Dear President Harring, Provost Furge and Professor Dowd:

We write on behalf of the Middle East Studies Association of North America (MESA) and its Committee on Academic Freedom to express our grave concern about the announcement by Muhlenberg College that it intends to terminate Dr. Maura Finkelstein, a tenured member of the college’s faculty, because of an Instagram post that she had reposted. Even if some people may find the post objectionable, we believe that Professor Finkelstein’s reposting is protected by the First Amendment and by the principles of academic freedom. It cannot reasonably be construed as a violation of Muhlenberg College’s equal opportunity and nondiscrimination policy or justify her termination.

MESA was founded in 1966 to promote scholarship and teaching on the Middle East and North Africa. The preeminent organization in the field, the Association publishes the prestigious International Journal of Middle East Studies and has nearly 2,800 members worldwide. MESA is committed to ensuring academic freedom and freedom of expression both within the region and in connection with the study of the region in North America and outside of North America.

Dr. Finkelstein is a cultural anthropologist whose research has addressed multiple geographies and theoretical realms. Her first book, The Archive of Loss: Lively Ruination in Mill Land Mumbai, charted the experiences of textile mill workers in the city of Mumbai. She is currently at work on a second book about equine-assisted therapy. Her scholarship and pedagogy have also engaged a range of issues relating to Palestine/Israel; her teaching includes a course on Palestine and she has published peer-reviewed work on her experiences teaching this material.

In the aftermath of the 7 October 2023 assault on Israel, Professor Finkelstein was subjected to intense attacks as a result of the criticism of Israel and of Zionism that she expressed in published work, academic forums and social media posts. Among other things, a number of donors to and alumni of Muhlenberg College circulated a petition demanding her removal from her tenured position. In January 2024 Professor Finkelstein was placed on administrative leave after reposting someone else’s Instagram post which was critical of Zionism and Zionists. The Muhlenberg College administration subsequently claimed that Professor Finkelstein’s reposting had violated its equal opportunity and nondiscrimination policy.

An outside firm hired by the college to investigate the case determined that Professor Finkelstein’s Instagram post had not constituted a violation of college policy. However, an ad hoc committee appointed by Muhlenberg’s Title IX office subsequently reversed this determination, without specifying the grounds for its decision. In late May 2024 Professor Finkelstein was informed that the college intended to terminate her for cause, because her Instagram post allegedly “met the standard for online discrimination and harassment involving hateful speech. It was severe and objectively offensive, and it denies or limits the ability to participate in the College’s programs.” She has appealed and is awaiting the decision of the college’s Faculty, Personnel and Policies Committee.

We note that Muhlenberg College has declared that it “endorses the robust, stimulating and thought-provoking exchange of ideas, which requires in-depth and complex educational experiences as well as the space for divergent perspectives.” We further note that neither college policy nor federal law defines those who adhere to or advocate for particular political ideologies (such as Zionism) as members of legally protected classes. As we have pointed out elsewhere, critiques of Israeli policies or of Zionism must not be conflated with antisemitism, nor should expressions of political opinion be sanctioned.

In these fraught times, college and university leaders have a heightened responsibility to protect the freedom of speech and academic freedom of all members of their communities. This country’s institutions of higher education should be places in which a broad range of perspectives can be expressed, debated and criticized without fear of defamation, harassment or termination. As MESA’s Board of Directors put it in a statement dated 18 December 2023: “We call on university leaders and administrations to affirmatively assert and protect the rights to academic freedom and freedom of speech on their campuses. We reaffirm that there can be no compromise of the right and ability of students, faculty, and staff at universities across North America (and elsewhere) to express their viewpoints free of harassment, intimidation, and threats to their livelihoods and safety.”

We therefore call on you to immediately reverse the decision to terminate Professor Finkelstein and to publicly declare her exonerated of the charges brought against her. We further call on you to vigorously reaffirm your commitment to uphold academic freedom and freedom of speech at Muhlenberg and to actively foster an atmosphere of free academic inquiry and discussion, including the unhindered right of faculty and other members of the campus community to express their political opinions in the public realm.

We look forward to your response.

Sincerely,

Aslı Ü. Bâli
MESA President
Professor, Yale Law School

Laurie Brand
Chair, Committee on Academic Freedom
Professor Emerita, University of Southern California

The verse “Shema Yisrael” is a testimony to God’s oneness. The same idea is central to Islam. A linguistic connection shows Judaism and Islam share much in common.

( The Times of Israel) – This Shabbat we read the second paragraph of the Shema, and last week we read the first paragraph which opens with a call — arguably the most famous prayer in our liturgy:

Listen, Israel: the Lord is our God, the Lord is one” (Deut. 6:4).

“The first paragraph of the Shema as written in a Mezuzah or Tefillin), July 2009, Picture taken from a Mezuzah or Tefillin.” Public domain. Wikimedia Commons.

The Masoretes determined that when written in the Torah scroll – 2 letters should have special formatting: The final letter of the first word שמע, ayin, and the final letter of the last word אחד, dalet, are enlarged (see pic). These two enlarged Hebrew letters spell the word עד, or “witness.” By saying the Shema, we are acting as a “witness” testifying to the existence and oneness of the Divine.

This concept of bearing witness to God’s oneness is central to Islam too, and is referred to as the ‘testimony‘ or Shahada (الشَّهَادَةُ).

It is part of the adhān, the call to prayer, and is considered one of the Five Pillars of Islam.

The word ‘Shahada’ derives from the same root of a Biblical monument to peace. When Jacob and Laban–who both felt wronged by the other–decided to let bygones be bygones, they erected a mound of stones as a witness their peace treaty. Laban called it in Aramaic יְגַר שָׂהֲדוּתָא, Yegar Sahaduta (like Shahada), while Jacob called it גַּלְעֵד Gal-ed – both meaning “Mound Witness” (Genesis 31:47).

We see how roots and concepts are shared between Judaism and Islam.

Reprinted from The Times of Israel with the author’s permission.

