J Street sticks to the script at its annual conference, despite coming to a two-state dead-end

The following excerpt is from an article by me and my partner Zoe Zenowich that was originally published on Alternet.  You can read the full article here.

When the liberal “pro-Israel, pro-peace” lobby J Street launched in 2008, it was big news. Coupled with a new presidential administration pledging sustained engagement on Israel/Palestine, the thought many had was that this was the moment a lasting peace deal could be forged between the Israelis and Palestinians.

J Street’s “No. 1 agenda item,” as founder and president Jeremy Ben-Ami told the New York Times in September 2009, was to “do whatever we can in Congress to act as the president’s blocking back.” J Street’s strategy of advocating “for urgent American diplomatic leadership to achieve a two-state solution” seemed on mark, given that President Barack Obama told the world in Cairo in June 2009 that he intended to “personally pursue” the two-state solution.

The goal of a two-state solution, in which Israel and a Palestinian state exist side-by-side, remains J Street’s message as around 2,400 activists gathered in Washington, D.C. last weekend for the group’s second annual conference. “It could not be more urgent for the administration to seize the initiative right now on peace and a two-state solution,” said J Street spokesman Isaac Luria.

But what happens when that goal, and the strategy of strong American leadership on the issue, seems out of reach? For some on the left, the current political situation means that J Street needs to adjust to the reality of fading prospects for a two-state solution.

While it’s clear, as blogger M.J. Rosenberg put it, that J Street has “opened up room” in the debate over Israel, progressive critics have called for new strategies to pressure Israel, such as the growing boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) movement. Indeed, even some of J Street’s own constituents are frustrated with the Obama administration and are exploring more forceful ways to change Israeli behavior.

Read the full article here.

Israeli Intransigence Lets BDS Into the Mainstream

The world is fed up with Israel, with its continued colonization of the West Bank, its continued ethnic cleansing of Jerusalem, its suffocating siege of Gaza and its crackdown on nonviolent Palestinian popular resistance.  This major Human Rights Watch report exposes the infrastructure of Israeli apartheid.

Israeli intransigence on the settlements issue has provided an opening for some more mainstream endorsements of the the boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) movement.

The Human Rights Watch report states:

The United States should consider suspending financing to Israel in an amount equivalent to the costs of the Israeli government’s spending in support of settlements and the discriminatory policies documented in this report, since the US’s $2.75 billion in annual military aid to Israel substantially offsets these costs.

And a week and a half ago, twenty-six former European Union leaders penned a letter that called for sanctions against Israel.

The ground’s shaking.

 

 

 

Werner Cohn Smears Academic Critic of Israel Again

Werner Cohn, professor emeritus of sociology at the University of British Columbia, has been making quite a name for himself this year as someone who wants to shut down academic critics of Israel.

He was among the academics leading the smear campaign against Brooklyn College professor Moustafa Bayoumi, the editor of a book highly critical of the Israeli raid on the Gaza-bound aid flotilla.  Bayoumi’s other book about Arab-Americans in Brooklyn was assigned as reading for incoming freshmen at Brooklyn College, which prompted Cohn and others to create an uproar.

Now, Cohn is attacking a self-described anti-Zionist Jew named Jennifer Peto who recently published a thesis on Jewish identity, victim hood and Israel.

Via Mondoweiss, the Canadian Jewish News reports:

The University of Toronto is coming under fire for granting its “imprimatur” to a master’s thesis that critics say is an allegation of “Jewish racism” and is of low academic standards.

In a letter to University of Toronto president David Naylor, retired sociology professor Werner Cohn said the thesis posits that “the Jews of the world, most particularly those of Canada and the United States, are racist and seek to oppress people of colour everywhere.”

The thesis, Cohen goes on, is averse to empirical data, and its author, Jennifer Peto, “makes wild… charges against her fellow Jews without a shred of evidence. . . “

Summarizing her thesis, Peto stated that it “focuses on issues of Jewish identity, whiteness and victimhood within hegemonic Holocaust education. I argue that today, Jewish people of European descent enjoy white privilege and are among the most socio-economically advantaged groups in the West. Despite this privilege, the organized Jewish community makes claims about Jewish victimhood that are widely accepted within that community and within popular discourse in the West…”

To give you an idea on where Cohn is coming from, he has written on “Jews who hate Israel,” links to documents that supposedly show Noam Chomsky’s “links to the neo-Nazis” and recently wrote a blog post that compared the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement to the Nazi campaign of boycotting Jewish-owned businesses in Germany.

