// essays //
Spring 2006
Lessons From the Palestine Solidarity Movement
Bari Weiss
It's not often that one gets to sit in a Jesuit chapel with the national organizers of the Palestinian Solidarity Movement (PSM), the Jewish Defense League (JDL), and Neturei Karta (Ultra-Orthodox Jews United Against Zionism). But that was precisely the company I kept on the weekend of February 17 at the Georgetown-hosted fifth annual Palestine Solidarity Conference. The conference website currently boasts that "400 student and community activists representing 90 different university and regional organizations from across the United States" attended the event. However, while sitting in the sparsely populated chapel with a seeming ratio of 1:1 reporter to participant, I got the feeling that it was not so much an organizing conference as a rhetorical showdown among a dubious cast of characters.
There was no contest. The PSM won hands down, and it wasn't because they were playing on their own turf. The PSM won, and will continue to win, because they look cooler, sound better, and use language that can win over the hearts and minds of anyone who cares about human rights and liberal values. Simply put, the anti-Zionist movement has aesthetic appeal, which buttresses an ideology that is increasingly more normative, particularly on college campuses. When juxtaposed with unselfconsciously extremist groups like the JDL and Neturei Karta, the rhetorical power of the anti-Zionist movement is even more seductive.
Given its motto ("Never Again") and its symbol (a raised fist within a Jewish star), just about all the JDL has in common with the PSM is the fact that both are no doubt monitored by the American government. Founded in Brooklyn in 1968 by Rabbi Meir Kahane, the JDL was originally a Jewish reaction and counterpart to the Black Panthers. Angered by what they saw as Jewish passivity in the face of the Holocaust and by the anti-Semitism they perceived among some black nationalists, the JDL sought to empower Jews to defend themselves. Photos on the group's official website show burly men in aviator sunglasses burning Nazi flags, or standing defiantly in front of Jeeps; it's far from the yeshiva bucher image of Eastern Europe.
Most notably, the JDL advocates the idea of forcibly transferring the Palestinians out of their land in order to establish a uniformly Jewish state in greater Israel. Kahane, in a 1981 article entitled "They Must Go," wrote that "The problem is the Jew who stupidly equates the transfer of Arabs with Hitler's genocide of the Jews, as if we were advocating gas chambers or the killing of the Arabs in any form. As if the separation…will not save Arab and Jewish lives both!" The ideology of extreme Jewish exclusion and power completely defines the JDL. The third of their "Five Principles," is the principle of Barzel ("iron"), which states "the Galut[diaspora] image of the Jew as a weakling, as one who is easily stepped upon who does not fight back is an image that must be changed."
Yet even the JDL, which has been called out as a racist terrorist organization by just about every Jewish group on the map, is conscious of its rough-around-the-edges image. In addition to framing the policy of transfer in humanist terms ("saving Arab and Jewish lives"), the JDL has increasingly invoked the idea of human rights. Its homepage boasts, "The Jewish Defense League is the most controversial and effective Jewish identity, human rights, and activist organization."1 Although the JDL is attempting to cloak itself in the universal language of human rights, at the conference itself the JDL only made good on its promise of being the most controversial. Dragged out of various workshops by Georgetown security for screaming accusations and insults ("Slime!") out of turn, accompanied by their thug-like bodyguards, the JDL are the Jewish mafia. They are stuck in 1968 Brooklyn oblivious to the fact that no one wants to rumble with them.
While JDL members stood in front of a giant Israeli flag passing out materials equating Palestinians to Nazis, across the room, some other Jews advocated a far different message. Rabbis Dovid Feldman and Dovid Weiss, dressed in Hasidic Eastern-European garb— fur streimels, knee socks, thick glasses and black overcoats—stood under their own banners: a giant Palestinian flag and a sign reading "Jews Against Zionism."
Neturei Karta International, a fringe ultra-orthodox anti-Zionist sect, has made a name for themselves by showing up at every major Zionist and anti-Zionist event. They rally for the late Yasser Arafat and protest against the America Israel Political Action Committee (AIPAC), the foremost Zionist lobby in Washington. Reportedly on the Palestinian Authority's payroll, Neturei Karta is the ideal ally for those in the anti-Zionist camp. Not only are Jews against Zionism, the logic goes, but the most authentic, religious Jews are against the Jewish state.