Another central passage is a paraphrase of the Ten Commandments (5:6-21). Differences between the original formulation and the one we read this Sabbath constitute fertile ground for interpretation and commentary. This week, we read about the universal meaning of the commandments: “Observe them faithfully, for that will be proof of your wisdom and discernment to other peoples, who on hearing of all these laws will say, ‘Surely, that great nation is a wise and discerning people’” (4:6). This highlights a crucial obligation bestowed on the Jews with respect to the rest of humanity: to be “a kingdom of priests and a holy people” (Exodus 19:6). There is nothing genetic or innate in this; only proper values and behavior would be valued by others.

Conversely, those Jews who violate these values would be abhorred by non-Jews and Jews alike. These violations are particularly grievous if they occur in the Land of Holiness, which is the proper translation of ארץ הקודש, usually referred to as “the Holy Land.” There are degrees of holiness: Jerusalem has more of it, and the Temple Mount (or Haram Al-Sharif in Arabic) is endowed with even more (Mishnah Kelim, ch. 1). This is why halacha, Jewish legal tradition, forbids Jews to ascend the Temple Mount. While a place of holiness does not make humans holy, humans may indeed desecrate it, including the Land of Holiness.

Yet, some Israeli politicians make a point of ascending the Temple Mount; this is how Ariel Sharon provoked the Second Intifada in 2000. While Sharon was not an observant Jew, those who do it nowadays observe Jewish rituals and are graduates of religious schools. They have been roundly denounced by those who remain loyal to traditional Judaism, especially because such provocative acts often lead to bloodshed. Jewish tradition affirms that the First Temple was destroyed because of three transgressions committed by the Israelites, one of them being bloodshed.

One may wonder how outwardly religious Jews can engage in such explicitly forbidden acts. What explains this is that they follow a religion that is “new and improved”; they call it דתי לאמי, National Judaism. It combines traditional practices with a commitment to Zionism, even though our weekly reading reminds us: “You shall have no other gods beside Me” (5:7). Followers of the new religion have transformed this political movement, developed mostly by atheists and agnostics, into a religious belief, overriding quite a few fundamental commandments, including “You shall not murder” (5:17), repeated in this week’s reading. Talmudic rabbis give a sharp definition of such behavior: כל ת”ח שאין בו דעת נבלה טובה הימנו, “any Torah scholar who has not internalized what he learns is worse than a carcass” (Vayikra Rabbah 1:15).

According to Jewish tradition, bloodshed led not only to the destruction of the temple built by King Solomon but also to the first exile. Moreover, this outcome is made explicit in this week’s reading: “I call heaven and earth this day to witness against you that you shall soon perish from the land that you are crossing the Jordan to possess; you shall not long endure in it but shall be utterly wiped out” (Deuteronomy 4:26).

This week marks the end of a mourning period preceding the 9th of Av, which commemorates numerous tragedies experienced by Jews. These include the destruction of the two Jerusalem temples, the expulsion from Spain, and the beginning of the First World War, which eventually led to the Second World War and the Nazi genocide.

The passage from the Prophets (haftarah) read after the weekly portion of the Pentateuch reflects a sense of relief and hope, suggesting that the worst is behind us.* This haftarah is usually referred to as “Comfort, oh comfort My people,” which is the first verse of Chapter 40 in Isaiah. Further on, the text explains one of the reasons to hope for better times. Amid the distress many of us experience, appalled by the disasters brought about by political leaders, it is comforting to be reminded that God “brings potentates to naught, makes rulers of the earth as nothing” (Isaiah 40:23). Let us pray and work to bring this about soon in our times.

—–

* “On Shabbat and holiday mornings, after the Torah is read, another biblical selection is read. Called the haftarah (plural, haftarot), this reading traditionally comes from one of the Prophets. Haftarah comes from the Hebrew root meaning ‘to conclude.'” – Reform Judaism.

—

Bonus video added by Informed Comment:

Middle East Eye Video: “Israeli rabbis denounce Jewish prayers at Jerusalem’s Al-Aqsa Mosque”

Instead of upholding a left-wing agenda and a critical lens, liberal Zionists are a mouthpiece for Israel’s occupation and genocide, writes Yoav Litvin.

( The New Arab ) – Israel’s ongoing genocide is part of a downward spiral for the Zionist project. In the words of acclaimed historian Professor Ilan Pappe: “We are witnessing a historical process – or, more accurately, the beginnings of one – that is likely to culminate in the downfall of Zionism.”

Yet Zionism’s long-standing settler goals have not only thrived through genocidal aggression masked as “self-defence” with subsequent land grabs as obscene rewards for its adherents but also via its “liberal” flank serving a crucial propaganda role, posturing as benevolent and humanitarian whilst aligned with aims of American imperialism.

Now, confronted with Israel’s failure to achieve its stated goals and international outrage over its barbaric aggression, liberal Zionist propagandists are intensifying efforts to whitewash Zionism’s genocidal criminality. Their aim is to prevent the project’s collapse by shifting from circling the wagons to rehabilitating the liberal Zionist facade, enabling a return to management of the Occupation with periodic “mowing the lawn.”

What is Liberal Zionism?

The liberal wing of Zionism sanitises and revises the movement’s reactionary, settler-colonialist, and white supremacist nature, masking its true strategy and motive of expansionism through apartheid and genocide.

It deceitfully presents Zionism as compatible with human rights, containing a right-to-left political spectrum with democratic and progressive values and a desire for peace and justice. This facade sanctifies a “peace process” of futile negotiations, while Israeli bulldozers and contractors continue to colonise Palestinian land, marketed in the US at Zionist land sales in synagogues.

Zionism’s liberal propaganda apparatus presents Israeli and Palestinian narratives as parallel truths, duplicitously portraying both peoples as victims with legitimate claims that require lengthy negotiations and concessions. This revisionist narrative equates Israeli settler colonialist aggressors, backed by the global US hegemon, with their Indigenous Palestinian targets. 

Media and Academia

Liberal Zionist media, NGOs, academia and other organizations have been busy obscuring the events of October 7, as well as Israel’s subsequent deceit, including atrocity propaganda and the Hannibal Directive.

They portray Zionist genocide as a trait of an “extreme” form of Zionism, scapegoating Prime Minister Netanyahu and his coalition as an anomaly rather than acknowledging it as an inherent aspect of the eliminationist project. Additionally, they suggest that by ousting Netanyahu, Zionism could revert to an acceptable trajectory.