It appears Cohn has somewhat of an obsession with members of the Jewish community who are critical of Israeli policy.  But instead of interrogating why such members exist–the occupation, massacres in Gaza, the colonization of the West Bank–he simply denounces them as “haters” of Israel.

Physical Attack on Jewish Voice for Peace Indicates Israeli Intimidation of Jewish Dissidents Comes Home

Under the reign of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his far-right coalition, dissident Israelis have been under attack (not to mention the continuing assault on the human rights of Palestinian citizens of Israel and the Palestinians of Gaza and the West Bank.)

Now, attacks on Jews working in solidarity with the Palestinian people in the U.S. are increasingly occurring.

In Israel, there was the organized attack by the group Im Tirzu on the New Israel Fund for the liberal group’s funding of organizations that cooperated with Richard Goldstone’s team investigating war crimes committed during the 2008-09 assault on Gaza.  There’s the anti-boycott legislation currently in the Israeli Knesset that would effectively criminalize Israelis supporting the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement. And in the most recent manifestation of Israel’s turn towards proto-fascism and the shutting down of internal dissent, the Israeli government has taken to threatening the cutting off of money to artists who are urging the boycott of a cultural center in the illegal West Bank settlement of Ariel.

It has officially come to the U.S. Jewish community.  Stand With Us, the thuggish pro-Israel organization whose members have called Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP) activists “kapos,” “Nazis,” and wished for the activists to be sunk in the next flotilla, has reportedly attacked a JVP meeting with pepper spray in the Bay Area.

This follows another disturbing event in California, which occurred when the home of Rabbi Michael Lerner, the progressive Jewish activist and editor of the magazine Tikkun, was attacked by right-wing Zionists last May.

Here’s the disturbing news from Jewish Voice for Peace:

Last night, up to a dozen members of San Francisco Voice for Israel/StandWithUs, a right-wing Israeli advocacy group with a documented track record of aggressively taunting and intimidating grassroots peace activists (http://bit.ly/SWUThreats), attended a Bay Area Jewish Voice for Peace community meeting at a South Berkeley Senior Center with the intention of disrupting, intimidating and possibly assaulting Jewish Voice for Peace members. Jewish Voice for Peace is the largest U.S. Jewish peace group dedicated to a resolution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict based on democracy and full equality — the Bay Area chapter is the founding chapter of the organization. Approximately 50 to 60 people were at the meeting, and numerous witnesses are available to corroborate the events.

Eyewitness testimonies are here (http://www.jewishvoiceforpeace.org/blog/eyewitness-testimony-jvp-member-about-stand-us-swu-attacks) and here (http://www.jewishvoiceforpeace.org/blog/eyewitness-report-stand-us-attacks-jvp-meeting)

Wrapped in an Israeli flag, San Francisco Voice for Israel/StandWithUs (SFVI/SWU) member Robin Dubner, an Oakland based attorney, pepper-sprayed two JVP members in the eyes and face after they attempted to nonviolently block her ability to aggressively videotape the faces of JVP meeting attendees against their will. The members, Alexei Folger and Glen Hauer, were careful to make no physical contact with her or her camera prior to the attack.

Folger said, “I did not see it coming and all of a sudden there was gooey stuff all over my head and hand. I have never been pepper-sprayed before, my whole head felt like it was on fire.”

How Much Money is Needed to Stop the BDS Movement?

$6 million dollars:  enough to combat a largely grassroots, bottom-up and growing boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) movement targeting Israel?  That’s what the Jewish Federations of North America and the Jewish Council for Public Affairs are hoping.

The Jewish Telegraphic Agency reports:

The Jewish Federations of North America and the Jewish Council for Public Affairs are launching a multimillion-dollar joint initiative to combat anti-Israel boycott, divestment and sanctions campaigns.

The JFNA and the rest of the Jewish federation system have agreed to invest $6 million over the next three years in the new initiative, which is being called the Israel Action Network. The federations will be working in conjunction with JCPA, an umbrella organization bringing together local Jewish community relations councils across North America.

The BDS movement–whose demands are based on international law–is clearly scaring Israel and the Jewish establishment, who have labeled the movement “the second most dangerous threat to Israel, after Iran’s pursuit of nuclear weapons.”

The article also reports that the new anti-BDS initiative sprung from the urging of the Israeli government, which “has been advocating for this, especially over the past six months or eight months,” as Jerry Silverman, the head of the Jewish Federation of North America, told JTA.

It appears that the Jewish Federations of North America and the Jewish Council for Public Affairs are following the recommendations of the Reut Institute, an Israeli think tank with close ties to the Israeli government, who called on the Israeli government to “sabotage” and “attack” the BDS movement in a February 2010 report.

