Posts Tagged ‘sherry wolf’
 
March 8, 2013 0

Anti-Israel Activity Reached Fever Pitch This Week

Anti-Israel activists took a multi-faceted approach to attack­ing Israel in the pub­lic sphere this week. In the span of 7 days, divest­ment res­o­lu­tions were con­sid­ered at three col­lege cam­puses, ten anti-Israel bill­boards were put up in Atlanta, over 30 col­lege cam­puses hosted Israeli Apartheid Week pro­grams and two day­long BDS con­fer­ences were scheduled.

These ini­tia­tives are for­mally or infor­mally part of a global effort to advance the Boy­cott, Divest­ment and Sanc­tions (BDS) move­ment against Israel. They demon­strate the anti-Israel movement’s com­mit­ment to employ­ing mul­ti­ple tac­tics and cam­paigns to attract sup­port for its positions.

A flyer adver­tis­ing the first pub­lic dis­cus­sion on the divest­ment res­o­lu­tion at UCSD

Here’s a closer look at what’s taken place this week:

  • Cam­pus Divest­ment Res­o­lu­tions: Stu­dent gov­ern­ments at Stan­ford Uni­ver­sity, the Uni­ver­sity of Cal­i­for­nia (UC), River­side, and UC San Diego con­sid­ered divest­ment res­o­lu­tions tar­get­ing multi­na­tional com­pa­nies that work with Israel like Cater­pil­lar, Gen­eral Elec­tric and Northrup Grum­man. The results were mixed: the res­o­lu­tion at Stan­ford was voted down; UC San Diego did not vote on its res­o­lu­tion (after a dis­cus­sion that lasted until 2am) and will resume dis­cussing it next week, while UC River­side passed its res­o­lu­tion in a stealth man­ner rem­i­nis­cent of the recent res­o­lu­tion at UC Irvine. The divest­ment res­o­lu­tion at River­side was intro­duced with­out advance notice and seems to be part of an effort to ensure that pro-Israel stu­dents are left in the dark and are there­fore not present at the pub­lic dis­cus­sion to voice their per­spec­tive and advo­cate against the bill.
  • Israeli Apartheid Week: At least 35 col­lege cam­puses in the U.S. are par­tic­i­pat­ing in IAW this year, the ninth con­sec­u­tive year that the pro­gram has been held in cities around the world. Most of the events in the U.S. were for­mally sched­uled to take place March 4–8 but some are stretch­ing into next week as well (due to var­i­ous university-related sched­ul­ing con­flicts). IAW events this year have pri­mar­ily included anti-Israel speak­ers, mock “apartheid walls” and check­point dis­plays on cam­pus, and screen­ings of two crit­i­cal of Israel films,  the Oscar award-nominated “5 Bro­ken Cam­eras” and a more extreme film called “Roadmap to Apartheid.” “Roadmap to Apartheid” is nar­rated by The Color Pur­ple author Alice Walker and analo­gizes Pales­tin­ian refugees to Jews in the War­saw Ghetto and par­tially con­dones ter­ror­ism as a “symp­tom” of the conflict.
  • BDS Con­fer­ences: This past Sat­ur­day the Uni­ver­sity of Texas, Austin, hosted a day­long “BDS Con­fer­ence” that fea­tured extreme speeches by Nada Elia, a fac­ulty mem­ber at Anti­och Uni­ver­sity in Seat­tle, and Sherry Wolf, a Jew­ish social­ist and activist. Elia avowed that she would not reject Pales­tin­ian extrem­ism because Pales­tini­ans “have a right to resist” and com­pared Israelis to Amer­i­can slave-owners. Wolf used the plat­form to claim that the notion that Israel is the Jew­ish people’s home­land is “bulls–t” and accused Israel of “ter­ror­ism” and insti­tu­tion­al­ized racism against the Pales­tini­ans. She fur­ther described Zion­ist Jews as “white suprema­cist racist[s].” On Sat­ur­day, March 9, a sim­i­lar con­fer­ence will take place on the Auraria cam­pus in Den­ver. Par­tic­i­pants will “learn about the his­tory of both Pales­tine and the global BDS move­ment, hear what coali­tion groups are work­ing on, and par­tic­i­pate in BDS and coalition-building train­ing,” accord­ing to the event flier.
  • Anti-Israel Bill­boards: The Coun­cil for the National Inter­est, an anti-U.S. aid to Israel group based in DC, recently started a cam­paign called “Stop the Blank Check to Israel” which hopes to place bill­boards in cities across the coun­try. Ten such ads, which read, “$8 Mil­lion a day to Israel just doesn’t make sense! STOP The Blank Check.org,” have recently been erected in Atlanta. Ads with sim­i­lar mes­sages have appeared in the past year in Den­ver, Detroit, Los Ange­les, Chapel Hill and New York.