Subject to military oversight and censorship under Israel’s “democratic” laws, Haaretz, Israel’s longest-running newspaper and a bastion of liberal Zionism, has engaged in atrocity propaganda, served as a stenography service for political and military agendas, including targeting hospitals in the Gaza Strip, alongside Islamophobic rants which conflate Zionism and Judaism, and attempts to whitewash war crimes such as looting.

“In contrast to their portrayal as aligned with humanitarian and leftist values, liberal Zionists sanitise, justify, sustain, and gatekeep the Zionist project”

Haaretz and its editorial board claim to advocate for “left-wing” and “liberal” agendas, though in fact they promote civil liberties for the privileged class (Zionists) and refuse to address the core white supremacist nature of Zionism, which has terrorised Indigenous Palestinians for over seven decades.

Indeed, anti-Zionist writers, other than a token couple of regular columnists, stand no chance of being published there. Similarly, Israel bars participation of parties in its elections if they negate “the existence of the State of Israel as a Jewish and democratic state,” clearly outlining the boundaries of acceptable debate.

Israeli academia has also served Israel’s reactionary Zionist agenda. In her recently published book, Towers of Ivory and Steel (Verso, 2024), Maya Wind lays out the case against Israeli academia and universities as embodying the apartheid typical of Israeli society and tools of Zionist settler colonialism and ongoing oppression of Palestinian people.

To this end, Israeli universities and legal scholars frequently collaborate with the Israeli military, legitimising Zionist atrocities and collective punishment of Palestinians, while developing and marketing police and military methodologies and weaponry intended for export.

Well-known liberal Zionists, including politicians, such as Israeli President Isaac Herzog, Yair Golan and former Chief of Shin Bet Ami Ayalon, and academics such as Yuval Noah Harari have all stepped up to the Zionist plate, regurgitating claims of guilt on “both sides” of “the conflict,” amongst other liberal Zionist canards.

The new political movement, Standing Together, exemplifies efforts to normalise the liberal Zionist framework. Consistently strengthening the conflation of Zionism with Judaism, Standing Together blames “extremists on both sides,” recently with homophobic graphics.

As stated by the Palestinian-led Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions: “By trying to paint Israel as a tolerant, diverse, and normal state, and focusing on “hatred” rather than oppression as the problem, this organisation is intellectually dishonest and outright complicit. It is serving a key role in Israel’s international propaganda strategy at this time.”

Within our lifetime

Popular protest in a democracy is aimed at producing political pressure on elected representatives to create substantial change in policy. Protest is typically effective if those protesting have sufficient power to vote the target of the protest out.

Recently, Within Our Lifetime (WOL), a Palestinian-led community organisation in New York City since 2015, faced strong opposition from liberal Zionists, progressives, and Democratic Party loyalists.

They protested at a rally featuring progressive Congressmembers Bowman, Ocasio-Cortez, and Sanders for their continued support of the Biden administration, demanding “pro-Palestinian” politicians: (i) rescind endorsement of Biden; (ii) declare anti-Zionism is not antisemitism, and; (iii) defend Palestinian right to resist. Following WOL’s protest Nerdeen Kiswani, an organiser at WOL said: “Our action accomplished the goal of confronting the hypocrisy within the Democratic Party and not allowing the demonization of those fighting against genocide to be normalised.”

Haaretz critiqued WOL’s protest with typical liberal Zionist talking points, smearing them as a “hard-line group,” simply for reiterating the Palestinian right of self-defence in all forms against occupation as established by international law, echoing critique against the group for rightfully demanding accountability from their elected representatives.

Haaretz’s gatekeeping aligns with recent findings showing wide-ranging Israeli government efforts to shape US discourse around the genocide in Gaza.

In contrast to their portrayal as aligned with humanitarian and leftist values, liberal Zionists sanitise, justify, sustain, and gatekeep the Zionist project. Media, academia, and political figures within the liberal Zionist sphere are complicit in advancing Zionist agendas and silencing dissent. 

To effectively halt ongoing aggression and the genocide of the Palestinian people, and in line with the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI) it is crucial to recognise liberal Zionists who act as agents for the Israeli regime and are reactionary proponents of Zionism and to advocate for their boycott, divestment, and sanction.

Reprinted from The New Arab with the author’s permission.

Since October 2023, American Jews have been engaged in an intense, fractious debate over Israel’s war in the Gaza Strip.

Media reports say that American Jews are experiencing “the great rupture,” widening “rifts,” and stand at a “moral, political crossroads.”

While most American Jews remain broadly supportive of Israel, others have protested vigorously against U.S. support for Israel and are demanding a cease-fire in the Gaza war. They carry signs saying “Not in Our Name.”

Their slogan highlights the fact that American foreign aid to Israel has long relied on the support of American Jews. Unqualified U.S. support for Israel was built, in part, on the promise that Israel kept American Jews – and all Jews – safe, especially after the Holocaust.

But American Jews have never been entirely unified in their support for Israel or in their visions of what role Israel and Palestine should play in American Jewish life.

No consensus

My new book, “The Threshold of Dissent: A History of American Jewish Critics of Zionism,” analyzes a century of debates among American Jews over Zionism and Israel.

My account begins in 1885, when elite Reform Jews, with a goal of full integration in Jim Crow America, composed the Pittsburgh Platform, which rejected Jewish nationalism out of fear that it would make them targets of antisemitic accusations of dual loyalty.

Two years later, Austrian journalist Theodor Herzl founded the modern Zionist movement, relying on European powers for support for a modern Jewish state.

The genocide of Europe’s Jewish population in the Holocaust fundamentally altered American Jews’ perspectives on Zionism.

Many believed that only a Jewish national homeland in what was then Palestine could prevent another genocide. Others insisted that the lessons of the Holocaust meant that Jews must not contribute to making refugees of another group of people: the Palestinians who were then living on the land.

The Majority Report with Sam Seder Video: “Jewish Voice For Peace Grows In North Carolina ”

There were other issues that contributed to a new understanding of Zionism in the 1950s and 1960s within American Jewish communities. Among them: the Nakba, which was the expulsion of 700,000 Palestinians during the 1948 founding of Israel; Israel’s treatment of immigrant Jews from the Arab and Muslim world known as Mizrahi Jews; and the rise in Israel’s militarism.

