What Does One Find at a Student Anti-Racism Conference? Anti-Semitism, of Course.

Drawing on the accounts of two Jewish undergraduates who attended the annual Students of Color Conference at the University of California, Berkeley, Anthony Berteaux describes the successful absorption of the anti-Israel movement within the broader campus left and its amalgamation with rabid anti-Semitism. The story begins many decades ago:

[A]nti-Israel co-option of progressive causes dates as far back as 1959, when the General Union of Palestinian Students (GUPS) was founded in Egypt. Supportive of terrorist groups like the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, GUPS saw a need to create a unified plan and message for student activists. It released a statement calling for students to channel their activism into supporting the “armed struggle” and fighting Israel from abroad. It is in this statement that . . . [an] alliance with progressives was [first] mentioned . . . Palestinian members living abroad would be encouraged to cooperate with the progressive political forces in their host countries to counter official Zionist activities, lectures, and movie screenings.

When the GUPS established a chapter at San Francisco State University in 1973, it organized accordingly, focusing its mission on “social justice” while simultaneously supporting Palestinian liberation through armed struggle.

Decades late, the seed planted in 1959 would bear fruit of the kind on display at the Students of Color Conference. One student would recount her experience on the first day in these words:

Over the course of what was probably no longer than an hour, [the basic facts of Jewish] history were denied, the murder of my people was justified, and a movement whose sole purpose is the destruction of the Jewish state was glorified. Statements were made justifying the ruthless murder of innocent Israeli civilians, blatantly denying Jewish indigeneity in the land, and denying the Holocaust. . . . These statements, and others, were met with endless snaps and cheers.

Read more at Tower

More about: Anti-Semitism, Israel & Zionism, Israel on campus, PFLP, Students for Justice in Palestine, University

It’s Time for Haredi Jews to Become Part of Israel’s Story

Unless the Supreme Court grants an extension from a recent ruling, on Monday the Israeli government will be required to withhold state funds from all yeshivas whose students don’t enlist in the IDF. The issue of draft exemptions for Haredim was already becoming more contentious than ever last year; it grew even more urgent after the beginning of the war, as the army for the first time in decades found itself suffering from a manpower crunch. Yehoshua Pfeffer, a haredi rabbi and writer, argues that haredi opposition to army service has become entirely disconnected from its original rationale:

The old imperative of “those outside of full-time Torah study must go to the army” was all but forgotten. . . . The fact that we do not enlist, all of us, regardless of how deeply we might be immersed in the sea of Torah, brings the wrath of Israeli society upon us, gives a bad name to all of haredi society, and desecrates the Name of Heaven. It might still bring harsh decrees upon the yeshiva world. It is time for us to engage in damage limitation.

In Pfeffer’s analysis, today’s haredi leaders, by declaring that they will fight the draft tooth and nail, are violating the explicit teachings of the very rabbis who created and supported the exemptions. He finds the current attempts by haredi publications to justify the status quo not only unconvincing but insincere. At the heart of the matter, according to Pfeffer, is a lack of haredi identification with Israel as a whole, a lack of feeling that the Israeli story is also the haredi story:

Today, it is high time we changed our tune. The new response to the demand for enlistment needs to state, first and foremost to ourselves, that this is our story. On the one hand, it is crucial to maintain and even strengthen our isolation from secular values and culture. . . . On the other hand, this cultural isolationism must not create alienation from our shared story with our fellow brethren living in the Holy Land. Participation in the army is one crucial element of this belonging.

Read more at Tzarich Iyun

More about: Haredim, IDF, Israeli society