The Jewish community excommunicates Jews who support Palestinian freedom and rights
“And I also made my choice: if excommunication is the cost of supporting Palestinian rights, bring it on. And to the extent Jewishness is important to me, which it still is, I am proud to have an outlaw Jewish community of friends”.
When you are Jewish and come out as an anti-Zionist, you get excommunicated.
That is how the Jewish community works to support Israel. The Jewish community says directly, “You may choose your community or what you call your sense of ethics”.
And if you persist, forget about your community, because Jewish life as we know it is committed to supporting Israel, the miraculous achievement of the Jewish people in the 20th century in the wake of the extermination.
REFORM JEWISH LEADER RICK JACOBS SPEAKING TO JEWISH VOICE FOR PEACE MEMBERS AT THE PRESBYTERIAN CONVENTION IN 2014 DURING DEBATE OVER DIVESTMENT.
PHOTO: CHRISTOPHER HAZOU VIA @LIZAVETA9 ON TWITTER.
As an optimist, I keep declaring that this “herem” — or ban/excommunication– is softening.
That young Jews who believe in justice are slowly taking over the community and an apartheid state is becoming impossible to defend.
But I’m inside the anti-Zionist bubble, not the community, and an interview published last week gives me pause. It is with a friend, Rabbi Alissa Wise, who lately stepped down as deputy director of Jewish Voice for Peace.
Wise has played a big role in growing that organization into a political force, as an openly anti-Zionist organization that supports BDS of Israeli settlers products in the West Bank.
RABBI ALISSA WISE, WHEN SHE WAS AT JVP
In the interview, Wise says in so many words, I’ve had enough for now. I’ve battled my community for 20 years and now I am going to be a member of that community and take a less political role, for the sake of my children being Jewish.
Alissa Wise spoke of the pride of building an anti-Zionist bloc among American Jews. “Our numbers have exploded in the past decade.”
But that achievement came at an “excruciating” personal cost, Wise said, alienation from her family and community.
Wise has strong family connections to organized Jewry, and her first shock came in 2002, when her efforts to bring a group of Israeli draft resisters to the U.S. was rejected by every “liberal” Brooklyn synagogue she went to.
It was truly painful to see so plainly how the Jewish community I had been raised to trust was in fact so closed. Sure, looking back I was being totally naive, but I recall just feeling genuinely crushed that the community who taught me Judaism, which led me to understand that I have a responsibility to stand with Palestinians, would refuse to hear the voices of young Jewish Israelis because they were challenging the occupation.
Wise developed a “tough skin” under the hail of hate mail, but she fears the spiritual consequences.
[T]he most vitriolic hatred directed towards me comes from the Jewish community. It has come between me and my family. Over the past ten years, I have regularly received death threats, sexually threatening emails, voicemails and even letters delivered to my home.
I have been barred from traveling to Israel. I almost was kicked out of rabbinical school. I have been called a kapo more times than I can count. I have developed a thick skin. One has to in order to keep doing this work.
I always maintained it didn’t seep in. But did it? Does it?…
She concluded that riding over the feeling of being trampled on by the community was actually hurtful. It prevented her from attaining her “full power.”
I think I was negligent when taking care of those feelings for myself, and I think that is a part of how I ended up needing to take a break 10 years in, when in all honesty I had imagined myself at JVP until JVP was not needed anymore.
We don’t want to let our skin be so tough that we don’t recognize the pain that is there. Let’s feel our pain AND feel our power…
Arielle Angel then drew Wise out in a Q-and-A. And my interpretation of Wise’s comments is: Jewishness is a core value, and she doesn’t want to be in an oppositional frame so as to allow her children to grow up with a healthy relationship to Jewishness and life.
Some excerpts. Wise says we’re in a “closed” period of Jewish history Not so different from the insular intolerance of religious Jews in the eastern European ghettos before the enlightenment.
“We’ve been in a closed period again, because of the hegemonic power of Zionism in the Jewish community. The vision I have is one of openness.”
But she can’t bring about that openness personally. She’s been scarred by the exclusions, notably when she was barred from getting on a plane to Israel and Palestine.