Across the 20th century, mainstream Jewish leaders manufactured an American Jewish so-called consensus on Zionism and Israel, in part by silencing American Jewish critics of Zionism.

From the late 1940s through 1961, journalist William Zukerman edited The Jewish Newsletter, a publication that captured some of the voices of Jewish dissent from Zionism, including his own. He reported on Israel’s human rights abuses against Palestinians and documented how American Jewish funds fueled Israel’s military campaigns instead of supporting vibrant American Jewish communities.

Because Zukerman dared to publish this criticism, he faced campaigns of steep resistance, eventually losing funding and support from Jewish communal organizations.

Anxious that Zukerman’s dissent would cause “increasing trouble” for American support for Israel, Israeli diplomats wrote to American Jewish leaders, and together they convinced some Jewish journalists to exclude Zukerman’s writings from their publications.

Liberation movements, American Jews and Zionism

Into the 1960s, as mainstream Jewish leaders emphasized the urgency of Jewish unity on Israel and Zionism and showed growing intolerance for dissent, anti-colonialist activists gained momentum across the world. From 1948 through 1966, Israel held all Palestinians citizens under martial law, limiting their movement and access to opportunities and resources. Across the 1950s, Israel excluded Palestinian workers from the Histadrut, the state’s largest labor union federation.

Activists allied with the cause of Palestinian rights noted Israel’s alliance with colonial power France during the Algerian war of independence from 1954 to 1962 and criticized Israel as an occupier after the 1967 war. They spoke, too, of Israel’s growing alliance with apartheid South Africa in the 1970s.

Black and Arab leaders in the U.S. taught within, and learned from, these anti-colonial movements. Civil rights and anti-war activists offered new perspectives to debates over Israel and Zionism.

Raised in a liberal Zionist family, student Marty Blatt was learning to fight for justice. Blatt was born in 1951 in Brooklyn, New York. His grandfather had died in a Nazi prison camp. In 1970, he joined the anti-war movement at Tufts University in Massachusetts.

“The Vietnam war was a horrible injustice,” Blatt said. From the movement and from members of the Israeli left, he learned that “Israel/Palestine was another great injustice.”

With no access to the history of Palestinians in school, at home or at the synogogue, young American Jews like Blatt who joined the civil rights and anti-war movements learned these lessons for the first time. When they then criticized Israel and American Zionism, they, too, met with hostility from the mainstream Jewish world.

Blatt sought to teach his fellow students at Tufts with a course in 1973 titled Zionism Reconsidered. In it, he taught the history of Zionism, Palestinian resistance and Israel’s Cold War alliance with the United States. He taught students that anti-Zionism was not antisemitism.

On March 13, 1973, in the midst of the semester, members of the Jewish Defense League, a far-right, anti-Arab, Jewish nationalist group founded by Rabbi Meir Kahane,disrupted Blatt’s class. They called it an “anti-Jewish outrage” and passed out a flyer that read, “Not since Germany in the days of Hitler has any university dared to offer a course presenting a one-sided view of any national movement.”

Boston-area Jewish leaders urged community members to write to Tufts leadership to shut down Blatt’s class. These letters used apocalyptic language to describe the damage wrought by his course, likening it to the destruction of the Jewish people. During this controversy, Blatt picked up the phone one day to hear someone who clearly knew his family history in the Holocaust tell him: “Your parents should not have been saved.”

An article about Blatt and his course in Boston’s Jewish Advocate was headlined “Tufts Anti-Zionist Course Seen as Abuse of Academic Freedom.” Though Tufts stood behind Blatt’s right to teach the class for another term, which it still touts on the university website, angry responses to the class appeared in community forums for years.

Divided on campus and beyond

In the current moment, college campuses have been riven with debates over the boundaries between student safety and free speech and whether criticism of Israel constitutes antisemitism.

Young Jews dismayed by the unconditional Zionist agenda of Jewish campus organization Hillel and who founded Open Hillel in 2013 are now active in Gaza protests as “Judaism on Our Own Terms.” They might be surprised to learn that in late 1972, even before his course began, Blatt and others founded the Tufts Hillel Non-Zionist Caucus. Hillel subsequently expelled them from the organization.

For over a century, some American Jews have modeled the idea that unqualified support for Israel and Zionism was “not in our name.” They prioritized justice as a Jewish value and were motivated not by self-hatred or antisemitism but by abiding commitments to human rights and to Jewish safety and community.

Today’s activists protesting over the devastation in Gaza are testing the threshold of dissent and the limits of free speech and academic freedom. They embrace what they view as more just visions of Israel and Palestine and more inclusive visions of an American Jewish community, one with space for dissent and earnest conversations about Israel and Zionism, and one in which Jews stand in solidarity with groups working for justice in Palestine, Israel and around the world.

Marjorie N. Feld, Professor of History and Society, Babson College

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

LET GAZA LIVE

FREE PALESTINE

CEASEFIRE – NO ARM$ TO ISRAEL

NEVER AGAIN FOR ANYONE

Why? 

Johanna (Jo) Rosen stands on the Common because she is “heartbroken and outraged by the death, destruction and displacement in Gaza.”  As a Jewish American, she believes she has “a particular responsibility to speak out against the US government’s material and diplomatic support for Israel and its military aggression…I am motivated,” she adds, “to build the world we want to live in where everyone has a safe home, healthy food, clean water, and can celebrate their culture in dignity.”

Since last October, Jo, a member of Jewish Voice for Peace, has called Congress almost daily, written letters to newspapers, participated in marches and rallies, donated to aid and advocacy organizations.  She joined hundreds of activists to disrupt the State of the Union address and works to support the students at Smith College, her alma mater, advocating for the college to divest from weapons manufacturers. 

Lianna Hart “feels powerless to stop” the war in Gaza” and simultaneously complicit in it as a taxpayer in the United States and as a Jewish American who was raised believing in Israel as the homeland of the Jewish people.” As Americans, we “cannot pretend…that we are not complicit in these atrocities…The least we can do is show up in our communities and say that we do not agree, that we refuse to watch this happen without speaking up against it.” 

