I have not posted about Israel and its actions in Gaza for over a month, hoping that the three-step ceasefire agreement would lead to a permanent peace in the region and create a path for formation of a Palestinian state. With the Trump administration’s proposals for a U.S. take-over of Gaza, its open-ended pledge of support for Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu, and its assault on academic freedom and freedom of speech in the United State, I will start posting about Israel and Gaza again. This is the first in a series of posts.
There is increasing pressure on schools and universities to endorse a definition of antisemitism that virtually labels any disagreement with Israel or Zionism as antisemitic. Harvard University, where the President was forced to resign last year and where trustees and donors threaten to cut off funds and blackball student protesters who support an independent Palestinian state and oppose Isreal’s destruction of Gaza, adopted the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s working definition of antisemitism. Critics charge that IHRA definition is a major assault on free speech and the right to protest.
The IHRA working definition of antisemitism endorsed by the United States State Department includes holding Israel to a standard not expected of other democratic nations. I hold Israel to the same standard as any other country. There is no other democratic country in the world today responsible for the slaughter of tens of thousands of non-combatants.
In December, the Chief Executive Officers of the Anti-Defamation League, the Center for Jewish Day Schools, the American Jewish Committee, and the Jewish Federations of North America protested statements made by speakers at a People of Color Conference sponsored by the National Association of Independent Schools.
In a letter to Debra Wilson, President of the NAIS, they charged that keynote speaker Dr. Suzanne Barakat and Dr. Ruha Benjamin used their platforms “to traffic in extreme, biased, and false anti-Zionist and anti-Israel rhetoric; label the establishment of Israel a ‘racist’ endeavor; accuse Israel of genocide; and downplay the October 7, 2023 Hamas terrorist attack.”
The authors of the letter and their organizations accused the NAIS of permitting “an atmosphere that was hostile for many Jewish students and faculty members in attendance” who were “forced to hear this damaging and antisemitic rhetoric repeated time and again and watch as their peers applauded.” According to the letter, Jewish students in attendance “felt so targeted, so unsafe, that we tucked our Magen Davids [Jewish stars, a historic symbol of Jewish peoplehood] in our shirts and walked out as those around us glared and whispered.”
In the letter, the ADL and the other groups charged that “anti-Zionism fuels antisemitism.” According to the signers, “The vast majority of the Jewish community is Zionist, supports self-determination and statehood for the Jewish people in their indigenous homeland of Israel . . . attacks on and exclusion of Zionists ultimately mean attacks on and exclusion of Jews.” While the speakers did not endorse violence against Jews, the letter asserted that “many people claiming to be ‘solely’ anti-Zionists have verbally and physically attacked Jews.”
I am worried about increasing antisemitism in the United States and the world, antisemitism that the Israeli government has contributed to by its actions in Gaza and its treatment of Palestinians, behavior that both the International Criminal Court and the International Court of Justice are investigating as war crime, behavior that Amnesty International has called genocide, so the speakers were within their rights to make similar claims. Whether the NAIS sponsored conference was the best venue or not is questionable, but I don’t believe the ADL and the other groups would have found the statements acceptable at any venue.
The letter identifies Jews as the “indigenous” population of Palestine, something they have not been for almost two thousand years since they were expelled by the Roman Empire. If we are going by Biblical accounts in the Book of Joshua, the Jewish tribes invaded the region and conquered the previously indigenous people of Canaan and Jericho. Arab people, however, including Palestinians, have lived in the region for at least the last 1,000 years.
Many Israelis and diaspora Jews, including me, are disgusted by the destruction of Gaza and the more than 45,000 deaths, the occupation of the West Bank, and the disregard for Palestinian life. The bombing of cities, schools, and hospitals does constitute war crimes. Evidence also suggests that Israel has systematically driven Palestinians off of their land to expand Israeli territory, which qualifies as genocide. If Israeli actions are justified by Zionism, I am not a Zionist, but I am also not an antisemite.
The letter accused Dr. Barakat of falsely defining Zionism as a decision by “some European Jews . . . that the solution to solving antisemitism in Europe and Russia was the establishment of a state in Palestine,” a statement which is historically accurate. The Zionist founders of Israel acknowledged that it was a colonizing project, however much supporters of Israel reject that idea today. In the 1890s, Theodore Herzl proposed a settlement plan based on the expulsion of Palestinians. Herzl believed that European Jews had to “expropriate gently the private property on the estates assigned to us. We shall try to spirit the penniless population across the border by procuring employment for it in transit countries, while denying it employment in our own country.”
They accused Dr. Benjamin’s use of the term genocide “a grossly inaccurate and misleading use of a well-defined legal term.” I don’ use the term genocide lightly, but I now believe Dr. Benjamin’s description of Israel action in Gaza and on the West Bank is correct. Genocide, as defined in the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide that Israel signed, includes “any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such: (a) Killing members of the group; (b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; (c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; (d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; (e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.” Israel has long refused to recognize Palestinians as a people with the right to nationhood and an independent state.
The authors of the letter demanded an apology from the NAIS and offered to help the organization select future speakers and review text to ensure presentations would not be biased or offensive to members of the audience. The letter was signed for the ADL by Jonathan Greenblatt, who claims that “Anti-Zionism is antisemitism.” Censorship by these group would only be a way to ensure that their biases are the ones that are presented and the people made to feel uncomfortable would be the ones who disagree with them.
