Published on Alternet (http://www.alternet.org)
The Israel
Lobby’s Dangerous Agenda for the US: Attack Free Speech and Criminalize
Resistance
March 28, 2016
Last week,
just a few minutes before the House Foreign Affairs Committee met for a
hearing, one of the Israel lobby’s most dependable members of Congress, Rep.
Ileana Ros-Lehtinen huddled with twenty supporters of AIPAC, the lobby’s front
line organization in Washington. It was a routine affair for the Florida
Republican and her pro-Israel allies, whom she addressed by their first names.
But a member of the public who witnessed the meeting noticed a startling new
agenda was on the table.
The witness
told me that Ros-Lehtinen vowed to destroy the mounting grassroots BDS campaign
to boycott, divest from and sanction Israel. To do so, she pledged to weaken
the First Amendment. “Free speech is being used in our country to denigrate
Israel and we need to actively fight against that,” Ros-Lehtinen declared,
according to the source.
Disturbing
as her statement might have been, it was consistent with the rhetoric bellowed
out by nearly every presidential contender who appeared on stage at DC’s
Verizon Center. Speaking before some 18,000 AIPAC supporters, Senator Ted Cruz
not only pledged [3] to starve educational
institutions of federal funding if they dared to support BDS, he promised that
under his watch, “they will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.”
Echoing Cruz, Republican contender John Kasich announced his intention [4] to
“use the full force of the White House” to destroy what he called “the scourge”
of BDS.
The
Democratic frontrunner, Hillary Clinton, was no less draconian. Reverting to
the “Goldwater girl” [5] sensibility
of her conservative college years, and tossing aside her recent appeals to social justice intersectionality [6],
Clinton vowed to punish [7] the
campus left for supporting Palestinian human rights. Slamming BDS as a form of
anti-Semitic hate speech, Clinton offered encouragement to the young, affluent
and almost uniformly white pro-Israel students bused into AIPAC in droves.
“Don’t let anyone silence you, bully you or try to shut down debate, especially
in places of learning like colleges and universities,” she implored them.
The BDS
movement has gathered momentum at a staggering pace since it was devised by
Palestinian civil society groups in 2005. With its call for grassroots level
boycotts to pressure Israel into respecting the human rights of Palestinians,
the movement has spread across European capitals and found fertile soil on
American college campuses. Yet just a few years ago, AIPAC and its affiliates
displayed little interest at all in it. When he appeared at AIPAC in 2011,
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu spent his entire speech badgering the
Obama administration for not attacking Iran. He did not feel compelled to
mention Palestinians even once. Despite the influential role played in the 2012
Republican presidential primary by Sheldon Adelson, a key benefactor of
Netanyahu and the Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney, BDS was scarcely
mentioned by any of the candidates, nor was it discussed much in mainstream
American media.
Almost four
years later, with the Iran nuclear deal ratified, the peace process in shambles
and the Green Line that was supposed to separate Israel from a future
Palestinian state fully erased by a settlement movement that dominates the
Israeli government, AIPAC is moving to destroy the last line of resistance.
From Washington to Paris to London, Israel lobbyists are extracting ritual
denunciations of BDS from its political hand puppets and authoring new laws to
forbid its implementation. Repressive legislative efforts are accompanied
by legal subterfuge [8], high-tech sabotage [9], McCarthy-style online blacklists [10] and
carefully orchestrated smear campaigns [11] against anyone who resists [12]. No target [13] is
too small. With guidance from Jerusalem, where the most right-wing government
in Israeli history is mounting an all-out assault on internal dissent [14], the lobby
has embraced a totalitarian agenda that aims for nothing less than the
criminalization of all political opposition.
On display
for the first time at AIPAC, the Israel lobby’s search-and-destroy mission
against BDS has already found enthusiastic allies in governments across the
West. In Paris, where President Manuel Valls vehemently equated
anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism [15], a French
court of criminal appeals recently upheld the conviction [16] of a
dozen Palestine solidarity activists for calling for the boycott of Israeli
goods. In the UK, the Conservative government of Prime Minister David Cameron
has introduced legislation [17] to
prevent local town councils from divesting from Israeli products or even from
weapons manufacturers. As state legislatures [18] across the US [19] vote
to blacklist companies [20] that
refuse to do business in Israel — a rare and highly unusual instance of
corporate regulation — the University of California board of regents has taken
the unprecedented step of defining anti-Zionism as anti-Jewish discrimination [21], setting
the stage for outlawing a political position gaining in popularity [22] among
Jewish Americans.
