In an interview with the Foundation for Middle East Peace, Ken Roth shares the details of how Harvard denied him a fellowship following donor pressure because he had supervised Human Rights Watch’s report accusing Israel of apartheid.
If you don’t want to socialize with people who support Israel, or you think Israel treats Palestinians the way Nazis treated Jews, you’re antisemitic, according to a new survey by the ADL aimed at branding “highly negative” views of Israel as bigotry, thereby granting political immunity to apartheid. “You hate the Jewish state, chances are you also deeply dislike the Jewish people,” says Jonathan Greenblatt.
The U.S. press is doing its utmost to ignore Palestinian persecution, but has given a lot of attention to a delicious political scandal involving Ken Roth at Harvard University. The story has highlighted the corruption of elite institutions by pro-Israel donors. An old story is finally news.
Israel is facing mass protests over the authoritarian government’s plans to override supreme court rulings so as to exonerate Netanyahu from corruption charges. But U.S. Ambassador Tom Nides praises Netanyahu as a sober leader, and he appeared to side with the government over any protesters this week, stating repeatedly that the government has a mandate from the public. He even characterized Israel’s move against the supreme court as “judicial reform.”
“Anybody who is contributing to the Israeli economy should stop. Stop that contribution until the wind changes.” Noa Sattath, an Israeli rabbi and civil rights activist often promoted by the liberal Zionist group J Street, called for crushing economic pressure on the fascistic new Israeli government during a webinar with Americans for Peace Now last week.
Hillel Halkin moved to Israel from the U.S. 50 years ago because he believed in the Zionist vision. Now the author confesses that the project failed because it could not deal with the central question, Palestinian demands, and he was naive when anti-Zionists made that argument to him years ago. Today the country is going off a rightwing-religious “cliff” — a quarter of all nonreligious Israelis between ages 18-24, and half of all religious ones, think Israel’s Palestinian citizens should be stripped of the right to vote!
We are barely a week into the new Netanyahu government and it is already proving its extremism in provocative and murderous actions against Palestinians.
But look what Aaron David Miller advises at CNN. The former peace processor says that Biden won’t confront Netanyahu because he has bigger fish to fry and he knows that “the Palestinian issue isn’t ready for prime time.”
An excellent piece in the Nation this week by Michael Massing documents that Ken Roth–the man who affixed the apartheid label on Israel as head of Human Rights Watch in 2021 — lost out on a fellowship at Harvard’s Kennedy School last year because of his criticism of Israel. Massing quotes Roth and a Kennedy School official saying the offer from a human rights center at the school was withdrawn because of the Israel issue. Then Massing identifies several pro-Israel donors he suggests had influence over the dean, Douglas Elmendorf.
Calls for sanctions and BDS against Israel in the wake of its new government’s “bold” actions against Palestinians are causing that government to dig in. Netanyahu ally Danny Danon called on the United States to block any UN Security Council resolution against provocative Israeli actions at the holy sites in Jerusalem. While Netanyahu minister Amichai Chikli accused Israeli opposition leader Yair Lapid of being the “spearhead of the BDS movement.”
The news from Israel is the job of explaining Israel to America — hasbara, Hebrew for propaganda– just got a lot harder. The government’s nakedly fascistic politics are a wakeup call to American Jews. We are enabling apartheid. We are the political lifeline for racist zealots who are going to hurt a lot more Palestinians this year. Supporting them goes against Jewish traditions. And American Jews will finally say Enough.