Believing that the establishment of a Jewish state is preventing the Messiah's arrival, they view the state as antithetical to strict Jewish law. They write in their pamphlet that "by establishing a state in Palestine which is forbidden according to Jewish law, [Israel] denies the Divine punishment inherent in the Jewish people's exile and seeks to remedy what is essentially a spiritual state by this worldly means." It is the language of Divine punishment that is most telling of their fundamentalist belief system. Because God dictates all, attempting to act as a free agent through political Zionism could potentially defy God's will. What this means practically is the polar opposite of the JDL's embrace of power: until the Messianic era, God wants the Jews to remain powerless and stateless. In their press release for the conference, Rabbi Yisroel Dovid Weiss stated, "The Torah explicitly forbids us, the Jewish nation, from having our own state in this Heavenly decreed exile." It is not entirely clear where Rabbi Weiss finds textual support for this assertion, but the basic sentiment is clear: Jews do not have the right to self-determination.
The rabbis spent the conference sitting in the front rows of each event, shaking hands dramatically with the organizers on the dais, and waving signs which advocated the immediate dismantling of the Jewish state. Their signs were eye candy for the media, but the heart of their ideology is unappetizing. When I asked Rabbi Dovid Feldman about his belief in God versus protecting human life, he responded, "Yes, I believe in the dismantling, even if it means the death of six million Jews." Thus, he prays daily for the dismantlement of the Jewish state and devotes his energies to supporting people who call for the destruction of Israel. On their website, the group chastises the organized Jewish community for fearing the nuclear threat of Iranian President Ahmadinejad. "It is a dangerous distortion to see the President's words as indicative of anti-Jewish sentiments. The President was simply re-stating the beliefs…of Ayatollah Khomeini, who always emphasized and practiced the respect and protection of Jews and Judaism." Beyond allying with the Ayatollah and Ahmadinejad, Neturei Karta blames unobservant Jews for causing anti-Semitism in the world. Their broadsheet, "Judaism, an alternative to Zionism" quotes Rabbi Joel Teitelbaum, "In sum, the hatred against the Jewish community is because it is said that those who are not Torah observant, who are heretics, are the leaders of Jewry. The nations of the world are misled by them and acquire hatred of Jews."
Though Neturei Karta is used masterfully by the anti-Zionist camp to buttress their claims, there is no question that the streimel-wearers are far less sophisticated in their anti-Zionist appeals than the kaffiyeh-clad crowd. Speaking from a fundamentalist religious perspective, they alienate anyone who does not believe in their version of "Torah Judaism" with a God that controls the universe like a grand puppeteer.
Despite their vicious ideas, there is something comforting about talking to the JDL and Neturei Karta. Participating in shouting matches with these racists and religious fanatics is tantamount to patting oneself on the back—their insanity proves your own rightness.
Talking to the PSM activists is an entirely different story. No matter how deeply I disagree with their position, I am always moved by their rhetoric of justice, freedom, and democracy. While I got in heated debates with the JDL and Neturei Karta contingencies, I got along with the PSMers quite well. Maybe because we looked the same: jeans, t-shirts with obscure bookstore names or political slogans, carrying around our college notebooks. It was a group that on some level I could relate to. One of the activists, a law student from D.C., recognized me from a community service project with a Bedouin community in Israel and introduced me to her friends.
While participating from morning till night in workshops on divestment, resistance to the occupation, and talking to the media, I was inundated with the language of social justice, roused by stirring speeches invoking the struggle against apartheid South Africa, and most often, appealed to act in the vocabulary of human rights and moral conscience. In a workshop run by Huwaida Arraf, a founder of the International Solidarity Movement, I learned about how to join the movement in Palestine. Arraf, wearing a t-shirt with a map of the entire territory between the Mediterranean and the Jordan and the caption, "Palestine: A Homeland Will Not Be Denied" showed powerful video footage of mass marches with Palestinians and internationals along the security wall and disturbing images from the village of Beit Lakia in 2004. Though the hand-held camera footage was fuzzy, we got the point: fully armed Israeli soldiers were shooting rubber bullets at unarmed Palestinians in an olive grove. It was impossible to see the footage and not feel moved and disturbed. Following the footage, I listened to a talk by Lisa Nessan and Joe Carr about the structure and organizing principles of the movement. They threw in all of the requisite buzzwords: "non-hierachical," "liberatory," "consensus decision-making" and "non-violent resistance to oppression."
I believe that the PSMers buy into these ideas, but they also function as a cloak for the disturbing underbelly of the organization. They admitted openly that in every community they work with, they "fall under Palestinian leadership." When I asked them to explain what this meant, Joe Carr provided me with this telling information, "We work with Hamas and Islamic Jihad." How can an organization that claims to support human rights work with terrorists that strap bombs themselves with the hopes of killing as many Jews as possible?
