Are Zionists allowed on the American left?
JVL Introduction
The Washington, DC branch of the environmental group, Sunrise, made news last week when it announced it would not speak at a voting rights rally so long as three Jewish Zionist groups took part.
In this contribution, Peter Beinart skewers American groups like the ADL which rushed to condemn Sunrise while remaining shtum about the Israeli government’s outlawing of six prominent Palestinian human rights organisations.
In the US today, as he points out, anti-Zionists are far more likely to be “cancelled” than are Zionists.
That said, Beinart nonetheless argues strongly against Sunrise’s decision. It is, he believes, politically self-destructive; and it specifically targeted Jews.
Here the argument is subtle but very important: Sunrise was not calling, for example, to boycott non-Jewish groups like the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), which supports Israel’s “right to exist”.
The debate has resonances here in Britain and it is important that the Palestine solidarity movement gets it right.
Thanks to Peter Beinart for permission to repost.
This article was originally published by The Beinart Notebook on Mon 25 Oct 2021. Read the original here.
Are Zionists allowed on the American left?
The Washington, DC chapter of the environmental group, Sunrise, made news last week when it announced it would not speak at a voting rights rally so long as three Jewish Zionist groups took part. This kind of thing seems to be happening more frequently—leftists are refusing to join coalitions that include supporters of a Jewish state. This worries me, for reasons I’ll detail below…
Loading article text…
I thought this article was bloody brilliant. A really important and thoughtful contribution to discussion on Palestinian solidarity politics. It is hugely important that we try to build the broadest and strongest alliances to campaign for Palestinian rights.
Beinart has his facts wrong, I’m afraid. Sunrise DC wanted those three groups excluded not because they were Jewish, but because they were the only groups that supported Israeli apartheid, not just through lip service, but though deeds. For example, the National Council for Jewish Women (NCJW) has a partnership with Tel Aviv University. TAU works extensively with the Israeli military to maintain the occupation and come up with ever more ghoulish ways to murder innocent Palestinian women, men and children.
NCJW and another of the group targeted by Sunrise DC, as well as Beinart himself, ran on the Hatikvah slate, during the last World Zionist Organization (WZO) elections. An important WZO function is to maintain the Jewish National Fund, which ensures that Israeli land can only be owned by Jews.