Standing on the Common with others, holding her artist-made Free Palestine, she finds the moments of connection with those driving and walking by who give “just a honk, a wave, a thumbs up” motivating.  For her, “visibility is meaningful, we cannot and should not go about our lives as if this war isn’t happening.”  Like Jo, Lianna has been engaged in many and various actions in western Mass, organized or co-hosted by Jewish Voice for Peace and other organizations.  She, too, donates to many relief and aid organizations working with Gazans suffering from this genocidal war.

Theirs are just two passionate, moral voices of many dozens who have gathered with us each Saturday for months, reinvigorating our years of standing on the Common against war and for peace with justice.

Those of us, whose activism on behalf of peace and justice was sparked by the US war of aggression in Vietnam or the Civil Rights movement, the Women’s Movement, the Environmental Movement (and, for some, all of these movements) are now joined with these younger generations.  They match our generations’ passionate protests; and we are heartened, energized, inspired by their integrity and deeply grateful to them.

Related video: NM PBS: “Jewish Voice for Peace Stands with Students”

Together we express what a majority of Americans polled recently support: that the U.S. call for a permanent ceasefire and stop sustaining Israel’s genocidal war with our government’s military aid and weapons.   Ranging in age from our 80s to early 20s, we also stand together in supporting student encampments on their university and college campuses across the country, calling for their administration to divest from necrophilous weapons industries that are sucking up profits from the deaths of Gazans, 70 percent of whom are women and children.

Despite what mainstream news chooses to carry – mainly photos of violence in student encampments, and President Biden recklessly defending police crackdowns on students causing “chaos,” the evidence gathered reveals the opposite.  A study of 553 campus protests between April 18 and May 3 across the country found that 97% “remained non-violent” and peaceful.   Further, half of the 3% where violence broke out were clashes with militarized police sent by university administrators to remove the otherwise peaceful student encampments. 

As we stand here on the Greenfield Common, teenage Israeli military resisters are there in Israel prisons for refusing to serve in the Israel Defense Force.  Two refusniks, before reporting to jail, wrote a letter to President Biden charging that his “unconditional support for Netanyahu’s policy of destruction has brought our [Israeli] society to the normalization of carnage and the trivialization of human lives…You are responsible for this alongside our leaders…you have the power to stop it.”

It took little more than 100 days of bombing for Israel to destroy most schools in Gaza and all 12 universities, killing students and teachers, and ending education for Gazan children and youth.  Yet only two US schools, Evergreen State College and Union Theological Seminary, and Ireland’s Trinity College have agreed to work toward divestment from “companies that profit from gross human rights violations and/or the occupation of Palestinian territories.”

“My message for the American students,” writes Palestinian Nawar Diab, “is that…their protests and their solidarity with Palestine and Gaza gave us a glimpse of hope. And they didn’t leave us left alone.  They didn’t leave us feeling helpless.”

Foxx and her MAGA colleagues are much more concerned about cracking the heads of principled undergraduates than about the 15,000 dead children in Gaza.

One of the presidents on the hot seat was Northwestern’s Michael Schill, who had dealt with the protests about as well as a person in his position could have, negotiating an agreement with the demonstrating students that included providing for two-year visiting fellowships for two Palestinian faculty and full scholarships for five Palestinian undergraduates. When I was an undergraduate, I had a full scholarship to Northwestern, so I don’t see what is wrong with that.

Schill, a descendant of Holocaust survivors, had to put up with angry Christian neo-fascists telling him how to run the university and keep Jewish students safe. Many of the university protesters have been idealistic young Jews from movements like Jewish Voice for Peace. Schill underlined that he had set up a commission on antisemitism on campus.

I can say, since the crackpot Rep. Tim Walberg spilled the beans, that the committee at Northwestern, which was concerned to include perspectives on Islamophobia and anti-Arab bigotry, asked me to give a presentation.

Walberg confronted Schill on my testimony, accusing me of being an antisemite. Since I am the director of the Arab and Muslim American Studies Program at the University of Michigan and have spent 52 years studying Arab and Islamic Culture (I started first year Arabic in 1972), I have the credentials, if I do say so myself, to speak about anti-Arab and anti-Muslim hate. Walberg does not, of course. In fact, he is a notorious racist against those very groups.

But let’s get this straight. A commission on fighting antisemitism and other forms of bigotry at Northwestern asked me to make a presentation to them, and I did. And my testimony against antisemitism and other forms of bigotry is being used by Walberg to prove that I’m an antisemite?

I actually have written about Walberg, possibly the most bigoted member of Congress, which is saying a lot. I pointed out a couple of months ago,

“US Representative Tim Walberg (R-MI), a former pastor, called this week for a genocide, the Final Solution of the Palestinian Problem . . .

At a meeting in Dundee with constituents on March 25, Walberg said that President Biden had spoken of our need to get aid into Gaza. He said, “I don’t think we should. I don’t think any of our aid that goes to Israel, to support our greatest ally, arguably maybe in the world, to the feet of Hamas, and Iran, and Russia. Probably North Korea is in there and China, too — with them, helping Hamas. We shouldn’t be spending a dime on humanitarian aid. It should be like Nagasaki and Hiroshima. Get it over quick.”

“Nuking Gaza,” by Juan Cole, Digital, Dream / Dreamland v. 3 / IbisPaint, 2024.

Unfortunately for Walberg, who likely talks like this all the time with his inner circle of fellow sociopaths, his remarks were recorded.

Michigan Congressman Tim Walberg, pastor and "good" Christian, talks about his solution for #Gaza: Give it the Hiroshima treatment. "Get it over quick."

A sitting US Rep in a secret town hall feels comfortable musing positively about genocide. Listen. Share.#DemCastMI #DemCast pic.twitter.com/6BQGfWMVjZ

— JMS 🫱🏻✋🏻 #DemCastMI (@WhitchMI) March 30, 2024

Walberg has also visited Uganda, which made being gay a capital crime, urging its government to continue to kill gay people. And he is part of the movement to take reproductive choice away from women so as to keep them barefoot, pregnant and firmly under the control of men like himself.

Everybody should send money to the Democratic Party challenger to Walberg in Michigan’s fifth district, former steel worker and union stalwart Libbi Urban . I know I will.

