This post originally appeared on The Arabist.

Hebron: At least 10 children arrested by Israeli military in one week
The extreme Golani Unit of the Israeli military is escalating its arrests of Palestinian children in Al Khalil (Hebron), targeting boys between the ages of 12 to15 years old with at least 10 reported cases of child arrests made just in the span of one week.
link to palsolidarity.org

Ethnic Cleansing / Destruction of Homes & Property / Apartheid 

Not behaving like Caesar's wife-- Goodman last month called for Israel to wage an international "war" for its public image. Now he's calling for war against Iran.

Notice the sloppy thinking-- that Iran is threatening America with nukes, threatening a world war.

Daniel Nolan reports for the Spectator, a Hamilton, Canada, newspaper on a speech by Goodman on Thursday night at a local synagogue, sponsored by the United Jewish Appeal:

A prominent Israeli writer is advocating his nation attack Iran’s nuclear development facilities now because the risk is too great after that country builds nuclear weapons.

Hirsh Goodman doesn’t believe sanctions being pushed by Western nations will stop Iran and said something has to be done this year before Iran moves its nuclear work underground.

He said a nuclear Iran, along with a nuclear Pakistan, would plunge the world into “a new cold war, if not a hot one.”

“The minute Iran is nuclear, it’s a whole different game,” Goodman said Thursday night at the Beth Jacob Synagogue in west Hamilton.

“Not because they are going to blow up Israel. They’ve got missiles that can reach the east cost of America, but what happens if the ayatollah (Iran’s supreme leader) wakes up one morning and destroys the Saudi fields and the Kuwaiti oilfields and the West is left with no energy.”

 

A recent response to a subpoena from the United States Capitol Police has revealed the main assailant of a peaceful demonstrator who was physically attacked and injured on May 24, 2011, to be Stanley Anthony Shulster, allegedly a member of the American-Israeli Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). According to the lawsuit, Mr. Shulster, a retired lawyer, admitted to assaulting Rae Abileah, a member of CODEPINK, in the House of Representatives while she protested the Israeli occupation of Palestine during the speech by Benjamin Netanyahu, Prime Minister of Israel. The Capitol Police issued an arrest warrant for Mr. Shulster for this attack.

Mr. Shulster’s biography on the Jackson County, Oregon Republican Women website identifies him as “an Unpaid Lobbyist,” and a “Volunteer in the Israel Defense Forces Medical Unit and a member of AIPAC.” The bio states: “At the last AIPAC meeting in May of 2011 Stan was present to hear the stirring address that Prime Minister Netanyahu gave to Congress and he grabbed the woman who heckled the Prime Minister while he was speaking.”

Abileah protests Israeli occupation
during the speech by Netanyahu 5.24.2011

Rabbi Shmuley Boteach also attested to the assault when he wrote in his blog, “The elderly gentleman to my right, whom I had been talking to just before the speech started, pulled the flag out of her hands, cupped his hands over her mouth, and assisted in subduing her.”  Additional witnesses have been identified by the U.S. Capitol Police.

According to the complaint, Mr. Shulster grabbed the banner held by Ms. Abileah, used his hand to attempt to gag and suffocate Ms. Abileah, and yanked her head back, injuring her neck. As a result of the attack, Ms. Abileah sustained a neck strain, swollen neck and muscle strain, and has since suffered from frequent head and neck aches as well as emotional trauma.

Ms. Abileah is a 29 year old American Jew of Israeli descent, who works as the Co-Director of CODEPINK, a women-initiated grassroots peace and social justice organization that seeks to end U.S. wars and the U.S. funded occupation of Palestine.

“I was shocked that the biography of the person who attacked me would brag about his use of violence. This lawless behavior echoes the routine actions of the Israeli government and military in carrying out violent acts daily against the Palestinian people. I am hopeful that my filing suit will be a clear signal to those who attempt to silence peaceful protesters, that they will be held accountable for their illegal actions,” said Ms. Abileah.

Photos of the action and assault can be found here.

AIPAC’s 2012 annual policy conference will be held from March 4 to 6 in Washington, D.C. It is expected that peaceful protesters will challenge AIPAC’s policies of supporting Israel’s ongoing crimes against the Palestinian people and its threats of attacking Iran.

(Plans for OCCUPY AIPAC are under way and will take place March 2-6 in Washington DC.)

News spreads fast. Bloomberg is reporting Adelson isn't planning on floating Gingrich anymore which leaves him high and dry and scrambling for cash.