Though never abandoning their disciplined talking points, it became increasingly clear as the conference wore on that the sort of universalistic vision that the PSM talks about are in reality just as narrow the JDL's, flipped 180 degrees. In a workshop entitled "Why Divestment? Why Now?" led by University of Wisconsin graduate student Muhammad Abed and founder of electronicintifada.com Ali Abunimah, Abunimah told us confidently that "the age of nations has passed." Israel has a choice, he explained, to "join the 21st century world with 21st century values." In other words, because Israel is a Jewish nation-state, it can never be part of the coming community that Abunimah imagines. No matter how democratic Israel strives to be, for Abunimah it will always be the pariah in the world order. More importantly, he ignores the explicitly nationalist nature of his own organization. He willfully averts his eyes to the reality of the region. For Israelis and Palestinians nationalism is far from dead, it's just getting started.
The PSM's double-speak in terms of nationalism is only half the problem. Their narrowness of vision can often lead it to distressing conclusions on more pressing issues, like genocide. Since part of the PSM platform is divestment from Israel, I asked Abed if he would support similar divestment from, say, Sudan. Without hesitating, he responded, "It's very clear that various Zionists organizations in the U.S. use Sudan as a way of diverting attention from the real problem: Palestine." I fail to see how divestment from Sudan is a distraction. Perhaps if the Sudanese government were dominated by Jews instead of Arabs, the PSM's priorities might be different.
With this in mind, it's tempting to dismiss the PSM as just another bunch of crazies like the JDL and Neturei Karta. But that would be too easy. The truth is, the PSM is an organization with serious and increasingly popular ideas because of it's appeals to liberal values that everyone wants to buy into. Basically, the PSM is making Zionism look like its inherently antithetical to human rights. Zionists need to engage this problem, both because they can and because if they don't, the PSM is going to continue to win over those still undecided.
Because some of the PSM's points have merits, people are swallowing it whole, ignoring the disturbing hypocrisies in its logic. Through its image and rhetoric, the PSM is forcing a strong dichotomy: you are either anti-Zionist and pro-human rights, or you are pro-Israel and anti-human rights. The price of this divide is severe. At this conference, undecided participants had three choices: religious fundamentalism, racist nationalists, or human rights advocates. This isn't, and shouldn't be, the case.
Coming away from this conference, I asked myself not why the JDL and Neturei Karta were there, but rather why the rest of Georgetown's Jewish community was not. Apparently, the PSM has successfully convinced the absent Georgetown Jewish community that it no longer has a claim to liberal values like human rights so long as it is pro-Israel in any way. The Zionist movement is doing itself a huge disservice by letting the JDL and PSM do all the talking and needs to reclaim its hold on these values. Zionists who believe in human rights for Israelis and Palestinians need to show up in numbers and shatter PSM's false binary.
There was no contest. The PSM won hands down, and it wasn't because they were playing on their own turf. The PSM won, and will continue to win, because they look cooler, sound better, and use language that can win over the hearts and minds of anyone who cares about human rights and liberal values. Simply put, the anti-Zionist movement has aesthetic appeal, which buttresses an ideology that is increasingly more normative, particularly on college campuses. When juxtaposed with unselfconsciously extremist groups like the JDL and Neturei Karta, the rhetorical power of the anti-Zionist movement is even more seductive.
Given its motto ("Never Again") and its symbol (a raised fist within a Jewish star), just about all the JDL has in common with the PSM is the fact that both are no doubt monitored by the American government. Founded in Brooklyn in 1968 by Rabbi Meir Kahane, the JDL was originally a Jewish reaction and counterpart to the Black Panthers. Angered by what they saw as Jewish passivity in the face of the Holocaust and by the anti-Semitism they perceived among some black nationalists, the JDL sought to empower Jews to defend themselves. Photos on the group's official website show burly men in aviator sunglasses burning Nazi flags, or standing defiantly in front of Jeeps; it's far from the yeshiva bucher image of Eastern Europe.
Most notably, the JDL advocates the idea of forcibly transferring the Palestinians out of their land in order to establish a uniformly Jewish state in greater Israel. Kahane, in a 1981 article entitled "They Must Go," wrote that "The problem is the Jew who stupidly equates the transfer of Arabs with Hitler's genocide of the Jews, as if we were advocating gas chambers or the killing of the Arabs in any form. As if the separation…will not save Arab and Jewish lives both!" The ideology of extreme Jewish exclusion and power completely defines the JDL. The third of their "Five Principles," is the principle of Barzel ("iron"), which states "the Galut[diaspora] image of the Jew as a weakling, as one who is easily stepped upon who does not fight back is an image that must be changed."
