(THIS ARTICLE IS MACHINE TRANSLATED by Google from Norwegian)
The ban on Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) at Northeastern University in Boston on March 7, 2014, along with a threat from the university on disciplinary action against some of its members, is just one example of sanctions being imposed on a number of Palestinian student rights groups across the United States.
The attacks, and other similar disturbing forms of punishment, appear to be part of a coordinated action by the Israeli government and the Israeli lobby in the United States to blacklist all student groups challenging the official Israeli narrative.
Northeastern University banned the SJP department after it sent out copies of evictions that are routinely set up at Palestinian homes that are threatened with demolition. The university announced that students would be banned, saying that if SJP asks to be reinstated next year, “no current members of Students for Justice in Palestine's main board could sit on the board of the new organization », and further that representatives from the organization will have to review the university« «schooling».
Retraining seminars and right-wing Israeli groups
In 2011, ten students who at UC Irvine in California had interrupted a speech given by Michael Oren, then Israeli ambassador to the United States, were found guilty, given a probationary period and sentenced to perform community service. Israeli citizen Oren, who has since been hired by the television company CNN, has called on Congress to blacklist supporters of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) campaign against Israel and to prosecute those who demonstrate against Israeli officials.
They were deprived of student leadership positions after leaving the venue during a speech given by an Israeli military.
Columbia Students for Justice in Palestine (CSJP) was abruptly banned in the spring of 2011 and denied being able to reserve rooms or hold events on campus. Prior to this ban, the university administration had a practice of notifying the Hillel campus in advance of any CSJP event.
The expulsion was eventually lifted after a protest led by CSJP's lawyers.
Max Geller, law student and SJP member at the Northeastern that I reached by phone in Boston, accused the university of responding "to outside pressure," including that of former student Robert Shillman, now CEO of Cognex Corp., and hedge fund billionaire Seth Klarman, both supporters of right-wingers Israeli groups.
Geller said the following: “Banning students from leadership roles, and banning student groups simply because they have engaged in peaceful political activity, violates the university's mission to educate students. In the past year, I have received death threats, been publicly and unfairly vilified and threatened with disciplinary measures. This has given engaging in debate about an issue I am deeply committed to, as both a Jew and an American, a fear- and anxiety-inducing perspective.”
BDS supporters
The heavy-handed responses to these student organizations are symptomatic of Israel's growing isolation and concern about declining American support. Decades of occupation and seizure of Palestinian land and the massive military attacks against a defenseless population in Gaza have left hundreds dead, along with increasing malnutrition among Palestinian children in enforced poverty. This has alienated former supporters of Israel, including many young American Jews.
At the same time, Israel has become a pariah in the global community. If the country were to lose American support, which it largely buys with political campaign contributions funneled through groups like American Israel Public Affairs Committee# (AIPAC), would Israel been bad out. Today, a growing number of banks and other companies, especially in the EU, are joining the boycott movement and refusing to do business with Israeli companies in the occupied territories.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, speaking at AIPAC on March 4, 2014, surprisingly devoted much of his speech to attacking the growing BDS movement, which he said stood for "xenophobia, dishonesty and shame." He called for BDS supporters "to be treated exactly as we treat any anti-Semitic or bigoted person." He warned against "naive and ignorant" people being recruited as "gullible fellow travelers" in an anti-Semitic campaign.
according to The Times of London, Israeli officials are apparently trying to infiltrate the BDS movement, using smear methods and trying to link the movement to Islamic extremism. The Israeli government is additionally advancing moralizing, anti-democratic bills in the state legislatures of New York, Maryland and Illinois that would impose financial sanctions on academic institutions that boycott Israeli institutions.
Israeli officials are apparently trying to infiltrate the BDS movement and are using smear methods.
Meanwhile, the US and others are enthusiastically imposing sanctions on Russia for an occupation far less draconian than Israel's long-standing resistance to international law. The ADL (Anti-Defamation League) designed indoctrination classes for university activists are, according to those who have been required to take them, lame attempts to equate any criticism of Israel with anti-Semitism.
The expulsion
Some activists at Florida Atlantic University were stripped of their student leadership positions after leaving the venue during a speech given by an Israeli military officer. They were ordered by university management to attend retraining seminars sponsored by the Anti-Defamation League (ADL): “Myself and two other members of SJP were forced to attend the ADL-sponsored 'diversity training' course, otherwise we would have violated the terms of our probation and in turn we would be banned and/or expelled," said Nadine Aly, a student
activist who, along with other activists, left a lecture given at the university by Israeli officer Colonel Bentzi Gruber – who had helped draft rules of engagement for Operation Cast Lead, the horrific attack on Gaza in late 2008 and early 2009.
I reached her by phone on the Florida campus: “The very idea that the administration is implying that criticizing Israeli policy is racist is ridiculous. We were put on 'indefinite probation' and they prohibited us from holding leadership positions in any recognized student organizations at the university, including the student council, until we graduated. I was no longer allowed to continue either as president of SJP or as a student representative, and the former vice-president of SJP lost his position as student house representative. It is a shame that this university, like most universities, bows to the pressure of the Zionist lobby and rich Zionist donors when they should be protecting the rights of their students.”
The persecution of academics such as Joseph Massad and Norman Finkelstein, who challenge the official Israeli narrative, has long been a feature of Israeli intervention in American academic life. Also, university presidents' eagerness to denounce the American Studies Association's call for an academic boycott of Israel. We see here an insatiable hunger for money that seems to rule university politics. However, the current effort to shut down student groups raises traditional Israeli censorship and interference to a new level. Israel is now attempting to shut down free speech on American college campuses—against all of which student groups have steadfastly engaged in nonviolent protests—and has enlisted our bankrupt liberal elites and college administrators as thought police.