Five losing contests later, Gingrich and Winning Our Future, an outside political action committee supporting him, are almost silent on television airwaves, offering free water and coffee at events, and revamping a fundraising strategy based largely on the support of a single wealthy backer, Sheldon Adelson, and the Las Vegas casino owner’s family.

In the past seven days, Winning Our Future has spent $61,290 on broadcast television advertisements, compared with $636,920 spent by Mitt Romney and a super-PAC backing him, Restore Our Future, according to data compiled by New York-based Kantar Media’s CMAG, a company that tracks advertising.

For now, the Adelsons don’t plan to deliver another big check to float Gingrich’s campaign, according to a person familiar with their deliberations.

So, have you checked out that video up there yet? (I rec, it's funny) Gee, what can I say?  Does America deserve a president named Santorum? Wrong question. Do I think he'll win? No. Do I think he'll win the GOP nomination? At this point, maybe. I've been saying all along you can't win the GOP nomination if the fundies don't love ya, and fundies don't like Mormons, something about hell....it's hard keeping all those extremists sorted out. I wish we could send them to an island far far away, together. Anyway, enough of my ramblings.

The Hill:

But Rick Santorum's wins in Missouri, Minnesota and Colorado have instead coalesced support around his campaign, with Gingrich now looking for another miraculous come-from-behind.

Meanwhile, a super-PAC supporting Santorum's campaign told Bloomberg the money has been "rolling in" since the former senator's upset wins, including a $1 million donation earlier this week.

Googled Santorum lately? Yep, that site is still holding strong and remains in the #1 position, after the Santorum campaign's paid spot. But it doesn't end there, it's not just a gag site, something I realized tonight when I clicked on "Click to continue":

Rick Santorum is Good at Winning Caucuses

Caucuses by nature are built around people who are the most politically passionate. In Democratic caucuses, this benefits a candidate who is a bit further to the left, and his success in caucuses was a big key towards President Obama's run to the Democratic nomination four years ago. But, as being too far to the left is considered completely unacceptable in our political climate, a socialist group is unable to highjack the proceedings. Things are different in the Republican, where you have two groups of complete whack jobs who are viewed as being a part of the conservative mainstream: the Ron Paul Libertarians and the extreme Religious Right. These people are more passionate than your average conservative, and are more willing to spend their time attending a caucus.

Think of it this way: following the Florida Primary, won by Mitt Romney, a fair amount of attention was paid to the low turnout rate. About 8.5% of Florida's population showed up to vote in the Republican primary. Compare that to Colorado, where just over 1% of the state population participated in the caucus, and Minnesota, where less than 1% participated. And while Santorum had a strong showing in Missouri's primary, that primary was merely symbolic and awarded no delegates. As a result, Missouri's Republican Primary only drew from 4% of the state's population.

What's the conclusion to draw from this? Santorum does have a following. In Midwest states, he is the social conservative candidate of choice. But we won't know if he's become the social conservative candidate of the south until March. More importantly, we have no evidence to this point that Santorum can win anything that a significant portion of a state's population actually shows up to. Until he does that, Santorum is merely the King of Contests Nobody Gives a Shit About. And while that may parlay a better contract for him with Fox News this fall, it will not get him the Republican nomination and certainly would not allow him to even put up a competitive race against President Obama in the General Election.

Comedians are going to have a field day with this, that's one thing we can look forward to.

The following press release was just sent out by WitnessBahrain.org:

American Citizens Arrested in Bahrain during Peaceful Protest
Huwaida Arraf & Radhika Sainath in Police Custody

For immediate release

Febraury 11, 2011

(Manama) – US Citizens Huwaida Arraf and Radhika Sainath were arrested by Bahraini security forces in Manama on Saturday during a peaceful protest in near the Standard Chartered Bank downtown. Protesters had marched into the city center to reestablish a presence of nonviolent, peaceful protest leading up to the 1-year anniversary of the Arab Spring uprising in Bahrain.

Huwaida and Radhika were in Bahrain as part of an international solidarity effort aimed at providing an international civilian presence to report and monitor the situation on the ground. Leading up to February 14, Bahraini authorities had prevented journalists, human rights observers and other internationals from entering the country, leading many to fear a brutal crackdown. The two women are part of the Witness Bahrain initiative ( http://www.witnessbahrain.org ), which arrived in Bahrain in response to a call by Bahraini democracy activists for international observers.