In its bid
to criminalize the speech of its opponents, the Israel lobby has sought to
formally redefine anti-Semitism according to the “3 D’s” formula conceived by Natan Sharansky [23]. Promoted
as a former Soviet dissident who champions freedom, Sharansky is, in fact, a
hardline Likudnik Israeli politician and promoter of Israel’s settlement enterprise [24] who helped inspire [25] George
W. Bush’s Middle Eastern conquests. Sharansky’s “3 D’s” abandons the
traditional understanding of anti-Semitism, redefining it from the
discrimination against Jews as Jews to any opposition to the political
imperatives of the Israeli government, thereby limiting Jewish identity to the
narrow ideological designs of Zionism. Israel lobbyists have successfully pressured the US State Department [26] to
adopt Sharansky’s definition, and after a long slog [27], have
pushed the University of California regents to endorse it as well. If this
highly politicized understanding of anti-Semitism is ever enforced, anyone who
has campaigned against Israeli human rights abuses could face harsh legal
recriminations, even if they identify as Jewish.
Capitalizing
on a campaign finance system deregulated by the Citizens United decision, which
defined corporations as people with unlimited rights to free speech, the Israel
lobby has unprecedented leeway to limit the speech of actual human beings.
Leveraging massive donations from Likudnik oligarchs [28], it is
planting cadres at every level of government, turning Congress, statehouses and
student government councils into a unified platform for crushing resistance. As
the veteran AIPAC operative Jonathan Kesslerdeclared [29], “We’re
going to make sure that pro-Israel students take over the student government
and reverse [divestment votes]. This is how AIPAC operates in our nation’s
capital.”
The lobby’s
campaign extends well beyond crushing Palestine solidarity. In the years ahead,
pro-Israel forces will serve as the leading edge of reactionary campaigns to
fracture any iteration of solidarity between marginalized social groups.
The smears of Jeremy Corbyn [30], the
leader of the British Labour Party, offer a perfect example of how Israel has
been instrumentalized to break down progressive social movements. Elected in
one of the most dramatic grassroots triumphs in recent political history by a
coalition of university students, blue collar workers and immigrants outraged
by deepening austerity and destructive foreign interventions, Corbyn has come
under sustained fire from the neoliberal Blairites who had dominated Labour
since the 1990’s. This February, anti-Corbyn elements opened up a new front
with a torrent of thinly sourced allegations that Labour had suddenly become
infected with “an anti-Semitism problem.” [31] Centered
around the resignation of a Blairite Oxford University Labour club leader who
complained that Jew-haters disguised as human rights activists had made his
life unbearable, the unconfirmed claims made their way to the New York Times
op-ed page through a column by Roger Cohen entitled, “An Anti-Semitism of the Left.” [32]
Cobbling
together a litany of complaints by anxiety-ridden Zionists about the tide of
Palestine activism rising all around them, Cohen bemoaned the “identity and
liberation politics” that now prevail on university campuses. Just a few
paragraphs later, however, Cohen pronounced his devotion to the Zionist
project, insisting that “the Jewish state was needed… That is why I am a
Zionist — now a dirty word in Europe.” Yet Cohen does not live in Israel; he
resides instead in an affluent locale in New York City, where Jews enjoy lavish
lifestyles, political power and a sense of security they could never dream of
in Jerusalem. His connection to Zionism is not grounded in the facts on the
ground in Israel-Palestine, but in an identity politics that only elites like
him can enjoy. When forms of speech that reinforce his identity have come under
attack, as when Islamic fanatics massacred the staff of Charlie Hebdo, he summoned [33] “the
entire free world” to “ruthlessly” defend liberal values. When his identity has
been challenged by the unrelenting demands of Israel’s colonial subjects,
however, Cohen quickly abandoned all pretense to enlightenment. He has become
the living embodiment of Phil Ochs’ sardonic classic, “Love
Me I’m A Liberal” [34]: “Ten degrees to the left
of center in good times, ten degrees to the right of center if it affects them
personally,” as Ochs sang.