The investment of a large amount of money to combat what is essentially impossible to combat as long as Israel continually flouts international law is a recognition of the powerful effect the BDS movement is having.  Members of the Israeli Knesset certainly see BDS as a threat, having introduced a bill that would make it illegal for Israelis to “launch or incite” a boycott against Israel.

When $6 million is apparently needed to attempt to halt the BDS movement, that means something.  But all the money in the world can’t stop the movement for Palestinian justice.  Couldn’t someone tell that to the Jewish Federations of North America and the Jewish Council for Public Affairs?  Their money would be better spent on something else.

 

 

‘The Burning Truth of White Phosphorus’: Responding to the ADL’s ‘Anti-Israel’ List

Among the groups on the Anti-Defamation League’s list of the “top ten anti-Israel groups in America” was Students for Justice in Palestine, a  nationwide group of organizations on a variety of college campuses working on Palestine solidarity in universities.

SJP chapters have been instrumental in moving the cause of Palestinian justice and the boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) movement forward in the United States.  At Hampshire College, the SJP chapter successfully pressured the college’s board of trustees to divest from holdings it had in companies that profit from the Israeli occupation, a first in the United States.  Last academic year at the University of California, Berkeley, the SJP chapter there attracted international attention for its groundbreaking effort to push their college to divest from companies complicit in the Israeli occupation, although their initiative was ultimately felled by a veto from the president of the student government.

It’s no wonder why the ADL is targeting the group.

Immediately after the ADL’s release of the “top ten anti-Israel groups in America” list, a number of SJP chapters quickly organized to put out a response, calling the list a “disingenuous and misguided attempt to vilify students that criticize Israel’s occupation, which denies Palestinian human rights and self-determination.”

For more on SJP’s response to the ADL, I recently caught up with Yaman Salahi, a student at Yale Law School who is involved with SJP at Yale.

Alex Kane: What was your immediate reaction to SJP being included on the ADL’s list?

Yaman Salahi:  Given the ADL’s record for smearing anyone speaking out for Palestinian freedom, for justice and human rights, it was not surprising. But the idea was kind of creepy — what kind of person would be interested in this kind of Top 10 list? What’s the point of the list? Why did the ADL create it? There’s no real useful substance in it at all, there are not even compelling factual findings. To the extent that the ADL smears activists supporting the Palestinian struggle for freedom and equality, it just didn’t seem like a very effective smear.

I think that the list really has a marketing function. The ADL list is an exercise in branding. The ADL recognizes that SJP and groups like JVP [Jewish Voice for Peace] have a growing influence on fair-minded people. It recognizes that these groups are breaking out of the activism circle and have growing influence on the mainstream. It recognizes that these groups are getting savvier by the day and are learning how to mobilize and intervene effectively.

Nowhere in its report does the ADL challenge the basis for our activism. Nowhere in its report does it say: “Israel should, in fact, be allowed to use white phosphorous as a weapon against civilians.” Nowhere does it say: “Israel should be allowed to bomb, indiscriminately, the civilians of Gaza.” Nowhere does it say: “Israel has a right to demolish the homes of Palestinian families in East Jerusalem, and hand their properties over to Jewish settlers.” Those are all the implications though because that is the kind of stuff we speak out against. But the ADL report constructs a vacuum completely devoid of moral principles and ethical concerns, nowhere acknowledging our motivating principles, and implies that if you object to any of these kinds of injustices, that you are simply “anti-Israel.” It can avoid the burning truth of white phosphorous by relying on these kinds of sophomoric labels. But if its definition of “anti-Israel” is nothing more than holding Israel to universal standards of decency and justice, then “anti-Israel” can only be a badge of honor.

So the ADL is engaging in a branding campaign to combat the fact that we are social justice and human rights activists coming together to put a stop to a real wrong. It wants to dismiss all of these legitimate and compelling concerns and rely simply on the label “anti-Israel.” It doesn’t even define “anti-Israel” — instead, the ADL relies on whatever preconceptions exist in readers’ minds to define the term for themselves. So you can see, it brings together not only ten very different organizations, all over the political spectrum, in order to imply some sort of “guilt” by association, but also to brand all these groups as nothing more than “anti-Israel.” It wants to distort the causality by suggesting that we are irrationally “anti-Israel,” that we have no legitimate reason for our attitudes. In fact, activists speak out against Israel because of what we know about Israel’s history and because of what we know about what Israel does every day to the Palestinians. The ADL wants to pretend that people who speak out against what Israel has done and continues to do are not motivated by the Nakba, the occupation, the siege of Gaza, apartheid, war crimes, etcetera, but by something else. It has to pretend that’s the case in order to dodge the real issues. That’s a deliberate strategy. The ADL doesn’t want Americans to judge Israel based on the facts; it wants to judge Israel based on marketing images.

