“This is our state — the Jewish state. This is our nation, language, and flag,” Netanyahu has said; and the Palestinian oppression is a Jewish shonda, overwhelmingly supported by world Jewry with cultural, political and financial backing. So Jews who object to Israeli crimes must come forward.
It is Israel and its supporters — not liberal celebrities, dissenting members of Congress, leftist and/or Muslim protesters, and student activist groups — that are responsible for not only carrying out a racial war of aggression against stateless refugees who are locked under its brutal and illegal rule, but of attempting to involve Jewish Diaspora communities in that racial war through lobbying efforts and crushing internal Jewish community dissent.
Israel’s apologists – whether Jewish or not – cannot deny all responsibility for Israel’s war crimes when they actively aid and abet those crimes.
New research charts a five-year campaign by highly partisan, pro-Israel lobby groups to mislead the international community about the nature of what has been widely described as the “gold standard” definition of antisemitism.
While “Woke Zionism,” which seeks to conflate anti-Zionism and antisemitism, is a relatively modern innovation, the erasure of Palestinian existence, both physically and discursively, is one of Zionism’s fundamental features. We must respond by reaffirming the subjectivity of Palestinians living under apartheid. One way to do this is to support the BDS movement which represents Palestinians’ demands for equality, freedom, and justice.
The NDP’s new pro-Palestine resolution is a victory and we must also continue to fight back against the Israel lobby’s efforts to delegitimize the Palestine solidarity movement by intensifing the work on all our campaigns – one struggle, many fronts.
Playing the “antisemitism” card against progressives is the Israel lobby’s weapon of choice. But we can fight back, here’s how.
Since its development the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s (IHRA) working definition of antisemitism has been used as a cudgel to stifle and suppress Palestine activism. Recently a group of over 200 Jewish scholars published the Jerusalem Declaration on Antisemitism, which takes direct aim at the IHRA.
The JDA is an overwhelmingly positive contribution to detoxifying the debate over antisemitism and the dishonest attempts of Israel’s supporters to conflate antisemitism and anti-Zionism. It should therefore be welcomed as a wholly positive contribution to demystifying the question of antisemitism and anti-Zionism, Tony Greenstein writes.
According to the new Jerusalem Declaration on Antisemitism, hostility to Israel “…could be the emotion that a Palestinian person feels on account of their experience at the hands of the State.” This, the sole appearance of the word “emotion” in the entire document, is applied exclusively to the direct victims of Israeli crimes, the very people who have the most fact-based, lived-experience for entirely rational “hostility” to the state. Categorizing the Palestinian response as emotional is to deny Palestinians the dignity to simply demand to be free of their shackles.