Jewish American Heritage Month

Posted By simmons on February 16, 2017

The political positions of the Progressive Action Coalition at UGA are known as the Points of Unity. These political positions orient our objectives to resist administrative policies that prioritize profit over people and all oppressive forces at UGA and the greater Athens community.

PAC expected to face vilification for its anti-Zionist stance, as demonstrated by thisrecent Red & Black op-ed, in which the author claims that PAC is excluding Jewish students. The author presents Israel as an enlightened and democratic state that genuinely strives to be inclusive of all its citizens.

This rhetorical tactic attempts to obfuscate the reality in which Israel is an apartheid state that continues to ethnically cleanse and militarily occupy Palestine.

The author is the president of Dawgs for Israel, an organization at UGA which has repeatedly denied the existence of the Israeli military occupation of Palestine. The Israeli occupation is recognized by theUnited Nations, theInternational Committee of the Red Cross,Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and national governments, including theU.S. State Department.

An organization that refuses to acknowledge the widely-recognized issue of Israeli occupation cannot be taken seriously.

PAC opposes Zionism because it is a nationalistic political ideology which called for the establishment of a European Jewish-majority state in Palestine in which indigenous Palestinians already resided.

To establish Israel in 1948 and to ensure its Jewish demographic majority, the Zionist leadership ordered theethnic cleansing of Palestine. Zionist militias destroyed hundreds of Palestinian villages and carried out massacres and expulsion.

The author declared Israel is inclusion. Does this sound like inclusion? Is Israel inclusion when it expelled my grandparents from al-Lydd in 1948? By the end of 1949, 750,000 Palestinians were expelled from their homeland.

Early Zionist leaders made explicit references topopulation transfer. Even many Jews oppose the false definition of Zionism as a liberation movement. Liberation movements do not colonize, occupy and expel other peoples.

After the Six-Day War in 1967, Israel militarily occupied East Jerusalem, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, also known as the Occupied Palestinian Territories. In the OPT, Israel continues to establish illegal settlements, annex Palestinian land, demolish Palestinian homes and severely restrict Palestinian movement, actions defined as apartheid by theUnited Nations.

Moreover, the Israeli occupation of Palestine is characterized by the routine killing and mass imprisonment of Palestinians,including children.

In Israel, more than 50 codified laws directly or indirectly discriminate against Palestinian citizens of Israel based solely on their ethnicity, rendering them second or even third class citizens in their own homeland.

Additionally, about 35 Palestinian villages in Israel, some of which pre-date the establishment of the state, are unrecognized by the government, receive no services and are not listed on official maps. The government denies them building permits, running water, electricity, roads, sewer systems and trash removal.

In order to expand Israeli Jewish communities,Israel routinely demolishes villages in the Naqab/Negev Desert. This is apartheid. The author claims to stand against Zionism is to stand against indigenous peoples rights despite Israels long history of subjugating the indigenous Palestinian people.

The author also argues that Israel sends humanitarian aid to other countries. However, this does not matter when Israel subjects Palestinians to an apartheid regime which deprives them of movement, security, agency and self-determination.

The only intersectional thing about Zionism is that it is intersectionally oppressive. When Zionists claim Israel does not discriminate against sexual orientation and religion, we remember that the brutality of Israeli occupation does not exempt Palestinian LGBTQ people and Palestinian Christians.

PAC will remain steadfast in opposing all forms of racism, including anti-Semitism, and all forms of colonialism, including Zionist settler-colonialism. PAC reaffirms its commitment to the Palestinian cause.

As the Palestinian writer Ghassan Kanafani once said, the Palestinian cause is not a cause for Palestinians only, but a cause for every revolutionary, wherever he is, as a cause of the exploited and oppressed masses in our era.

- Submitted by Osama Mor on behalf of the UGA Progressive Action Coalition and Students for Justice in Palestine

Read more here:
OPINION: To support Zionism is to support apartheid - Red and Black

Category: Zionism
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