In an era of polarization, there is very little middle ground; and yesterday the liberal Zionist group J Street offered an object lesson about this reality. Early yesterday morning the group’s student arm, J Street U, proudly tweeted that they would be attending a global summit against BDS (boycott, divestment and sanctions campaign aimed at Israel) at the United Nations that day. There was a photo of the young delegates, eager beavers at 6 in the morning.
To be sure, J Street opposes the Israeli occupation and the Israeli rightwing government. The students were affixing their own special message to their chests:
They were certainly taking a risk. The sponsors of the summit were rightwing pro-Israel groups who love the occupation. They included the feverish groups StandWithUs, the Zionist Organization of America, Camera, the Israel Project, and ACLJ (American Center for Law and Justice).
And sure enough, yesterday afternoon, when J Street reps said they were against the occupation, South Carolina State Rep. Alan Clemmons, a longtime opponent of BDS, called out from the stage, “You’re anti-Semitic.”
This accusation elicited a stream of protest from J Street U and its parent organization. The head of J Street, Jeremy Ben-Ami, called the treatment of the student group “shocking“. He writes today:
Every day, estab Jew ldrs tell me J Street shd do more re BDS. When
@jstreetu attends UN Summit, gets called anti Semitic, where’s estab?
And he points out the sorry political company:
Seems @RepAlanClemmons who called @jstreetu “anti-Semitic” at UN claim to fame is limiting voting in SC. He’s Jewish estab choice as ally?
Brooke Davies of J Street U wrote a post for J Street with the title that the summit empowered “fringe voices,” calling on Hillel and the Jewish Federations and other sponsors of the summit to “condemn the smear of J Street and J Street U.” She said why she went:
I was part of a delegation of J Street U student leaders who attended today’s anti-BDS Summit at the United Nations to engage with fellow pro-Israel advocates and to talk about effective strategies for countering the Global BDS Movement…
While we appreciated many of the perspectives that were shared at the summit, we were alarmed to see a platform given to a Republican state legislator who leveled a hateful attack on J Street, accusing J Street U’s pro-Israel, pro-peace students like us of supporting an “anti-Semitic” organization. At the same time, we were alarmed to see other speakers with long records of hateful rhetoric directed at Palestinians, Muslims and liberal American Jews given prominent roles at the summit.
These voices from the political fringes are the worst possible “Ambassadors Against BDS,” virtually guaranteed to alienate anyone with progressive values or real concerns about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict…
The only result of such an approach will be more and more young people giving up on Israel’s future.
What is fascinating to me is that if you watch the webcast of the morning plenary yesterday– hours before J Street was smeared to such outrage– Arab human rights leaders were smeared (as Davies acknowledges).
Danny Danon, the Israeli ambassador to the UN, calls Rima Khalaf an “anti-Semite.” Khalaf is a a former minister in the Jordanian government, and former head of a UN agency who resigned after submitting a report documenting an Israeli “apartheid regime.”
The great human rights activist Bassem Tamimi of Nabi Saleh, was denounced by Jay Sekulow of the ACLJ as a “terrorist” who encourages his children to throw rocks at Israeli soldiers.
Tamimi lives in a village whose lands and spring have been stolen by a Jewish settlement, Halamish. Tamimi is the hero of the wonderful new book on the Palestinian resistance to occupation, The Way to the Spring, by Ben Ehrenreich. Tamimi has toured the U.S. as a guest of Jewish Voice for Peace and Amnesty International. From JVP’s report:
Mr. Tamimi, who has been recognized as a human rights defender by the European Union in 2011, and declared a prisoner of conscience by Amnesty International in 2012…
He relayed that despite everything he has endured – prison, paralysis, deaths of family members, and continuing brutal occupation – he believes and teaches his children that all people must love each other in order to bring about a world where there is peace and safety for all people.
In short, Tamimi is a John Lewis of the nonviolent resistance movement to occupation in Palestine. J Street’s friends are calling him a terrorist. Is this really the side they want to be on?
J Streets wants to fight BDS its own way. But this is what it means to fight BDS these days: going to an event with CAMERA and the Israel Project and Nikki Haley, heroine of AIPAC. Who else will they find for their coalition? Jeremy Ben-Ami warns the anti-BDS folks that if they don’t acknowledge the occupation, they’re going to lose. But those groups have defiantly made their choice on that question, and so has the Israeli government.
We have been saying that the polarization of the discourse in the Trump era has put the crunch on liberal Zionists. The rightwing Israeli government is more committed to the settlement project than ever, the 50th anniversary of the occupation is upon us, the U.S. government is only encouraging Israel; and meantime the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) campaign aimed at Israel has been gaining strength; and Israeli leaders are crying out against it. There is less and less middle ground. There is a feeling that you’re either with Israel or against it.
