the Gaza Strip.

Yet, as The Electronic Intifada reported this week, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon caved in to pressure from Israel and the US and removed the Israeli military from its list of serious violators of children’s rights in an annual report on children in armed conflict.

DCI-Palestine’s Parker said that he sees opportunities for further discussions between Palestinian children’s advocates and Washington policymakers.

“We’re embarking on an incremental approach to engaging on an issue with specific policymakers who aren’t necessarily predisposed to being sympathetic to the issue, or regularly interested in actually pursuing anything related to the issue,” he said.

Following the congressional briefing, Representative Betty McCollum of Minnesota wrote a “dear colleague” letter to US Secretary of State John Kerry, calling on him to make the “human rights of Palestinian children a priority in our bilateral relationship with the State of Israel.”

The US Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation has launched an online drive to urge other members of congress to sign McCollum’s letter.