“[T]hat was the beginning of the end for me…I really felt like I’d been trampled on. I reached a point where the thick skin turned from being protective to being corrosive. There’s only so much that one can bounce back from. I’m not leaving the Palestinian rights movement, but I am attentive to where I am emotionally and how that affects my ability to lead this organization….
Wise recognized that membership in the Jewish community is central to her.
[T]he future of Judaism and Jewishness still matters to me and is the centerpiece of my life.
My kid is in second grade, and she was in her Torah school class on Zoom last week… The teacher introduced the concept of l’dor v’dor, from generation to generation, because they were going to be talking to an elder. She asked the class, “What do you want to pass down to the next generation?”—which is a very tender thing to ask eight-year-olds. One little girl said, “I want to pass down being Jewish.” I started crying in the other room, because that’s what I want. I have this sacred, intimate responsibility to caretake Judaism in my lifetime…
Wise says she has banged her head against the wall for 20 years trying to get the Jewish community to change its views of Palestine, and it worked. “Now there are anti-Zionist Jews all over rabbinical school!”
But the political approach can be overwhelming, for instance when every Torah portion has to be interpreted in an anti-Zionist manner. That’s one reason she is leaving JVP.
“I felt clearly how my relationship to Judaism was going to compromise my children’s relationship to it, and I wasn’t willing to have that.”
Alissa Wise imagines an open Jewish community in which everyone is not judged either for being a Zionist or an anti-Zionist.
One principle I emphasized to [JVP staffers] was pluralism: No matter how much we want to interpret a Torah text or a holiday cycle or a historical event in a way that brings people into solidarity with Palestinians, we need to leave room for other ways to be Jewish. Obviously, I want there not to be apartheid in Israel. I don’t want Palestinians to be living under occupation. But that’s different from how we live our Jewish cultural and spiritual lives. Our vision isn’t that everybody be anti-Zionist, or for that to be the centerpiece of everybody’s Jewish lives. It needs to be bigger than just an expression of a particular politics
And she believes her next job will be in Jewish life.
I decided to dedicate my life to the Jewish people, and I’m going to pursue that and trust that the work I’ve been a part of has created enough space for another Jewish home for me.
I respect Wise’s choices. I like pluralism, I’m Not a litmus test person. But having done this work for some time now and been subject to the same invective and ostracization, with the same initial emotional shock that Wise experienced, I’ve lost my romance about the Jewish community.
It made a clear choice to cancel us. And I also made my choice: if excommunication is the cost of supporting Palestinian rights, bring it on.
And to the extent Jewishness is important to me, which it still is, I am proud to have an outlaw Jewish community of friends.
Wise’s word “hegemonic” is helpful. So is her admission that her own family is divided. The official Jewish community has decided again and again in recent years that it is going to close rank around Zionism and muster the astounding historical unity of Jews to enforce orthodoxy in the face of apartheid.
“[Studies have noted that the overwhelming majority of British Jews support Israel,” says a British Jewish group in enforcing the line. Anti-Zionist Jews are “as deeply opposed to Jewish interests as many of our community’s enemies,” a leading Zionist writer told a leading liberal NY Jewish institution.
Another leading Zionist writer said that 97% of Jews worldwide support Zionism and that anti-Zionist Jews are as marginal as black people who voted for Trump.
The line here is clear. If you support BDS targeting Israel, you are not welcome. We will not invite you to the synagogue or even the J Street conference.
We will say you are antisemitic, or “you have Jewish parents” (as former Israeli prison guard Jeffrey Goldberg once laid down the law to redline me and others).
The young Jewish group IfNotNow is still on the community side of the line. It is careful in its criticism of Israel; not taking an anti-Zionist position.
That’s why it continues to be welcome in the Jewish community. Even if the US Campaign for Palestinian Rights is pushing it to go further, it hasn’t done so yet, presumably because it values its communal position.
Jewish Currents is in a similar position. In that interview Angel notes that attacks from inside the Jewish community for the publication’s new investigative fund to look into the Israel lobby’s hold inside U.S. Jewish institutions, have been “exhausting” and “demoralizing.”
I assume both IfNotNow and Jewish Currents will continue to move left.
