Omar Barghouti, Welcome to New Haven
Omar Barghouti was in New Haven last week to receive the Gandhi Peace Prize from a local organization, Promoting Enduring Peace. The award was presented in a Yale building, but Yale quickly declared that the university was not making or endorsing the award. The New Haven Register’s coverage noted that Omar is controversial, and, sure enough, four heavy hitters from the New Haven Jewish Federation condemned both the award and Omar in an op ed days later.
What’s going on here? Omar Barghouti is the Palestinian leader of the international movement for boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) against Israel. His own family was driven out of Palestine in the “ethnic cleansing” of 1948, when Zionist terrorists drove two thirds of the Palestinians into refugee status.
Omar is dedicated to ending Israeli oppression, but he is not a terrorist. His BDS movement is sponsored by a broad cross section of Palestinian civil society – religious bodies, educational institutions, commercial and labor organizations, social service and health care organizations – in the occupied territories of East Jerusalem, West Bank and Gaza, inside Israel, and in refugee camps and the Palestinian diaspora.
All of these groups have pledged to work through peaceful means to secure rights already guaranteed by international law: the right of occupied peoples to self-government and the lifting of military rule; the right of Palestinian citizens inside Israel to equality before the law; and the right of refugees to return to their homes. Boycott is the same course that worked to defeat Apartheid in South Africa: international economic and moral pressure leading to governmental sanctions against the apartheid regime, and, finally, good faith negotiating by the government of South Africa. Until the end only a few governments failed to join in that pressure, notably the US and Israel.
Now again, the US and Israel are notable resisters to the BDS movement. In both countries the major resistance is coming from ideological Zionists – people who believe that Israel is entitled to “exceptional” rights – the right to displace people from their homes and property to make way for a Zionist state; the right to claim to be a democracy when one ethnic group is given superior legal status; the right to turn a temporary occupation into a de facto annexation. And incresingly disturbing to a growing number of American Jews: the Zionist claim to speak for all Jews and to define the meaning of both Judaism and anti-Semitism.
That is why the ardently Zionist Jewish Federation rose to condemn the Gandhi Peace Award to Omar Barghouti. They know he is not a terrorist. And they know that the heavy-handed current government of Israel is increasingly condemned even by Israel Jews as anti-democratic, racist and fascistic. But they REALLY don’t want to admit even to themselves that Israel’s history of anti-Palestinian oppression was deliberate, is continuing, and is a gross distortion of Judaism’s ethical tradition.
As Israeli settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem have grown on literally stolen land, and as Israel has constructed walls and road networks to isolate Palestinians in disconnected small tracts, the Federation sees disastrous options ahead: either Israel annexes all the land it wants and dominates a unitary state as a Jewish minority, or it gives up the occupied territories and provokes a civil war among Israeli Jews. Faced with these choices Zionists have opted, for 50 years, to avoid any “final status” decision and to blame the unsettled status quo on Palestininans’ refusal to make enough “concessions.”
At the same time, Zionist defenders of Israeli policy can see that public opinion, even among Jews, and especially younger Jews, is turning against Israel. Their great fear is that BDS will force Israel to treat Palestinians justly. And that would mean the end of the so-called “Jewish democracy” dominating all of historic Palestine, just as the incomplete US civil rights movement has demanded the end of a “White democracy” here. No wonder that BDS and Black Lives Matter have seen each other as seeking the same human ends.
The spirit of Gandhi still lives. We can hope for the day when Omar will come back to New Haven as the guest of a reformed Jewish Federation and maybe receive an honorary degree from a less fearful Yale University.
Jewish Voice for Peace,New Haven www.jvpnh.org April 29,2017
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