In a moment when support for Israel is slipping a bit in Congress, this Israel-right-or-wrong group proposes a new category of antisemitism in hopes of persuading Progressives to alter their agenda to accommodate pro-Israel Jewish Americans. It’s called “Progressive Except Palestine.”
The Anti-Defamation League wants to train our children to treat all people equally and with respect. They refuse to take their own advice when it comes to Palestinians, preferring instead to silence their calls for justice and turn a blind eye to Israel’s human rights abuses. A discriminatory organization that bullies others should not be in our schools.
Many Jewish groups in America are sending mixed signals: YES, we want to see an end to injustice for Black Americans; NO, we do not want to see the same for Palestinians.
A bill before Congress seeks merely to stop US aid dollars from subsidizing the incarceration and torture of Palestinian children. Pro-Israel organizations would rather believe outrageous fallacies than stand up for these kids’ rights.
Racism was part of the birth of the state of Israel; apartheid is part of its fabric. Nelson Mandela agreed. Palestinians struggle for equality, as do people of color (both Jewish and non-Jewish).
The New York Times – most notably columnist Thomas Friedman – acknowledges that current policies and practices in Israel/Palestine are now and have been for decades a form of apartheid, yet for some unspecified reason, the paper has stated for twenty years merely that the region is “at risk of” becoming an apartheid state. In spite of profuse evidence from experts around the world and from Israel’s own legislation, NYT refuses to state the obvious.
Israeli author Shlomo Sand writes: Zionism – the idea of a “Jewish State” – was at first fully secular and socialist, but how to define “a Jew” in a way that includes both the religious and the nonreligious (and no Arabs)? Eventually, religious features were appropriated and nationalized: the “need” for more land became a holy pact with God; Israel is only for Jews, not “all of its citizens.”
Netanyahu: “Israel is not a state of all its citizens. According to the nation-state law we passed, Israel is the nation-state of the Jewish people — and not anyone else.”
Palestinian citizens of Israel are constantly reminded of the fragility and conditionality of our (second-class) Israeli citizenship, and the illegitimacy of our Palestinian identity – and that’s amplified as elections approach.
The Palestinian identity of Israeli citizens is conceptualized as a perpetual threat precisely because it resists the constant revisionist efforts of the state. By virtue of existing, Palestinians contest the erasure of their own narratives and histories.
Katherine Franke writes in the New York Review of Books that while Palestinian rights are getting more attention than ever, advocates of justice still face accusations of “anti-Semitism,” harassment, and most of all, censorship on college campuses….