Just yesterday, top US human rights envoy, Assistant Secretary of State Michael Posner, called on the Bahraini authorities to respect the rights of Bahrainis to peaceful protest and to refrain from using excessive force. Huwaida was dragged away by numerous security forces after sitting on the ground, and it is widely reported that detainees have suffered physical abuse while on the way to and at police stations.

Both women were part of a peaceful protest marching near the Pearl Roundabout – site of last year’s peaceful round-the-clock protest in Bahrain, modeled after Egypt’s Tahrir Square – when they were attacked. Both are human rights lawyers, and both have experience as human rights activists in Palestine. Additionally, both were part of the National Lawyer’s Guild delegation to Gaza following Operation Cast Lead to investigate possible war crimes and illegal use of American weaponry on a civilian population.

A new, neoconservative online outlet called the Washington Free Beacon is continuing the campaign against the Center for American Progress (CAP) in two articles that go after the organization for “downplaying” intelligence on Iran’s nuclear program. But the author, Adam Kredo, misleads readers by distorting the existing evidence on Iran. The articles represent a continuation of a campaign to discredit those who are cautious about a war on Iran, a core reason why neoconservatives are attacking CAP.

Kredo’s main contention is that CAP, along with the Huffington Post and Media Matters, has “downplayed new intelligence indicating Iran’s nuclear program is more dangerous than previously thought.” Kredo writes that liberal groups have taken to questioning the reporting of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), the organization tasked with monitoring nuclear energy and weapons. But it’s Kredo’s characterization of the most recent IAEA report that is wrong.

But first, Kredo is also wrong when he writes that liberal groups like CAP have questioned “the IAEA’s recent findings on Iran.” As evidence for that assertion, he links to a CAP report that approvingly cites the IAEA report “detailing Iran’s past and current nuclear weapons-related research.” So in fact, CAP does not question the veracity of the IAEA report--and neither do the other articles Kredo links to.

More important though is Kredo’s distortion of the IAEA report--which, it should be noted, has been credibly criticized by some analysts. The distortion serves up an agenda that portrays an Iranian nuclear weapons program as an “existential threat” to Israel that should be wiped out by the U.S. and/or Israel--actions that would lead to a disastrous war.

"This is the exact same pattern that we saw in Iraq, and the effort by folks to hype the threat and take things out of context and confuse the American public into thinking things that are not true," said Jamal Abdi, the policy director for the National Iranian American Council (NIAC). "Right now, a lot of Americans have been fooled into thinking that Iran has a nuclear weapon, or even that Iran is pursuing a nuclear weapon."

In Kredo's first article (which has a hyperlink with the title, "war on truth,") Kredo writes:

The IAEA’s most recent report reveals that Iran has been pursuing nuclear weapons since the mid-1980s with public activities peaking around 2002 before apparently moving underground.

And in his second article, which smears CAP as "prejudiced" and "anti-Semitic," he similarly states:

Liberal writers routinely question the veracity of the International Atomic Energy Agency’s (IAEA) November report on Iran. The report builds the case that the regime is aggressively pursuing nuclear weapons.

The IAEA report does sound the alarm on certain aspects of Iran’s nuclear work that the report says may indicate nuclear weapons work. But no where in the report can you find a definitive statement that “Iran has been pursuing nuclear weapons since the mid-1980s” or that Iran is “aggressively pursuing nuclear weapons,” which is how Kredo characterizes it.

"What [U.S.] intelligence reports found and continue to find is the same thing the IAEA report found, which is that Iran had a concerted nuclear weapons program up until 2003, and shut that program down," Abdi explained in a phone interview. "And while there still remains some activities that appear to be geared towards no other purpose than potential weapons work, it’s the finding of both the intelligence community and the IAEA that Iran has not made a decision to actually pursue a nuclear weapon. If anything, what they’re moving towards is the capability if they decide to get a nuclear weapon. And that’s much different than what this reporter is asserting."

Kredo's misleading characterizations, which frequently shows up in mainstream media, have been roundly criticized by the media watchdog group Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR). In November 2011, a FAIR “action alert” noted:

The first part of the agency's November 8 report declares--once again--that Iran is not transferring uranium for use in a military project.

The more explosive allegations that media are focusing on are contained in an annex that attempts to lay out evidence that has been circulating for years. The IAEA report stresses concern over allegations over past activities; very little of the report is dedicated to research that could be describing as ongoing. Indeed, the media is focusing primarily on the IAEA's speculation about what might be ongoing research that could be related to a military program.