While
Israel lobbyists howl about the threat of intersectionality [35] on
campus, they are actively appropriating its identitarian language to undermine
progressive social justice organizing on campus. Mark Yudof, the former
University of California president who tacitly endorsed [36] the
criminal prosecution of Muslim-American students for protesting a speech by
Israel’s former ambassador to the US, put the tactic on display by describing [37] factual claims [38] that
Israeli soldiers deliberately kill civilians as a “microaggression against
Jews.” At the University of Michigan, a member of the student governing
council justified her vote [39] against
a resolution to divest from corporations involved in the Israeli occupation on
the grounds that it denied “safe spaces” to Jewish students. And at the
University of South California, a pro-Israel student conceded [40] that
the UC regents’ decision to classify anti-Zionism as a form of anti-Semitism
was an attack on free speech — but supported it anyway because, in her view,
Jews are “a minority still so unfairly discriminated against and maligned.”
Animated by the perceived ethnic slights of a hyper-privileged overclass,
pro-Israel activism is essentially a White Lives Matter movement protected from
accountability by morally inconsistent liberals. Indeed, many of the Jewish
liberals who claim to have battled South African apartheid [41] and marched alongside the civil rights movement [42] now
seek to destroy a struggle [43] they
inspired.
Towards the
end of his life, as he watched the occupation of Palestine deepen and expand,
the dissident Israeli philosopher Yeshayahu Leibowitz described Israel as “the
only totalitarian country in the enlightened world.” He was referring to the
way that the Jewish state promoted itself as beacon of liberal democracy while
it imposed a brutal, panopticon-style regime of repression on Palestinians,
raiding their homes at night, shuttering their media outlets, and torturing them
at will. Today, Israel is projecting this regime outwards, recruiting
operatives across the West to eradicate all resistance, even attacking
constitutionally protected forms of protest. Like the country it has enlisted
to defend, a borderless settler-colony that demands special exemption from
international law, the lobby’s mission knows no limits. Where the occupation
started is well known, but where will it end?
Max
Blumenthal is a senior editor of the Grayzone Project at AlterNet, and
the award-winning author of Goliath [44] and Republican
Gomorrah [45]. His most recent book is The
51 Day War: Ruin and Resistance in Gaza. Follow him on Twitter
at @MaxBlumenthal [46].
[48]
Links:
[1] http://www.alternet.org/authors/max-blumenthal
[2] http://alternet.org
[3] http://www.policyconference.org/article/transcripts/cruz-2016.asp
[4] http://time.com/4267674/john-kasich-aipac-israel-speech-transcript/
[5] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WycwDYlOCDw
[6] https://shadowproof.com/2016/02/28/clinton-intersectionality-language-interview/
[7] http://time.com/4265947/hillary-clinton-aipac-speech-transcript/
[8] http://mondoweiss.net/2015/05/standwithus-lawsuit-olympia/
[9] http://www.alternet.org/grayzone-project/israel-announces-26-million-cyber-attack-boycott-divestment-and-sanctions-movement
[10] http://www.alternet.org/tea-party-and-right/modern-day-mccarthyists-are-going-extremes-slime-activists-fighting-israels
[11] http://mondoweiss.net/2016/03/nyt-finally-mentions-goliath-in-rightwing-ad-smearing-max-blumenthal/
[12] https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/charlotte-silver/pro-israel-group-targets-jewish-professor-over-palestine-activism
[13] http://www.buzzfeed.com/christophermassie/cory-booker-boycott-israel-movement-an-anti-jewish-movement#.jhmz6579B
[14] http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/27/opinion/how-israel-silences-dissent.html
[15] https://vimeo.com/145816483
