Jewish American Heritage Month

Posted By admin on July 19, 2020

The Database of Victims maintained by the Institute for the Terezn Initiative has now published data about the victims of the Holocaust labeled "cikni" by the Nazis and their accomplices on Czech territory during the Second World War. (PHOTO: holocaust.cz)

The database of Holocaust victims available online inCzech, English and Germanat holocaust.cz now has a new section containing data about more victims of racial persecution in the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, those who were labeled "cikni" during the Second World War. The Nazis' racist persecution of those labeled this way affected most of the Roma and Sinti people during the Second World War who were living on the territory of what is today the Czech Republic.

Despite the gravity of that fact, the subject of the genocide of these people was not reflected upon by most of Czech society until 1989, for many reasons. Even though, under conditions of democracy, there is a development ongoing in the Czech Republic of the commemoration of this history, education about it, and research into it, even today these themes are not a natural component of mainstream awareness, as is documented by the decades it has taken for the memorials at Hodonn u Kunttu and Lety u Psku to be created, as well as the periodic recurrence of the belittling or even the denial of the genocide of the Romani people here.

On 13 May 2020, the educational portal holocaust.cz launched a new database containing information about the victims of the Nazi genocide of those labeled "cikni" on the territory of what is today the Czech Republic. Currently data is available there about the people who perished in the Protectorate's "Ciknsk camp" (the "Zigeunerlager" or "CT Lety") at Lety u Psku, which was in operation from August 1942 to August 1943.

The Institute of the Terezn Initiative (ITI -Institut Tereznsk iniciativy), since its establishment in 1993, has been systematically dedicatedto the commemoration of theHolocaust and research about Holocaustvictims, and since 2008 it has published a Database of Victims at holocaust.cz. Information was first published there about those victims who had been labeled "Jews" according to the Nuremberg Laws then in effect.

The Database of Victims draws from the data published inthe Terezn Bookof Memory (Tereznsk pamtn kniha, vols. 1 and 2), which were published in 1995 by Melantrich and the Terezn Initiative and contain data about the Jewish victims of the Nazi deportations from Bohemia and Moravia that took place from 1941 to 1945. That information has been constantly augmented and expanded ever since, not just by new data, but also with archival documents and photographs thanks to which it is possible to restore not just these people's faces, but also their life stories.

The Database contains brief informationabout all the prisoners in the ghetto at Terezn who were then deported from the Czech lands - prisoners from Austria, Denmark, Germany, the Netherlands and Slovakia - as well as those who arrived at Terezn during the final days of the war in the death marches (the so-called "evacuation transports"). Information is also available there about those who were deported from the Czech lands directly to Auschwitz, d, Minsk and Ujazdw, or who were imprisoned in the concentration camp at Mauthausen.

Another difficult task the ITI staffers set themselves was to also commemorate other victims of the Nazis' racist policy during the Second World War, namely, those who were labeled "cikni" by the bureaucratic powers. ITI historians began to systematically dedicate themselves to that task four years ago.

The historians based that work on their experience with the database of Jewish victims and adapted their existing approaches to the specific needs of the new project. At the very beginning, archival research was undertaken in three archives holding basic collections on the subject of the persecution of the Roma and Sinti on Czech territory:the National Archive of the Czech Republic in Prague, the Moravian Provincial Archive in Brno, and the State Regional archive in Tebo.

Research in archives abroad was also important, for example, in the Bundesarchiv in Berlin, Germany, or the archive of the Auschwitz-Birkenau Museum in Owicim, Poland. It was also necessary to visit other Czech archives such as the archives at Mikulov in South Moravia, Zmrsk in East Bohemia, the City of Brno, the City of Prague, and others.

With the growing amount of accumulated data and documentation it then became necessary to set other goals to be achieved within the timeframe established and to focus the research in that direction. Given that the digitalization of the entire archival collection about "CT Lety" in the Teboarchive had been part of the research from the beginning, data about the prisoners from the camp at Lety u Psku was chosen to be publicized first.

Lists of the prisoners' names were found and transcribed from the documents in that collection, and the data there were compared with the published lists of prisoners that had beenpreviously producedby the historian Ctibor Neas. From the larger set of those imprisoned at some point at the Lety camp, ITI haschosen to publish data just about those who perished there.

The Database of Victims has two sections, a public-facing section and one that is not accessible by the public. The public section is accessible at holocaust.cz and contains data just about persons who were murdered or who died as a consequence of their imprisonment.

In order to protect personal information, it is not possible to publish data about survivors or about those whose fates have not yet been traced. Even though their names have been published in book form - as have, for example, the prisoners of the ghetto at Terezn in the Terezn Books of Memory (Tereznsk pamtn kniha, vols. 1 and 2) - that data remains in the part of the database that is accessible just to curators.

This does not mean, however, that these data cannot be made accessible. It is possible to access data on the basis of a research request.

This same approach was chosen when it came to expanding the database to include the Lety prisoners. In the public section ofthe database, identification information is published about prisoners who died in the "Ciknsk camp" at Lety between August 1942 and August 1943, the time it was in operation.

A database user will find a name and surname (either a birth surname or a subsequent surname), a date and place of birth, the length of imprisonment, and a date and place of death. The rest of the information found (the larger part) isin the part of the database that is not publicly accessible.

On the basis of consultations with experts and representatives of the family members of those imprisoned at Lety, the project team decided all the data and information found and processed would be stored just in the part of the database that is not publicly accesible. Documentation and information has been included in the database for each victim so that, from among the innumerable personsmurdered there, it is possible to present these children, men and women as individuals.

Database users also are able to accessarchival documents and photographs that give a sense of each victim as an individual figure who lived until his or her life was forcibly interrupted by the events associated with this racial persecution during the Second World War. These documents and photographs are predominantly from archives in Bohemia and document just one dimension of these individuals' lives, namely, the record left in official documents.

The daily, private lives of these victims are documented by photographs contributed to the database by private donors, predominantly family members of the victims. To restore a face and a life story to each victim, however, is a labor that will never end.

Documents have not always been conserved, it is not always possible to identify the people in these old photographs, and those who might be able to do so are not always still among the living. One such victim of the Nazi persecution of the "cikni" during the Second World War wasTekla imandlov (born 1902), who was imprisoned at Lety u Psku, at Hodonn u Kunttu, and at Auschwitz-Birkenau, where she perished.

In the summer of 1942, when the forced concentration of persons labelled "cikni" and "ciknsk half-breeds" began to be implemented on the territory of the Protectorate, Tekla imandlov lived with her children in Plze and was a manual laborer. On 3 August 1942, all of them were imprisoned in the newly-opened "Ciknsk camp" at Lety u Psku.

Her daughter Marie was transported from the camp to the hospital in Psek with a diagnosis of typhoid fever, while Tekla, her daughter Anna, and her son Josef were transported to the camp at Hodonn u Kunttu after the Lety camp was closed. Tekla, Anna and Josef were then deported from Hodonn u Kunttu to Auschwitz-Birkenau, where she died on 7 December 1943;the fates of her children have not yet been clarified.

The ITI database should function as an easily accessible information source and a resource for developing the discussion of these issues today.Expert commentaries are, therefore, also part of the database, explaining various concepts and subjects and contextualizing the published data and materials.

These commentaries will be followed by academic articles and possibly other outputs. In future the database should be expanded to include more information, above all about the victims of the "Ciknsk camps" at Hodonn u Kunttu and Auschwitz-Birkenau.

First published in Czech in the magazine Romano voi.

Elika Waageov, Michal Schuster, Institut Tereznsk iniciativy, translated by Gwendolyn Albert

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Czech website on the Holocaust launches database of victims labeled "cikni" by the Nazis and their accomplices - Romea.cz

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Posted By admin on July 19, 2020

Peter Beinart, a bellwether for American Jews, has provoked a storm by renouncing the two-state solution and urging equality for all

Peter Beinart, an influential liberal commentator on Israel and Zionism, poked a very large stick into a hornets nest this month by admitting he had finally abandoned his long-cherished commitment to a two-state solution.

Variously described as the pope of liberal Zionism and a bellwether for the American Jewish community, Beinart broke ranks in two essays. Writing in the New York Times and in Jewish Currents magazine, he embraced the idea of equality for all Israelis and Palestinians.

Beinart concluded:

The painful truth is that the project to which liberal Zionists like myself have devoted ourselves for decades a state for Palestinians separated from a state for Jews has failed. It is time for liberal Zionists to abandon the goal of Jewish-Palestinian separation and embrace the goal of Jewish-Palestinian equality.

Similarly, the Times article was headlined: I no longer believe in a Jewish state. Beinarts main point that a commitment to Israel is now entirely incompatible with a commitment to equality for the regions inhabitants is a potential hammer blow to the delusions of liberal Jews in the United States.

Long journey

His declaration is the apparent culmination of a long intellectual and emotional journey Beinart has conducted in the public eye a journey many American liberal Jews have taken with him.

Once the darling of the war-mongering liberal establishment in Washington, he supported the illegal attack on Iraq in 2003. Three years later, he wrote a largely unrepentant book titled The Good Fight: Why Liberals and Only Liberals Can Win the War on Terror and Make America Great Again.

There is no heavyweight publication in the US that has not hosted his thoughts. Foreign Policy magazine ranked him in the top 100 global thinkers in 2012.

