Yonatan Shapira in Oslo, speaking at a rally in front of the Norwegian Parliament, May 19 2021 .
Archive for May, 2021
What We Did: How the Jewish Communist Left Failed the Palestinian Cause
May 14, 2021Dorothy Zellner in Jewish Currents
May 12, 2021
I WAS SEVEN YEARS OLD when World War II ended, but I remember the way the war lived in our house. Both my parents were secular, non-Zionist Jewish immigrants and lifelong followers of the Soviet Union, which they believed would end exploitation, poverty, and racism. My siblings and I have memories of blacked-out windows and air raid sirens and the sound of incessant war reports on the radio, which my father turned up as loudly as possible to drown out the normal din of childhood. He raved almost daily, waving his fists in the air, cursing the “Nazi swine!” and obsessively following the progress of the Red Army, which he hoped would save not only the Jews but the entire human race. I cannot recall my parents talking about what many American Jews of that period considered the promised land, the Zionist project in Palestine.
Until the late 1940s, the Soviet Union and its Communist followers in the United States opposed the partition of Palestine to create a Jewish state, advocating instead for the establishment of a single state that would confer equal rights on everyone who lived there. In the US, this Jewish Communist left was small in number but influential. Thus it was significant that in 1947, the year I turned nine, the Soviet Union abruptly altered its position, throwing its support behind the creation of what would become the State of Israel. After a brief period of shock and confusion, the Jews of the Communist Party USA (CPUSA) followed suit.
Until the late 1940s, the Soviet Union and its Communist followers in the United States opposed the partition of Palestine to create a Jewish state, advocating instead for the establishment of a single state that would confer equal rights on everyone who lived there. In the US, this Jewish Communist left was small in number but influential. Thus it was significant that in 1947, the year I turned nine, the Soviet Union abruptly altered its position, throwing its support behind the creation of what would become the State of Israel. After a brief period of shock and confusion, the Jews of the Communist Party USA (CPUSA) followed suit.
I learned of these events only a few years ago, when I went searching for a record of how my own political forebears reacted to the founding of the State of Israel. The impetus for my research was the 20 years I spent living in the American South, five of them spent working for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) in the early 1960s. What I learned from SNCC is still firmly planted in my head, especially the wisdom that if you are white and anti-racist, you need to organize inside the white community, where racism lives. After a few decades of denial, I became a Jewish activist in the Palestine solidarity movement 18 years ago. In the past few years, I’ve sought in particular to reckon with how the community of my own origins, the American Jewish Communist left, acted in 1948, and how it might be implicated in Israel’s oppression of Palestinians.
Facing the mistakes of the Party that I so respected remains an incredibly painful task. All these years later, I still applaud its pioneering role in organizing interracial labor unions during the Great Depression, its heroic participation in the Spanish Civil War, its courageous fight against fascism during World War II, and, most importantly, its constant, uncompromising struggle against racism. Yet I am deeply critical of the way the CPUSA followed the Soviet party line—both when it came to Israel and on other occasions—to the detriment of its own internal democracy and stated principles.
Dorothy M. Zellner is a longtime social justice activist who worked for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and the Southern Conference Educational Fund in the early 1960s, and at the Center for Constitutional Rights and CUNY School of Law. She has also contributed several articles to Jewish Currents. She is one of six editors of the prize-winning book, Hands on the Freedom Plow: Personal Accounts of Women in SNCC.
When a stone confronts a rifle
May 10, 2021When a person holding a stone confronts soldiers who are armed with rifles, ask yourself why they are willing to do that.
On May 8, 80,000 Palestinians came to stand in front of rifles and pray at the Al Aqsa Mosque. They overwhelmed the rifles with their numbers and spirit. We stand with them.
We deplore Israel’s violation of sacred space during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan. We are horrified by the mob violence and the paramilitary police who enable it. This is not a ‘clash’ between two opinions, this is occupation and apartheid at work.
We reject Israel’s campaign to dispossess the Palestinians, including current efforts to evict families from Sheikh Jarrah. The New York Times notes, “A spokesman for the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, Rupert Colville, said Friday that the evictions ‘would violate Israel’s obligations under international law’ prohibiting the forced transfer of residents from occupied territory…. [Aryeh] King, the deputy mayor, said ‘of course’ [the evictions] are part of a wider strategy of installing ‘layers of Jews’ throughout East Jerusalem.”
We say, stop the evictions, and get the Israeli settlers out of occupied East Jerusalem. This is ethnic cleansing.
