This week Israeli President Isaac Herzog was welcomed to The White House. The meeting with Biden comes just a week before Israelis head to the polls and less than a two weeks before the U.S. midterms.
In remarks to reporters before the meeting the two leaders focused the alleged threat of Iran and Israel’s recent maritime demarcation deal with Lebanon. There was no mention of escalating tension in the West Bank, where five Palestinians were killed and twenty were wounded this week.
The White House’s readout of the meeting did reference the violence, but the diagnosis was hardly surprising: “negotiated two-state solution remains the best avenue to achieve a lasting peace.”
The readout also condemned “the open-ended and biased nature” of the UN Commission of Inquiry, which is “unfairly singling out Israel” according to the Biden administration. Last week that commission put out a 28-page report affirming that Israel’s occupation is illegal. “The Commission finds that there are reasonable grounds to conclude that the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territory is now unlawful under international law owing to its permanence and to actions undertaken by Israel to annex parts of the land de facto and de jure,” the commission members wrote.
“We have made our concerns about this Commission of Inquiry clear from the start. Israel is consistently unfairly targeted in the UN system, including in the course of this Commission of Inquiry. Israel is the only country that’s subject to a standing country-specific agenda,” State Department spokesman Ned Price told reporters at the time.
Of course Price never addressed the actual findings of the report because none of it can actually be refuted. When he was asked if Palestinians had the right to resist Israel’s occupation this week the standard line on the issue was reiterated: “We want to see a negotiated, two-state solution to this conflict. There is no military solution to this conflict. There is no solution to this conflict through violence. Ultimately, it has to come through diplomacy.”
Everyone knows how diplomacy works here. The occupier gets billions every year and is allowed to act with impunity. It doesn’t seem like the killing of Shireen Abu Akleh came up during the Herzog meeting, but why would it? Israel intentionally killed a Palestinian journalist, tried to cover up, then declared it was a big accident, and that no one will be punished. Israel knows there will be no repercussions and that they will always be welcomed in The White House regardless of how any forthcoming U.S. elections shake out.
This week the State Department’s Vedant Patel was asked about Abu Akleh and whether the U.S. would ever support any kind of independent investigation into her death. Here’s his response: “What I can say is that from this department, we have taken the death of Shireen Abu Akleh quite seriously, and we have mentioned it and engaged with our Israeli counterparts on it. The Secretary has spoken about it a great deal, Ned has spoken about it a great deal. And it’s something that we are very, very mindful of.”
MRC‘s “Antisemitism 2.0”
The entertainment group MRC has announced that they are shelving a planned documentary on Kanye West. That’s not surprising, as multiple groups and companies have severed their relationship with the rapper over his recent string of antisemitic comments.
However, things get a little stranger when you look at the group’s statement on the decision. After explaining why they’re cutting ties with West, the statement proceeds to explain something that MRC calls “Antisemitism 2.0.”
“It is brilliantly crafted, fast becoming part of mainstream thinking, and puts Jews is a terrible philosophical corner,” the statement explains. “That lie goes as follows: If you support Israel’s right to exist, you are a racist. If you are a Jew, you support Israel’s right to exist. Therefore, if you are Jewish, you are a racist.”
This confounding digression makes an even more abrupt swerve and randomly begins referencing the student newspaper at Wellesley College: “For proof of how quickly a protest of Israel’s policies can jump to antisemitism, look no further than last week’s outrage at Wellesley College. The school is a historical bastion of liberalism and civil rights. But last week its newspaper editorial board saw fit not only to condemn Israel, but actually publish a MAP of Jewish places of worship, organizations and business in the area so that they could be targeted for protest – or worse. This would not be shocking from Neo-Nazis, but Wellesley?”
What on earth is going on here? MRC is referencing a September op-ed in the paper that called for the liberation of Palestine and for the school to divest from Israeli apartheid. “As the Wellesley News Editorial Board, we firmly support the work that Wellesley’s Students for Justice in Palestine and Palestinian students have done to push Wellesley’s administration to acknowledge the College’s role in settler-colonialism and divest from Israel,” wrote the editors. “We proudly support the BDS movement and the liberation of Palestine, and we call on our fellow students, our professors, Wellesley’s administration and the Board of Trustees to do the same.”
The opinion piece references the Mapping Project, a tool that aims to expose “local links between entities responsible for the colonization of Palestine… and for the economy of imperialism and war… policing… and displacement.”
There’s been all kinds of debate about the Mapping Project and Mondoweiss has been part of that conversation but, whatever one thinks of the effort, it doesn’t identify Jewish places of worship, organizatons, and businesses so they can be “targeted for protest – or worse.” The implication here is obviously that the project is encouraging violence against Jewish people.
But leaving all of that aside, the Wellesley editorial doesn’t include a map at all! It cites the Mapping Project as an important resource but anyone reading this statement will come away with a much different conclusion. The MRC smears also ignore a clarification from the editorial board that was tacked onto the op-ed shortly after it ran: “We intended to use the Mapping Project only as a source of information about Wellesley College and its affiliated institutions. We apologize for not clarifying the nuanced nature of the Project’s inclusion, and we recognize that the impact of our citation may have differed from its purpose. We did not and do not endorse The Mapping Project. The Wellesley News editorial board would like to reemphasize that we condemn antisemitism and all discriminatory beliefs, including the use of The Mapping Project for antisemitic rhetoric and actions.”