The Christian Science Monitor also had a good report outlining why the IAEA report wasn’t the “game changer” it was made out to be:

In a 14-page annex to its quarterly report on Iran released yesterday, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) said new intelligence and other data gave it "serious concern" about the allegedly peaceful nature of Iran's nuclear program. But the casus belli for military strikes that anti-Iran hawks in the US and Israel expected to gain from the IAEA report is far from clear-cut...

Prior to the report's release, speculation mounted in Israel and Washington that new revelations might prompt military strikes to prevent Iran from acquiring a weapon.

Instead, experts say, much of the information is years old, inconclusive – and perhaps not entirely real.

Most of the weapons-related work it details was shut down nearly a decade ago – in 2003 – the IAEA says, and less formal efforts that "may" continue do not bolster arguments that Iran is a nation racing to have the bomb.
Iran "doesn't seem to have the same North Korea-like obsession with developing nuclear weapons. That's nowhere to be found in the [IAEA] evidence," says Shannon Kile, head of the Nuclear Weapons Project at the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI).
"Yes, Iran is making progress, they've covered the waterfront in terms of the main technical areas that you need to develop a nuclear weapon," says Mr. Kile. "But there is no evidence they have a dedicated program under way. It's not like they are driving toward nuclear weapons; it's like they're meandering toward capability."

And after readers, urged on by FAIR, complained to the New York Times’ ombudsman about articles claiming that the IAEA report states that Iran's nuclear program has a military objective, the ombudsman agreed with FAIR. Arthur Brisbane wrote correctly that the “agency has stopped short” of emphatically saying that Iran is building nuclear weapons. Similarly, the Washington Post's ombudsman criticized his paper's reporting for "getting ahead of the facts on Iran" after a headline in the Post read, "Iran’s quest to possess nuclear weapons." The Times and the Post are no bastions of anti-war on Iran sentiment, so it’s significant that their ombudsmen would chastise their papers for reporting what Kredo is also writing.

To bolster the case that Iran is definitively pursuing nuclear weapons, Kredo quotes Director of National Intelligence James Clapper as saying that Iran is “certainly moving on [the] path” towards weaponization. It’s true that Clapper said that; but the next sentence in his testimony was this: “We do not believe they have actually made the decision to go ahead with a nuclear weapon.” This is similar to what Defense Secretary Leon Panetta said on CBS last month: “Are they trying to develop a nuclear weapon? No. But we know that they’re trying to develop a nuclear capability and that’s what concerns us.”

Kredo’s zeal to discredit CAP and other analysts who are speaking out against a war with Iran is clearly one more step in the attempt to marginalize critics of current U.S./Israeli policy on Iran. Predictably, the clamoring for an Iran war is appearing in an outlet whose chairman is the neoconservative writer Michael Goldfarb, who advises the Emergency Committee for Israel. Goldfarb has also advised Sarah Palin on foreign policy.

"The hyping of this type is going to become a self-fulfilling prophecy," NIAC's Abdi said. "We’re going to see a repeat of Iraq. But a war with Iran is going to make the wars of the past ten years look like a cakewalk."

About a week ago the David Project co-produced a video, where a full cast of unpaid college students parodied the newest cannon of viral YouTube videos with "Sh*t people say about Israel."  The video depicts "college students" making generalizations about Israel, or asking naive questions, and closes with a standard hasbara line: Israel wants peace. 

In the video, one brunette co-ed says, "I heard everyone there is in the army." Then, twirling her hair follows up with "are you in the army?"  Another sits with a friend eating from a Sabra container and asks, "is it Hamas or hummus?"  Later, what appears to be a student giving a presentation in class says, "Israel uses disproportionate force against the Palestinians," backed with a clip of, "Jews have no connection to the land of Israel." 

The purpose behind the statements and questions in the video is to demonstrate that people who support the Palestinian cause, are uninformed on Israel, its society and politics.  At the end, the video concludes with a bunch of clips where confused looking people say "you mean Palestine?" and then the punchline:

'No, we mean Israel. Because Israel wants peace. Israel is the only democracy in the Middle East. Jews have been in Israel for over 3,000 years. Israel wants peace. Hamas doesn't want peace. Peace, peace, peace, peace.'