Also if you want to help out Informed Comment, which appears to have upset the MAGA snowflakes in Congress, here’s how:

Personal checks should be made out to Juan Cole and sent to me at:

Juan Cole
P. O. Box 4218,
Ann Arbor, MI 48104-2548
USA
(Remember, make the checks out to “Juan Cole” or they can’t be cashed)

So why did Walberg say I am an antisemite? He quoted me as “claiming that Israel quote, was founded on a formal racial supremacist principle that Jews must rule the state, and that, quote, ‘The only thing that Palestinians and their sympathizers can do to make Zionists happy is to bend over and allow themselves to be royally screwed.'”

Of course, Walberg wasn’t actually alleging that I had said anything antisemitic, only that I criticized Israel, and MAGA is trying to equate the two, as though criticizing Mexican president Andrés Manuel López Obrador is equivalent to bigotry toward Chicanos.

In 2018 I wrote a column on the Israeli Parliament’s passage of a law that vested “sovereignty” solely in the Jewish citizens of Israel, excluding the 21% who are of Palestinian heritage. I pointed out that this would be like the US Congress passing a law that sovereignty in the United States is vested solely in white Christians. (At the time I thought it far fetched,, but maybe Elise Stefanik, Virginia Foxx and Tim Walberg have such plans).

So I wrote, “2018 was in many ways a turning point for the position of Israel in the system of Western, liberal, capitalist democracies. It had long sat uneasily among France, Britain, and the United States, inasmuch as it was founded on a formal racial supremacist principle that Jews must rule the state. Racism is important in the other democracies, as well, but it is not typically enshrined in the constitution. The French Rights of Man mentioned nothing about race.” Anyone who knows anything about the thinking of founders of Israel such as David Ben Gurion, whom I am sure that Walberg has not read, knows that he precisely held that Israel would be a state for Jews where Jews must rule.

As for the second quote, it was in a 2015 column in which I complained about CNN firing Mark Lamont Hill. I pointed to the success of letter-writing and smear campaigns by pro-Israel groups in disallowing a compassionate consideration of the plight of Palestinians. In that column, I wrote:

This success is not because “Jews” are “powerful.” First of all, only a minority of Jewish Americans sympathize with the far right politics of the Likud Party. Jon Stewart used to complain tongue in cheek that if Jews were so powerful he ought to have been able to get off basic cable and have a network show.

The success is because right wing white people are so powerful, and many of them still have a latent belief in the goodness of colonialism and in the White Man’s Burden. Melanie McAlister argued brilliantly that for right wing Christian whites in the United States, the Israeli domination of the Palestinians is a symbolic reenactment of the Vietnam War, in which this time the “white people” (as they characterize themselves) win instead of losing. I.e., Israel functions as did those old Rambo movies.

I think my point is borne out by the spectacle of Elise Stefanik, a proponent of the antisemitic and fascist Great Replacement Theory, strafing poor Michael Schill and weaponizing antisemitism for MAGA white Christian nationalist purposes.

I then went on to write,

One of the standard Israeli propaganda techniques is to equate any resistance to their frankly fascist techniques of social control imposed on the colonized Palestinians with “terrorism.” There is nothing new or strange about this. The British in India considered Gandhi a terrorist. Of course the colonial state views opposition as terrorism.

That same dishonest columnist at The Forward managed to reconfigure Hill’s activism as violence. The fact is that international law recognizes the right of occupied peoples to mount even violent resistance to occupation militaries. But that isn’t what Hill was calling for. And then, any violence is then twisted around as violence toward civilians. And there you have it. Terrorism.

The golden magic circle of Hasbara (Zionist propaganda) gives us: resistance= violence= terrorism.

The only thing the Palestinians and their sympathizers can do to make Zionists happy is to bend over and allow themselves to be royally screwed– or better yet, allow themselves to be deported from their homeland of millennia at the hands of the Russian and Polish immigrants.

As we speak, the Polish prime minister of Israel is trying to deport 2.2 million indigenous Palestinians from Gaza by making the Strip uninhabitable.

I think if you read the whole column it is pretty obvious it isn’t about Jews at all. It is about virulent right wing Zionism, which now rules Israel in an increasingly fascist manner.

The American right wing is now trying to equate criticism of the Israeli government with antisemitism, and if you let them do that, you may as well kiss the First Amendment goodbye.

Why we must maintain our focus on the agonies of Gaza and the West Bank, denouncing them and calling for an end to Israel’s assaults.

By Ellen Cantarow and Jennifer Loewenstein | –

( Commondreams.org ) – All of us—and we are legion across the worldmust keep our eyes on the genocide in Gaza, as well as on the vicious pogroms underway in the West Bank. A recent statement by James Elder of UNICEF reports that in Rafah, “The European hospital is crammed with severely injured and dying children. A military offensive here will be catastrophic.”

At the same time, throughout the West Bank, mobs of fascist settlers torch homes, steal possessions including livestock, kill Palestinians and drive them off their land. All of this has been enabled by President Joseph Biden, who has sent fulsome amounts of aid to Israel to carry out its genocidal and ethnic cleansing assaults on the Palestinian people. A holocaust, underwritten by the greatest military power in the world, is underway in both occupied territories.

Promoting the savageries Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, said, “Whoever perpetrates against the Jewish people like these evil ones have perpetrated on us, will be destroyed, they will be annihilated, and it will echo for decades and decades onwards.” In another statement he declared: “Rafah, Deir al-Balah, Nuseirat, total and utter destruction that will erase the memory of the Amalek from under the skies.”

This is the fulfillment of Israel’s dream of inhabiting all of what was once historic Palestine, making it a land unencumbered by its indigenous Arab population. Israel’s ongoing efforts since 1948 to kill or expel all Palestinians from what was historic Palestine have triggered student sit-ins and demonstrations on some 120 American college campuses.

Israel has become a country with powerful fascistic tendencies, headed by fanatics and demagogues catering to a population so filled with hatred of Arabs that it welcomes the genocide. In a recent article, “Dead on Arrival: Israel’s Blowback Genocide,” Ellen recalls visiting the West Bank city of Hebron in the 1980s and seeing graffiti on walls that proclaimed, “Arabs to the Gas Chambers.” At that time renowned Israeli public intellectual Yeshayahu Leibowitz warned that Israel was turning its soldiers into Judeonazis. Recent YouTube videos of soldiers mocking their victims bear out his prophecy. This hatred is pervasive in Israel. There are courageous exceptions like journalists Amira Hass and Gideon Levy who write for the newspaper Haaretz and the group Combatants for Peace. But all too many Israelis have supported their country’s assault on Gaza, or even wanted something worse.