[16] https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/ali-abunimah/france-now-more-repressive-boycott-calls-israel
[17] https://electronicintifada.net/content/uk-wants-law-stop-councils-boycotting-israel/15061
[18] http://www.masslive.com/politics/index.ssf/2015/09/massachusetts_state_representa.html
[19] http://mondoweiss.net/2016/03/indiana-lawmakers-seek-to-silence-critics-of-israel/
[20] https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/nora-barrows-friedman/new-york-bill-would-create-official-blacklist-israel-boycott-supporters
[21] http://regents.universityofcalifornia.edu/regmeet/mar16/e1.pdf
[22] http://forward.com/news/israel/217528/embracing-israel-boycott-jewish-voice-for-peace-in/
[23] http://forward.com/opinion/4184/antisemitism-in-3-d/
[24] http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2005/03/dissident-interview-natan-sharansky
[25] http://www.haaretz.com/print-edition/features/want-to-know-what-bush-thinks-read-sharansky-1.151005
[26] http://www.state.gov/j/drl/rls/fs/2010/122352.htm
[27] http://forward.com/opinion/312358/why-u-of-california-should-dump-three-d-definition-of-anti-semitism/
[28] http://forward.com/news/309413/sheldon-adelson-bds-campaign-campus-vegas/
[29] http://mondoweiss.net/2010/04/aipac-we-make-sure-that-pro-israel-candidates-take-over-government/#sthash.C6sYv9C8.dpuf
[30] http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/labour/11749043/Andrew-Gilligan-Jeremy-Corbyn-friend-to-Hamas-Iran-and-extremists.html
[31] http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/mar/18/labour-antisemitism-jews-jeremy-corbyn
[32] http://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/08/opinion/an-anti-semitism-of-the-left.html?_r=0
[33] https://twitter.com/tinyrevolution/status/554294504099155968
[34] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u52Oz-54VYw
[35] http://forward.com/opinion/328585/bds-and-the-rising-danger-of-intersectionality/
[36] http://www.thenation.com/article/free-speech-pro-israel-lobby-and-case-irvine-11/
[37] https://www.insidehighered.com/views/2015/12/14/colleges-should-commit-robust-debate-about-middle-east-conflicts-essay?utm_source=Inside+Higher+Ed&utm_campaign=06f09dc32e-DNU20151214&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_1fcbc04421-06f09dc32e-197769874
[38] http://www.btselem.org/publications/summaries/201501_black_flag
[39] https://twitter.com/MaxBlumenthal/status/583116374026809344
[40] http://dailytrojan.com/2016/03/21/uc-recognizes-racism-may-hide-anti-zionism/
[41] http://www.thejc.com/news/israel-news/150198/taking-israel-icc-would-exculpate-terror-backers
[42] http://www.jta.org/2015/07/21/news-opinion/politics/dermer-makes-civil-rights-appeal-to-black-dems-and-other-iran-deal-politics
[43] http://www.huffingtonpost.com/alan-dershowitz/lets-have-a-real-aparthei_b_485399.html
[44] http://www.amazon.com/Goliath-Life-Loathing-Greater-Israel/dp/1568586345
[45] http://republicangomorrah.com/
[46] http://twitter.com/maxblumenthal
[47] mailto:corrections@alternet.org?Subject=Typo on The Israel Lobby’s Dangerous Agenda for the US: Attack Free Speech and Criminalize Resistance
[48] http://www.alternet.org/
[49] http://www.alternet.org/%2Bnew_src%2B
[2] http://alternet.org
[3] http://www.policyconference.org/article/transcripts/cruz-2016.asp
[4] http://time.com/4267674/john-kasich-aipac-israel-speech-transcript/
[5] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WycwDYlOCDw
[6] https://shadowproof.com/2016/02/28/clinton-intersectionality-language-interview/
[7] http://time.com/4265947/hillary-clinton-aipac-speech-transcript/
[8] http://mondoweiss.net/2015/05/standwithus-lawsuit-olympia/
[9] http://www.alternet.org/grayzone-project/israel-announces-26-million-cyber-attack-boycott-divestment-and-sanctions-movement
[10] http://www.alternet.org/tea-party-and-right/modern-day-mccarthyists-are-going-extremes-slime-activists-fighting-israels
[11] http://mondoweiss.net/2016/03/nyt-finally-mentions-goliath-in-rightwing-ad-smearing-max-blumenthal/