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December 21, 2012 1

“Violent Resistance” Makes Comeback in Wake of Pillar of Defense

Through­out Oper­a­tion Pil­lar of Defense, the recent clash between Israel and Hamas oper­a­tives in Gaza that came to an end almost a month ago, anti-Israel activists expressed sup­port for Hamas and vio­lent resis­tance against Israel. Ral­lies across the U.S. included chants of “intifada, intifada” and hos­tile mes­sages posted on Face­book and other social media plat­forms also sided with Hamas and joy­fully announced that the “resis­tance has reached Tel Aviv!”

Inter­est­ingly, this sort of extreme rhetoric has not fully ebbed since the lat­est oper­a­tion came to a close. At an event on Wednes­day called “Resis­tance and Rev­o­lu­tion: Gaza, the Arab Spring, and the new Mid­dle East,” which was held in down­town Brook­lyn, sev­eral pan­elists acknowl­edged that vio­lence is a nec­es­sary part of the “rev­o­lu­tion” against Israel.

Lamis Deek, a founder of Al-Awda, even crit­i­cized the Mus­lim Brotherhood’s lead­er­ship in Egypt for seiz­ing and con­fis­cat­ing an arms ship­ment en route to Gaza from Libya, using it as an exam­ple of Egypt’s exces­sive “pro-Israel” posi­tion. She also included in her remarks, which were titled “Pales­tine and the Right of Resis­tance,” praise for the lan­guage of the cease­fire agree­ment between Israel and Hamas pre­cisely because the text did not include a call for the recog­ni­tion of the state of Israel.

Sherry Wolf, an activist with the Inter­na­tional Social­ist Orga­ni­za­tion and the event’s spon­sor, sim­i­larly claimed that out­siders “can’t dic­tate the type of resis­tance” used by Pales­tini­ans and that there should be no expec­ta­tion of a “resis­tance ‘Dream Team.’” Wolf has pre­vi­ously advo­cated an explic­itly pro-terrorist posi­tion. On Novem­ber 20, a day before the cease­fire was declared, Wolf pub­lished an arti­cle on the Social­ist Worker’s web­site titled, “Gaza’s Right to Resist Israeli Ter­ror.” In the arti­cle, she called “Hamas’ mil­i­tary resis­tance” a “source of tremen­dous pride” and said that those who stand with the oppressed ought to defend the “right of Pales­tini­ans to resist the ter­ror of the Israeli mil­i­tary machine.”

Wolf has been invited to speak on sev­eral col­lege cam­puses in recent weeks, includ­ing at New York Uni­ver­sity and Williams Col­lege in Mass­a­chu­setts. Her appear­ances are gen­er­ally spon­sored by social­ist stu­dent groups and Stu­dents for Jus­tice in Pales­tine.

There is also evi­dence of increased sup­port for Pales­tin­ian resis­tance beyond the U.S. At the Uni­ver­sity of Lon­don tomor­row, an event called “Gaza: Refo­cus­ing Resis­tance, How the resis­tance in Gaza has refo­cused the Arab Spring” will take place. Speak­ers sched­uled to appear at the event include Roshan Muhammed Salih, a cor­re­spon­dent for Iran’s government-run Eng­lish lan­guage news net­work PressTV, and Sukant Chan­dan, a London-based activist who sup­ports Hezbol­lah and praised the sec­ond intifada dur­ing his speech at an Al Quds Day rally in Lon­don last August.

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November 16, 2012 1

Anti-Semitism and Legitimization of Terror Abound in Reaction to Israeli Operations in Gaza

Anti-Israel activists are using var­i­ous social media plat­forms to express their oppo­si­tion to Israel’s ongo­ing mil­i­tary oper­a­tions in Gaza and com­ment on the unfold­ing sit­u­a­tion. These remarks fre­quently con­tain extreme lan­guage. Sev­eral state­ments tend to legit­imize Hamas and rocket attacks tar­get­ing Israeli civil­ian com­mu­ni­ties. Oth­ers com­pare Israel to Nazi Germany.

