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What Does One Find at a Student Anti-Racism Conference? Anti-Semitism, of Course.

Feb. 12 2016

Drawing on the accounts of two Jewish undergraduates who attended the annual Students of Color Conference at the University of California, Berkeley, Anthony Berteaux describes the successful absorption of the anti-Israel movement within the broader campus left and its amalgamation with rabid anti-Semitism. The story begins many decades ago:

[A]nti-Israel co-option of progressive causes dates as far back as 1959, when the General Union of Palestinian Students (GUPS) was founded in Egypt. Supportive of terrorist groups like the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, GUPS saw a need to create a unified plan and message for student activists. It released a statement calling for students to channel their activism into supporting the “armed struggle” and fighting Israel from abroad. It is in this statement that . . . [an] alliance with progressives was [first] mentioned . . . Palestinian members living abroad would be encouraged to cooperate with the progressive political forces in their host countries to counter official Zionist activities, lectures, and movie screenings.

When the GUPS established a chapter at San Francisco State University in 1973, it organized accordingly, focusing its mission on “social justice” while simultaneously supporting Palestinian liberation through armed struggle.

Decades late, the seed planted in 1959 would bear fruit of the kind on display at the Students of Color Conference. One student would recount her experience on the first day in these words:

Over the course of what was probably no longer than an hour, [the basic facts of Jewish] history were denied, the murder of my people was justified, and a movement whose sole purpose is the destruction of the Jewish state was glorified. Statements were made justifying the ruthless murder of innocent Israeli civilians, blatantly denying Jewish indigeneity in the land, and denying the Holocaust. . . . These statements, and others, were met with endless snaps and cheers.

Read more at Tower

More about: Anti-Semitism, Israel & Zionism, Israel on campus, PFLP, Students for Justice in Palestine, University

The Summary: 10/7/20

Two extraordinary events demonstrate something important about Israel’s most fervent adversaries. One was a speech given at something called The People’s Forum (funded generously by Goldman Sachs), which stated, “When the state of Israel is finally destroyed and erased from history, that will be the single most important blow we can give to destroying capitalism and imperialism.”

The suggestion that this tiny state is the linchpin of a global, centuries-old phenomenon like capitalism goes well beyond anything resembling rational criticism. Even if Israel were guilty of genocide, apartheid, and oppression—which of course it is not—it would not follow that its destruction would help end capitalism or imperialism.

The other was an anti-Israel protest that took place in front of New York City’s Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, deemed “complicit” in Israel’s evils. At organizers’ urging, participants shouted their slogans at kids in the cancer ward, who were watching from the windows. Given Hamas’s indifference toward the lives of Gazan children, such callousness toward non-Palestinian children from Hamas’s Western allies shouldn’t be surprising. The protest—like the abovementioned speech—deliberately conveyed the message that Israel is the ultimate evil and its destruction the ultimate good, cancer patients be damned.

The fact that Israel’s adversaries are almost comically perverse does not mean that they can be dismissed. If its allies fail to understand the obsessive and irrational hatred that it faces, they cannot effectively help it defend itself.

Read more at Mosaic