[12] https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/charlotte-silver/pro-israel-group-targets-jewish-professor-over-palestine-activism
[13] http://www.buzzfeed.com/christophermassie/cory-booker-boycott-israel-movement-an-anti-jewish-movement#.jhmz6579B
[14] http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/27/opinion/how-israel-silences-dissent.html
[15] https://vimeo.com/145816483
[16] https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/ali-abunimah/france-now-more-repressive-boycott-calls-israel
[17] https://electronicintifada.net/content/uk-wants-law-stop-councils-boycotting-israel/15061
[18] http://www.masslive.com/politics/index.ssf/2015/09/massachusetts_state_representa.html
[19] http://mondoweiss.net/2016/03/indiana-lawmakers-seek-to-silence-critics-of-israel/
[20] https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/nora-barrows-friedman/new-york-bill-would-create-official-blacklist-israel-boycott-supporters
[21] http://regents.universityofcalifornia.edu/regmeet/mar16/e1.pdf
[22] http://forward.com/news/israel/217528/embracing-israel-boycott-jewish-voice-for-peace-in/
[23] http://forward.com/opinion/4184/antisemitism-in-3-d/
[24] http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2005/03/dissident-interview-natan-sharansky
[25] http://www.haaretz.com/print-edition/features/want-to-know-what-bush-thinks-read-sharansky-1.151005
[26] http://www.state.gov/j/drl/rls/fs/2010/122352.htm
[27] http://forward.com/opinion/312358/why-u-of-california-should-dump-three-d-definition-of-anti-semitism/
[28] http://forward.com/news/309413/sheldon-adelson-bds-campaign-campus-vegas/
[29] http://mondoweiss.net/2010/04/aipac-we-make-sure-that-pro-israel-candidates-take-over-government/#sthash.C6sYv9C8.dpuf
[30] http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/labour/11749043/Andrew-Gilligan-Jeremy-Corbyn-friend-to-Hamas-Iran-and-extremists.html
[31] http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/mar/18/labour-antisemitism-jews-jeremy-corbyn
[32] http://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/08/opinion/an-anti-semitism-of-the-left.html?_r=0
[33] https://twitter.com/tinyrevolution/status/554294504099155968
[34] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u52Oz-54VYw
[35] http://forward.com/opinion/328585/bds-and-the-rising-danger-of-intersectionality/
[36] http://www.thenation.com/article/free-speech-pro-israel-lobby-and-case-irvine-11/
[37] https://www.insidehighered.com/views/2015/12/14/colleges-should-commit-robust-debate-about-middle-east-conflicts-essay?utm_source=Inside+Higher+Ed&utm_campaign=06f09dc32e-DNU20151214&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_1fcbc04421-06f09dc32e-197769874
[38] http://www.btselem.org/publications/summaries/201501_black_flag
[39] https://twitter.com/MaxBlumenthal/status/583116374026809344
[40] http://dailytrojan.com/2016/03/21/uc-recognizes-racism-may-hide-anti-zionism/
[41] http://www.thejc.com/news/israel-news/150198/taking-israel-icc-would-exculpate-terror-backers
[42] http://www.jta.org/2015/07/21/news-opinion/politics/dermer-makes-civil-rights-appeal-to-black-dems-and-other-iran-deal-politics
[43] http://www.huffingtonpost.com/alan-dershowitz/lets-have-a-real-aparthei_b_485399.html
[44] http://www.amazon.com/Goliath-Life-Loathing-Greater-Israel/dp/1568586345
[45] http://republicangomorrah.com/
[46] http://twitter.com/maxblumenthal
[47] mailto:corrections@alternet.org?Subject=Typo on The Israel Lobby’s Dangerous Agenda for the US: Attack Free Speech and Criminalize Resistance
[48] http://www.alternet.org/
[49] http://www.alternet.org/%2Bnew_src%2B
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21218. Ph: 410-323-1607; Email: mobuszewski [at] verizon.net. Go to http://baltimorenonviolencecenter.blogspot.com/
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The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject
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