AK: What do you think SJP’s inclusion on the list says about the state of the Palestine solidarity movement in the U.S., and specifically on campus?

YS: I think it reflects the tremendous growth of student activism on the issue. By and large campus organizations are autonomous of one another, but now, networks are beginning to form. I think that these networks have a lot of potential. I believe that the response issued by SJP and signed by over 60 campus groups is the first coordinated action of that scale. It’s really promising because such networks can be leveraged in support of much more ambitious and effective campaigns, on a national scale. I think that the ADL sees the writing on the wall, and that is why it wants to focus on SJP. I think it believes that the divestment Debate at UC Berkeley was just the tip of the iceberg, and that because it can’t argue on the merits, the ADL has to resort to ad hominem attacks instead.

Nevertheless, it’s important not to react triumphantly. Just because the ADL puts us on its blacklist doesn’t mean we are guaranteed to succeed. We will succeed, but only if we are serious and work hard. The best way to honor this report is for students to find ways to provoke meaningful discussion and action on their own campuses. Students must always re-focus the discussion on Israel’s actions, because the ADL and other groups like it want to derail all discussions about Israel’s actions. We have to provoke the discussions that they can’t win.

AK: What do you think the list itself tells us about the ADL?

YS: It re-affirms that the ADL can’t be taken seriously when it comes to the Middle East. It has no moral authority. It is nothing more than a cheerleader for Israel, with absolutely no fidelity to values of justice or equality. It can’t cite a single progressive value that would support the creation of such a McCarthyist list. Seriously, what value does it promote? None. That’s not the ADL’s only unprincipled position lately. It took the shocking position that Muslims trying to build a mosque in New York City were doing something “offensive.” It’s almost as if the ADL was saying that, in order to avoid offending anyone, Muslims should only build mosques at the back of the bus. As far as the ADL is concerned, Muslims and Arabs have fewer rights than others. It can’t be taken seriously. It just honored Rupert Murdoch — what kind of organization that cares about racism, equality, civil rights would celebrate Rupert Murdoch, the owner of Fox News?

AK: Do SJP chapters plan on capitalizing on the attention the ADL has given you guys, and if so, how will you capitalize on it

YS: I can’t really speak for any SJP chapter on this. I think the fact that so many groups came together to issue that joint statement says that there’s definitely an intention to use this opportunity to contribute to the public discourse, to defend student activism, and to make sure that Israel is accountable for its actions. However, to be honest, the ADL’s report itself didn’t get very much attention. Generally, only Israeli newspapers and a couple Jewish-American publications covered it, and most focused on the inclusion of Jewish Voice for Peace.  This focus itself reflects a characteristic of public discourse that I think can only be described as a form of racism: many people only pay attention when the right-wing Israel defenders attack Jews or Israelis, but insofar as they’re only attacking Arabs, Muslims, or other human rights activists, not very many people are interested. It’s funny, in a way, though, that the ADL would include JVP on this list. It goes back to the whole guilt by association thing. Here, the ADL is basically saying: “Look, JVP hangs out with Arabs & Muslims!” In other words, they’re Arab-lovers! Last time people talked like this, they lost. I think this attack by the ADL is a good opportunity for SJPs to gain access to public forums and respond. I hope people can use the opportunity to draw more attention to the real issues, like Israeli war crimes and the occupation of Palestinian land.

The Israel debate and the failure of J Street

The following originally appeared at Salon.com:

The Emergency Committee for Israel, an advocacy group launched by Bill Kristol and other neoconservative activists, and J Street, the 2-year-old outfit that bills itself as a liberal “pro-Israel, pro-peace” voice, recently aired dueling ads about Joe Sestak, the Democratic nominee for Senate in Pennsylvania.

The Emergency Committee went first, with a menacing spot that asked, “Does congressman Joe Sestak understand Israel is America’s ally?” J Street’s defensive response was telling. “In Congress, Sestak consistently votes to aid Israel,” the group informed Pennsylvanians.

The ad, needless to say, didn’t bother to question why the U.S. should be spending so much money on Israel in the first place. So much for challenging the assumptions of the pro-Israel establishment.

J Street, which launched in April 2008 to great fanfare under the helm of Jeremy Ben-Ami, a former advisor to President Bill Clinton, was founded in part to “ensure a broad debate on Israel and the Middle East in national politics and the American Jewish community.” That debate has largely been dominated by unquestioning supporters of Israel and all its actions.