Last fall the David Project created a department that trains college students in multimedia production.  The program, Israel Video Advocacy Project was held in November in Baltimore, MD, where the hasbara group brought sixteen students together for a crash course in production.  Dubbed as "video advocacy" in order to "create a positive atmosphere towards Israel on campus," the David Project also provided each participant with "a flip camera and a USB wrist-band loaded with video-specific links and resources, as well as general Israel campus advocacy information." 

The program is in its pilot year, and "Sh*t people say about Israel" is the first video. (For a double-whammy of sexism and hasbara, check out "Shit Girls Say (Taglit Birthright Israel Parody."

Post-racial racism

In early January comedian Franchesca Ramsey created the online video genre that "Sh*t people say about Israel" models.  She produced what Colorlines calls a "popular and critical examination of race," through her video "Shit White Girls Say…to Black Girls."  In the short, Ramsey, clad in a blond wig uses a voice that pitches the perfect imitation of "not trying to be racist" and being very racist, while asking a series of naive questions to the camera. What makes the video funny is that the perspective is from a black spectator and mocks the notion of a "post-racial" society.

People loved the videos and in days over a million viewed it.  Young people also started making their own, which reflected their particular experience.  "Shit white girls say...to Arabs," reflecting growing Islamophobia and Orientalist attitudes, "Shit White Girls Say... To Brown (Desi/Indian) Girls," reflecting widespread appropriation of Indian culture. 

Though, not all of the videos engage in a constructive discussion of race and gender.  In addition to the videos above, a series of well-made "Shit girls say" videos hit it big online, however in this series men dressed up as women, and depicted women as annoying, insecure and self-obsessed. As Samhita Mukhopadhyay writes at Feministling these videos further gender stereotypes rather than deconstruct them. 

If Ramsey's video is to explore the gaze of the oppressed, a more apropos video would be called, "Sh*t Zionist say to Palestinians."  However, no one has made that video yet.

Yesterday, an Israeli judge postponed a decision for hunger striker Khader Adnan’s final appeal in the military court system, which was heard in his hospital room. The judge requested more documents as the reason for the delay in either ordering a continuation of Adnan’s administrative detention, or possible release from Israeli custody.

The unusual trial was held in Zeif Hospital and media were not permitted on site. Currently, Adnan is held without charge, based on secret evidence the prosecution has not disclosed to the political prisoner or his legal representation. However, the prosecution previously noted that the current evidence against Adnan as so-called leader in Islamic Jihad is not sufficient to press charges against the hunger striker.

Adnan’s case sits at an impasse. It is unknown when the Israeli judge will make release a decision on the hunger striker’s appeal. In the absence of judicial release, human rights organizations and activist are petitioning for his release, and pressuring news agencies to cover Adnan’s detention.

The article states: “The Governor’s educational visit was part of a JUF initiative that, for the past two decades, has brought influential leaders to Israel.” Quinn signed a “formal agreement on academic cooperation between Ben Gurion University of the Negev in Beersheba and the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC) to establish a wide-ranging partnership. The agreement will promote faculty and student exchanges, joint research, and other academic activities of mutual interest. The agreement greatly expands the existing relationship between the universities in the field of public health.”

Beyond principled opposition to such academic agreements between our public universities and those of the apartheid Jewish state, it’s important to note that the academic merit and social outcomes of such agreements are obviously limited by the political context that provokes fundamental opposition from advocates of social justice. In relation to Motorola, for example, it’s impossible to believe that there will be public discussion promoting the public interest regarding military applications in general or surveillance technology in particular.

Similarly, such an agreement cannot conceivably promote consideration of fundamental and historical water resource and environmental degradation issues pertaining to political conflict between Israel and Palestine, Lebanon, Syria, and Jordan. It’s also highly unlikely that the essentially political nature of such an academic agreement would allow or encourage researchers to address the public health concerns of Palestinians, either as citizens of Israel or in the occupied territories; nor would they likely address, for example, the conditions of African immigrants in Israel who find themselves increasingly despised and unwanted.

A biased and discriminatory political agenda, dictated and limited by Israeli state interests and U.S. hegemonic interests in the region, is thus inevitably part and parcel of such academic agreements. The public university and its scholarly and scientific reputation is commandeered and exploited by the Israel Lobby in order to serve and legitimize that agenda.

Beyond this particular “academic exchange,” my perspective is informed by the principles of the BDS movement and the challenges inevitably presented to the movement by the Israel Lobby’s incessant pressure on public officials and institutions at all levels. As a long-term resident of Illinois and employee of the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC), I have been a journalist and activist regarding the manner in which Jewish and Zionist institutions have come to occupy the putatively public space of our public university—clearly to the detriment of dignity and justice for the Palestinians, as well as informed discussion in a democratic and scholarly context of the Israel/Palestine issue.