Jewish Voice for Peace has been a leader, and over the line. It supports BDS. It is not welcome inside the Jewish community, except at outsider congregations, because it insists on the truth about Israel and Palestine: a tale of oppression. All the rest is just commentary.
Note: Israel was created by the USA and the colonial powers, including the Soviet Union of Stalin, to dismember the Middle East and eliminate daily trade among the peuple. There would have been many more Jews confronting Zionist, racism and apartheid if Not for the total support of the colonial powers institutions.
This is a story about how European Union officials evade accountability when they are caught in a blatant lie for the benefit of Israel.
Earlier this week I wrote about a major legal victory for supporters of Palestinian rights in Spain.
In 2015, activists from the group BDS País Valencià (Palestinian Boycott, Divestiture, Sanctions of Israel settlement products) called on a music festival to cancel a performance by Matthew Paul Miller, the singer who uses the stage name Matisyahu, because he had made anti-Palestinian statements and had helped raise money for the Israeli occupation army.
European Union anti-Semitism coordinator Katharina von Schnurbein (Chambre des Députés)
This month, a court in Valencia threw out hate crime accusations against the activists. The judges found that they were only contesting Miller’s presence in the festival because of his alleged views on Israeli policy, “not because of his Jewish status, religion or any other circumstance.”
The Spanish court also affirmed last June’s landmark ruling by the European Court of Human Rights that calling for boycotts of Israel because of its crimes against Palestinians is not anti-Semitic and is protected political expression.
Although the facts about the incident in Spain have been clear from the start, the recent ruling is a total vindication of the activists by impartial judges.
Yet in recent years, the European Union has smeared the activists, falsely claiming that they only protested Miller because he is Jewish.
This false charge of anti-Semitism was made by Katharina von Schnurbein, the EU’s anti-Semitism coordinator, at a 2019 conference launching an Israeli government report smearing the Palestine solidarity movement.
This misleading definition, backed by Israel and its lobby, conflates criticism of Israel’s racism and war crimes against Palestinians, on the one hand, with anti-Jewish bigotry, on the other.
Evasion
While I was writing my story, I emailed von Schnurbein asking whether she would retract the false claims she made about the 2015 Matisyahu incident.
The reply came after I had already published my article, but not from von Schnurbein herself.
Instead, Christian Wigand, a spokesperson for the European Commission – the EU’s executive branch – wrote to me:
“We do not comment [on] court judgments in our member states. As for the Commission’s – and in fact the European Union’s – position on the BDS movement, which was reiterated by our coordinator Ms. von Schnurbein at the event you mention, our position is very clear and has not changed.”
I can give credit to Wigand for a masterful example of bureaucratic evasion, but not for much else.
I had not been seeking a comment on the court judgment per se, but asked whether von Schnurbein stood by her own statements grossly mischaracterizing the 2015 Matisyahu incident.
Nor had I asked for the EU’s position on the BDS – boycott, divestment and sanctions – movement.
The opinionated von Schnurbein
Yet even if I did want a comment on the court decision itself, the last person who can claim that she does not speak about such matters is Katharina von Schnurbein.
As her Twitter feed shows, von Schnurbein has regularly commented on court cases – some of them while they were ongoing
She has even been taken to task for publicly criticizing an elected member of the European Parliament – a flagrant breach of the neutrality she should observe as an unelected civil servant.
The citizens of EU states deserve better than to be bullied, smeared and lied about by bureaucrats in Brussels who appear to answer only to Israel and its lobby.
Notes and tidbits posted on FB and Twitter. Part 162
Note: I take notes of books I read and comment on events and edit sentences that fit my style. I pa attention to researched documentaries and serious links I receive. The page is long and growing like crazy, and the sections I post contains a month-old events that are worth refreshing your memory.
Since 2,000, Israel killed 2027 Palestinian children.
The new Palestinian National Council will revisit all the agreements and deals that Israel failed to carry out, after Trump pronouncement on Jerusalem.
The UN voted on 84 Palestinian resolutions that have never been executed. The US has the highest number of vetoes and 43 of them vetoes were related to Palestinian rights.
I’m tired of Petanque players (boules) who want to corner you as “pointeur” in order to enjoy the “privilege” of “tireurs”. They are the worst players: can do neither task.
