A week ago Brandeis Hillel excluded the Jewish Voice for Peace chapter on campus from the Jewish organization because it supports a limited boycott, of Israeli settlement products. Rabbi Lynn Gottlieb offers this summons to Hillel:
This letter is addressed to anyone who works for Hillel, locally or nationally, and has agreed to implement the newest guidelines to regulate conversation on campus regarding Israel by excluding anyone who supports any form of boycott, divestment and sanctions applied to Israeli state policy.
Hillel the Sage said two things. Don’t do to others that which is hateful to you, and do not separate yourself from the community. Jewish tradition is a multivocal interpretive community. Two opposing streams within our tradition represent points of view that promote violence and those that promote peace. Using the word Amalek, for instance, to apply to contemporary Palestinians and then to murder twenty Muslims (1994) in the tomb of Abraham on the holy day of Purim arose from the school of thinking that promotes violence. So did Operation Cast Lead.
In promoting peace, it is clear that the issue of structural violence is paramount in any social analysis. Within that school of thinking, the ‘pursuit of peace and justice’ may involve the use the withdrawal of economic support to delegitimize and ‘boycott’ .
This is an honored tradition both within Jewish teachings and in the history of nonviolent struggle for social change.
Only a person living in a bubble could fail to understand the dire situation of the Palestinian people under Israeli Occupation. Only people who never watch the news could fail to notice the ethnic cleansing of East Jerusalem which is taking place before our very eyes. Or the building of a Museum for Jewish Tolerance over a historic Muslim graveyard. Or the arrest of over sixty West Bank children in the middle of the night by the IDF from villages nonviolently protesting the Separation Wall. Gaza has been called a humanitarian disaster by the international community. 95% of the water is undrinkable. One third of the children have no shoes.
Personally, after years of dialogue and education that failed to produce positive change on the ground, I too, have turned to boycotting Israeli consumer products, especially those produced and manufactured on stolen land. I also support selective divestment from companies that profit from policies of dispossession and assault. These tactics are time honored and highly effective nonviolent tools to assert economic pressure on a government which, according to the Palestine Papers, as well as tens of thousands of observers on the ground, and Judge Goldstone’s exhaustive report, absolutely refuses to negotiate peace, freeze settlements, or stop dispossessing people. To exclude the voices of those within the Jewish community who represent this voice implies that Hillel is joining the ranks of those who use the language of ‘hasbara’, slick scripts of denial, to launch smear campaigns against those who are deeply committed to human rights and international law for all people, Jews and Palestinians alike. As a person who is absolutely fed up with lies and deception coming out of Jerusalem, I want to stand on the side of those whose love of humanity and Jewish people and, indeed, all people, compel us not only to articulate our support for human rights, but also to take direct action. And this is where the road divides. As Gandhi said, without direct action, nonviolence is meaningless.
The Only Democracy in the Middle East and the US Democracy, it seems, have something in common: criminalizing those who express dissent. With the FBI banging at the door, it’s time to reverse course and count everyone in your minyan. Change your policy. Let all who are deeply concerned about oppression come in.