Yet even the JDL, which has been called out as a racist terrorist organization by just about every Jewish group on the map, is conscious of its rough-around-the-edges image. In addition to framing the policy of transfer in humanist terms ("saving Arab and Jewish lives"), the JDL has increasingly invoked the idea of human rights. Its homepage boasts, "The Jewish Defense League is the most controversial and effective Jewish identity, human rights, and activist organization."1 Although the JDL is attempting to cloak itself in the universal language of human rights, at the conference itself the JDL only made good on its promise of being the most controversial. Dragged out of various workshops by Georgetown security for screaming accusations and insults ("Slime!") out of turn, accompanied by their thug-like bodyguards, the JDL are the Jewish mafia. They are stuck in 1968 Brooklyn oblivious to the fact that no one wants to rumble with them.
While JDL members stood in front of a giant Israeli flag passing out materials equating Palestinians to Nazis, across the room, some other Jews advocated a far different message. Rabbis Dovid Feldman and Dovid Weiss, dressed in Hasidic Eastern-European garb— fur streimels, knee socks, thick glasses and black overcoats—stood under their own banners: a giant Palestinian flag and a sign reading "Jews Against Zionism."
Neturei Karta International, a fringe ultra-orthodox anti-Zionist sect, has made a name for themselves by showing up at every major Zionist and anti-Zionist event. They rally for the late Yasser Arafat and protest against the America Israel Political Action Committee (AIPAC), the foremost Zionist lobby in Washington. Reportedly on the Palestinian Authority's payroll, Neturei Karta is the ideal ally for those in the anti-Zionist camp. Not only are Jews against Zionism, the logic goes, but the most authentic, religious Jews are against the Jewish state.
Believing that the establishment of a Jewish state is preventing the Messiah's arrival, they view the state as antithetical to strict Jewish law. They write in their pamphlet that "by establishing a state in Palestine which is forbidden according to Jewish law, [Israel] denies the Divine punishment inherent in the Jewish people's exile and seeks to remedy what is essentially a spiritual state by this worldly means." It is the language of Divine punishment that is most telling of their fundamentalist belief system. Because God dictates all, attempting to act as a free agent through political Zionism could potentially defy God's will. What this means practically is the polar opposite of the JDL's embrace of power: until the Messianic era, God wants the Jews to remain powerless and stateless. In their press release for the conference, Rabbi Yisroel Dovid Weiss stated, "The Torah explicitly forbids us, the Jewish nation, from having our own state in this Heavenly decreed exile." It is not entirely clear where Rabbi Weiss finds textual support for this assertion, but the basic sentiment is clear: Jews do not have the right to self-determination.
The rabbis spent the conference sitting in the front rows of each event, shaking hands dramatically with the organizers on the dais, and waving signs which advocated the immediate dismantling of the Jewish state. Their signs were eye candy for the media, but the heart of their ideology is unappetizing. When I asked Rabbi Dovid Feldman about his belief in God versus protecting human life, he responded, "Yes, I believe in the dismantling, even if it means the death of six million Jews." Thus, he prays daily for the dismantlement of the Jewish state and devotes his energies to supporting people who call for the destruction of Israel. On their website, the group chastises the organized Jewish community for fearing the nuclear threat of Iranian President Ahmadinejad. "It is a dangerous distortion to see the President's words as indicative of anti-Jewish sentiments. The President was simply re-stating the beliefs…of Ayatollah Khomeini, who always emphasized and practiced the respect and protection of Jews and Judaism." Beyond allying with the Ayatollah and Ahmadinejad, Neturei Karta blames unobservant Jews for causing anti-Semitism in the world. Their broadsheet, "Judaism, an alternative to Zionism" quotes Rabbi Joel Teitelbaum, "In sum, the hatred against the Jewish community is because it is said that those who are not Torah observant, who are heretics, are the leaders of Jewry. The nations of the world are misled by them and acquire hatred of Jews."
Though Neturei Karta is used masterfully by the anti-Zionist camp to buttress their claims, there is no question that the streimel-wearers are far less sophisticated in their anti-Zionist appeals than the kaffiyeh-clad crowd. Speaking from a fundamentalist religious perspective, they alienate anyone who does not believe in their version of "Torah Judaism" with a God that controls the universe like a grand puppeteer.
Despite their vicious ideas, there is something comforting about talking to the JDL and Neturei Karta. Participating in shouting matches with these racists and religious fanatics is tantamount to patting oneself on the back—their insanity proves your own rightness.
Talking to the PSM activists is an entirely different story. No matter how deeply I disagree with their position, I am always moved by their rhetoric of justice, freedom, and democracy. While I got in heated debates with the JDL and Neturei Karta contingencies, I got along with the PSMers quite well. Maybe because we looked the same: jeans, t-shirts with obscure bookstore names or political slogans, carrying around our college notebooks. It was a group that on some level I could relate to. One of the activists, a law student from D.C., recognized me from a community service project with a Bedouin community in Israel and introduced me to her friends.
