Israel and its apologists can no longer defend the country on its merits, instead they must try to suppress debate 16Nov13 November 16, 2013
by Josh Ruebner  -  Mondoweiss  -  16 November 2013
In yesterdayâs New York Daily News, Tammi Rossman-Benjamin scurrilously attacks Brooklyn College President Karen Gould and the universityâs Political Science Department for encouraging an open debate on campus about Israelâs apartheid policies toward Palestinians. She baselessly charges that I, having spoken yesterday on campus, support âanti-Semiticâ policies, âcondone terrorism,â and âadvocate the elimination of the Jewish stateâ in my effort to change U.S. policy toward Israel and the Palestinians to support human rights, international law and equality.
Curiously, despite the recent publication of my book Shattered Hopes: Obamaâs Failure to Broker Israeli-Palestinian Peace, dozens of op-eds, and hundreds of lectures on college campuses, Rossman-Benjamin marshals not one iota of evidence to substantiate these allegations because it does not exist.
As the grandson of a Holocaust survivor of a Nazi concentration camp, I understand ânever againâ to mean that all human beings have an obligation to abhor and dismantle all forms of racism and bigotry, which includes opposing Israelâs discriminatory treatment of Palestinians.
As someone who was slightly injured in a Jerusalem bus bombing in 1996, I have witnessed the horrors of terrorism and condemn as a violation of international law all forms of violence deliberately targeting civilians, whether the perpetrator of those acts is Israel or a non-state actor.
And I do not advocate for either a one-state or two-state resolution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, but simply point out that Israelâs torrid colonization of Palestinian land is making more remote each day the possibility of establishing a Palestinian state. Israelâs ongoing colonization of Palestinian land is a clear indication that it is not interested in having a truly sovereign Palestinian state on any portion of historic Palestine, thus creating the conditions for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to be resolved eventually on the basis of equality between Palestinians and Israeli Jews within the same political entity.
Israel is now demanding that Palestinians accept it as a âJewish stateâ that continues to treat its own Palestinian citizens as second-class citizens at best, while privileging its Jewish citizens, and to deny Palestinian refugees their internationally-guaranteed right of return to the homes and lands they were ethnically cleansed from by Israel in 1948. These Israeli efforts to demographically engineer a Jewish majority and deny Palestinians full citizenship fly in the face of universal human rights standards and cannot form the basis for a truly just and lasting peace.
But, to be clear: Ms. Rossman-Benjaminâs attacks are not aimed primarily against me or the organization for which I work, the US Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation, whose name she could not even be bothered to get right in her article. Instead, her efforts are part of a concerted strategy by the Israel lobby to stifle freedom of speech on campus and leverage pressure against university administrations to constrain the abilities of chapters of Students for Justice in Palestine from effectively organizing on campus.
Why are Ms. Rossman-Benjamin and her organization, the AMCHA Initiative, exerting such strenuous efforts to attempt to prevent Students for Justice in Palestine chapters from raising awareness on campuses of Israelâs apartheid policies toward the Palestiniansâand U.S. military and diplomatic support for themâand why is the Israel lobby spending millions of dollars to try to defeat the increasingly successful student-led movement on campuses for boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) against Israel and corporations that profiteer from its human rights abuses of Palestinians?
Simply put: Israel and its apologists can no longer defend on its merits Israel and its apartheid policies toward Palestinians. Instead, they must try to suppress any such discussion from occurring in the first place because they are backing a losing argument.
The historical tide has turned and the only factor preventing Israel from becoming the international pariah that apartheid South Africa was is the backing it enjoys from the United States and the existence of the charade-like âpeace processâ it dominates. However, this âpeace processâ is no longer capable of pulling the wool over anyoneâs eyes and is widely viewed as facilitating Israelâs continual land grabs rather than a fair resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
As the sputtering âpeace processâ gasps its last few breaths and as the BDS movement gains more important victories nearly every month, the only thing left for Ms. Rossman-Benjamin to do is hurl her invective ineffectually at those working for peace and justice.
Josh Ruebner is the National Advocacy Director of the US Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation and a former Analyst in Middle East Affairs at Congressional Research Service. He is author of Shattered Hopes: Obamaâs Failure to Broker Israeli-Palestinian Peace (Verso Books).
Thank You.