Editor’s Note: Every Spring while I was growing up, my father and his sisters would invite our family friend Ofra to Passover. Ofra was the only person at the table who spoke Hebrew, so she could lead us in “Dayenu” and read specific portions of the Haggadah. She was also the only Israeli. Every year, she and my father would get into an argument about “Israel,” using abstract language to discuss “America’s endorsement of Israel” or “the settlements.” To me, “Israel” could have been anything, any place. I finally asked one year what in the world they were talking about, and my father gave me a vague description of the injustices Israel has inflicted upon Palestinians, concluding by saying the conflict is “complicated.”
Outside of Passover, Israel was never discussed in my household. I know that this is a unique position for an American Jew: most of my Jewish friends went to Hebrew school, temple, or Jewish summer camp where there some form of discourse around Israel. My father’s family is Jewish, but considers the tradition as a link to familial continuity and legacy rather than to religion or culture. So, I knew almost nothing of the circumstances of the Palestine-Israel conflict until tenth grade AP World History, where my radical, Jewish-Buddhist teacher laid out the state-mandated facts with as much anti-colonial nuance as he could. In my second semester at Vassar, I joined Jewish Voice for Peace and took on the specific political position in opposition to Israel’s ongoing settler-colonial occupation of Palestine and in favor of Palestinian self-determination.
I tell this history of my coming to knowledge about the occupation because I believe that without the dialogues that Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP) and Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) have provided, I would still be ignorant of my complicitness in the occupation, and of my capacity for action. I now know that my father supports Palestinian self-determination, but his silence around the issue kept me from learning, for years, about the critical role of American Jews in the maintenance of Israeli occupation. I acknowledge that my testimony centers my privileged perspective of a white American Jew, a centering that often occurs in conversations about Palestine at Vassar, which has a wildly disproportionate enrollment of Jewish students to Palestinian and Middle Eastern students. Growing up, I had the privilege, as a documented American citizen who benefits from whiteness, of remaining ignorant about explicit settler-colonialism in the United States and abroad. However, with this testimony I hope to highlight that the space which JVP and SJP aim to create on campus for political education, coalition building, and action is critical for each of us, on and off this campus, to understand our unique positions in the complex matrices of global settler-colonialism and imperialism.
From April 13th to April 20th, Students for Justice in Palestine and Jewish Voice for Peace, in collaboration with Vassar Prison Initiative, Multi-Biracial Student Alliance (MBSA), WVKR, Middle Eastern and North African Students Alliance (MENASA) and other campus chapter partners will be hosting Israeli Apartheid Week in solidarity with the international events taking place across campuses and cities. Israeli Apartheid Week is an opportunity to reflect on Palestinian resistance and further advance Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) campaigns for the continued growth and impact of the movement. Despite Israel’s legal and propaganda war on BDS internationally, Israeli Apartheid Week and the BDS movement continue to build linkages and solidarity with other struggles to achieve freedom, justice, and equality. Throughout the week, Vassar students and faculty will have the opportunity to attend workshops, lectures, performances, and moderated dialogues to understand support of Palestinian liberation as an integral component of anti-colonial and anti-racist work, and critical in fighting transphobia, homophobia, anti-semitism and islamophobia which have been exacerbated by our current political climate.
Queer, Japanese-American, Jewish, and self-loving anti-zionist performer, writer, and educator Una Osato will give a talk and a performance surrounding how we can embrace our personal and political selves fully. Playwright and artist on JVP’s artist council, Dan Fishback, will talk about censorship, tackling anti-semitism, and navigating the issue of Palestine within Jewish families. Activists from the International Solidarity movement will share their experiences from organizing in Palestine. Chicago-based activist and educator Stephanie Skora, who describes herself as “an unapologetic femme, a statistically middle-aged genderqueer trans woman, a lesbian in a culture quickly moving away from that label, and an anti-racist, anti-Zionist white Jew practicing her spiritual tradition through radical activism” will be in residence from Monday to Friday doing workshops, talks, discussion spaces, and meet and greets. Every evening following the day of events, there will be moderated dialogue and discussion spaces with the support of Campus Life and Diversity at 9:00pm in the Gold Parlor. Through these dialogues, we can start to see the interconnectedness of oppressive structures such as the Military Industrial Complex in the United States and abroad – and start to organize for action.
The following article frames an anti-Zionist, anti-Apartheid perspective that holds true to the mission of Israeli Apartheid Week and the cause of SJP and JVP. Our goal is to open a necessary conversation about the reality behind Israel’s claims of diversity and multiculturalism, a reality of ongoing state-sanctioned violence against Palestinians, Mizrahi Jews, African migrants, and other marginalized groups affected by the occupation. It is my hope that this article, the events taking place over Israeli Apartheid Week, and the daily moderated dialogue and discussion spaces will break the silence surrounding the occupation in Palestine on campus, by centering the voices of those affected by oppressive structures and opening dialogue across lines of difference for coalition building.