The excellent “tireur” in Petanque is who mastered for years the task of “pointer”. He steps in to point instead of regurgitating the beginners’ cliche’: “In this game, we must have a pointeur, a milieu and a tireur”. Desist lying to yourself and train to control your body parts movements
Frankly, I feel lucky that I lived long enough in this century to realize that books of females authors are far more interesting than their gender’s counterparts
Chez nous, on est garcon ou fille. Des codes differents regissent les deux genres. Les termes “garcon manque'” ou “fille manquee'” n’existent pas pour devenir cliche’.
Et moi, la fille qu’on expectait de naitre garcon, je me revais adulte comme le voisin qui fumait, le torse nu, sur le balcon dans l’indifference generale.
Je fesais le pitre et sautais entre les jambes des adolescentes femelles. Ma soeur ainee’ me chuchotas en Francais: ” Franchement, on dirait que tu es Lesbienne“. Je ne savais pas ce que ce mot signifiait, mais il tomba en moi comme une goutte d’encre noire dans un verre d’eau.
Est-ce qu’etre une lesbienne veut dire avoir l’energie grisante et la gaiete’ espiegle quand je suis entre les femelles adolescentes, et que cette sensation disparait quand je retourne jouer avec les garcons?
Can’t become secular without working actively on a secular community. Need to avoid the claim that secularism is basically an internal individual spiritual condition, a permanent discipline, an individual asceticism that refuses the domination of abstract concepts and belief-systems on the reality of life and the true needs and wants of the common people.
Citizens needs to be educated how to differentiate among abstract concepts that cannot be demonstrated, concepts that can be measured and experimented with, concept that can be made operational to be measured, evaluated and tested (such as mental and emotional abilities…), concepts that require tolerance, and concepts that we should never tolerate under any excuse.
OSLO, Norway, Feb 2 2018 (IPS) – As a member of the Norwegian parliament, I proudly use my authority as an elected official to nominate the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement for Palestinian rights for the Nobel Peace Prize.
Nominating the BDS movement for this recognition is perfectly in line with the principles I and my party hold very dear.
Like the BDS movement, we are fully committed to stopping an ascendant, racist and right-wing politics sweeping too much of our world, and securing freedom, justice and equality for all people.
Inspired by the South African anti-apartheid movement and the American Civil Rights movement, the grassroots, Palestinian-led BDS movement is a peaceful, global human rights movement that urges the use of economic and cultural boycotts to end Israeli violations of Palestinian human rights and international law.
The BDS movement seeks to end Israel’s 70 years of military rule over 4.5 million Palestinians, including the devastating ten-year illegal siege collectively punishing and suffocating nearly 2 million Palestinians in Gaza, the ongoing forcible eviction of Palestinians from their homes, and the theft of Palestinian land through the construction of illegal settlements in the occupied West Bank.
It seeks equal rights for Palestinian citizens of Israel, currently discriminated against by dozens of racist laws, and to secure the internationally-recognized legal right of Palestinian refugees to return to homes and lands from which they were expelled.
Palestinian refugees constitute nearly 50% of all Palestinians, and they are being denied their right to return, (as of UN resolution 194) guaranteed by law to all refugees, simply because of their ethnicity.
The BDS movement’s aims and aspirations for basic human rights are irreproachable. They should be supported without reservation by all democratically-minded people and states.
The international community has a longstanding history of supporting peaceful measures such as boycotts and disinvestment against companies that profit from human rights violations. International support for such measures was critical in the struggle against apartheid in South Africa and the racist colonial regime in former Rhodesia.
If the international community commits to supporting BDS to end the occupation of Palestinian territory and the oppression of the Palestinian people, new hope will be lit for a just peace for Palestinians, Israelis and all people across the Middle East.
The BDS movement has been endorsed by prominent figures, including the former Nobel Peace Prize winners Desmond Tutu and Mairead Maguire.
It is gaining support from unions, academic associations, churches, and grassroots movements for the rights of refugees, immigrants, workers, women, indigenous peoples and the LGBTQI community. It is increasingly embraced by progressive Jewish groups and anti-racist movements across the world.
Eleven years since BDS’ launch, it’s high time for us to commit to doing no harm, and for all states to withdraw their complicity in Israel’s military occupation, racist apartheid rule, ongoing theft of Palestinian land, and other egregious human rights violations.