Continuing from an article that I wrote for Electronic Intifada in 2009, I argue here that the developments noted above constitute egregious extensions of the Zionist infrastructure that has been promoted by the Israel Lobby in state government in general and in public higher education in Illinois. I would hope that this opportunistic, outrageous, and cynical agreement between Governor Quinn and Israeli officials creates a critical mass of awareness and potential activism within and beyond the BDS movement in Illinois. I would hope to see a clear response to the manner in which the Lobby feels entitled to self-righteously promote—without objection—what are repugnant and sectarian political interests in state politics and higher education—disingenuously and transparently framed in terms of technological, scientific, and economic development.

From my perspective as a Jewish pro-Palestinian activist in Urbana-Champaign, I have observed two primary developments: first, the establishment of a privately-funded Program for Jewish Culture and Society two decades ago and its attendant moral emphasis on the Holocaust and Jewish victimization in general; second, the use of PJCS as an institutional and moral umbrella for an Israel Lobby-funded and baldly propagandistic“Israel Studies Project,” which has moreover been clearly racist in its exclusion of Palestinian Israelis from its purview.

Blatant conflicts of interest regarding PJCS in relation to the Israel Lobby were obvious from the start, and dovetail with Governor Quinn’s junket. The promoters of PJCS were two professors with prominent positions in local Jewish institutions—religious, secular, and Zionist. One professor, Michael Shapiro, is the father of Daniel Shapiro, current U.S. ambassador to Israel.

In 2004, Michael Shapiro worked closely with Michael Kotzin, JUF Executive Vice President, to fund the Israel Studies Project, part of a state-wide effort by the Israel Lobby at both public and private universities. Kotzin wrote in the Forward in 2004 that the “manner in which Israel and the Middle East are taught about in the nation’s university classrooms has increasingly come to the fore as one of the most difficult and far-reaching challenges facing the Jewish community.” In translation, this is to say that the Lobby needs to take serious measures to intervene in academia to promote Israel’s interests, in response to students who are increasingly enlightened regarding the plight of the Palestinians.

Kotzin, a long-time Lobby apparatchik in Chicago, accompanied Governor Quinn to Israel, commenting “It is particularly gratifying to be here with Gov. Quinn today when that partnership moves to a new level.” Quinn’s group was addressed in Israel by Ambassador Shapiro, who tellingly “called his address to the group ‘his first official duty’ after arriving the day before to assume his responsibilities as U.S. Ambassador to Israel.”

I would add that the Urbana campus has also procured, for the past two academic years, a visiting Jewish-Israeli professor of Israel Studies whose position is by no means disinterestedly funded by the Schusterman Family Foundation and the American-Israeli Cooperative Enterprise (AICE). According to the Jewish Virtual Library, “The aim of the program is to present American students with a broad understanding of Israel's history, society, politics, culture and relations with its neighbors and the broader international community.” In plainer language, the aim of this program—as of the Israel Studies Project at UIUC and the broader Israel Studies movement in general—is to promote a sanitized version of Zionism, Israel, and Israel’s oppression of the Palestinians. The current visiting professor at the Urbana Campus, Rhona Seidelman, has well-served this purpose.

It is unacceptable that a visiting professor essentially hired by the Israel Lobby is charged with teaching the one class offered at UIUC on the history of the Israel/Palestine conflict. Perhaps needless to say, UIUC has never hired a professor of Palestinian or Arab background specifically in relation to teaching and research regarding the topic of Israel/Palestine. Regarding any other oppressed minority, it would be unheard of for faculty members to be bought and paid for by interests promoting and justifying such oppression. But in the case of the Israel Lobby on campus, it is business as usual. At UIUC and other campuses in Illinois, the Lobby has de facto attempted to limit the institutional space within which Palestinian perspectives can be understood and legitimized.

The political proficiency and resources of the Israel Lobby in Illinois and elsewhere present formidable challenges to pro-Palestinian and BDS activists. Nevertheless, popular support for Israel, including among Jews and on campuses, is at an all-time low. The recent and welcome radicalization of the notion of “occupy,” combined with the principles and goals of the BDS movement, suggests assertive and persistent responses to Lobby business as usual on campus and in state government.