Two featured Jewish speakers at an “Israel Apartheid Week” event at Marquette University denounced accusations that their views and such events constitute expressions of anti-Semitism.
“These fabrications of anti-Semitism actually demean the memory of those who died fighting real anti-Semitism in Europe,” said journalist and author Max Blumenthal.
“I hate seeing it on every campus I visit being leveled against students who embody the highest ideals I was raised on as an American, as a Jew, as someone from a liberal home,” he said.
“It is always very disheartening when you hear about slurs of anti-Semitism and the very cynical political approaches and tactics that are being used against Palestinians and Palestinian solidarity activists,” said Rabbi Brant Rosen.
Both were members of a four-person panel that discussed “Living Under Apartheid” on March 27 at MU. The event climaxed the “Israel Apartheid Week” events sponsored by the campus chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine. About 100 people attended.
Blumenthal is the author most recently of the book “Goliath: Life and Loathing in Greater Israel” (Nation Books). He said the book derived from “four or five years” of reporting on “Israel-Palestine” and from spending “over a year on the ground” in the area.
He contended that some in the Jewish community have called him a Jewish anti-Semite because of the book. He cited his ninth place on the Simon Wiesenthal Center’s list of the “2013 Top Ten Anti-Semitic/Anti-Israel Slurs” and said, “I’m hoping to be number one next year.”
But such allegations, he said, fail “to dispute one fact in my book” about how Palestinian Arabs suffer discrimination for not being Jews.
He defined “apartheid” as “institutional discrimination against one group by another,” adding that “it usually occurs in the framework of settler colonialism, like the Afrikaners in South Africa.”
As examples of Israel’s apartheid actions, he cited the Gaza Strip, where “80 percent of the people” are refugees who “originally lived in what is now Israel and were forced off their land,” and where the area is “ghettoized” because “they’re not Jewish. If they were Jewish, the walls would come down.”
And Israel won’t allow them to return because if they did, they would constitute “a demographic threat” that would “contaminate the ethnic purity of the Jewish state,” said Blumenthal.
“And to have a Jewish state, or any ethnically pure state, you have to maintain the majority of your dominant population,” Blumenthal said.
Blumenthal also alleged that the Arab population of the West Bank is “heavily ghettoized,” “surrounded by checkpoints” and a “separation wall.” He contended that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has said the wall’s purpose is not for security, but to “prevent demographic spillover” (Ha’aretz, Dec. 18, 2003).
“To deny this is apartheid is to deny the meaning of the term,” Blumenthal concluded.
Rosen is spiritual leader of the Jewish Reconstructionist Congregation in Evanston, Ill., and co-chair of the Jewish Voice for Peace Rabbinical Council.
He said he had been “a Zionist for much of my life,” but came to a realization that “if you define a Jewish state based on the number of Jews, then someone who is not Jewish is going to be a problem… no matter how democratic you try to make your country.”
He said, “The paradigm is starting to shift in my community… Zionism is not any more the litmus test for what it means to be a good Jew.”
In fact, he said, in the Jewish community Zionism was at one time a “radical and dissident” movement that “rejected many principles of diaspora-based faith.”
Rosen said that “Zionism ascended” in the community after World War II, and this development “has had tragic connotations for the Jewish people.
“It’s in many ways a betrayal of what I think are the best aspects of my faith, which arose in the context after the destruction of the Second Temple that was rejecting empire and militarism, that was promoting a globally-based peoplehood, that you could be a member of this people no matter where you lived in the world, and you didn’t need to define yourself based on land and military and empire.”
Rosen claimed that other congregational rabbis have told him they agree with him, but will not say so publicly for fear of losing their jobs. And he said that “the younger generation of Jews does not share the same assumptions about what Israel means to being Jewish” that previous generations have had. “That’s what gives me hope.”
The other speakers on the panel were:
• Kathy Kelly, coordinator of Voices for Creative Non-Violence, who described some of her experiences in Gaza during Operations Cast Lead and Pillar of Cloud and denounced “militarism in any of its forms.”
• Osama Abu Irshaid, founder and editor of the U.S.-based Arabic language newspaper Al Meezan. He spoke about how he is the son of a Palestinian Arab who as a child was “expelled and driven out” of Israel in 1948, and contended that Israel was founded by people who wanted to create a solution to “the Jewish problem” in Europe, and did so at the expense of people who had “nothing to do” with creating that problem.
Moderating was Muhammad Ayesh, president of the MU SJP chapter. After Rosen’s remarks, Ayesh said, “One of the messages that we’ve been trying to kind of explain and one of the themes of this week of events… is that this is not a religious conflict, not a conflict between Muslims and Jews or Christians and Jews, but rather this is an issue that’s dealing with humans who aren’t being treated equally by other humans living within a certain boundary or a certain country.”
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