“As surely as Israel relies on the extraordinary young people in the IDF [Israeli Defense Forces], it relies on you for steadfast support and success,” House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer tells thousands of American college students at the AIPAC policy conference, describing their “mission” to fight BDS on campuses.
Batya Ungar-Sargon asked students not to protest Ruth Wisse at Bard because she’s a Holocaust survivor, giving her a pass for anti-Arab racism. The panel she did want the students to protest featured Ungar-Sargon and a black Jew, Shahanna McKinney-Baldon, who now seeks an apology for Ungar-Sargon’s error-laden account of the event.
Batya Ungar-Sargon, the opinion editor of the Forward, issues extraordinary claims: 97 percent of Jews are Zionists, anti-Zionists in the Jewish community are as anomalous as Trump supporters who are black; she is the “number one publisher of Palestinian voices in America”; and intellectuals who cheered demonstrators at a pro-Israel panel bear responsibility for the spike in anti-semitism and even synagogue murders.
Ilhan Omar is accused of antisemitism in fostering a “hoary myth of dual loyalty” to Israel. But Jews from Joe Klein to Eric Alterman to Melissa Weintraub to MJ Rosenberg say that allegiance to Israel is actually an important factor in the support for Israel in the United States, to the point that some support Israel’s interests over America’s.