The ban­ner at right, for exam­ple, which has been widely cir­cu­lated on Face­book, calls the oper­a­tion, “the Holo­caust in Gaza.”

Mary Hughes-Thompson, co-founder of the Free Gaza Move­ment, com­mented on her Face­book page: “Oper­a­tion Israeli Gestapo is under­way in Gaza.” Another anti-Israel activist who posted on Face­book almost imme­di­ately after the strike that killed Hamas leader Ahmed Jabari yes­ter­day wrote: “Jew­ish Zion­ist ‘moral­ity and brav­ery’ on dis­play in Gaza is no dif­fer­ent than that which was dis­played by the Nazis in the Con­cen­tra­tion Camps.”

George Gal­loway, a for­mer mem­ber of the British Par­lia­ment and leader of Viva Palestina, used extremely caus­tic and vir­u­lent lan­guage on a pro­gram he hosts on Press TV, an English-language Iran­ian satel­lite sta­tion. Gal­loway called on view­ers advo­cat­ing for non­vi­o­lent resis­tance and/or diplo­macy to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian con­flict to “get off their knees” and acknowl­edge that diplo­macy won’t be use­ful against Israel’s “blitzkrieg of death and gas.”  He also claimed that Pales­tini­ans in Gaza are being “gassed” and “roasted” by Israel.

Attempts to legit­imize or min­i­mize Hamas’s rocket attacks against Israeli civil­ians have also appeared. A stu­dent at George Wash­ing­ton Uni­ver­sity who is involved with Stu­dents for Jus­tice in Pales­tine on cam­pus wrote, “The Resis­tance has reached Tel Aviv! Long Live the Resis­tance.” The com­ments appear to cel­e­brate that an Iran­ian rocket launched by Islamic Jihad in Gaza had landed in Tel Aviv. After a com­ment appeared ques­tion­ing his sup­port for vio­lence, the stu­dent responded, “Vio­lent resis­tance is our right” and com­pared the sit­u­a­tion to a raped woman strik­ing her assailant in self-defense.

Ben White, a promi­nent anti-Israel activist and author of “Israeli Apartheid: A Beginner’s Guide,” wrote on his Face­book page: “Israel’s has­bara says con­text for assault is rocket fire. Well, con­text for rocket fire is 64 years of expul­sion and occu­pa­tion.” (As a side note, Israel’s occu­pa­tion of the West Bank began in 1967. White’s ref­er­ence to “64 years” of occu­pa­tion sug­gests that he con­sid­ers all of Israel to be occu­pied Pales­tin­ian land.)

Noura Erakat, a fel­low at George­town Uni­ver­sity and for­mer orga­nizer with the US Cam­paign to End the Israeli Occu­pa­tion, expressed frus­tra­tion with what she deemed to be a response from Israel that was wholly unpro­voked. She wrote on Twit­ter: “#Hamas has observed cease­fire, Shalit returned, now what?” [Con­trary to this claim, Hamas did not observe the cease­fire and was respon­si­ble for launch­ing more than 100 rock­ets into Gaza in the days pre­ced­ing Israel’s response.]

Other extreme com­ments include state­ments by:

  • Julio Pino, a pro­fes­sor at Kent State Uni­ver­sity who infa­mously shouted “Death to Israel” dur­ing a pro-Israel pre­sen­ta­tion on cam­pus last year. Pino called the action a “geno­cide” on his Face­book page.
  • Ali­son Weir, the direc­tor of the Coun­cil for the National Inter­est and If Amer­i­cans Knew, who referred to Israel’s actions as a “slaughter.”
  • Remi Kanazi, an anti-Israel activist and rap­per based in New York who wrote, “Dear Zion­ists: You have never ‘defended your­selves.’ You came in, stole land that wasn’t yours & main­tained a racist state through mas­sacres and brute force.”
  • Sherry Wolf, a Jew­ish anti-Zionist and mem­ber of the Inter­na­tional Social­ist Orga­ni­za­tion, who wrote: “The homi­ci­dal racists who run Israel have launched an all-out bomb­ing cam­paign on Gaza…#FuckIsrael.”

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