Awarding a Nobel Peace Prize to the BDS movement would be a powerful sign demonstrating that the international community is committed to supporting a just peace in the Middle East and using peaceful means to end military rule and broader violations of international law.
My hope is that this nomination can be one humble but necessary step towards bringing forth a more dignified and beautiful future for all peoples of the region.
Imagine you’re the Palestinians. Perhaps residents of East Jerusalem.
47 difficult years are behind you; a big, depressing darkness lies ahead.
The Israeli tyranny that dooms your fate declares arrogantly that everything will stay like this forever.
Your city will remain under occupation “for ever and ever.”
The defense minister, second in importance in the government that subjugates you, says a Palestinian state will never be established.
Imagine you’re Palestinian and your children are in danger.
Two days ago, the occupation forces killed another child because “he lit a firebomb.”
The words “Death to Arabs” were sprayed near your home. Everywhere you turn, a soldier or Border Police officer may shout at you.
Every night, your home may be invaded brutally. You will never be treated like human beings. They’ll destroy, humiliate, intimidate, perhaps even arrest you, possibly without trial.
There are close to 500 administrative detainees, a record number in recent years. If one of your dear ones is arrested, you will have difficulty visiting him. If you succeed, you’ll get half an hour’s conversation through a glass window.
If your dear one is an administrative detainee, you will never know when he’ll be released. But these are trivia you grew accustomed to long ago.
Maybe you’ve also grown accustomed to the land theft.
At every moment a settler can invade your land, burn your plantation or torch your fields. He will not be brought to trial for this; the soldiers who are supposed to protect you will stand idly by. At any moment, a demolition order or random eviction order may appear. There’s nothing you can do.
Imagine you’re the Palestinians. You can’t leave Gaza and it’s not easy to leave the West Bank, either.
The beach, less than an hour’s drive from your West Bank home, is beyond the mountains of darkness. An Israeli can go to Tierra del Fuego, between Argentina and Chile, much more easily than you can go to the beach at Ajami.
There are no dreams, no wishes.
Your children have a slim chance of accomplishing anything in life, even if they go to university.
All they can look forward to is a life of humiliation and unemployment.
There’s no chance that this situation is about to change anytime soon. Israel is strong, the United States is in its pocket, your leadership is weak (the Palestinian Authority) and isolated (Hamas), and the world is losing interest in your fate. What do you do?
A Palestinian youth holds a slingshot during clashes with Israeli police in a suburb of East Jerusalem, Oct.23, 2014.
There are two possibilities.
The first is to accept, give in, give up.
The second is to resist. Whom have we respected more in history? Those who passed their days under the occupation and collaborated with it, or those who struggled for their freedom?
Imagine you’re a Palestinian. You have every right to resist.
In fact, it’s your civil duty. No argument there.
The occupied people’s right to resist occupation is secured in natural justice, in the morals of history and in international law.
The only restrictions are on the means of resistance. The Palestinians have tried almost all of them, for better and worse – negotiations and terror; with a carrot and with a stick; with a stone and with bombs; in demonstrations and in suicide. All in vain.
Are they to despair and give up? This has almost never happened in history, so they’ll continue.
Sometimes they’ll use legitimate means, sometimes vile ones.
They don’t want armed settlers who invade their apartments in the middle of the night, under the Israeli law’s protection, and evict them.
They don’t want a municipality that grants its services according to national affiliation, or judges that sentence their children according to their origin.
They also go nuts when the house of a Jewish terrorist is not demolished, while the house of a Palestinian will be torn down.
They don’t want Israel to continue tyrannizing them, so they resist.
They hurl stones and firebombs.
That’s what resistance looks like. Sometimes they act with heinous murderousness, but even that is not as bad as their occupier’s built-in violence.
The BDS movement seeks to end Israel’s 70 years of military rule over 4.5 million Palestinians, including the devastating ten-year illegal siege collectively punishing and suffocating nearly 2 million Palestinians in Gaza, the ongoing forcible eviction of Palestinians from their homes, and the theft of Palestinian land through the construction of illegal settlements in the occupied West Bank.