P.S. I must say I was encouraged watching the Webcast. Advertised as Ambassadors against BDS, there were only two ambassadors there, Nikki Haley and Danon, and the whole event had a Soviet Politburo officialese alternative-fact feeling to it. We are alienated from world opinion but we’re gonna just keep carrying on. I imagine events in South Africa and the Jim Crow South had a similar atmosphere.
Those who protect (unearned but traditional or long-standing) privilege do not give up that privilege without a fight, and they persuade themselves that those who ask them to are enemies-to-the-death.
Recall civil war, begun because North tried to limit the geographical spread of slavery, a system that enriched the super-rich in the south w/o helping the poor whites (or the black slaves, of course). The southern planters were not ready to be content just within the borders of the original slave states. And poor whites fought for slavery — just like poor whites voting for Trump today.
Poor J-Street, trying to square the circle, but backing contradictory positions as if to do so was (what? “good for the Jews?”) sensible.
J-Street, listen up: [1] Oppose Occupation; [2] Support BDS; [3] Oppose Apartheid within any territory that Israel has controlled since (or before) 1967
Poor “liberal Zionists”: Just because they prefer to “hold their noses” while their hardier co-collectivists do the dirty work doesn’t mean their pro-“Jewish State” cred (even if it is “supremacism lite”) should be disrespected.
RE: [W]hen J Street reps said they were against the occupation, South Carolina State Rep. Alan Clemmons, a longtime opponent of BDS, called out from the stage, “You’re anti-Semitic.” ~ Weiss
S.C. STATE REP ALAN CLEMMONS’ GLASS HOUSE:
I can’t help but recall the time recently when a couple of Republican county chairmen in the great state of South Carolina wrote in a newspaper op-ed:
** SEE: “2 South Carolina Republicans Apologize for Reference to Jews” – http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/21/us/21carolina.html?_r=0
P.S. ONE OF CAROLINA’S “GOOSE CREEK MEN”:
■ James Moore (South Carolina politician)
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Moore_(South_Carolina_politician)
Absolutely hilarious. The creature who opened the “show” was the stuff sick buckets were invented for. As for Danon – seriously creepy.
Great to see that the Zios are seriously crapping themselves over BDS. Perhaps even the most brain dead amongst them are beginning to realize that there is no such thing as bad publicity and this theatrical farce is excellent publicity for the BDS cause.
And boy Zios seriously “do not like it up em”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ejmFSN2qBG0
Well I was there. I actually talked to the girl on the far right of your picture as well as several others who aren’t pictured from J-StreetU. I was damn impressed by them. Extremely knowledgeable and well versed. They often made far more sense policywise often than their elders in J-Street often do. I’d say in terms of liberal grown ups that were knowledgeable the Israel Policy Forum offered the best discussion, kind of like J-Street without the boy crush on Obama.
I’d agree with their comments regarding many speakers alienating students with progressive values. The event felt very much like a meeting for Republican Jews (though there were some gentile supporters of Israel, and those are often further to the right). The range of opinion I saw ran from JDL (whom I also talked to there) to J-Street. I suspect I was about the leftmost 10% at that event.
There were speakers who came from more center left organizations and they had approaches that were more likely to succeed. I’d say mostly on the hard right you were dealing with people with little experience with BDS at all, it wasn’t just they were rightwing they were often quite fantastical. I certainly did meet a lot of people who had been victims of SJP / Palestine solidarity protests and traumatized by the event. For example a Jewish library manager whose event had been disrupted, in a way that the library had never experienced.
So J-Street is center left. A lot of the crowd though is very right. There are definitely large number of people in that crowd who would consider any Democrat a traitorous socialist. The criticism of J-Street needs to be taken as coming from a Republican context. I wouldn’t make too much of it. Republicans don’t agree with Democrats across the board, and that isn’t much different in the Jewish community.
As far as J-StreetU being in the middle they are quite happy there and didn’t seem to be under any pressure. To the right they had people who simply would not acknowledge the facts on the ground or were openly racist (in their opinion). To the left they had people who refuse to engage Israel from a place and love and engage this issue from a place of hate.
The J-Streeters wanted to oppose both extremes. Deal with reality, try and come up with policy alternatives that respect everyone’s viewpoint. Dialogue not confrontation as a strategy for resolving problems (lots of success cases were mentioned incidentally). Try and see things from the other person’s point of view as much as possible ….
In short the J-Streeters are with Israel 100% yet feel free to critique Likud’s policies the same way they would critique American Republican policies without having to hate America.