But despite the hysterical rhetoric from the likes of Alan Dershowitz and Commentary magazine, who like to claim that J Street is agitating for radical policy change, the new group has done little to broaden the constricted U.S. debate over Israel/Palestine.

Instead, J Street has largely given a liberal cover to more right-wing groups like the American-Israel Public Affairs Committee, whose line seems to be one of supporting Israel no matter what.

The Goldstone report, a landmark U.N. document that accused both Israel and Hamas of committing war crimes during the 2008-09 Israeli assault on Gaza, and the boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) movement that seeks to pressure Israel to live up to its obligations under international law, are two areas where the J Street line has differed little from AIPAC.

The debate over the Goldstone report was an early indicator of things to come for J Street. When a largely fact-free congressional resolution denouncing the report was about to pass, J Street, which aired some concerns about the resolution and urged Congress to modify it, still ultimately agreed with the thrust of it: “J Street supports passage of a resolution by the U.S. Congress calling for the United States to oppose and work actively to defeat one-sided and biased action in the United Nations when it comes to Israel and the Goldstone Report.” That statement was similar to AIPAC’s position on the report, who called it “deeply flawed” and “rigged.”

J Street’s acquiescence to the establishment line on Israel/Palestine reached its zenith during the University of California at Berkeley debate in March/April 2010 over a student effort to divest from two companies that profit from the Israeli occupation of Palestine. When the president of the student government at Berkeley vetoed the measure, which was passed earlier by an overwhelming margin, J Street joined AIPAC, the Anti-Defamation League and the local Israeli consul general in pressuring the student government. J Street joined a wide coalition of groups such as the David Project and the Jewish National Fund that authored a letter labeling the divestment measure as “misleading” and “dishonest.” (J Street’s president, Jeremy Ben-Ami, has since said that the group won’t be signing on to similar letters with “organizations like that in group settings again.”) Their effort worked — a measure to override the veto failed by just one vote.

This timidity has earned J Street harsh criticism from the left. An Israeli-authored letter circulated on an activist listserv called on the group to “stop trying to gain political capital at the expense of dedicated peace activists.”

It is also creating a vacuum that older, more left-leaning groups like Jewish Voice for Peace are poised to fill. This third pole, which has emerged underneath the surface, is challenging the pro-Israel lobby’s hold on the debate. The future battle, especially in the Jewish-American community, will not be J Street vs. AIPAC, but rather the pro-Israel lobby vs. critical Jewish groups who are questioning the desirability of the U.S.-Israel “special relationship.”

The divestment debate at Berkeley and the criticism of J Street is a prominent example of the new battle that is coming to a head within the Jewish community over Israel/Palestine and the Palestinian-led call to boycott, divest from and sanction Israel. The BDS movement started in 2005, and calls on global civil society to use the tactics of boycotting, divesting and sanctioning Israel until it adheres to its obligations under international law. The movement demands that Israel withdraw from the occupied Palestinian territories, implement equal rights for Palestinian citizens of Israel and recognize the “right of return” for Palestinian refugees and their descendants who fled or were expelled from Palestine during the 1947-49 Israeli-Arab War.

The debate over BDS is heating up. Recently, Jacob Weisberg, the editor in chief at Slate, called the BDS movement “a weapon designed not to bring peace but to undermine [Israel]” and “hard to disassociate from anti-Semitism.” The smearing of the BDS movement as anti-Semitic, though, is increasingly losing credibility, especially because groups such as Jewish Voice for Peace and others are backing aspects of the movement. In its latest issue, Tikkun magazine published a debate on BDS between Ben-Ami, Jewish Voice for Peace’s Rebecca Vilkomerson and others, an indication of the growing importance of the movement.

During the Tikkun debate, Ben-Ami argued that those opposed to the Israeli occupation should not engage in BDS tactics that alienate Israelis and should instead “double down on our movement to try to get particularly President Obama to be deeply and actively engaged to outline what a solution is.” But with peace talks at a standstill, and President Obama averse to pressuring Israel, the BDS movement will only gain steam — with or without J Street on board.

The momentum was evident just a few months ago, after the Israeli Navy raided an aid flotilla on its way to Gaza and killed nine people, when a wave of music acts honored the cultural boycott, and garnered attention from major media outlets like the Associated Press and CNN.

While it’s hard to predict when mainstream discourse will allow candid discussion about Israel/Palestine, cracks in the wall are appearing, and they’re only going to get bigger.