While participating from morning till night in workshops on divestment, resistance to the occupation, and talking to the media, I was inundated with the language of social justice, roused by stirring speeches invoking the struggle against apartheid South Africa, and most often, appealed to act in the vocabulary of human rights and moral conscience. In a workshop run by Huwaida Arraf, a founder of the International Solidarity Movement, I learned about how to join the movement in Palestine. Arraf, wearing a t-shirt with a map of the entire territory between the Mediterranean and the Jordan and the caption, "Palestine: A Homeland Will Not Be Denied" showed powerful video footage of mass marches with Palestinians and internationals along the security wall and disturbing images from the village of Beit Lakia in 2004. Though the hand-held camera footage was fuzzy, we got the point: fully armed Israeli soldiers were shooting rubber bullets at unarmed Palestinians in an olive grove. It was impossible to see the footage and not feel moved and disturbed. Following the footage, I listened to a talk by Lisa Nessan and Joe Carr about the structure and organizing principles of the movement. They threw in all of the requisite buzzwords: "non-hierachical," "liberatory," "consensus decision-making" and "non-violent resistance to oppression."
I believe that the PSMers buy into these ideas, but they also function as a cloak for the disturbing underbelly of the organization. They admitted openly that in every community they work with, they "fall under Palestinian leadership." When I asked them to explain what this meant, Joe Carr provided me with this telling information, "We work with Hamas and Islamic Jihad." How can an organization that claims to support human rights work with terrorists that strap bombs themselves with the hopes of killing as many Jews as possible?
Though never abandoning their disciplined talking points, it became increasingly clear as the conference wore on that the sort of universalistic vision that the PSM talks about are in reality just as narrow the JDL's, flipped 180 degrees. In a workshop entitled "Why Divestment? Why Now?" led by University of Wisconsin graduate student Muhammad Abed and founder of electronicintifada.com Ali Abunimah, Abunimah told us confidently that "the age of nations has passed." Israel has a choice, he explained, to "join the 21st century world with 21st century values." In other words, because Israel is a Jewish nation-state, it can never be part of the coming community that Abunimah imagines. No matter how democratic Israel strives to be, for Abunimah it will always be the pariah in the world order. More importantly, he ignores the explicitly nationalist nature of his own organization. He willfully averts his eyes to the reality of the region. For Israelis and Palestinians nationalism is far from dead, it's just getting started.
The PSM's double-speak in terms of nationalism is only half the problem. Their narrowness of vision can often lead it to distressing conclusions on more pressing issues, like genocide. Since part of the PSM platform is divestment from Israel, I asked Abed if he would support similar divestment from, say, Sudan. Without hesitating, he responded, "It's very clear that various Zionists organizations in the U.S. use Sudan as a way of diverting attention from the real problem: Palestine." I fail to see how divestment from Sudan is a distraction. Perhaps if the Sudanese government were dominated by Jews instead of Arabs, the PSM's priorities might be different.
With this in mind, it's tempting to dismiss the PSM as just another bunch of crazies like the JDL and Neturei Karta. But that would be too easy. The truth is, the PSM is an organization with serious and increasingly popular ideas because of it's appeals to liberal values that everyone wants to buy into. Basically, the PSM is making Zionism look like its inherently antithetical to human rights. Zionists need to engage this problem, both because they can and because if they don't, the PSM is going to continue to win over those still undecided.
Because some of the PSM's points have merits, people are swallowing it whole, ignoring the disturbing hypocrisies in its logic. Through its image and rhetoric, the PSM is forcing a strong dichotomy: you are either anti-Zionist and pro-human rights, or you are pro-Israel and anti-human rights. The price of this divide is severe. At this conference, undecided participants had three choices: religious fundamentalism, racist nationalists, or human rights advocates. This isn't, and shouldn't be, the case.
Coming away from this conference, I asked myself not why the JDL and Neturei Karta were there, but rather why the rest of Georgetown's Jewish community was not. Apparently, the PSM has successfully convinced the absent Georgetown Jewish community that it no longer has a claim to liberal values like human rights so long as it is pro-Israel in any way. The Zionist movement is doing itself a huge disservice by letting the JDL and PSM do all the talking and needs to reclaim its hold on these values. Zionists who believe in human rights for Israelis and Palestinians need to show up in numbers and shatter PSM's false binary.
BARI WEISS is the editor-in-chief of The Current. She is a Columbia College junior majoring in history.