Academics and professors
That academics do not defend these student groups' right to express dissenting views and engage in political activism is a sad counterpart to how irrelevant most academics have become. Where, in this battle, are the professors of constitutional law who defend the right to free speech? Where are the professors of ethics, religion and philosophy who remind students of everyone's right to a dignified life free from oppression? Where are the professors of Middle Eastern studies who explain the historical consequences of Israel's violent annexation of Palestinian land? Where are the journalism professors who defend the dissident's and victims' right to fair treatment in the press? Where are the professors of gender studies, African American studies, Indigenous or Chicano studies who protect the voices and dignity of the marginalized and oppressed?
Where are the professors of ethics, religion and philosophy?
The attacks on students will not end with groups such as Students for Justice in Palestine. Here they refuse to hear the cries of the Palestinian people, especially the 1,5 million – 60 percent of them children – who are confined by the Israeli military in Gaza. This is part of the broader campaign by right-wingers like Lynne Cheney and billionaires like the Koch brothers to eliminate all programs and academic disciplines that give voice to the marginalized, especially those who are not privileged and white. Latinos, African Americans, feminists, and LGBT students also feel this pressure.
According to a bill signed by Republican Governor Jan Brewer, books by leading Chicano authors have been banned from public schools in Tucson and elsewhere in Arizona because such ethnic studies promote "hatred of a race or people”. It is language similar to what former ambassador Oren has used to justify his call for the prosecution of BDS activists – that they promote bigotry.
The neoconservatism growing in Israel has its toxic counterpart in American culture. And if other marginalized groups within the university remain silent while Palestinian solidarity activists are persecuted on campus, there will be fewer allies when these right-wing forces come after them. And they come. Those of us who condemn the suffering Israel and its war crimes against the Palestinians are causing, and who support the BDS movement, are used to sneaky Israeli smear campaigns.
Max blumenthal
I have been repeatedly labeled anti-Semitic by the Israeli lobby, including for my book War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning. Some of the critical voices, such as Max Blumenthal, who wrote Goliath: Life and Loathing in Greater Israel, one of the best accounts written about contemporary Israel, is Jewish, but that doesn't seem to bother right-wing Israeli propagandists who see deviation from the Israeli government line as a form of religious heresy.
“I have been on tour discussing my book Goliath since October 2013", said Blumenthal, whom I interviewed by phone:
“On several occasions, Israeli lobby groups and pro-Israel activists have tried to pressure organizations to cancel my events before they took place. I've been slandered by pro-Israel teenage students, prominent magazine columnists, and even Alan Dershowitz as anti-Semitic, and my family has been attacked in the right-wing media just for hosting a book party for me. The absurd means pro-Israel activists have resorted to to stop journalism and my analysis from reaching a wide audience is a perfect illustration of their intellectual exhaustion and moral poverty. All they have left is plenty of money to buy politicians and an unlimited will to defend the only nuclear weapon and apartheid state in the Middle East. As young Arabs and Muslims demand a presence at universities across the country, and Jewish Americans show disgust with Netanyahu's Israel, we are witnessing a pro-Israeli comeback. The question is not whether they will win or lose, but how much damage they can do to freedom of expression on the way to a settlement with justice. […] It would be encouraging if prominent liberal intellectuals agreed with all my conclusions, or would accept the legitimacy of BDS, but the only reasonable expectation we can have of them is that they mobilize in defense of those whose free speech and rights to to organize is crushed by powerful forces. When these forces come to the defense of Israel, unfortunately, too many liberal intellectuals remain silent—or, as in the case of Michael Kazin, Eric Alterman, Cary Nelson, and famous university presidents, they actively collaborate with other elites determined to crush Palestinian solidarity activism with anti-democratic means.”
The Campus Hillel Centers
Local chapters of Hillel [Hillel is the world's largest Jewish campus organization and stands for social action, defense of Israel, global exchange, entrepreneurship, business clubs and art/culture, editor's note] unfortunately often function as nothing less than the extended arm of the Israeli authorities and AIPAC- university outposts. This is true at Northeastern as well as at educational institutions such as Barnard College and Columbia. And university presidents like Barnard's Debora Spar see nothing wrong with accepting Israel lobby trips to Israel, while Palestinian students risk prison and even death to study in the United States.
The launch of campus-wide defamatory campaigns by supposedly religious groups is sacrilege to the Jewish religion. In a number of seminars, I have read enough of the great Hebrew prophets – who were primarily concerned with the oppressed and the poor – to know that you would not find them at today's Hillel centers. These prophets would instead protest alongside SJP activists. The Campus Hillel Centers, with their lavish budgets and gleaming campus buildings, offer ongoing events, lectures and programs to promote official Israeli policy. They arrange free trips to Israel for Jewish students as part of the Taglit Birthright program and act as a government Israeli travel agency. Jewish students, often with no family ties to Israel, are escorted on these well-choreographed propaganda trips to Israel. At the same time, hundreds of thousands of Palestinians, trapped in squalid refugee camps, do not have access to their own homes, even though their families may have lived for centuries on what is now Israeli land.
Israel has for several decades been able to frame discussions about the Palestinians. But Israel's control of the narrative is coming to an end. As Israel loses ground, it will viciously and irrationally attack all truth tellers, even if they are American students, and especially if they are Jewish. There will come a day, and that day will come sooner than Israel and its paid lackeys expect, when the entire edifice will crumble, when even students at Hillel will no longer have the stomach to defend the continuous mistreatment and random killing of Palestinians. By recklessly refusing others to speak, Israel now risks being silenced itself.
This is a lecture sponsored by Northeastern University's Political Economy Forum given by Chris Hedges on March 25, 2014. It was originally published on March 17, 2014 on the Truthdig website, reproduced here with permission and
translated by John Y. Jones.
