By COOPER BARD
On Aug. 29, Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) at Temple University in Philadelphia held a rally and march, with multiple stops, to highlight the numerous on-campus actors providing aid to Israel, whose military has killed over 40,000 Palestinians including 7000 children. Soon afterward, university president Richard Englert published a statement that charged the protesters with using “intimidation and harassment tactics,” and implied that their action had been antisemitic. This statement was clearly untrue and unhelpful toward protecting safety and free speech on campus.
Students for Justice in Palestine released a reply that said in part: “Englert singled out our stop at Hillel, and intentionally distorted our message to serve the false narrative that Temple SJP is a threat to Temple University. Our clear-cut goal was to highlight Hillel’s hand in sponsoring and legitimizing the Zionist Entity, an apartheid state that has killed countless friends and family members of Palestinian students at Temple University. Englert has once again threatened SJP and the students involved with disciplinary action, striving to unfairly punish us and to scare students from participating in our future actions.”
The U.S. struggle for the right to protest
To call the killing and genocide that is purposefully carried on by the State of Israel a mere “situation,” as the Temple University president does, vastly understates the unending slaughter of the people of Gaza. Moreover, his statement implying (wrongly) that SJP has antisemitic intentions and is a danger to Jewish students can only have a chilling effect on the right to protest—particularly in light of the current climate of repression nationwide. The right to protest is a constitutional guarantee, and in the struggle to save the people of Gaza, it is the only morally correct thing to do.
Repression against left-leaning activists is reaching a decades-long high in the U.S. This includes mounting repression and attacks against pro-Palestinian youth nationwide, as well as the state-led crackdown against anti-police-brutality activists and climate activists. In many ways, the state and the capitalist class—with the compliance of the country’s college and university systems—are attempting to silence youth on multiple burning issues that have the potential to explode into mass struggles against the inherent madness and inhumanity of this system.
This is why, as Mondoweiss reported, U.S. universities spent the summer planning with consultant firms—including openly Zionist outfits—to clamp down on even the possibility of student unrest.
Zionism is not Judaism
Israel has never truly represented the Jewish community. Zionism as a political project has for over a century enlisted the aid of first British and then U.S. imperialism to implant itself on the land against the wishes or interests of the original Palestinian inhabitants. Israel is, in short, a country established by land theft and genocide, over many decades, which acts as a vehicle for U.S. domination of the Middle East.
Anti-Zionist Jews have resisted the project from day one, although their voices have been sidelined by the pro- imperialist mainstream media. There exists today a broad, and widening layer of anti-Zionist Jews in the Western world—including U.S. organizations such as Not In Our Name and Jewish Voice for Peace—that have mobilized tens of thousands of Jews in solidarity with Palestine. Pro-Zionist media conveniently ignores the uncomfortable fact that the opposition to Israeli includes Jewish people in many countries, since the myth of total Jewish-Israel identity is absolutely essential to legitimizing the colonial-settler project.
Zionism, in fact, requires the survival of antisemitism in order to justify the existence of Israel. The ideological justification for Israel rests on the allegation that it is the homeland of the Jews and the only safe space for Jews in the world.
Early Zionist leaders had made peace with antisemitism. For instance, Theodor Herzl, who is regarded as the father of Zionism, wrote: “I achieved a freer attitude toward anti-Semitism, which I now began to understand historically and to pardon. Above all, I recognized the emptiness and futility of trying to ‘combat’ anti-Semitism.” [1] This kind of attitude permeates the thinking of leaders of modern Israel.
The most pervasive source of antisemitism in the U.S. is not the activists who support Palestinian rights, but the far right, which projects a hidden Jewish plot in fantasies such as the so-called “great replacement” theory. The Republican Party, now fused with a strong white nationalist and Christian nationalist wing, helps to promote antisemitism in the U.S. today. Trump, for example, refused to condemn the fascists who marched in Charlottesville in 2017 while chanting, “Jews will not replace us!” And Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) suggested in one of her outlandish utterances that a wildfire in California might have been set by a laser from space that was controlled by wealthy Jewish bankers.
It is the far right that, historically, has promoted the false belief that Israel dictates U.S. policies, whereas the anti-Zionist movement correctly identifies Israel as the stooge of U.S. policy in the Middle East, and the beneficiary of U.S. corporate and institutional investment. At the same time, the global far right has supported Israel as an example of a “successful” ethnostate.
Defend civil liberties!
Big U.S. capitalist interests—including the major financial supporters of U.S. universities—find the demonstrations by Palestinian and Jewish youth to be a potential hindrance to their economic and political objectives in the Middle East. The line was drawn clearly when students, faculty, and supporters set up encampments on campuses across the country. In response to the urgings of the political establishment, university administrators used repression, slander, and expulsion against peaceful protesters—and even tolerated physical assault against them by Zionists. Simultaneously, pro-Palestinian formations inside the unions have faced attacks.
The Temple community and all supporters of civil liberties should express solidarity with the right of the SJP to protest against genocide. Last year, Temple students and faculty showed during the strike by graduate student instructors their willingness to fight the administration on issues of workers’ rights and win. This same solidarity can be mobilized to protect the community from harmful infringements upon our right to protest. It is vital that we defend the civil liberties of Temple students against these attacks, and mount a united defense. The fight for civil liberties at home also strengthens our resolve to end wars abroad.
Defend Temple students’ right to protest!
Stop slandering opposition to Israel as antisemitism!
Defend Jewish students against their real enemies on the far right!
For a free, secular, and democratic Palestine!
End all U.S. aid to Israel!
Notes:
[1] Theodor Herzl, The Diaries of Theodor Herzl (New York: Dial Press, 1956), p. 6.
Top photo: Palestinian solidarity protesters gather on the edge of the Temple University campus for the Aug. 29 march organized by the SJP. (Kayla McMonagle / The Temple News)