The student protests that for weeks have been under public scrutiny have been peaceful mass gatherings of citizens outraged at Biden’s unconditional support for Israel’s relentless campaign in Gaza. Yet early on, riot police were summoned to Columbia’s campus as well as that of the City College of New York, the University of Texas-Austin, UCLA, and others, to dismantle the encampments, arrest, and sometimes beat up students and supporting faculty. Ayman Mohyeldin on MSNBC last week showed images of a mob hurling fireworks at the UCLA protesters, spraying them with pepper spray, and beating them with sticks and other weapons.

In tandem with the police actions, cries of “antisemitism” have arisen about the protests. When interviewed in print or on television, the Jewish student activists have said unanimously that these protests are neither antisemitic nor hate-filled. Moreover, the antisemitism claims are irreconcilable with the fact that thousands of Jewish students nationwide are participating. Two leading protest organizations, Jewish Voices for Peace and If Not Now, are Jewish, proclaiming that never again may genocide take place against any people, not just Jews.

Both of us writers of this article have experienced real antisemitism. Ellen remembers, in her early childhood, around 1945, her mother saying that the local grocer, a Mr. McGonigle, was glad Hitler was “mopping up all the kikes.” She remembers the child in her third-grade class who called her “a kike.” Jennifer remembers being pelted with spitballs by classmates shouting “Jew!” at her for making a Star of David design in her art class. Meanwhile, her father recalled being chased around the block by a neighborhood bully holding a knife saying, “You killed Christ!”

These experiences mirror what until now has been the guiding definition of antisemitism, that of The International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA): “Antisemitism is a certain perception of Jews, which may be expressed as hatred toward Jews. Rhetorical and physical manifestations of antisemitism are directed toward Jewish and non-Jewish individuals and/or their property, toward Jewish community institutions and religious facilities.”

Democracy Now! Video: “12 Arrested Outside NYC’s New School as First Faculty-Led Gaza Solidarity Encampment Continues”

Yet the campaign against alleged “antisemitism” has gone forward, adding criticism of Israel to the definition of the term. In Congress, the House of Representatives on May 1 passed a bill entitled “The Antisemitism Awareness Act.” It makes speech seemingly threatening the existence of Israel newly “antisemitic,” citing, for example, the cry, “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” as a call for the annihilation of the Jewish state and of the Jews in it. It makes no difference that Jewish students and people like the writers of this article have chanted that slogan, intending its meaning to be that Palestinians should be free within a redefined state.

Congressman Jerrold Nadler, a longtime supporter of Israel and a Zionist, has criticized the bill: “While there is much in the bill that I agree with,” he said, “its core provision would put a thumb on the scale in favor of one particular definition of antisemitism to the exclusion of all others to be used when the Department of Education assesses claims of antisemitism on campus.” He continued that the new definition includes “contemporary examples of antisemitism,” adding: “The problem is that these examples may include protected speech, in some contexts, particularly with respect to criticism of the State of Israel.”

Omer Bartov, an Israeli-American Professor of Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Brown University, described by the U.S. Holocaust Memorial museum as one of the world’s leading specialists on the subject of genocide, is the author of an article entitled, “Weaponizing Language: Misuses of Holocaust Memory and the Never Again Syndrome.” In a recent dialogue with the Israeli Holocaust scholar Raz Segal, the two discussed antisemitism and “the perils of antisemitism and its current weaponization.”

In an April 30 interview on Democracy Now!, Bartov noted the peaceful nature of the University of Pennsylvania demonstration as well as the one at Brown University. Of antisemitism he said that it “is a vile sentiment, it’s an old sentiment, it has been used for bloodshed, for violence, and for genocide. But it has also become a tool to silence speech about Israel. And that, too, has quite a history, and numerous governments under Benjamin Netanyahu have been pushing this agenda of arguing that any criticism of Israeli policy, not least, of Israeli occupation policies, is antisemitic.” He added that there are Jewish students who feel threatened, for instance by the term “Intifada,” which literally means “shaking off,” as in the shaking off of the 57-year-long occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. “But there’s nothing threatening about opposing occupation and oppression.”

The Antisemitism Awareness Act, which indeed weaponizes antisemitism against those protesting Israel’s savagery in Gaza and the cruelty of its overall occupation policies, is soon to be voted upon by the Senate. Its enactment would mark a giant step towards degrading the U.S. Constitution, in particular its protection of freedom of speech, assembly, and a free press. It also threatens the status of academia as a realm in which the free exchange of ideas can flourish.

Fascism threatens American democracy embodied in a Republican Party that has long ceased to be a political party and is rather, according to Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein of The American Enterprise Institute, “an insurrection.” The reelection of Donald Trump would import an Israeli-style fascism embodied by Netanyahu and Smotrich, while the reelection of Joe Biden will allow these smoldering tendencies to ignite the flames of that ideology within the U.S. If the Antisemitism Awareness Act is passed by the Senate, the erosion of civil liberties long anchored in the Constitution seems all but certain.

Like all forms of prejudice and ethnocentrism, antisemitism has no place in an enlightened society. But what about genocide? Is that an acceptable manifestation of a modern society? Are those denouncing protests against Israel’s genocidal and ethnic cleansing actions OK knowing that over 100,000 people, most of them women and children, have been killed, wounded, and maimed in indiscriminate bombing raids across the Strip since Oct. 7th?

Meanwhile, all the focus on alleged antisemitism has diverted national attention from the genocide in Gaza and the barbaric settler actions in the West Bank. The official number of Gaza’s dead is close to 35,000 with another 8-10,000 people unaccounted for under the rubble. If 6,000 of these people were Hamas fighters, that still leaves a total of nearly 40,000 civilians dead.

News of atrocities within this holocaust continues. Recently, UN Special Rapporteur of the Palestinian Territories Francesca Albanese stated, “I am extremely alarmed by information that Dr. Adnan Albursh, a well-known surgeon at #alshifa_hospital, has died while detained by Israeli forces in the Ofer military prison. While I acquire more information, I urge the diplomatic community to intervene with CONCRETE MEASURES to protect Palestinians. No Palestinian is safe under Israel’s occupation today.”