Israel’s refusal to vaccinate the Palestinians whose land it occupies in Gaza and the West Bank has been condemned by UN Rapporteurs as “discriminatory and unlawful.” Covid is rampant and we plead with our governments to provide the lifesaving assistance that Israel is withholding.
We call for an end to Israel’s impunity. These are crimes. We must begin to respond to them as crimes.
We hold the Palestinian protestors in our thoughts.
— International Jewish Collective for Justice in Palestine
Israel and apartheid | Opinion
May 4, 2021SPECIAL TO THE South Florida SUN SENTINEL MAY 04, 2021
By DONNA NEVEL
Palestinian laborers some wearing protective face masks amid concerns over the country’s coronavirus outbreak, cross illegally into Israel from the West Bank through an opening in a fence, south of the West Bank town of Hebron on Sept. 6, 2020. One of the world’s best-known human rights groups says Israel is guilty of the international crimes of apartheid and persecution. Human Rights Watch cites discriminatory policies toward Palestinians within Israel’s own borders and in the occupied territories. In so doing, the New York-based group joins a growing number of commentators and rights groups that consider Israel and the territories as a single entity in which Palestinians are denied basic rights that are granted to Jews. (Oded Balilty/AP)
While he wears his great friendship with Israel as a badge of honor, it would do the governor well to read a historic report just released by the prominent global human rights organizations, Human Rights Watch, which documents in great detail and over a period of many years the ways that Israel is committing “crimes against humanity of apartheid and persecution” against Palestinians.Advertisement
Gov. DeSantis has long championed the state of Israel and has called himself Israel’s greatest friend. In fact, while campaigning for governor, DeSantis proclaimed, “As soon as I take the oath of office, that very day, we’ll have the most pro-Israel governor in the country.”
This comes on the heels of another position paper the governor should have read, issued last January by Israel’s premier human rights organization, B’Tselem, which came to similar conclusions. While the charge of apartheid continues to be denied by Israel’s defenders, the evidence could not be any clearer, as laid out in this 213-page report and the numerous well-documented accounts of Israeli apartheid that preceded it.
The Human Rights Watch report details how Israel, in order to achieve its goal of domination over the Palestinians living there, practices institutional discrimination. As stated in the report, “On the basis of its research, Human Rights Watch concludes that the Israeli government has demonstrated an intent to maintain the domination of Jewish Israelis over Palestinians across Israel and the OPT (Occupied Palestinian Territory). In the OPT, including East Jerusalem, that intent has been coupled with systematic oppression of Palestinians and inhumane acts committed against them. When these three elements occur together, they amount to the crime of apartheid.”
The report goes on to point out that government policy has, for decades, been guided by the clear objective “of maintaining Jewish Israeli control over demographics, political power and land.” And, as the report also documents, “In pursuit of this goal, authorities have dispossessed, confined, forcibly separated and subjugated Palestinians by virtue of their identity to varying degrees of intensity. In certain areas, as described in this report, these deprivations are so severe that they amount to the crimes against humanity of apartheid and persecution.”
One often hears Israel claiming that it carries out certain practices for security reasons, yet the Human Rights Watch report makes clear that the Israeli government often uses security as a justification to advance its demographic objectives, and so its claims of security needs have served as a pretext for its acts of aggression and violence against Palestinians.
It is no secret that Israel has sought since its inception and in whatever ways it had at its disposal to maintain its control over the land, and that it has long-denied Palestinians their civil, human and national rights. Palestinian human rights groups, scholars, writers, activists and researchers have long described and applied the apartheid framework to Israel. Israel’s laws have always been discriminatory toward Palestinians, and the government has engaged in massive land theft and displacement of Palestinians from their homes. According to Adalah, a legal justice center protecting the human rights of Palestinian citizens of Israel and Palestinians in the OPT, which has welcomed the HRW report, “Israel has long promoted Jewish supremacy and racial segregation between Jews and Palestinians in all the territories under its control.”
The HRW Report echoes what Palestinians have been saying in great detail for decades. It is also worth noting that over the years, no fewer than four Israeli prime ministers, from David Ben Gurion in 1967 to Ehud Olmert in 2007, have warned that Israel would be an apartheid state if it continued to rule over Palestinians. It is impossible to read the HRW and other reports and testimonies and not recognize the reality of Israeli apartheid. Florida doesn’t need a governor who is an apologist or cheerleader for Israel’s discriminatory system, but, rather, one who stands firmly for liberty, human rights and justice.
Donna Nevel, a community psychologist and educator, is a Jewish social justice activist living in South Florida.
Jews Say No: Not In Our Name! 