This newsletter is usually devoted to how Israel and Palestine intersect with U.S. policy, but it feels like a mistake if we don’t begin with the horrible situation in Ukraine. I’ve
Biden pick Deborah Lipstadt condemned Amnesty International’s report on Israeli apartheid saying it was “part of a larger effort to delegitimize the Jewish state.”
In January Sheffield Hallam University suspended associate lecturer Shahd Abusalama following anonymous complaints related to false charges of antisemitism. By the beginning of February Abusalama had been reinstated following an international campaign in her support. “Popular pressure works and if we fight back, we can win,” Abusalama tells Mondoweiss’s Ramona Wadi.
The pro-Israel tactic of accusing advocates for Palestinian rights of antisemitism is weakening, as shown by a series of recent attacks. Now labelling Amnesty International an antisemitic organization for stating that Israel practices apartheid can only discredit those tactics further. Palestinians are becoming more relatable to the world, and the antisemitism charge is transparently its own form of bigotry, for it denies Palestinians the right to self-determination.
Right after Israel’s foreign minister derided social media portrayal of Israel at an ADL conference, two New York Times staffers came on to criticize social media for spreading antisemitism and conspiracy theories. Their appearance was an implicit endorsement of the Israel lobby group, with the imprimatur of the New York Times.
Who could have possibly predicted that Terry McAuliffe would blow it in Virginia? Thousands of people, maybe millions
Charges of antisemitism are being used as a weapon to weaken Palestinian solidarity. It is time for this tactic to be called out and confronted head-on.
Britain’s pro-Israel lobby gained another victory last week after a prolonged campaign of intimidation finally pushed a major UK university into firing one of its lecturers. Bristol University dismissed David Miller, a political sociology professor, even though an official investigation had concluded that accusations of antisemitism against him were unfounded. Research by Miller, a leading scholar on propaganda, had charted networks of influence in the UK in relation to Islamophobia that included the very pro-Israel lobby groups that worked to get him fired.
When Idris Ebakri asked at a public event on Israel — “Do we want an ethnic enclave? What’s being called for is basically an ethnic enclave in the middle in the Arab Middle East for Jews only” — the University of Winnipeg sadly sided with the IHRA definition of antisemitism in finding that it was antisemitic speech. It was actually civil, thoughtful speech that exposes the anti-free-speech intent of the IHRA.
Zionism has not yet murdered Judaism but it has undermined its moral and historical integrity. Just as Israel must de-Zionize in order to finally find its place in the Middle East, so, too, must Jews abroad de-Zionize in order to reclaim their own traditions, experiences and communal validity.