Israel is neither a democratic nor a peace-loving society. It is an arm of US regional hegemony and a US client state that receives $3.8 billion annually in military aid and that has received over $30 billion additional military aid since October 7th. Since its founding in 1948, Israel has received $158 billion in military support, making it the greatest recipient of US military aid in history. Israel has nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons the only such power in the Middle East to have this kind of arsenal. [We] suggest the next time someone complains that “little Israel” is “surrounded by enemies” (a false statement to begin with), people consider these facts. We need look no further than Tel Aviv to determine which nation is the real destabilizing force in the region.

If the Antisemitism Awareness Act passes the Senate, what will befall student protests? Will they all become acts of civil disobedience? What about the alternative press, whose independent organs have become invaluable given the corporate media’s pussyfooting or downright ignoring of the Gaza holocaust and West Bank atrocities? Will it be shuttered by the federal government on the grounds of banned “hate speech”? Will what we write be rejected by publications that fear for their survival?

“As a Jewish person who stands hand-in-hand with my Palestinian brothers and sisters and works daily against anti-Arab hate, I find this weaponization of my identity particularly disgusting,” states Arab-American Antidiscrimination Committee staff attorney Chris Godshall-Bennet. “Criticism of Zionism and of the Israeli government is not antisemitic, and conflating the two only serves to provide cover for Israel’s numerous, ongoing human rights abuses and violations of international law, as well as its genocide of Palestinians in Gaza.”

Declares Palestinian poet Mohammad Al Kurd, “I am asked to have patience for these kinds of debates that tell me that words are genocidal. The Israeli regime is engaging in a war of attrition against the Palestinian people and yet we are asked to talk about chants and slogans… But this is about our moral obligation as human beings to reject genocide, the real genocide that is happening in real time.”

All people of conscience must keep this in mind. And we must maintain our focus on the agonies of Gaza and the West Bank, denouncing them and calling for an end to Israel’s assaults, to settler violence, and ultimately to the occupation of both the West Bank and Gaza.

We must honor the student demonstrators and all who champion them as the heroes they are, cease the opportunistic abuse of the term ‘antisemitism,’ and urge them to continue their protests.

\

Ellen Cantarow

Jennifer Loewenstein

Although anti-Jewish acts in Europe date back more than a thousand years, since the 19th century the term ‘antisemitism’ has been used to describe a hatred of Jews as a race, a concept that was instrumental in the expansion of colonialism. Racism was then considered legitimate, and even scientific. It asserted the inferiority of all Jews, Africans, Asians and others. This racism led to the massacres of millions of people in the Belgian Congo at the turn of the 20th century, the genocides that Germany committed at the same time in Southwest Africa (Namibia today), and then, barely thirty years later, in Europe, exterminating millions of Jews, Slavs, Roma and other ‘sub-humans’. antisemitism is therefore a form of racism.

Antizionism, on the other hand, is a rejection of Zionism, a political movement that emerged in Europe towards the end of the 19th century. Its founder, Theodor Herzl (1860-1904), was concerned about antisemitism and aimed to create Der Judenstaat, a state for the Jews. Zionism, which emerged at a time when ethnic nationalism and the right of peoples to self-determination were in full swing (Greece, Germany, Italy, etc.), asserted that the Jews constituted a people or a race apart who, never being able to integrate into the European society, needed a state for themselves.

The movement encouraged colonisation of Palestine and set up institutions such as the Jewish Colonial Trust (1899) and the Palestine Jewish Colonisation Association (1924). This settlement campaign, which created a separate economy and society under the British mandate, marginalised and even sought to replace the local population. It provoked resistance that would have arisen in the same way had the Palestinians been colonised and mistreated by the French or the Chinese. Opposition to Israel and Zionism, its founding ideology, is therefore political in origin.

From the outset, Zionism was a revolt against traditional (rabbinic) Judaism, which evolved around the world for nearly two thousand years. The new movement divided the Jews and fomented opposition, both religious and political. Moreover, it persists to this day. Ultra-Orthodox Jews can be seen at anti-Israel demonstrations alongside progressive activists from Jewish Voice for Peace or Independent Jewish Voices. One need only recall the Jewish demonstrations last November at the Statue of Liberty in New York calling for freedom for the Palestinians. 

It follows that Zionism, like all nationalism, divides the group in whose name it claims to act. Jews opposed to Zionism is as normal a phenomenon as Quebecers or Catalonians opposed to political independence. Many Jews welcomed the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948, others denounced it. Today, it is the tragedy of the Palestinians that makes this division among Jews even deeper.

Kaufmann Kohler, d. 1926, rabbi, president of Hebrew Union College, Cincinnati, promoter of Reform Judaism, and prominent anti-Zionist. He co-authored the 1885 Pittsburgh Platform that proclaimed, “We recognize, in the modern era of universal culture of heart and intellect, the approaching of the realization of Israel s great Messianic hope for the establishment of the kingdom of truth, justice, and peace among all men. We consider ourselves no longer a nation, but a religious community, and therefore expect neither a return to Palestine, nor a sacrificial worship under the sons of Aaron, nor the restoration of any of the laws concerning the Jewish state.” Photo public domain.

What encourages antisemitism is the conflation of Jews with Israel, of Judaism with Zionism. This is regularly done by Israel and pro-Israel Jewish and Christian organisations. Israel promotes this association by declaring itself ‘The State of the Jewish People’, even though half the Jews do not live there, and more and more young Jews reject it. Moreover, Israel’s allies around the world use this amalgam to stifle criticism of Israel by labelling it antisemitic.

Those who declare their solidarity with Israel as Jews reinforce this amalgam and, no doubt in spite of themselves, fan the flames of antisemitism. It is true that Israel has become central to the identity of many Jews, who mistake their political choice – to support a state in West Asia – for a commitment inherent in Judaism (see the recent film Israelism). But it is essential to avoid the trap of racist generalisations by associating all Jews with Zionists, particularly since the vast majority of Zionists nowadays are Evangelical Christians.

—

NB A French version of this essay appeared in La Presse.