But his infatuation with Israel and Zionism has been souring for years. A decade ago, he published a seminal essay on how young American Jews were increasingly alienated from their main leadership organisations, which he criticised for worshipping at the altar of Israel even as Israeli governments lurched ever further rightwards. His argument later formed the basis of a book, The Crisis of Zionism.

The tensions he articulated finally exploded into physical confrontation in 2018, when he was detained at Israels main airport and nearly denied entry based on his political views.

Beinart has not only written caustically about the occupation a fairly comfortable deflection for most liberal Zionists but has also increasingly turned his attention to Israels behaviour towards its large Palestinian minority, one in five of the population.

Recognition of the structural racism towards these 1.8 million Palestinian citizens, a group whose identity is usually glossed over as Israeli Arabs, was a clear sign that he had begun poking into the dark recesses of Zionism, areas from which most of his colleagues shied away.

Disappointment and distrust

Beinarts two essays have been greeted with hesitancy by some of those who might be considered natural allies.

Understandably, some Palestinians find reason to distrust Beinarts continuing description of himself as a Zionist, even if now a cultural rather than political one. They also resent a continuing western colonial mentality that very belatedly takes an interest in equality for Palestinians only because a prominent liberal Jew adopts the cause.

Beinarts language is problematic for many Palestinians too. Not least, he frames the issue as between Palestinians and Jews, implying that Jews everywhere still have a colonial claim on the historic lands of Palestine, rather than those who live there today as Israelis.

Similarly, among many anti-Zionists, there is disappointment that Beinart did not go further and explicitly prescribe a single democratic state of the kind currently being advanced in the region by small but growing numbers of Israelis and Palestinians.

Tested to breaking point

But the importance of Beinarts intervention lies elsewhere. He is not the first prominent Jewish figure to publicly turn their back on the idea of a Jewish state. Notably, the late historian Tony Judt did the same to much uproar in a 2003 essay published by the New York Review of Books. He called Israel an anachronism.

But Judt had been chiefly associated with his contributions to understanding European history, not Zionism or Israel. And his essay arrived at a very different historical moment, when Israelis and Jews overseas were growing more entrenched in their Zionism. The Oslo Accords had fizzled into irrelevance at the height of a Palestinian uprising.

Beinarts articles have landed at a problematic time for his main audience. The most fundamental tenet of liberal Zionism that a Jewish state is necessary, verging on sacred is already being tested to breaking point.

The trigger for the articles is the very tangible threat from Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahus government, backed by the Trump White House, to annex swaths of the West Bank.

Meagre alibi lost

The significance of Netanyahus position on annexation, as Israeli human rights lawyer Michael Sfard has noted, depends not simply on whether annexation is realised on the ground, now or later. The declaration itself crosses a Rubicon.

Netanyahu and the right-wing faction who now control Israel unchallenged have made it explicit that they do not consider the occupation to be a temporary arrangement that will eventually be resolved in peace talks.

The intent to annex, whether or not the US allows such a move, now taints everything Israel does in the occupied territories. It proves beyond any doubt even to liberal Jews who have been living in deep denial that Israels goal is to permanently seize the occupied territories.

That, in turn, means that Israel has only two possible approaches to the Palestinian populations living in those territories as long as it denies them equality: It can either carry out ethnic cleansing operations to expel them, or rule over them in a formal, explicit arrangement of apartheid. That may not constitute much of a tangible difference on the ground, but it marks a legal sea change.

Occupation, however ugly, is not in breach of international law, though actions related to it, such as settlement-building, may be. This allowed many liberal Jews, such as Beinart, a small comfort blanket that they have clung to tightly for decades.

When challenged about Israels behaviour, they could always claim that the occupation would one day end, that peace talks were around the corner, that partition was possible if only Palestinians were willing to compromise a little more.

But with his annexation plan, Netanyahu ripped that comfort blanket out of their clutches and tore it to shreds. Ethnic cleansing and apartheid are both crimes against humanity. No ifs, no buts. As Sfard points out: Once Israel began officially striving for annexation that is, for perpetuating its rule by force it lost this meagrealibi.

Apartheid state

Sfard makes a further important legal observation in a report written for the human rights group Yesh Din. If Israel chooses to institute an apartheid regime in parts of the occupied West Bank either formally or through creeping legal annexation, as it is doing now that regime does not end at the West Banks borders. It would mean that the Israeli regime in its entirety is an apartheid regime. That Israel is an Apartheid state.

Of course, one would have to be blind not to have understood that this was where political Zionism was always heading even more so after the 1967 war, when Israels actions disclosed that it had no intention of returning the Palestinian territories it had seized.

But the liberal Zionist condition was precisely one of willful blindness. It shut its eyes tight and saw no evil, even as Israel debased Palestinian life there for more than half a century. Looking back, Beinart recognises his own self-inflicted credulousness. In practice, Israel annexed the West Bank long ago, he writes in the New York Times.

In his two articles, Beinart denies liberal Jews the one path still available to them to rationalise Palestinian oppression. He argues that those determined to support a Jewish state, whatever it does, are projecting their own unresolved, post-Holocaust fears onto Palestinians.

In the Zionist imagination, according to Beinart, Palestinians have been reinvented as heirs to the Nazis. As a result, most Jews have been manipulated into framing Israels settler-colonialism in zero-sum terms as a life-or-death battle. In that way, they have been able to excuse Israels perpetual abuse of Palestinians.

Or as Beinart puts it: Through a historical sleight of hand that turns Palestinians into Nazis, fear of annihilation has come to define what it means to be an authentic Jew. He adds that Jewish trauma, not Palestinian behaviour, has ended in the depiction of Palestinians as compulsive Jew-haters.

Forced into a choice

Annexation has forced Beinart to confront that trauma and move beyond it. Perhaps not surprisingly, most of Israels supporters have been reluctant to follow suit or discard their comforting illusions. Some are throwing tantrums, others sulking in the corner.

The Zionist right and mainstream have described Beinart as a traitor, a self-hating Jew, and a collaborator with Palestinian terrorism. David Weinberg of the Jerusalem Institute for Strategy and Security called Beinart a shill for Israels enemies who secretes poison.

Dan Shapiro, a former US ambassador to Israel, described Beinarts advocacy of equality as a disaster in the making, while Dani Dayan, Israels consul general in New York, accused Beinart of wanting Israel to drop dead.

The liberal Zionist establishment has been no less discomfited. Aaron David Miller, a former US Middle East envoy, warned that Beinarts prescription was an illusion tethered to a fantasy wrapped in an impossibility.

And Beinarts friend, Jeremy Ben Ami, head of the two-state lobby group J Street, snatched back the ragged remains of the comfort blanket, arguing that peace talks would be revived eventually. In a standard Zionist deflection, Ben Ami added that Israel was no different from the US in being far from perfect.

But to understand how quickly liberal Zionist reasoning may crumble, it is worth focusing on a critique of Beinarts articles by the Israeli newspaper Haaretzs in-house liberal Zionist, Anshel Pfeffer.

Collapse of support

Pfeffer makes two highly unconvincing arguments to evade Beinarts logic. Firstly, he claims that a one-state solution of any variety is impossible because there is no support for it among Palestinians and Israelis. It is, he argues, a conceit Beinart has absorbed from Jews and Palestinians in the US.

Lets overlook Pfeffers obvious mistake in ignoring the fact that a single state already exists a Greater Israel in which Palestinians have been living for decades under a highly belligerent system of apartheid, laced with creeping ethnic cleansing. Still, his claims about where Israeli and Palestinian public opinion currently lies are entirely misleading, as is his assumption about how Beinarts attack on liberal Zionism may impact regional possibilities.

The views of Palestinians in the occupied territories (Pfeffer, of course, ignores the views of refugees) have been undergoing radical and rapid change. Support for the two-state solution has collapsed. This is far from surprising, given the current political context.

Among Palestinians, there are signs of exasperation and a mirroring of Israeli Jewish intransigence. In one recent poll, a majority of Palestinian respondents demanded a return of all of historic Palestine. What can be inferred from this result is probably not much more than the human tendency to put on a brave show when faced with a highly acquisitive bully.

In fact, increasingly Palestinians understand that if they want to end the occupation and apartheid, they will need to overthrow their compromised leaders in the Palestinian Authority (PA), effectively Israels local security contractor. It is an uprising against the PA, not polls, that will seal the fate of the two-state solution. What may inspire Palestinians to take on the risk of a major confrontation with their leaders?

A part will be played, however small, by Palestinians understanding of how a shift from a struggle for statehood to a struggle for equal rights in one state will be received abroad. Liberal Jewish opinion in the US will be critical in changing such perceptions and Beinart has just placed himself at the heart of that debate.

Journey to self-immolation

Meanwhile, a majority of Israeli Jews support either Greater Israel or an end-of-the-rainbow two-state solution, one in which Palestinians are denied any meaningful sovereignty.They do so for good reason, because either option perpetuates the status quo of a single state in which they prosper at a heavy cost to Palestinians. The bogus two-state solution privileges them, just as bantustans once did white South Africans.

The view of Israeli Jews will change, just as white South Africans did, when they suffer a harsher international environment and the resulting cost-benefit calculus has to be adjusted.

In that sense, the issue isnt what Israeli Jews think now, when they are endlessly indulged, but what Israels sponsors chiefly the US eventually demand. That is why Beinarts influence on the thinking of liberal American Jews cannot be discounted. Long term, what they insist on may prove critically important.

