Supporting Palestinian rights and examining the positions of anti-Zionist Jews: I think one thing that’s really key to point out is that the way the world is seeing Zionism right now, and the way that Zionism is playing out in its current political manifestation in Palestine, is very much in an oppressive colonial manifestation.
Supporting Palestinian rights
The kind of Zionism that we’re seeing on the nightly news is Israeli forces going into Sheikh Jarrah and removing people at gunpoint. It is Zionism that is sending soldiers into the West Bank to fire at protestors who are simply trying to defend their olive groves or to protest against illegal settler roads from being built.
Supporting Palestinian rights and Gaza Restrictions
It is a form of Zionism that keeps Palestinians in Gaza entrapped in the world’s largest open-air prison. We’re unfortunately seeing right now, as part of—certainly here in Canada and in the United States—part of the pro-Israel lobby’s discourse, that they’re trying to paint anti-Zionism as anti-Semitism.
And that’s something that flat out has to be rejected because it’s really important when we’re talking about Zionism to again understand that it’s a political ideology. Supporting Palestinian rights means advocating for their basic human dignity and freedom.
Political Nature of Zionism
And it is a political ideology that has always been contested within global Jewry and within Jewish communities around the world. Anti-Semitism on the other hand, is a form of anti-Jewish hatred and bigotry.
It’s a form of racism and white supremacy directed against Jews just for the simple fact that we are Jews, and that always has to be condemned no matter what form it takes. Many Jewish groups worldwide are actively supporting Palestinian rights through peaceful protests.
Clarifying Criticism
But it’s really important that people understand that when people are critiquing Zionism or when people come out as anti-Zionist, that is a specific critique against a political ideology.
There’s been a wonderful and beautiful and robust tradition within Judaism––as long as there’s been the concept of Zionism––to critique and to debate Zionism, and there have always been anti-Zionist Jews.
Current Importance
And I think that now is a really, really important time for Jews to be speaking out against Zionism, or certainly, against the abuses being done in the name of Zionism. Israel very much has to find pillars of support, for itself, and find ways in a sense to normalize its relations with the world, to justify its own existence.
U.S. Support Israel
I think it does rely on a few of those pillars of support, and one of those massive pillars of support is the support it enjoys from the US government, to the tune of nearly $4 billion a year in military aid.
And then, of course, Canada is much more of an ideological supporter of Israel. But then of course, there’s the global Jewish question of, “Does the global Jewish community support Israel?” And again, Jews have always been divided on that question.
Israeli Claims
So, while Israel does want to come out and say we are defending ourselves, and the state of Israel is the eternal Homeland for all Jewish people, you have massive Jewish communities around the world coming out and saying, well, no.
First of all, there’s a really good argument to be made that the diaspora is a beautiful thing. And then again, this ethnic cleansing and this displacement of Palestinians in Palestine is not going to make the world a safer place for Jews.
Palestinian Safety and Supporting Palestinian rights
It’s not going to make the world a safer place for Palestinians. In 2018, IJV commissioned an opinion poll and eco-survey amongst Jews in Canada. And we found that roughly a third of Jews in Canada have a negative perception of Israel.
And that’s actually really astounding––a third is really significant, especially when you know, our pro-Israel lobby groups like CIJA, which is the Center for Israel and Jewish affairs in Canada, or groups like B’nai B’rith, really do try to give this impression that all of the Canadian Jewish community stands behind Israel.
Support for BDS
An even larger proportion of Jews believe at least––I believe this is closer to 50%, according to that same opinion poll—they believe that calling for boycotts of the state of Israel is, at least, a legitimate thing to do.
There’s a whole laundry list of pro-Israel talking points they try to level at Jews who are speaking out in support of Palestinians. So, an older one going back a few decades was that we’re self-hating Jews.
Certainly there’s an argument they try to make that we’re inauthentic, We’re hearing more and more that Jews who support Palestine are marginal. Of course, none of these things are true, right?
I mean, we’ve got rabbis as part of our membership; we’ve got people who are devout practicing Jews and we, of course, have people who are secular as well, too. The whole self-hating Jew thing, I think that’s been dispelled a long time ago.
Because I love myself as a Jew. And all of our members would say that we love the fact that we’re Jewish, and we love being Jewish in this world. Supporting Palestinian rights includes opposing illegal settlements and military occupation.
Moral Distress
But one thing that we absolutely disagree with, and I would say causes a lot of grief and sorrow, is the fact that Israel is committing such travesties in our name.
I think what we’re seeing is a shift in attitudes, especially amongst young Jews in North America, who are starting to come around to positions that are in solidarity with the Palestinian people. I would say that it’s very much related to Israel’s aggression in Gaza.
There’ve been these awful bombing campaigns, roughly every five years or so, going back to 2009, which was the first big Israeli bombing campaign in the Gaza strip since the unilateral disengagement of Israel from Gaza.
Political Shift in Israel
I think the fact that the Israeli government Israeli governments that we’ve seen, especially in recent years, have been moving more and more to the right does pose a real problem for the Zionist movement around the world and for Jews who support Israel in different countries, because on the one hand, they’re trying to paint a picture of Israel as this rainbow country; a country that has rights for women [and] LGBTQ folks.
They’ll even go as far as perpetuating this myth that Palestinians and Arabs in Israel have full, equal rights, when it’s extremely well-documented that they don’t. And then you have this reality on the ground, What we’ve seen in recent weeks [is]; large amounts of Israelis marching in different cities in Israel, chanting things like “Death to Arabs”.
Impact on Young Jews
So I think what that’s going to do is, it’s going to start to alienate [Jews] especially a lot of younger Jews––around the world who are starting to look towards other social movements for example, Black Lives Matter, especially in the United States.
So I think it is going to start to be a little bit of a PR nightmare for pro-Israel lobbies around the world who are going to have to explain this to younger Jews, that, in a sense, we are supporting a project in the Middle East that is really bent on exterminating a large part of the population of this country.
Israeli Society Trends
I think the ground within Israel is shifting, but I don’t know if it’s shifting for the better. One interesting thing is that we’ve seen opinion polls come out in the last few months that actually show that younger generation of Israelis are actually moving more to the right and becoming more racist.
And that’s a bit of a disturbing trend because, as I was saying before, we’re seeing tendencies in the rest of the world for younger generations to be more accepting and more tolerant and want to combat racism much more. The BDS movement is a key example of supporting Palestinian rights through economic pressure.
It’s so disheartening to see the fact that there’ve been four Israeli elections in the last two years. There seems to be no end in sight to this political stalemate Because you have Israeli parties that simply do not want to cede any ground to Palestinian statehood or to any kind of Palestinian self-determination.
Role of International Community
And I think that is why we need to turn our attention back to BDS because I think right now the ball is really in the court of the international community to step up and to try to prevent Israel from carrying on its system of apartheid. Supporting Palestinian rights does not equal anti-Semitism—it’s about justice and equality.
We have a lot of like-minded partners, a lot of like-minded Jewish organizations around the world that do really similar work to us—so this concept of not in our name; of Jews around the world opposing Israel’s actions being done, supposedly, in the name of the Jewish diaspora or the world Jewery.
We work very closely with organizations such as Jewish Voice for Peace in the United States [and] Jewish Voice of Labour in the UK. Na’amod as well is another British group of Jews who oppose the occupation.
We have some partners in Israel itself, groups like Boycott from Within, which is a group of Jewish Israelis who are working on the BDS movement. you can read more about Supporting Palestinian rights here. and you can watch about Supporting Palestinian rights: