With the annual “Israeli Apartheid Week” (IAW) upon us, self-described “pro-Palestinian” activists everywhere are getting ready to participate in events that will inevitably be tainted by anti-Semitic rhetoric. This is a foregone conclusion for more reasons than can be listed here, but in order to highlight some of the major reasons, it is instructive to consider a very basic definition of anti-Semitism that was posted on Twitter a few months ago by Yair Rosenberg. Apartheid is of course also one of the great evils of our time, and last year, Fathom editor Alan Johnson marked the publication of a pamphlet on “The Apartheid Smear” with an excellent article outlining “The ugly history of the Apartheid Smear.” But this well-meaning effort to “prove” how patently unfair it is to demonize Israel as an apartheid state raises a problem: is there also a need to make the case that Israel is not like Nazi-Germany and not like the Islamic State (ISIS/ISIL)? After all, leading activists who promote IAW and the associated BDS (Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions) movement are making these comparisons all the time in the hope to mainstream the notion that the world’s only Jewish state is too evil to have a right to exist. It was thus entirely predictable that recently, when people all over the world recoiled at the news of the sadistic immolation of a captured Jordanian pilot by ISIS, anti-Israel activists were quick to seize the opportunity to claim that Israel had done the same in Gaza. The person who created this image had previously come up with another image that wasn’t circulated so widely because even activists like Max Blumenthal – who after all has written a book demonizing Israel as the Nazi Germany of our time – seemed to feel it was too blatantly anti-Semitic. While Blumenthal restricted himself this time to complimenting the image as “too real,” the demonization of Israel visualized here is of course all too common in the verbal output of anti-Israel activists – indeed, it is even reflected in the Orwellian definition of anti-Semitism propagated by Ali Abunimah as an integral part of the “struggle for Palestinian rights.” It is therefore hardly surprising that related themes demonizing Israel feature prominently in the material provided for this year’s “Israeli Apartheid Week.” The text displayed at the top of the campaign’s website accuses Israel of “fresh war crimes and crimes against humanity” and an “‘incremental genocide’ of Palestinians” and describes the Jewish state as “the world’s dangerous pariah.” This text is presented as a quote from a “call from Gaza” posted at the BDS website, and the text there provides a link for the accusation that Israel is committing an “incremental genocide” of Palestinians, which leads to an Electronic Intifada article by veteran anti-Israel academic Ilan Pappe. Published last July under the title “Israel’s incremental genocide in the Gaza ghetto,” Pappe begins his article by noting that he first “defined the Israeli policy towards the Gaza Strip as an incremental genocide” in a September 2006 article for The Electronic Intifada. His earlier article is entitled “Genocide in Gaza” and opens with the assertion: “A genocide is taking place in Gaza.” Pappe speculates in this article that in the wake of the war against Lebanon’s Hezbollah, “the frustrated and defeated Israeli army is even more determined to enlarge the killing fields in the Gaza Strip.” According to Pappe, “A daily killing of up to 10 civilians is going to leave few thousands dead each year. This is of course different from genociding a million people in one campaign — the only inhibition Israel is willing to undertake in the name of the Holocaust memory. But if you double the killing you raise the number to horrific proportions.” Ignoring the fact that terrorist groups in Gaza fired more than 11,000 rockets into Israel since the evacuation of all Jewish civilians and military personnel from the territory in 2005, Pappe wrote in July 2014 that “Israel’s present assault on Gaza alas indicates that this policy [of “incremental genocide”] continues unabated.” Needless to say, Pappe also ignores the fact that his genocide fantasies are all the more absurd in view of the finding that the “Palestinian territories have one of the fastest growing populations in the world” and that particularly the massive population growth in Gaza is widely seen as problematic; indeed, one Palestinian official has described it as “excessive,” noting that between 2000 and 2013, “the number of Gazans increased by more than 687,000 people.” The fact that this year’s IAW organizers have decided to feature Pappe’s revolting fantasies about an Israeli “policy” of “incremental genocide” of Palestinians so prominently provides an excellent illustration of the willingness of so-called “pro-Palestinian” activists to slander the Jewish state in ways that echo age-old anti-Semitic tropes. But the adoption of such tropes is almost inevitable for a movement that is devoted to demonizing Israel in the service of a cause that defines “justice” not as establishing a Palestinian state alongside Israel, but as replacing the world’s only Jewish state with yet another Muslim Arab majority state.
HARTFORD, Conn., February 23, 2015 – More than half of 1,157 self-identified Jewish students at 55 campuses nationwide who took part in an online survey reported having been subjected to or having witnessed anti-Semitism on their campuses, according to a new report issued jointly by Trinity College (Hartford, Connecticut) and the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law (Washington, D.C.). The National Demographic Survey of American Jewish College Students, which covered a variety of topics, was conducted in spring 2014 by a research team from Trinity College. Of the 1,157 students in the sample, 54 percent reported instances of anti-Semitism on campus during the first six months of the 2013-2014 academic year. The data provide a snapshot of the types, context, and location of anti-Semitism as experienced by a large national sample of Jewish students at university and four-year college campuses. The rates of victimization for students with different social characteristics – such as type of campus, year of study, academic major, demographics, religiosity, or politics – ranged from a low of 44 percent to a high of 73 percent. There was only a slight variation in the rates across the regions of the United States, strongly suggesting that anti-Semitism on campus is a nationwide problem. The Trinity College researchers who led the team conducting the survey were Barry Kosmin and Ariela Keyes, public policy and law professors and the authors of other well-known national social surveys, including the American Religion Identification Survey (ARIS) series. Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law (LDB) President Kenneth L. Marcus, former head of the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights and author of a forthcoming volume on The Definition of Anti-Semitism (Oxford University Press, 2015), provided recommendations on the report. Kosmin and Keysar pointed out that, historically, the most likely targets of anti-Semitism in the general population have been Orthodox Jewish males, who tend to be easily identified by perpetrators. However, this tendency does not seem to be the case on college campuses. Conservative and Reform Jewish students are more likely than Orthodox students to report being victims. Membership in a Jewish campus organization also raises the likelihood of a student reporting anti-Semitism. According to Kosmin, “The patterns and high rates of anti-Semitism that were reported were surprising. Rather than being localized to a few campuses or restricted to politically active or religious students, this problem is widespread. Jewish students are subjected to both traditional prejudice and the new political anti-Semitism.” Another finding was that female students were more likely than males to report anti-Semitism. “Jewish women seem to feel more vulnerable on campus, with 59 percent of female students versus 51 percent of males telling us that they have personally witnessed or experienced anti-Semitism,” said Keysar. “This gender gap is alarming and needs to be further explored,” she added. Kosmin and Keysar observed that while anti-Semitism is often linked to anti-Zionism, this survey was undertaken in the spring of 2014, before the summer 2014 conflict in Gaza that led to a worldwide flare-up in anti-Semitism. Numbers of participating students voiced concern that their experiences of anti-Semitism made for an uncomfortable campus climate. In his foreword for the report, Marcus wrote, “We hear frequently from college students who find that their experiences of anti-Semitism are not taken seriously. A decade ago, Jewish college students spoke of the vindication that they felt when the U.S. Civil Rights Commission gave voice to their concerns,” added Marcus, who, as then-staff director, drafted the Commission’s announcement that campus anti-Semitism had become a “serious problem” at many universities around the country. “This report should provide a similar vindication, since it indicates that the scope of this problem is greater than most observers had realized.” (more…)