That was why Beinarts harshest critics, in attacking his two essays, also warned of the current direction of travel.

Jonathan Tobin, editor of the Jewish News Syndicate, argued that Beinarts views were indicative of the crisis of faith within much of American Jewry. Weinberg described the two essays as frightening because they charted liberal Jews intellectual journey towards anti-Zionism and self-immolation.

Both understand that, if liberal Jews abandon Zionism, one leg of the Israeli stool will be gone.

Mocked as utopianism

The other problem Pfeffer inadvertently highlights with liberal Zionism is contained in his mocking dismissal of Beinarts claim that the justification for a Jewish home needs to be rooted in morality.

Pfeffer laughs this off as utopianism, arguing instead that Israels existence has always depended on what he vaguely terms pragmatism. What he means, once the euphemism is stripped out, is that Israel has always pursued a policy of might is right.

But Pfeffers suggestion that Israel does not also need to shape a moral narrative about its actions even if that narrative bears no relation to reality is patently implausible.

Israel has not relied solely on its own might. It has needed the patronage of western states to help it diplomatically, financially and militarily. And their enthusiastic support has depended on domestic perceptions of Israel as a moral agent.

Israel understands this only too well. It has presented itself as a light unto the nations, a state that redeemed a barren land, and one that has the most moral army in the world. Those are all moral claims on western support.

Beinart has demonstrated that the moral discourse for Israel is a lost cause. And for that reason, Israels chief allies now are states led by covert, and sometimes overt, antisemites and proud authoritarians.

Beinart is doubtless ahead of most liberal Jews in the US in rejecting Israel as a Jewish state. But it would be foolish indeed to imagine that there are not many others already contemplating following in his footsteps.

First published in Middle East Eye

This article was posted on Saturday, July 18th, 2020 at 2:33pm and is filed under Annexation, Apartheid, Benjamin Netanyahu, Ethnic Cleansing, Hypocrisy, Israel/Palestine, Nationalism, Neo-Nazis, Occupation, Oslo Accords, Palestinian Authority, Settler Colonialism, Transparency/Secrecy, US Hypocrisy, West Bank, Zionism.

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Liberal Zionism begins the Journey Towards a One-State Solution - Dissident Voice

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Posted By admin on July 19, 2020

Dear Members of the Faculty Senate and the Massachusetts Society of Professors,

I write to you because we are in urgent times requiring our action. Once again, we are met with news of Israels plan to continue annexing even more of the West Bank, its intention to claim the Jordan Valley as its own. These plans constitute an egregious assault on Palestinian livelihood and blatant disrespect for international law.

This annexation, understood in its historical and political context, is the ongoing process of violent settler-colonialism which created the state of Israel in 1948 and has continued to ethnically cleanse and dispossess Palestinians in the pursuit of yet more land for its ethnocracy. These annexation plans do not exist in a historical vacuum; rather, they are the predictable next steps in the ongoing Zionist* colonization of Palestine, perennially on the political horizon so long as Israels occupation remains intact.*(when I use the term Zionism or Zionist, I am referring to Political Zionism, a late 19th-century nationalist political ideology emanating from Europe which explicitly advocated for the colonization of Palestine and resulted in the expulsion of the indigenous Arab-Palestinian population from Palestine to facilitate its resettlement with Jewish immigrants).

Annexation is the reality of Zionism. Recognizing this, we should not limit ourselves to opposing just this annexation, but be consistent by denouncing all prior annexation as well. To be against these plans, therefore, requires us to be against the military occupation as a whole and instead support a politics of liberation: one that secures true democracy, equality, adherence to standards of international law and human rights, and a lasting peace rooted in justice. There will be no peaceful solution to the occupation while its violent architecture and ideology remain intact; these oppressive structures continue to exist, in part, because they are empowered by international partnerships that legitimize and sustain them.

There will be no peaceful solution to the occupation while its violent architecture and ideology remain intact; these oppressive structures continue to exist, in part, because they are empowered by international partnerships that legitimize and sustain them.

Timmy Sullivan

To that effect, our siblings in Palestine have identified how we, internationally, can be in solidarity with their struggle for liberation by targeting our institutions that sustain the occupation. This is the movement for boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS).

The BDS movement categorically opposed to all forms of racism, anti-semitism, and islamophobia is an ideologically diverse, human-rights-based movement to pressure Israel into accordance with international law and defend the equality and rights of Palestinians.

In 2005, the overwhelming majority of Palestinian civil society issued a call to support BDS until Israel meets three of its fundamental obligations under international law which have been systematically denied, including:

*(e.g., Palestine, Lebanon, and Syria)

Already on our campus, there is a movement of students and faculty committed to ending UMass partnerships with institutions directly implicated in the occupation and responsible for the denial of human rights. As Israel annexes more land, it is increasingly urgent that we leverage our political power of protest to raise the economic and social cost of injustice now.

I believe we as undergraduates, graduates, faculty, and professors must act on our governance authority per the Wellman Document to pass a BDS resolution and elect for ourselves democratically what the character of our University will be. Doing so is a crucial step in actualizing our commitment to freedom, equality, and human rights and is also morally consistent with UMass prior condemnation and divestment from apartheid in South Africa. Further, it is important that we pass these resolutions through our governance channels because an inclusive, democratic approach is a stark rebuke and correction to the Chancellors unilateral decision-making which has, for the time being, sided UMass with the Zionist lobby.

I am referring to last October, when, in an effort to stifle the growing movement in solidarity with Palestine on our campus, Chancellor Subbaswamy bluntly rejected the BDS campaign, deciding unilaterally for us all that the University remains firmly opposed to BDS and to academic boycotts of any kind. In conversation with me later that week, he elaborated that this move was in defense of academic freedom. It strikes me as curious, though, that someone principally committed to academic freedom would hasten to chastise a movement in defense of freedoms and align himself instead with institutions notorious for their denial of freedoms, academic and civil.

By this, I mean that diminishing, restricting, and denying academic freedom to Palestinians is just another manifestation of Israels military occupation, enforced both by physical violence and the bureaucratic and structural technologies of apartheid. Palestinian students are no strangers to Israeli military raids of their campuses; the banning of academic conferences and detainment of participating researchers and academics; having their colleges shut down by Israeli police; learning that certain degrees are no longer recognized by Israeli authorities; and even being shot in the head with rubber-coated steel bullets or suffocating on tear gas.

Issuing an in-depth report on the matter in 2015 titled Palestinian Universities Under Occupation, the Association of Academics for the Respect of International Law in Palestine, a European organization of researchers and professors, documented a pattern of:

coherent and multi-faceted policy of Israeli interference with the normal functioning of academic life. This interference inhibits free movement of staff and students; reduces academic effectiveness and productivity by the usurpation of staff time through mobility restrictions and imposed bureaucratic obstacles; prevents effective collaboration and sharing of intellectual resources between Palestinian universities; obstructs international visits to Palestinian universities; substantially prevents the employment of teaching staff from abroad; interrupts the supply of equipment, materials and books; and subjects staff and students to repeated humiliations and indignity.

Meanwhile, Israeli universities are structurally integrated into Israels permanent war effort. These campuses author and rely on doctored histories of Israels founding; publish strategic reports that architect apartheid; conduct Israeli Defense Force officer trainings; and even capture the bodies of murdered Palestinians to hold as political bargaining chips, refusing a burial to families.

Thus, to shield his rejection of BDS with a false notion of supporting academic freedom is, in fact, applying a blatant double standard which unequally privileges the academic freedoms of US and Israeli institutions while denying the same rights to Palestinians. Indeed, it privileges these so-called academic freedoms not just over Palestinian freedoms, but at the expense of them. Therefore, the Chancellors remark certifies the academic freedoms of only some; which is to say, it certifies not academic freedom, but academic exclusion.

To support true academic freedom would entail noncooperation with repressive and exclusionary institutions until such time that full academic freedoms and rights are realized. As such, the Palestinian call for academic boycotts of Israeli institutions is a specifically designed pressure against the conditions of unfreedom; in other words, BDS is not an obstacle to academic freedom but rather a way to achieve it.

To support true academic freedom would entail noncooperation with repressive and exclusionary institutions until such time that full academic freedoms and rights are realized. As such, the Palestinian call for academic boycotts of Israeli institutions is a specifically designed pressure against the conditions of unfreedom; in other words, BDS is not an obstacle to academic freedom but rather a way to achieve it.

Timmy Sullivan

It is further ironic that to make his point about academic freedom, the Chancellor relies on talking points from those actively invested in the suppression of political speech. His words echo those from Israels defenders relentless in their pursuit to silence criticism of the occupation by delegitimizing, ostracizing, vilifying, and criminalizing those of us who dare to promote human rights. It is, in fact, these Zionist campaigners who deny and infringe upon our academic freedoms by bringing lawsuits against events such as ours; digitally harassing and doxxing supporters of BDS; rescinding job offers, academic opportunities, and awards for supporting the Palestinian freedom struggle; subjecting activists to surveillance; destroying and rewriting history in favor of a Zionist mythology; denying visas; and socially excluding or disinviting anti-zionist Jews from Jewish spaces for supporting Palestinian liberation. To import this culture of fear and silencing onto our campus known as the Palestine Exception to Free Speech constitutes a legitimate threat to UMass academic freedoms and calls into question the extent to which academic freedom applies to Palestine-solidarity activists and scholars at UMass.

