I urge you to contact me or Rep Alan Clemmons and take advantage of our policy support if you are considering filing a bill. A Republican representative from South Carolina, he introduced a similar antisemitism definition into a budget bill in his state in Sabag told the Guardian that it would be incorrect to suggest that IAC for Action was encouraging state lawmakers to adopt the definition.
Antisemitism is a hot issue right now, so of course there are many who are naturally interested. He also denied that Alec was involved in the legislative push.
The emails give a clear indication of the motive behind the push for antisemitism bills — countering criticism of Israel on campuses. Students for Justice in Palestine is now treated the same way as the Ku Klux Klan — as they should be. Students for Justice in Palestine SJP is a leading pro-Palestinian student activist group that campaigns in at least 80 campuses for an international boycott of Israel in protest at its occupation of the West Bank and Gaza.
It has been at the forefront of the boycott, divestment and sanctions BDS movement in the US that has already prompted a number of states to pass new laws penalizing such boycotts of Israel to the dismay of free speech advocates.
In the course of promoting BDS, or national-origin based discrimination against Israel, SJP members typically employ classic antisemitic themes and blood libels. This messaging strategy aims to facilitate the development of anti-Israel and anti-Jewish perspectives among unsuspecting and unknowledgable audiences. The Guardian spoke to a student member of SJP at University of California, Berkeley who insisted on anonymity because of the harassment she had experienced on campus.
Last November she was one of the SJP organizers of a vigil to mourn jointly the 11 Jewish victims of the mass shooting at the Tree of Life synagogue in — the deadliest attack against Jews in America — and three Palestinian children who were killed that same October weekend from an Israeli airstrike.
After SJP advertised the vigil on its Facebook page, the student said she came under a barrage of attacks on social media accusing her of being antisemitic. Then we sit on the floor and unwrap the beautiful pots and cups that she has made for us. We chat about how things are in Tel Aviv — the people, the weather, new restaurants.
Soon enough we turn to politics. Here the mood changes. Great place, Israel. Terrible politics. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu staged a rally of his supporters last week. In the face of mounting accusations of corruption, he hit back at the media and the liberal elite who he says want to unseat him. Such are the similarities between Netanyahu and Donald Trump, it is hard to know who is copying whom.
Netanyahu deliberately plays up the connection. So long as Israel remains a Jewish state, no Palestinian citizen can credibly tell her son or daughter that they can become prime minister of the country in which they live.
My preferred solution would be for the West Bank and Gaza to become a Palestinian state, thus giving Palestinians in those territories citizenship in an ethnically nationalist though hopefully democratic country of their own.
But, in a post-Holocaust world where antisemitism remains frighteningly prevalent, I want Israel to remain a state with a special obligation to protect Jews. We are simply saying that we want to base the existence of the state not on the preference of Jews, but on the basics of equality … The state should exist in the framework of equality, and not in the framework of preference and superiority.
These are reasonable criticisms. But are Zahalka and his colleagues — who face structural discrimination in a Jewish state — antisemites because they want to replace Zionism with a civic nationalism that promises equality to people of all ethnic and religious groups? T here is, finally, a third argument for why anti-Zionism equals antisemitism. It is that, as a practical matter, the two animosities simply go together. Just as virtually all segregationists are also racists, he suggests, virtually all anti-Zionists are also antisemites.
You rarely find one without the other. But that claim is empirically false. It is easy to find antisemitism among people who, far from opposing Zionism, enthusiastically embrace it.
In the s, the Polish government adopted a similar tack. Its ruling party, which excluded Jews, trained Zionist fighters on Polish military bases. Because it wanted Polish Jews to emigrate. And a Jewish state would give them somewhere to go.
You find echoes of this antisemitic Zionism among some rightwing American Christians who are far friendlier to the Jews of Israel than the Jews of the US. I f antisemitism exists without anti-Zionism, anti-Zionism also clearly exists without antisemitism.
Consider the Satmar, the largest Hasidic sect in the world. Neither is Avrum Burg. Burg, the former speaker of the Knesset, in declared that settlement growth in the West Bank had rendered the two-state solution impossible. Israel must belong to all of its residents, including Arabs, not to the Jews alone. Other Jewish Israeli progressives, including the former deputy mayor of Jerusalem Meron Benvenisti, the Haaretz columnist Gideon Levy and the activists of the Federation Movement, have followed a similar path.
Can one question their proposals? Of course. Are they antisemites? Of course not. To be sure, some anti-Zionists really are antisemites: David Duke, Louis Farrakhan and the authors of the Hamas Covenant certainly qualify.
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