Anya Bernstein
Content Warnings: Police Brutality, Mention of Sexual Assault, Anti-Blackness, Racism
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An online video shows Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu trying to justify the construction of Israeli settlements within Palestinian territory. While illegal under international law, Netanyahu says that all these settlements are doing is promoting diversity between the two embattled nations. He compares calls for the removal of Israeli settlements to ethnic cleansing, and asks his viewer how they would feel if someone called for a state “without Jews, without Hispanics, without blacks”. He signs off by claiming that his vision is for an inclusive Middle East, where people of all religions and ethnicities can live together in harmony.
From his referring to the West Bank as “Judea Samaria” (a Talmudic term that implies Israeli ownership of land that is legally allotted to Palestinians) to his evocation of the words of Martin Luther King at the video’s end, the video is a highly calculated exercise in doublespeak and misdirection. Misleading as it is, the language Netanyahu uses is not at all dissimilar to what I heard about the State of Israel in my years as a Jewish person living in America. According to this narrative, since returning to their ancestral homeland after the horrors of the Holocaust, the Jewish people who came to Israel have created a flourishing society that is simultaneously successful and inclusive. Out of a region so deeply mired in turmoil rose a nation that has used its remarkable advances in science and technology to become a force for good.
To believe the story I was told requires a deliberate and willful ignorance that does not take into consideration the intricacies of how Israel came to be what it is today.
The State of Israel was created by the United Nations in 1947 within what was then the British Mandate of Palestine. The UN gained approval for this plan not by consulting the residents of the land, but rather by getting the support of the United Kingdom, the region’s colonial force. Because of this, Israel cannot be separated from its legacy as an imperialistic project.
Even beyond this, successive Israeli governments have continuously encroached further and further onto Palestinian land. Through military occupation and aforementioned illegal settlement building, Palestinians now only have about a fourth of the land they had been granted by the first partition plan, forcing five million people to live in a space about ⅛ the size of New Jersey. And this isn’t even mentioning the millions of Palestinians who have been forced to flee their homes and seek refuge in neighboring countries or nations across the world.
A side-by-side comparison of Israel and the Palestinian territories of the West Bank and Gaza demonstrates the breadth of the inequality between them. Israel’s per capita GDP ranks 53rd in the world while the West Bank’s is 176th. Israel has a fortified and reliable power grid that relies on several different types of fuel whereas some residents of Gaza get only four hours of electricity per day. Israel has created a world-renowned water treatment system when more than 96% of Gaza’s water is undrinkable.
These stark differences between two peoples living on intertwined plots of land are not coincidences, nor are they a testament to the strength of one nation over another. Israel has consistently destroyed existing Palestinian water treatment and electric plants and has disallowed the construction of new ones. Israel also controls the region’s natural resources through its occupation of Palestinian land, giving itself the lion’s share and leaving whatever is left to the residents of Palestinian territories under their control.
In addition, Israel’s continued military presence within Gaza and the West Bank has resulted in clashes between Palestinian citizens and significantly better-armed and more powerful Israeli forces. Several months ago, after learning that an Israeli soldier had shot her cousin in the head by a rubber bullet, Palestinian teenager Ahed Tamimi hit an Israeli soldier who was wielding an assault rifle in her yard. Her subsequent arrest made international headlines. Tamimi, who has also alleged sexual harassment by her interrogator while in Israeli custody, is the only party who has faced any punishment as a result of this incident. Recent protests in Gaza over the right of Palestinians to return to their homes have resulted in the deaths of dozens of Palestinians at the hands of Israeli troops, including a photojournalist wearing clothing identifying him as a member of the press. While Israeli officials have alleged that Palestinian protesters have thrown rocks and Molotov cocktails at their soldiers, the great disparity between these makeshift weapons and Israeli forces’ state-of-the-art arms is undeniable.
The abuses of the Israeli state are not, however, limited to their attacks on Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza. Despite Netanyahu’s references to the American Civil Rights movement in the above video, many Israeli residents face anti-black violence and discrimination. Ethiopian Jews in Israel face high rates of poverty and incarceration, and have even been subjected to forced sterilization. Israel has also recently released a plan to deport nearly 40,000 African migrants, a move that would effectively send all of these refugees back to the war-torn nations from which they fled.
The State of Israel often broadcasts the high standard of living enjoyed by many of its citizens, and while there is some truth to these claims—Israelis do live in relative prosperity and they have built an expansive and technologically advanced national infrastructure—they are true in the same way that a balloon, when blown up, is round. And similarly, with nothing more than a few pin pricks in its surface, one can see the myth of an enlightened, progressive Israel for what it really is: an illusion supported by nothing but hot air.
Criticisms of the State of Israel are not intrinsically anti-Semitic. Israel, a small nation that has not even existed for a century, does not define Judaism, a 3000-year-old religion currently being practiced on all seven continents. Beginning this April 13th, Jewish Voice for Peace at Vassar College will be working with Vassar’s chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine to mark Israeli Apartheid Week, where diasporic Judaism and Jewish resistance to Zionism will be celebrated through a number of on-campus events. Jewish people have endured thousands of years of some of the most brutal injustices ever waged against a people. It is time to acknowledge and disavow the crimes of the government that claims to act in our name.