His statement, then, clearly has less to do with academic freedom as it does for supporting a Zionist politics. Ultimately, for the Chancellor to subject his professors and students to strict and public condemnation for speaking in defense of human rights, while not applying any scrutiny to the Israeli institutions violating those same human rights, is at best irresponsibly hypocritical and at worst dangerously complicit in the very politics which normalize and allow for those abuses.

Many faculty also realized this and were rightfully outraged by the Chancellors inflammatory statement. Responding quickly, nearly 130 UMass Amherst professors signed on to a letter rejecting the Chancellors denigration of BDS supporters and instead offered their own commitment to academic freedom. I am writing today to implore you and your colleagues to act with similar moral conviction as you did in October and to translate that commitment to academic freedom into symbolic and material action, by authoring and passing a BDS resolution through the Faculty Senate and the Massachusetts Society of Professors.

I am writing today to implore you and your colleagues to act with similar moral conviction as you did in October and to translate that commitment to academic freedom into symbolic and material action, by authoring and passing a BDS resolution through the Faculty Senate and the Massachusetts Society of Professors.

Timmy Sullivan

Your colleagues in Palestine and the diaspora, who form the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel, have outlined in the guidelines for the international academic boycott what is useful, tactical, and also meant by an academic boycott that targets the institutions* which comprise the main pillars of support for the occupation. Specifying 5 useful ways to enact a boycott, your colleagues ask you to:

*(it should be noted that the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel has stated that mere affiliation by individuals with an Israeli institution is not sufficient cause for boycott; rather, the call for boycott is of the institutions themselves and projects and events of such institutions, which does include events and projects with individuals representing such institutions)

It is high time that major institutions, such as ours, recognize what is at stake. Annexation is not a new phenomenon it is the ongoing Nakba (catastrophe), the logical next step in the Zionist project to fully colonize Palestine. Annexation of today is the unfinished business of 1948. And it will persist until Israels criminal impunity is meaningfully challenged and the structures of its military occupation are dismantled.

Passing a BDS resolution through our respective governance bodies is necessary because our University through institutional partnerships is aiding and abetting Israels illegal military occupation. Moreover, the Chancellor has in our name repeatedly issued statements that publicize the Zionist pseudo-logics necessary to promote, sustain, and normalize the ethnic cleansing of Palestine. These direct affiliations and patterns of selective support for the Zionist lobby make it clear that UMass is complicit.

As Mahmoud Nawajaa, the General Coordinator of the BDS National Committee, reminds us, for decades, international inaction and complicity have enabled Israel to violate the laws of belligerent occupation, advance its colonization of the occupied Palestinian territory and impose an apartheid regime that is enshrined in Israels domestic law. It is therefore incumbent upon us, as people of moral conscience and members of an institution and country which lend legitimizing support to the occupation, to heed the call for solidarity with Palestine. Thus, we must recognize our responsibility to enact BDS until such time that freedom is won.

In solidarity,

Timmy Sullivan

Commonwealth Honors College 20

B.A. in Political Science; Academic Minor in History

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Boycott! Divest! Sanction!: An Open Letter to the UMass Amherst Faculty Senate and Massachusetts Society of Professors - Amherst Wire

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Posted By admin on July 19, 2020

We must resist attempts to Mandela-wash Israels occupation of Palestine, writes Suraya Dadoo

In February 2018, I attended a panel discussion at Liliesleaf Farm that centred on the question: "Israel and Palestine: What lies ahead?" As the event was organised by a liberal Zionist group, the audience comprised mainly of pro-Israel supporters and lobbyists.

During the question and answer session, an audience member boldly declared that the problem in Palestine-Israel was that there wasnt a Palestinian Mandela who wanted to make peace, neither was there an Israeli equivalent of FW De Klerk who, according to the audience member, had "bravely" led South Africa out of apartheid and into negotiations and democracy. Almost everyone in the audience nodded their head enthusiastically in agreement.

In an instant, the man as well as those who agreed with him, had disempowered the peoples struggle - erasing decades of internal resistance, global solidarity, exile, torture, and assassinations, while feting De Klerk as a messiah of change.

As infuriating as the comments about De Klerk single-handedly ending apartheid were, even more tone deaf were the remarks that Mandela was simply a peace activist. The very place that we were sitting in was a monument to armed resistance - that Mandela himself led.

Did the largely pro-Israel audience in the auditorium at Liliesleaf think that Mandela was organising sit-ins and silent protests with Thabo Mbeki, Ahmed Kathrada, Walter Sisulu, Denis Goldberg and others when they regularly met at the farm for Umkhonto we Sizwe strategy meetings? As Accused Number 1, Mandela headed a group charged with 221 acts of sabotage that the apartheid state believed was designed to "ferment violent revolution". Mandela went to prison because he was angered by the injustice that he saw around him and he fought. Angrily. Sometimes violently.

Reconciliation and forgiveness

Yet, when Israels lobbyists talk about Mandelas legacy and its relevance for Palestine-Israel, they focus almost exclusively on his message of reconciliation and forgiveness.

Dialogue, forgiveness and reconciliation had a place in Mandelas political strategy, but it was never the main component of his lifes work. The centre of Mandelas activism and the cause that he was prepared to die for was the attainment of justice and the liberation of black South Africans not peace and reconciliation. Reconciliation and forgiveness only came after liberation had been achieved. It was a useful consequence and appropriate political tactic at a specific time.

Mandela the Peacemaker was only one of Madibas political personalities. When the anti-pass protests and stay-at-home campaigns of the late 1950s were met by the bullets of Sharpeville and Langa, Mandela adopted the armed struggle. When the apartheid government finally met the conditions for negotiated settlement in the early 1990s, Nelson Mandela became a principled, pragmatic negotiator unwilling to compromise dignity and liberation. Only once freedom was achieved, did President Mandela become an advocate for reconciliation. Mandela did not talk dialogue, forgiveness and reconciliation when non-violent protest was being met by the guns of apartheid. As acclaimed South African writer, Sisonke Msimang, plainly stated: "Mandela did not worship forgiveness"

It is cruelly ironic that the majority of pro-Israel supporters - who were never a part of South Africas liberation struggle - now dishonestly reduce the entirety of Mandelas revolutionary, radical, freedom-fighting life to that of a reconciler and pacifist in order to Mandela-wash Israels occupation of Palestine.

The Mandela that Israels apologists love and promote is always "reasonable" - never angry. This invented Mandela is nothing like the Palestinians. He would never have resorted to the Second Intifada. Except that the real Mandela, when speaking to Palestinians in Gaza in 1999, said that, "in cases where we cannot move forward, then if the only alternative is violence, then we will use violence".

Mandela's legacy weaponised

The Mandela that has been conjured up by pro-Israel lobbyists was never stubborn and always willing to surrender dignity and lives under the charade of negotiations. But in June 1992, Nelson Mandela walked out of negotiations in the wake of the Boipatong massacre where 46 people were killed in fighting instigated by the apartheid government. The real Mandela was also quick to call out Israel for land-grabbing while talking peace. "It is no use for Israel to talk of peace if they still hold on to Arab [Palestinian] territories which they conquered during the Six-Day War in 1967," he said in Gaza in 1999.

Israels propagandists especially those in South Africa have tried to weaponise Mandelas legacy against the Palestine solidarity movement, fiercely arguing that comparisons of Israels policies and treatment of Palestinians to blacks under apartheid in South Africa was something Mandela avoided.

Writing in 2011 in the book Jewish Memories of Mandela, David Saks, a key Israel lobbyist in South Africa, conceded: "Mandela never seems to have progressed very far from his initial post-jail understanding that their [the Palestinians] situation was essentially analogous to those of blacks in Apartheid South Africa." It is an observation that the pro-Israel lobby in South Africa has simply erased out of existence.

The Israel lobbys manipulation of Mandelas story from a revolutionary struggle for freedom to a sanitised tale of peacemaking is not innocuous. It is a deliberate distortion of Mandelas legacy to serve the hasbara (propaganda) project of the Israeli government whose policies are centred on the belief that Palestinians simply do not deserve the same rights as Israelis. This is an injustice and insult to the memory of Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela.

Unbanning of the ANC

The legacy that Israels lobbyists should be drawing from is FW De Klerk. On 2 February 1990, De Klerk announced the unbanning of the ANC and other liberation groups, the release of political prisoners including Nelson Mandela, and the inevitability of negotiations.

This did not happen because De Klerk had a sudden change of heart and wanted to restore dignity, justice and freedom to all South Africans. The apartheid government was left with little choice but to yield to both internal and external pressure. Intense internal resistance and protest, the armed struggle, and international sanctions that brought with it the crisis of the apartheid economy made February 2 both possible and necessary.

Israel has used a mythical 'peace process' to counter boycott and sanctions calls. Now that the annexation of Palestinian land is all but a formality, and the current government has discarded any pretence of a Palestinian state, the world can finally accept the reality that Israeli apartheid cannot be reformed, it needs to end. As its pariah status grows, Israels own February 2 moment wont be too far off, and with it justice, freedom and dignity for everyone living between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. Peace and reconciliation, as Nelson Mandela showed, can then take its proper place.