However, according to MRC the op-ed constitutes “proof of how quickly a protest of Israel’s policies can jump to antisemitism.”
This is a clear attempt to use Kanye’s awful comments as a means to attack Palestinian rights advocacy and we’re sadly seeing a fair amount of this. This week Anti-Defamation League CEO Jonathan Greenblatt told Anderson Cooper that Kanye was giving “a license to other haters. So whether its white supremacists or radical anti-Zionists, we got to call out all this kind of hate, no matter where it comes from.”
Shameful stuff from an organization that claims to be a civil rights group, but not surprising.
Odds & Ends
⚖️ The ACLU is petitioning SCOTUS to overturn Arkansas’ anti-BDS law.
?? Amnesty International is calling for the ICC to investigate attacks committed during Israel’s August 2022 assault on Gaza as war crimes. Amnesty International’s Secretary General Agnès Callamard: “Israel’s latest offensive on Gaza lasted only three days, but that was ample time to unleash fresh trauma and destruction on the besieged population. The three deadly attacks we examined must be investigated as war crimes; all victims of unlawful attacks and their families deserve justice and reparations.”
“These violations were perpetrated in the context of Israel’s ongoing illegal blockade on Gaza, which is a key tool of its apartheid regime. Palestinians in Gaza are dominated, oppressed and segregated, trapped in a 15-year nightmare where recurrent unlawful attacks punctuate a worsening humanitarian crisis. As well as investigating war crimes committed in Gaza, the ICC should consider the crime against humanity of apartheid within its current investigation in the Occupied Palestinian Territories.”
?? Jared Kushner at Future Investment Initiative conference in Saudi Arabia: “You see this region now, where Israel, which is a startup nation and the UAE, which is a startup nation, and even Saudi Arabia, which is a startup nation, are starting to think about their future generations. I think you’re going to see over the next decade a lot of progress and growth coming from this part of the world.”
?? Dr. Raz Segal, associate professor of Holocaust and genocide studies at Stockton University, on UN experts being attacked as antisemites for investigating Israel’s human rights abuses: “Israeli human rights violations and settler-colonial state violence against Palestinians are thoroughly documented, and the UN Commission of Inquiry has very rightly emphasized this violence in its report. Not only is this not antisemitism, but as part of a struggle against a violent state and part of an effort to stop mass violence, protect victims, and insist on accountability and justice — the report is very much part of the legacy of the struggle against antisemitism… It is clear that these allegations are baseless and that their aim is to create a chilling effect.”
?? At Responsible Statecraft Connor Echols writes about the Ukraine letter that the House Democrats retracted.
? There’s some very interesting info in this Haaretz op-ed by Mira Sucharov. She surveys a number of U.S. Jews on the subject of Zionism but changes the way she asks the question:
When I asked in my survey of American Jews whether respondents identified as Zionist, a majority (58 percent) did. Only 10 percent identified as anti-Zionist, and another 12 percent as non-Zionist. (Another 12 percent said “it’s complicated,” with only 7 percent answering “unsure.”)
But then I presented respondents with a series of definitions of Zionism. Here’s where it got interesting.
“Zionism means a feeling of attachment to Israel.” According to this definition,” I asked, “are you a Zionist?” Not surprisingly, a strong majority said they are “definitely” (56 percent) or “probably” (14 percent) a Zionist – 70 percent) in all.
Then I presented this definition: “Zionism means a belief in a Jewish and democratic state.” Again, unsurprisingly, the affirmative answers represented a strong majority: 72 percent said that, according to this definition, they were “definitely” (52 percent) or “probably” (20 percent) a Zionist.
I then presented respondents with a third definition of Zionism: “Zionism means the belief in privileging Jewish rights over non-Jewish rights in Israel.” Here, respondents’ support for “Zionism” plummeted: only 10 percent of respondents said they were “definitely” (3 percent) or “probably” (7 percent) Zionist. A full 69 percent said they were “probably not” or “definitely not” a Zionist according to this definition.
✉️ Adalah Justice Project and the NDN Collective have written actor Dan Levy an open letter:
We are writing to make you aware that on October 26 your father, Eugene Levy, is being honored at the Creative Community for Peace gala in LA, and Schitt’s Creek is being spotlighted in their event promotion. Creative Community for Peace (CCFP) is an anti-Indigenous, racist organization that works to undermine Black and Indigenous solidarity with Palestinians who are resisting Israel’s systematic and violent efforts to remove them from their native lands.
While your father describes Creative Community for Peace as “a dedicated and consistent advocate for peace and understanding around the world,” in fact they are a proven front group for StandWithUs – a known anti-Palestinian organization with close ties to Israel’s apartheid government. An official in Israel’s far-right Netanyahu government was a featured speaker at CCFP’s 2017 gala, where he praised CCFP’s mission.…
…So now you know: Endorsing Creative Community For Peace is an endorsement of the Israeli government’s violent policies of apartheid and military occupation, which is an endorsement of colonial violence everywhere.
Stay safe out there,
Michael
