Hen Mazzig, a young Israeli, a former member of the leftist Zionist party, wrote an article last year for the Times of Israel describing his tenure as an educator at StandWithUs in the greater Seattle area, Oregon and Berkeley. It is an article that should bring shame to every American.
As a soldier in the West Bank, Mazzig said he was used to having ugly things said to him but nothing prepared him for the misinformation, demonization of Israel and the gut-wrenching, anti-Israel, anti-Semitic hostility he encountered from college students, their professors, so-called Christians and even some high school students in the Pacific Northwest. “My experiences in America have changed me. I never expected to encounter such hatred and lies. I never believed that such anti-Semitism still existed, especially in the U.S. I never knew that the battle field was not just Gaza, the West Bank, and hostile Middle Eastern countries wanting to destroy Israel and kill our citizens and soldiers. It is also here in America, where a battle must be waged against prejudice and lies.”
Mazzig mentions a few specific attacks in his article, like a university professor in Portland that told an assembly that the “Jews of Israel have no national rights and should be forced out of the country.” When questioned as to where the professor would have them go she answered “I don’t care. I don’t care if they don’t have any place else to go. They should not be there.” But then again, she denied that she was calling for an “ethnic cleansing.” In Seattle, a woman stood up and yelled “You are just like the Nazi youth!” Another professor asked him if he knew how many Palestinians had been raped by the Israel military and when he answered none that he knew of she said, “You IDF soldiers don’t rape Palestinians because Israelis are so racist and disgusted by them that you won’t touch them.”
Of course this anti-Semitism exists outside of the Pacific Northwest. For example: At a BDS rally at the University of Michigan, pro-Israel students were threatened with death and Jews, well they were called Kikes and Dirty Jews by BDS protestors. This rally was sponsored by the American Friends Service Committee (Quakers) who claimed that they were not targeting Jews but Jewish businesses located in Palestine. “It’s not anti-Semitic to want equal justice for everyone.” That is, unless you happen to be Jewish or for that matter, a Palestinian worker at that Jewish business they’re trying to close.
This new bigotry is neatly packaged in the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions campaign (BDS) which claims to champion human rights while its true goal is to erode American support for Israel, discredit Jews who support Israel, and pave the way for eliminating the Jewish state. Very popular with the far-left, BDS is well organized and funded in their efforts to convince universities, corporations, food co-ops, churches, artists, labor unions, Hollywood, Congress, etc. to boycott Israel and demand that Israel return their own land to the Palestinians, who I might add, do not exist as a people and never had claim to the Israeli lands.
BDS would be more truthful if they changed their name to the Palestinian Rights Movement. Founded in 2005 by some 170 organizations that included Al-Awda, the Al-Mezan Center for Human Rights, the Holy Land Trust, the Council of National & Islamic Forces, the Arab Association for Human Rights, and the YWCA-Palestine, BDS refers to the 1948 creation of an Israeli state as the ‘Nakba,’ or Catastrophe. This movement is a throw-back to the 1945 Arab League boycott against the Jews and the forthcoming Jewish state, in the hopes that isolation and starvation would drive them out. The Arab League itself was an outgrowth of previous unification efforts in the Arab world that included a boycott of Jewish interests in the region as early as 1921, based solely on their hatred of the Jewish people.
BDS states that their goal is the return of all the UN designated Palestinian Refugees to pre-1967 Israel lines. Hamas, on the other hand wants ALL of the land between the Mediterranean and Jordan. Either would mean the annihilation of the Jewish people and the state of Israel, which of course, is the end goal.
Israel was not created on the concept of Jewish superiority. It was created so that all the Jewish peoples of the world would have a legitimate right to self-determination in their ancestral homelands. Israel does not exclude the Arab peoples who call themselves Palestinians from living there, which many do. Israel does, however, have the right to require that all citizens obey their laws, something that the so-called Palestinian peoples refuse to do.
During the Kerry/Palestinian/Israel peace negotiations, Palestinian Authority (PA) leader Mahmoud Abbas declared that his vision of peace entailed a Palestinian state with “no presence of a single Israeli, civilian or soldier…,” a statement that was “missed” by most lap-dog reporters in the U.S. Abbas statement provides some important context for the key Israeli demand that the Palestinians refuse to accept – acknowledgement of the legitimacy of Israel as a Jewish state. As Hani Ramadan, a prominent Muslim leader from Geneva, speaking at a major conference on Islam held in Paris said “all the evil in the world originates from the Jews and the Zionist barbarism.”
The existence of the State of Israel has been a critical pillar supporting the greater sense of security for the Jewish people since the Holocaust, yet they are being told by anti-Zionists that they are the primary cause of injustice and disorder in international societies.
Jean-Paul Sartre in his essay Anti-Semite and Jew provided a description of an abstracted, idealized type closely association with this convoluted reasoning, which he named the ‘democrat.’ “The anti-Semite reproaches the Jew with being Jewish: the democrat reproached him with willfully considering himself a Jew.” According to Sartre, the democrat is a feeble protector of Jews, because while those Jews who discard their Jewish identity acquire a nobility in the eyes of the democrat, those who embrace their identity are by definition a danger, to themselves and to others.
For the far-left and the Arab world, Israel exemplifies the refusal of most Jews to just disappear, as well as their apparent stubbornness in clinging to the anachronism of the nation-state, especially when their dubious claim to nationality has been indulged at the expense of Arab peoples calling themselves Palestinians, claiming ownership of land they’ve never owned.
But unfortunately, its not just in America that anti-Semitism has reared its ugly head. According to the Kantor Center for the Study of Contemporary European Jewry, about one-half the population in Europe professed to being verbally or physically attacked in public because they were Jewish.
BDS and their supports are the cornerstone of anti-Semitism. All the things that they insist on as human rights for Palestinians, they would deny to the Jew. Their followers don’t boycott the religious tyranny of Hamas and other terrorist organizations. They don’t boycott products from terrorism regimes or from Russia or China – only Israel is in their sights. If that is not Anti-Semitism, what would you call it?
“If there is one minority in the Middle East that enjoys the rule of law, protection and democracy, it is Arabs living in Israel. One out of every five Israelis is a Palestinian (Arab) and overwhelmingly they are Muslim. There are Arabs in the government, in the Supreme Court, in all walks of life and in the universities. There is actually an affirmative action for Palestinians in the universities.” Charles Krauthammer