-Suraya Dadoo is a writer based in Johannesburg, South Africa. You can follow her on Twitter @Suraya_Dadoo.

You can read David Saks' response to this column here.

*Want to respond to the columnist? Send your letter or article to opinions@news24.com with your name, profile picture, contact details and location. We encourage a diversity of voices and views in our readers' submissions and reserve the right not to publish any and all submissions received.

Disclaimer:News24 encourages freedom of speech and the expression of diverse views. The views of columnists published on News24 are therefore their own and do not necessarily represent the views of News24.

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OPINION | The hijacking of Nelson Mandela's legacy by the Zionist lobby - News24

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Posted By admin on July 19, 2020

A recent study commissioned by the Solomon Observatory on Discrimination, an Italian Zionist think-tank, which was conducted by Euromedia Research, a statistical analysis organization, documents a chilling reality. The study demonstrates that classical 19th century anti-Semitism is still alive and well throughout the Italian peninsula. More worryingly, that it has evolved and developed subtly as a weapon that propels the ethnic or racist variant of political Jew-hatred into the 21st century: bias and hostility are expressed openly with iconographic and lexical forms that are increasingly becoming more and more aggressive.

According to Euromedia, contemporary anti-Semitism continues to perpetuate old stereotypes and myths about Jews. Those at the top of the list are that they dominate the world economy and practice social prevarication against Gentiles. Yet new manifestations of bias have now been thrown into the mix, namely the State of Israel, which identifies with the party of evil and guilt whenever a case may be at issue.

Surprisingly, the Shoah itself has not yet been fully grasped despite Holocaust education efforts and annual Holocaust Remembrance Day commemorations across the country. The data of this particular study unveils a disheartening story: while 10.5 percent of those interviewed believe that the Shoah has been exaggerated and its proportions were lesser than narrated by history, 1.3 percent negate the Holocaust altogether.

Youths between the ages of 18-24 are the most cognizant of anti-Semitic prejudice while those aged 25-44 are the most biased, more so than adults over 45.

Party affiliation also plays a relevant role in this study. Italians who vote for Forza Italia, a party sympathetic to Zionism and sensitive to Jewish issues, were less likely to hold negative views about Israel and Jews. On the other hand, the greatest anti-Semitic attitudes among Italians is found among those who vote for the following parties: the Northern League, the Five Star Movement and the Brothers of Italy all parties that are generally perceived as outsiders and hostile to Romes national politics despite the fact that the Northern League is the oldest party in the Italian Parliament today.

A certain apathy vis--vis anti-Semitism also emerges among voters of Italys left-leaning parties, namely the Democratic Party and Italia Viva both of which hold markedly pro-Arab stances.

Italian voters of centrist and libertarian orientation, who today suffer the least political representation in Italy, are warmest to the State of Israel and hold the least bias and prejudice against not only the latter, but also Jews in general.

According to the polls findings, anti-Semitism is the product of a general climate of hatred, as well as a consequence and corollary of the Arab-Israeli conflict.

However, the most significant revelation is also the most alarming. Alongside classical anti-Semitism a new devious breed of anti-Zionism masks anti-Semitism behind the guise of political criticism against the State of Israel. Not too long ago, an Italian court held it lawful to display a banner on the Grand Synagogue in the historic Jewish quarters of Vercelli, near Turin, bearing the inscription Israel murderers. In short, the ideology of Jews as jointly and severely liable for the actions of the State of Israel has gone mainstream, together with a stubborn view of Israel as being part and parcel of the collective Jew.

Israels thriving democracy is rightly open to criticism. However, unfair and biased attacks against Israel or Jews who support Israel need to be condemned and countered.

For this very reason, as early as 2016, the IHRA (International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance) developed a working definition of anti-Semitism including 11 operational examples illustrating bias, hostility and prejudice in the context of modern anti-Semitism. The IHRA definition is clear and unequivocal. If used to give guidelines to the courts, it would relieve judges from having to determine what constitutes anti-Semitism on a case-by-case basis.

In January 2020, the Italian Government adopted the IHRA definition and appointed Milena Santerini, a professor of pedagogy in Milan as its Special Envoy for the fight against anti-Semitism. Santerini is faced with no easy task. She will be judged by her effectiveness in promoting the adoption of the IHRA definition at all levels in Italy and in pushing a national agenda to combat anti-Semitism.

Fortunately, there are additional encouraging signs. The Republican Party of Italy (PRI), forever a staunch supporter of Zionism, was the first political party to formally adopt the IHRA definition. It is expected that other parties in Italy will follow suit.

The IHRA definition may also promote a cultural shift and a more balanced view of Zionism. Anti-Zionism is a slow-release poison pill that attacks Jewish identity at its historical, spiritual and psychological core. Italia Atlanticas Israel analyst Niram Ferretti puts it bluntly: denying the millenary link of the Jewish people with the Land of Israel means denying not only the Jewish people, but more importantly, their right to exist.

Bepi Pezzulli is a Solicitor specialised in International law and a foreign policy adviser covering Israel, the UK and the US. Currently, he is Executive Director of Italia Atlantica, a think-tank based in Rome, Italy. In 2018, he published "The other Brexit" (Milano Finanza Books), investigating the economic and geopolitical implications of Brexit. He is a columnist for the Italian daily financial newspaper Milano Finanza; and a pundit for the financial TV channel CNBC. He received degrees at Luiss Guido Carli in Rome (LLB), New York University (LLM), and Columbia University (JD).

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Italy, beware of the slow-release poison pill - The Times of Israel

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Posted By admin on July 19, 2020

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Peter BeinartsNew York Timesop-edadvocating the end of Israel as the nation-state of the Jewish people is a study in historical ignorance, willful deception and arrogant rejection of democracy.

Beinart proposed that a single binational, bi-religious state in what is now Israel, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip replace current Israel, whose Jewish population would then be given a homeland within the new nation. But Beinart is woefully ignorant of previous attempts to create or maintain binational or bi-religious states.

Beinart ignores the lessons of history surrounding the former Yugoslavia Titos failed effort to create a single artificial nation from different ethnicities and religions which ended in genocide, tragedy and its breakup into several states now living in relative peace. He omits any mention of Lebanon a failed experiment in sharing power between Muslims and Christians. He writes as if Hindu India still included Muslim Pakistan, instead of having been divided after considerable bloodshed and divisiveness. He focuses instead on two countries, Northern Ireland and South Africa, which bear little relationship to current-day Israel, the West Bank and Gaza. Northern Ireland is a country whose population is ethnically similar, with only religious differences at a time when religion is playing a far less important role in the life of many secular Northern Irish. South Africa was a country in which a tiny minority of whites dominated a large majority of Blacks, and is now a dominantly Black nation.

Israel and the Palestinian territories are totally different. The population of Israel is a mixture of Ashkenazi and Sephardic Jews, Muslims and Christians. The West Bank and Gaza are comprised almost exclusively of Muslim Arabs.

There used to be a mixture of Muslim and Christians, but most Christians have been forced out. The combined Muslim Arab population of Israel, the West Bank and Gaza is close in number to the Jewish population of Israel. If Israel were to end its existence as the nation-state of the Jewish people as Beinart advocates and become a Jewish homeland in a single binational, bi-religious state, a demographic war would become inevitable, in which Jews and Muslims would compete to become a majority. As soon as a Muslim majority materialized, the Jewish homeland would become precisely the kind of Bantustan that Beinart has railed against in the context of South Africa. The Jewish minority would be ruled by the Muslim majority, even if it were given some degree of autonomy. Their protection would be largely in the hands of the Muslim majority, many of whom believe there is no place for a Jewish entity anywhere in the region.

It was precisely this fear that led to the creation of political Zionism in the 19th century. Theodor Herzl and others experienced the anti-Semitism of Europe and the inability of the Jewish minority there to protect itself against pogroms and discrimination. Placing the safety of Israels Jewish population in the hands of a potentially hostile Muslim majority would be an invitation to possible genocide.

Beinart is insistent that todays Israelis and Jews must ignore the lessons of the Holocaust. But those who ignore history are destined to repeat it. And Jews cannot afford to see a repetition of their tragic past.

Beinart never discusses the issue of who would control the armed forces and, most particular, Israels nuclear arsenal, under a binational and bi-religious state. Recall that the current Hamas constitution demands that a Palestinian state be an Islamic nation bound by Sharia law. Even if the Palestinian majority state would allow the Jewish minority homeland to have its own domestic laws, the state itself, with its Muslim majority, would presumably control the armed forces. This would create yet another Islamic state, among the many that currently exist but this one would have a nuclear arsenal. A Palestinian majority would also not allow persecuted Jews from around the world to seek asylum, as they can today under Israels Law of Return. Instead, the Palestinian state would enact its own law of return that would allow millions of exiles to return and assure a permanent Muslim supermajority.

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Beinart's Final Solution: Israel NOT Nation-State of the Jewish People - The Jewish Press - JewishPress.com

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Posted By admin on July 17, 2020

Peter Beinart, an influential liberal commentator on Israel and Zionism, poked a very large stick into a hornets nest this month by admitting he had finally abandoned his long-cherished commitment to a two-state solution.

Variously described as the pope of liberal Zionism and a bellwether for the American Jewish community, Beinart broke ranks in two essays. Writing in the New York Times and in Jewish Currents magazine, he embraced the idea of equality for all - Israelis and Palestinians.

Recognition of the structural racism towards these 1.8 million Palestinian citizens... was a clear sign that he had begun poking into the dark recesses of Zionism

Beinart concluded: The painful truth is that the project to which liberal Zionists like myself have devoted ourselves for decades - a state for Palestinians separated from a state for Jews - has failed It is time for liberal Zionists to abandon the goal of Jewish-Palestinian separation and embrace the goal of Jewish-Palestinian equality.

Similarly, the NYT article was headlined: I no longer believe in a Jewish state. Beinarts main point - that a commitment to Israel is now entirely incompatible with a commitment to equality for the regions inhabitants - is a potential hammer blow to the delusions of liberal Jews in the United States.

His declaration is the apparent culmination of a long intellectual and emotional journey Beinart has conducted in the public eye. It's a journey many American liberal Jews have taken with him.

Once the darling of the war-mongering liberal establishment in Washington, he supported the illegal attack on Iraq in 2003. Three years later, he wrote a largely unrepentant book titled The Good Fight: Why Liberals - and Only Liberals - Can Win the War on Terror and Make America Great Again.

There is no heavyweight publication in the US that has not hosted his thoughts. Foreign Policy magazine ranked him in the top 100 global thinkers in 2012.

Why Peter Beinart's call for a one-state solution misses the mark

But his infatuation with Israel and Zionism has been souring for years. A decade ago, he published a seminal essay on how young American Jews were increasingly alienated from their main leadership organisations, which he criticised for worshipping at the altar of Israel even as Israeli governments lurched ever further rightwards. His argument later formed the basis of a book, The Crisis of Zionism.

The tensions he articulated finally exploded into physical confrontation in 2018, when he was detained at Israels main airport and nearly denied entry based on his political views.

Beinart has not only written caustically about the occupation - a fairly comfortable deflection for most liberal Zionists - but has also increasingly turned his attention to Israels behaviour towards its large Palestinian minority, one in five of the population.

Recognition of the structural racism towards these 1.8 million Palestinian citizens, a group whose identity is usually glossed over as Israeli Arabs, was a clear sign that he had begun poking into the dark recesses of Zionism, areas from which most of his colleagues shied away.

Beinarts two essays have been greeted with hesitancy by some of those who might be considered natural allies.

Understandably, some Palestinians find reason to distrust Beinarts continuing description of himself as a Zionist, even if now a cultural rather than political one. They also resent a continuing western colonial mentality that very belatedly takes an interest in equality for Palestinians only because a prominent liberal Jew adopts the cause.

Beinarts language is problematic for many Palestinians too. Not least, he frames the issue as between Palestinians and Jews, implying that Jews everywhere still have a colonial claim on the historic lands of Palestine, rather than those who live there today as Israelis.

Similarly, among many anti-Zionists, there is disappointment that Beinart did not go further and explicitly prescribe a single democratic state of the kind currently being advanced in the region by small but growing numbers of Israelis and Palestinians.

But the importance of Beinarts intervention lies elsewhere. The American is not the first prominent Jewish figure to publicly turn his back on the idea of a Jewish state. Notably, the late historian Tony Judt did the same - to much uproar - in a 2003 essay published by the New York Review of Books. He called Israel an anachronism.

The most fundamental tenet of liberal Zionism - that a Jewish state is necessary, verging on sacred - is already being tested to the breaking point

But Judt had been chiefly associated with his contributions to understanding European history, not Zionism or Israel. And his essay arrived at a very different historical moment, when Israelis and Jews overseas were growing more entrenched in their Zionism. The Oslo Accords had fizzled into irrelevance at the height of a Palestinian uprising.

Beinarts articles have landed at a problematic time for his main audience. The most fundamental tenet of liberal Zionism - that a Jewish state is necessary, verging on sacred - is already being tested to the breaking point.

The trigger for the articles is the very tangible threat from Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahus government, backed by the Trump White House, to annex swaths of the West Bank.

The significance of Netanyahus position on annexation, as Israeli human rights lawyer Michael Sfard has noted, depends not simply on whether annexation is realised on the ground, now or later. The declaration itself crosses a Rubicon.

Netanyahu and the right-wing faction who now control Israel unchallenged have made it explicit that they do not consider the occupation to be a temporary arrangement that will eventually be resolved in peace talks.

Why are Israel's allies suddenly concerned about its latest annexation?

The intent to annex, whether or not the US allows such a move, now taints everything Israel does in the occupied territories. It proves beyond any doubt - even to liberal Jews who have been living in deep denial - that Israels goal is to permanently seize the occupied territories.

That, in turn, means that Israel has only two possible approaches to the Palestinian populations living in those territories as long as it denies them equality: It can either carry out ethnic cleansing operations to expel them, or rule over them in a formal, explicit arrangement of apartheid. That may not constitute much of a tangible difference on the ground, but it marks a legal sea change.

Occupation, however ugly, is not in breach of international law, though actions related to it, such as settlement-building, may be. This allowed many liberal Jews, such as Beinart, a small comfort blanket that they have clung to tightly for decades.

When challenged about Israels behaviour, they could always claim that the occupation would one day end, that peace talks were around the corner, that partition was possible if only Palestinians were willing to compromise a little more.

But with his annexation plan, Netanyhu ripped that comfort blanket out of their clutches and tore it to shreds. Ethnic cleansing and apartheid are both crimes against humanity. No ifs, no buts. As Sfard points out: Once Israel began officially striving for annexation - that is, for perpetuating its rule by force - it lost this meagrealibi.

Sfard makes a further important legal observation in a report written for the human rights group Yesh Din. If Israel chooses to institute an apartheid regime in parts of the occupied West Bank - either formally or through creeping legal annexation, as it is doing now - that regime does not end at the West Banks borders. It would mean that the Israeli regime in its entirety is an apartheid regime. That Israel is an Apartheid state.

Of course, one would have to be blind not to have understood that this was where political Zionism was always heading - even more so after the 1967 war, when Israels actions disclosed that it had no intention of returning the Palestinian territories it had seized.

But the liberal Zionist condition was precisely one of willful blindness. It shut its eyes tight and saw no evil, even as Israel debased Palestinian life there for more than half a century. Looking back, Beinart recognises his own self-inflicted credulousness. In practice, Israel annexed the West Bank long ago, he writes in the New York Times.

In his two articles, Beinart denies liberal Jews the one path still available to them to rationalise Palestinian oppression. He argues that those determined to support a Jewish state, whatever it does, are projecting their own unresolved, post-Holocaust fears onto Palestinians.

In the Zionist imagination, according to Beinart, Palestinians have been reinvented as heirs to the Nazis. As a result, most Jews have been manipulated into framing Israels settler-colonialism in zero-sum terms - as a life-or-death battle. In that way, they have been able to excuse Israels perpetual abuse of Palestinians.

Or as Beinart puts it: Through a historical sleight of hand that turns Palestinians into Nazis, fear of annihilation has come to define what it means to be an authentic Jew. He adds that Jewish trauma, not Palestinian behaviour, has ended in the depiction of Palestinians as compulsive Jew-haters.

Annexation has forced Beinart to confront that trauma and move beyond it. Perhaps not surprisingly, most of Israels supporters have been reluctant to follow suit or discard their comforting illusions. Some are throwing tantrums, others sulking in the corner.

The Zionist right and mainstream have described Beinart as a traitor, a self-hating Jew, and a collaborator with Palestinian terrorism. David Weinberg of the Jerusalem Institute for Strategy and Security called Beinart a shill for Israels enemies who secretes poison.

The view of Israeli Jews will change, just as white South Africans' did, when they suffer a harsher international environment and the resulting cost-benefit calculus has to be adjusted

Dan Shapiro, a former US ambassador to Israel, described Beinarts advocacy of equality as a disaster in the making, while Dani Dayan, Israels consul general in New York, accused Beinart of wanting Israel to drop dead.

The liberal Zionist establishment has been no less discomfited. Aaron David Miller, a former US Middle East envoy, warned that Beinarts prescription was an illusion tethered to a fantasy wrapped in an impossibility.

And Beinarts friend, Jeremy Ben Ami, head of the two-state lobby group J Street, snatched back the ragged remains of the comfort blanket, arguing that peace talks would be revived eventually. In a standard Zionist deflection, Ben Ami added that Israel was no different from the US in being far from perfect.

But to understand how quickly liberal Zionist reasoning may crumble, it is worth focusing on a critique of Beinarts articles by the Israeli newspaper Haaretzs in-house liberal Zionist, Anshel Pfeffer.

Pfeffer makes two highly unconvincing arguments to evade Beinarts logic. Firstly, he claims that a one-state solution - of any variety - is impossible because there is no support for it among Palestinians and Israelis. It is, he argues, a conceit Beinart has absorbed from Jews and Palestinians in the US.

Lets overlook Pfeffers obvious mistake in ignoring the fact that a single state already exists - a Greater Israel in which Palestinians have been living for decades under a highly belligerent system of apartheid, laced with creeping ethnic cleansing. Still, his claims about where Israeli and Palestinian public opinion currently lies are entirely misleading, as is his assumption about how Beinarts attack on liberal Zionism may impact regional possibilities.

Israel's annexation plan is the Nakba revisited

The views of Palestinians in the occupied territories (Pfeffer, of course, ignores the views of refugees) have been undergoing radical and rapid change. Support for the two-state solution has collapsed. This is far from surprising, given the current political context.

Among Palestinians, there are signs of exasperation and a mirroring of Israeli Jewish intransigence. In one recent poll, a majority of Palestinian respondents demanded a return of all of historic Palestine. What can be inferred from this result is probably not much more than the human tendency to put on a brave show when faced with a highly acquisitive bully.

In fact, increasingly Palestinians understand that, if they want to end the occupation and apartheid, they will need to overthrow their compromised leaders in the Palestinian Authority (PA), effectively Israels local security contractor. It is an uprising against the PA, not polls, that will seal the fate of the two-state solution. What may inspire Palestinians to take on the risk of a major confrontation with their leaders?

A part will be played, however small, by Palestinians understanding of how a shift from a struggle for statehood to a struggle for equal rights in one state will be received abroad. Liberal Jewish opinion in the US will be critical in changing such perceptions - and Beinart has just placed himself at the heart of that debate.

Meanwhile, a majority of Israeli Jews support either Greater Israel or an end-of-the-rainbow two-state solution, one in which Palestinians are denied any meaningful sovereignty.They do so for good reason, because either option perpetuates the status quo of a single state in which they prosper at a heavy cost to Palestinians. The bogus two-state solution privileges them, just as bantustans once did white South Africans.

The view of Israeli Jews will change, just as white South Africans did, when they suffer a harsher international environment and the resulting cost-benefit calculus has to be adjusted.

In that sense, the issue isnt what Israeli Jews think now, when they are endlessly indulged, but what Israels sponsors - chiefly the US - eventually demand. That is why Beinarts influence on the thinking of liberal American Jews cannot be discounted. Long term, what they insist on may prove critically important.

That was why Beinarts harshest critics, in attacking his two essays, also warned of the current direction of travel.

Jonathan Tobin, editor of the Jewish News Syndicate, argued that Beinarts views were indicative of the crisis of faith within much of American Jewry. Weinberg described the two essays as frightening because they charted liberal Jews intellectual journey towards anti-Zionism and self-immolation.

Both understand that, if liberal Jews abandon Zionism, one leg of the Israeli stool will be gone.

The other problem Pfeffer inadvertently highlights with liberal Zionism is contained in his mocking dismissal of Beinarts claim that the justification for a Jewish home needs to be rooted in morality.

Pfeffer laughs this off as utopianism, arguing instead that Israels existence has always depended on what he vaguely terms pragmatism. What he means, once the euphemism is stripped out, is that Israel has always pursued a policy of might is right.

Beinart is doubtless ahead of most liberal Jews in the US in rejecting Israel as a Jewish state. But it would be foolish indeed to imagine that there are not many others already contemplating following in his footsteps

But Pfeffers suggestion that Israel does not also need to shape a moral narrative about its actions - even if that narrative bears no relation to reality - is patently implausible.

Israel has not relied solely on its own might. It has needed the patronage of western states to help it diplomatically, financially and militarily. And their enthusiastic support has depended on domestic perceptions of Israel as a moral agent.

Israel understands this only too well. It has presented itself as a light unto the nations, a state that redeemed a barren land, and one that has the most moral army in the world. Those are all moral claims on western support.

Beinart has demonstrated that the moral discourse for Israel is a lost cause. And for that reason, Israels chief allies now are states led by covert, and sometimes overt, antisemites and proud authoritarians.

Beinart is doubtless ahead of most liberal Jews in the US in rejecting Israel as a Jewish state. But it would be foolish indeed to imagine that there are not many others already contemplating following in his footsteps.

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.

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Liberal Zionism begins to make the journey towards a one-state solution - Middle East Eye

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Posted By admin on July 17, 2020

On Tuesday, I joined Mondoweiss editor Philip Weiss and writer and activist Nada Elia for a discussion titled The End of Zionism: Thoughts and Next Steps, co-organized with Haymarket Books.

The starting point was a talk I gave in 2009, at the Hampshire College conference on boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS).

My talk predicted with some accuracy how Israels battle for legitimacy around the world would play out.

Then, as now, Israel retains immense power. But I argued that despite overwhelming military power, an ideological project that loses legitimacy in the eyes of the world would eventually crumble.

I described how Israel would try to win back declining support among young people in the United States and elsewhere by marketing itself as LGBTQ friendly and environmentally conscious propaganda strategies known as pinkwashing and greenwashing.

All of this is designed to obscure and distract from the fundamental facts about Zionism, Israels racist state ideology which holds that Jews from anywhere in the world have a right to settle in historic Palestine and maintain a Jewish-majority state there that trumps any rights of the indigenous Palestinian people.

This month also marks the 15th anniversary of the Palestinian call for BDS another opportunity for reflection, assessment and looking to what is ahead.

In our Tuesday webinar we also spoke about what Peter Beinarts recent abandonment of the two-state solution and Jewish statehood portends for liberal Zionism in general.

Beinart, the author of the 2012 book The Crisis of Zionism, had over the last decade been the great hope of the liberal Zionist establishment that it could lay new roots for long-term, broad support of Israel.

But with Beinarts defection and embrace of some form of one-state solution, it looks like liberal Zionism as it has existed for decades is in total collapse.

As the world goes through the pandemic, and the attendant political, economic and social crises, we are also seeing a resurgence of activism and radicalism especially the Black-led uprising against systemic white supremacy.

Can this moment also deliver justice in Palestine? Will we see an end to Israeli apartheid and oppression in the next five, 10 or 20 years?

Our panel could not predict that with certainty, of course, but we had a lively and passionate discussion about what it might take to get us there.

Watch the video above.

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The end of Zionism - The Electronic Intifada

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Posted By admin on July 17, 2020

Israels impending annexation of the West Bank has put the fate of the two-state solution or, perhaps more accurately its death back in the headlines. Yet neither Benjamin Netanyahus announcement of his annexation intentions, nor the Trump peace plan, killed the chances of two states, which ceased to be realistic long ago. What the great drama of annexation playing out in the Anglo-American press is really about in no small part due to the exclusion of Palestinian voices is whether liberal Zionists will reconcile themselves to this reality or continue to deny it.

While some liberal Zionists, like the Jewish Currents editor-at-large Peter Beinart, now recognize that, as he wrote last week, the traditional two-state solution no longer offers a compelling alternative to Israels path, most seem likely to choose the path of continued denial. For many liberal Zionists as well as those further to the right a two-state solution has for decades been less a practical policy proposal than an article of faith, a constitutive political fiction that has enabled them to reconcile their contradictory commitments to both ethnonationalism and liberal democracy.

The abstract idea of two states has also served a valuable strategic purpose for the Israeli government and professional Israel advocates. References to Israels putative commitment to two states in theory have become a way to shield Israel from criticism, and consequences, for actions that in practice rendered a two-state solution impossible.

The vast majority of Zionist and pro-Israel groups even, or perhaps especially, the self-defined liberal ones will be loth to confront their contradictions, or surrender their talking points, now.

Indeed, faced with annexation, liberal Jewish groups have so far responded with the same kinds of warnings they have issued for decades. In a joint statement, eight Jewish organizations including the New Israel Fund and Americans for Peace Now declared in May that annexation would show, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that the government of Israel no longer seeks a two-state solution. Back in March, when Benny Gantz joined Netanyahus government, J Street cautioned that annexation was an absolute red line that Israel must not cross.

Yet its been obvious for years that Israels government no longer seeks a two-state solution: annexation would hardly be the first line Israel has crossed without facing any serious consequences. In fact, since before the Oslo process began in 1993, Israel has continually crossed supposedly decisive lines.

Meron Benvenisti, former deputy mayor of Jerusalem, warned in 1982 that, with the settler population in the West Bank approaching 100,000, Israel would cross the threshold past which territorial compromise would become impossible. When Israel blew past that, new lines were drawn: now 250,000 settlers, now 500,000; now construction in the E1 corridor, between East Jerusalem and the settlement of Maaleh Adumim; and now, finally, annexation of the West Bank and the Jordan Valley.

With each new line crossed, believers in a two-state solution have found new excuses to ignore the obvious. This is especially true of liberal Zionists. Since 1967, they have clung to the myth that Israels military occupation of the West Bank is temporary, and, consequently, that Israel proper defined as the parliamentary regime within Israels pre-1967 borders can be meaningfully disentangled from the half-century-old military dictatorship on the other side of the Green Line. The occupations putative temporariness enabled liberal Zionists to see themselves as genuine liberals, to define Israel as a democracy. Annexation, which would confirm that the occupation is permanent and inextricable from Israel proper, would in theory force liberal Zionists to decide between support for democratizing the one-state reality, or support for apartheid.

Wholesale ideological reversals are uncommon, however. With a few notable exceptions, liberal Zionists conversion to non-state Zionism, non-Zionism, or anti-Zionism seems unlikely. And, after all, over the course of more than a decade of Netanyahu governments, liberal Zionists have become habituated to the dissonance between their values and those the Israeli government acts on.

But the idea of two states will continue outliving any realistic prospect for a two-state solution for those to the liberal Zionists right, too. Israels foreign ministry and professional Israel advocates alike recognize that the two-state solution has served as a useful means of deflecting criticism of Israeli territorial expansion. After roughly a dozen Democratic congressional representatives signed a letter, spearheaded by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, calling to condition US military funding to Israel in the event of annexation, Aipac responded that doing so would, paradoxically, make a two-state solution less likely.

Netanyahu and his allies in the US are making the argument for annexation in similar terms. In a Washington Post op-ed, Ron Dermer, Israels ambassador to the US, argued that annexation actually will open the door to to a realistic two-state solution and get the peace process out of the cul-de-sac it has been stuck in for decades. Likewise, the authors of the Trump administrations peace plan were careful not only to construe it as an instrument for achieving a two-state solution but as the logical continuation of the Oslo process.

While theres no small degree of cynicism here, it also reflects a genuine ideological commitment. Most American Zionists, even rightwing ones, do not openly support an apartheid-style single state, unlike hardline Israeli settlers who oppose the Trump plan because it provides for areas of nominal Palestinian autonomy. In this sense, the position staked out by Dermer and the Trump administration is not that different from the liberal Zionist one: both envision a Palestinian state as an archipelago of isolated, non-contiguous Bantustans subordinated to Israeli control.

Yet as long as Zionists outside of Israel remain uncomfortable with openly defending an apartheid-style regime in terms that reflect the reality on the ground, the rhetoric of the two-state idea will serve as an invaluable means of obscuring the actual ramifications of their position not only from the public, but from themselves. Political fictions of such existential importance take a long time to die, if they ever fully do. The lack of a viable two-state solution does not mean liberal Zionists will stop believing in one.

Joshua Leifer is an assistant editor at Jewish Currents, where a longer version of this article first appeared

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The two-state solution is a political fiction liberal Zionists still cling to - The Guardian

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Posted By admin on July 17, 2020

We have followed the meteoric career of Bari Weiss with keen interest, admittedly often for the shock and humor value, and two days ago the meteor left The New York Times with a resignation letter that says she was made to feel unwelcome in the illiberal new political environment at the paper.

I hesitated to write about Weisss news. First, Weiss is such a gifted careerist that even this moment feels like shtik: Bari Weiss playing her own persecution for the greater glory of Bari Weiss, and and, why play any part in that? Though I also found her letter persuasive about ways she was made to feel uncomfortable re the intolerance of the left. As a writer with leftwing goals, I know that if you stray from certain views you will bring down cascades of scorn, and its not good for independent thought. (In fact, its why I no longer have much interest in being an intellectual; theres a sense that all the hard works been done already if youre on the left, read from the script, mic check.)

But here I go because Weisss departure from the Times is real news, and important for what it says about the place of Zionism in the media.Weiss has made a career as a Zionist warrior, often smearing anti-Zionists in ways that she is quick to call McCarthyism when others employ the same methods.

Two points in her resignation letter leap out.

Weiss cites as a count against the Times the alacrity with which the newspaper amended a 2019 travel article about Jaffa for failing to touch on important aspects of Jaffas makeup and its history (as she quotes the correction), compared to its failure to amend Cheryl Strayeds interview with Alice Walker last May to say that Alice Walker has made antisemitic comments. The cases are not comparable; and Weisss comparison says way more about her than the Times. No doubt Alice Walker has made some foolish commentsin fact the Times covered them ad nauseum just two years ago, in two articles about her alleged antisemitism in an earlier interview. The question is whether Alice Walker, a person of great achievement, gets to live these comments down or are they an important aspect of her career that must be pinned to her name at all times? My opinion is, the Timess two pieces on the matter are plenty; certainly no one can say the Times hasnt publicized Walkers comments. Now look at the Jaffa article. It was a piece of pure puffery for Israeli tourism that in characterizing Jaffa as an ancient Tel Aviv neighborhood left out truly the central aspect of its modern history: the fact that barely a generation ago this city was the pearl of Palestinian culture, and that beginning with the Zionist terrorist gangs (which later supplied Israeli prime ministers), rolling barrel bombs into Palestinian neighborhoods, Palestinians were forced into the sea during the ethnic cleansing of the Nakba period, when tens of thousands of residents were evicted, including such luminaries as Ibrahim abu-Lughod. We can only imagine the outcry if the Times had run any similar travel piece about a Lithuanian/Russian village where my ancestors were subject to pogroms in the late 19th century without mentioning the blood in the soil.

This distortion is typical of Bari Weisss thinking.

The former opinion editor also brags about bringing Matti Friedman into the paper. He is a propagandist for poor little Israel a tiny village on the volcano of Islam, is his metaphor who wrote one of four pieces that the NYT op-ed page ran justifying the slaughter by Israeli snipers of Palestinian demonstrators in Gaza over a few months in 2018.

So Bari Weiss is proud of her hand in those op-eds. This position is indefensible; It goes without saying, we have never seen a piece in the Times justifying Palestinian terror attacks; were such a piece to slip through, editors would lose their jobs in an instant. No one has lost their job for approving these vicious arguments.

The Times op-ed page is surely making moves to the left these days in the context of the George Floyd uprisings But it has so far held the line on anti-Zionism and Palestinian solidarity. Yes it was big news last week that it ran Peter Beinarts op-ed saying he no longer believes in a Jewish state. Though what does it tell you about the discourse that a critique Palestinians have been saying for a very long time without getting published in the Times has to be delivered by a man who still calls himself a Zionist?

As Krystal Ball said on Twitter, There is no issue of legitimate inquiry which is more likely to get you cancelled than support for Palestinian rights. She describes Bari Weiss as an intellectual architect of that regime of censorship.

Many have pointed to Bari Weisss origins as an ideologue at Columbia U trying to get Palestinian professors dismissed. I try to give Weiss a break on that because of all the stupid things I said in my (protracted) youth, except that Bari Weiss has prolonged this role by making accusations against anti-Zionists that are if nothing illiberal. She has said we are anti-semites and as dangerous as white nationalists. In her book on antisemitism, Weiss published the foolish claim that antizionist Jews are as deeply opposed to Jewish interests as many of our communitys enemies. In a talk at a Jewish organization with Jake Tapper, Weiss dismissed Jewish supporters of BDS as being like Jews who had their circumcisions surgically reversed so as to fit in to the larger culture.

Zionism is Judaism, in Weisss view of the world, so if you dont like Zionism, prepare to be stamped as an antisemite and (justifiably) marginalized from all mainstream platforms. This is a toxic attitude and much as I am dismayed by the lefts censoriousness, Id note that Weisss school of intolerance has affected me more directly(I have been fired twice by mainstream orgs for being anti-Zionist).

Bari Weiss has also argued for Jewish power in the U.S. establishment, indeed a special status in American public life, so long as Jews are Zionist. BDS is an anti-semitic conspiracy theory aimed at Jewish power, she said. [I]f you want to be a part of the coalition of the oppressed, you need to publicly disavow any kind of Jewish power at all Support for Israel, Jewish success, apologizing for Jewish success.

Our Jewish specialness goes way back. We invented the idea that people shouldnt be slaves, and that human life is sacred, Weiss says, and that specialness is frankly why we drive people crazy still. Such belief in Jewish exceptionalism was the norm in my fathers generation, and I have certainly dipped into it at times myself; but Bari Weiss makes cultural pride problematic by infusing it with celebrations of establishment power and Israeli might. For instance, she said that Jews are insane not to perceive that they are safe walking around New York City because of Israels military strength, and she said that Jews should stop giving money to prestige institutions like Harvard and Columbia because they have given harbor to anti-Zionism.

I think Weiss is a talented writer who will be with us for a long time; but when it comes to Zionism she is an ideological hack who might as well be cribbing her fathers handouts from AIPAC and the ZOA. After Pittsburgh she declared that criticizing rightwing Israeli government officials for visiting the grieving Jewish community there was an inappropriate politicization of their visit. Even young leftwing Jews welcomed the arrival of two Netanyahu loyalists, she said, because it showed we are all one people.

You better believethey [IfNotNow and Bend the Arc] liked the fact that Ron Dermer and Naftali Bennett showed up in the same way that Israeli officials show up after the shooting of a Hypercacher in France. Its sending a message that we are all one, Am Yisrael [the people of Israel].To politicize that I just think is wrong.

IfNotNow specifically rejected this projection, but the delusion shows, Weiss has always reduced Jewish life in our country to some branch office of the larger Zionist enterprise.

It seems obvious to say that Bari Weisss departure takes place amidst a Zionist discursive collapse Beinarts apostasy, the downfall of Eliot Engel, the mutiny of 500 left-Zionist recruits at one Israel lobby group, and 1000 at J Street, the defection of even centrist Jewish donors over Israel, and the willingness of a few American politicians anyway tosuggest that military aid to Israel be cut due to its endless expansionism. This is real progress. And in that sense Bari Weisss exit is good news for Palestinian news and opinion. A reliable Israel lobbyist is going to find some other venue that is less prominent in the making of mainstream opinion. There are going to be more Palestinians in the Times. Maybe the paper wont run so many justifications of Israeli massacres.

Weiss will surely say that her departure is evidence of anti-semitism on the left. It is more accurate to say that anti-Zionism is now the spirit of left politics, and it is staking a claim on liberal institutions.

Thx to notes from Adam Horowitz, Scott Roth, James North, Allison Deger, Dave Reed, Norman Finkelstein, Michael Arria and Donald Johnson.

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Bari Weiss leaves the 'NYT' and that's bad for Zionists Mondoweiss - Mondoweiss

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