UCLA SSI: Anti-Zionists Hijacked Intersectionality

UCLA’s Students Supporting Israel (SSI) chapter says anti-Zionists have hijacked the intersectionality narrative.

Chapter President Justin Feldman told around 30 people at UCLA’s Royce Hall on Feb. 28 that intersectionality is defined as where “oppressed people” who face racism, sexism, and anti-Semitism, etc. “fight for their social justice separately as these forces interrelate and [create] ‘intersecting’ systems of oppression.”

Feldman argued that anti-Zionist organizations including Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) have stolen seven narratives regarding Israel and intersectionality. Among them was SJP comparing police brutality toward blacks in America to the Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories.

Feldman cited New York University’s SJP chapter’s July 2016 Facebook post following the shootings of Alton Sterling and Philando Castile, which stated, “Many US police departments train with the #IsraeliDefense Forces” and that “Palestinian liberation and black liberation go together.”

“Only senior commanders and staff actually go to train [in Israel], not patrol officers that are going around black communities in the United States,” Feldman said. He added that none of the police officers involved in the unjustified shootings of blacks in America were trained in Israel and crowd control methods were never discussed.

Feldman also said the United States has similar law enforcement partnerships with other countries, “ranging from Australia [and] Asia to Europe. To say that Israel, one country, is responsible for training American officers to brutalize black Americans in United States isn’t backed by fact,” he said.

The second stolen narrative, Feldman said, is anti-Zionists attempting to co-opt the civil rights. Feldman gave as an example a sign at a 2013 Martin Luther King, Jr. Day parade that read, “Stop $30 billion to Israel.”

Feldman pointed to a 1967 quote from King about Israel during the Six Day War: ‘The whole world must see that Israel must exist and has a right to exist and is one of the great outposts of democracy in the world.’

“Since the assassination of MLK by a white supremacist, many anti-Semitic, anti-Zionist people have been using his legacy as a means to fuel hatred against Jewish people and against Zionists, but most importantly against Israel’s right to exist,” Feldman said.

The SJP crowd also attempts to exploit the U.S.-Mexico border crisis, Feldman said, saying anti-Zionists claim that Israel’s border fence is a symbol of racist oppression, just like President Donald Trump’s attempt to build a border wall on the U.S.-Mexico border.

But this is “a false comparison,” Feldman said, arguing that Mexicans coming across the border are “not opposing any threat to civilian life in the United States. But in the Middle East it’s a lot more tumultuous.”

Feldman pointed out that before the Second Intifada, which began in 2000, Israel didn’t have any form of “security barrier,” and they only built one to stem the tide of Palestinian suicide bombings. He also noted that 65 countries have border fences and walls, including Arab countries like Lebanon with a “full concrete barrier” to deal with Palestinian refugees, which SJP never talks about.

“It’s astounding, it’s hypocritical, and it just goes to show how little regard they [SJP] have for Palestinians’ lives,” Feldman said.

Another narrative co-opted, Feldman said, is the treatment of Native Americans by “white European” colonizers as equivalent to how Israelis treat Palestinians. Feldman called this comparison “offensive,” stating that European colonizers committed genocide and spread disease against Native Americans. Jews, on the other hand, were frequently forced out of Israel throughout history, only to return to the land. “Israel’s the only country in the world that speaks the same native tongue as the indigenous peoples did 3800 years ago,” he said.

The anti-Zionist crowd, he added, also likes to accuse Israel of being an apartheid state. Under South African apartheid, blacks were in segregated residential communities, excluded from representation in the central government, and treated as “separate but inferior” under the law, Feldman said, adding that Israel does not treat its minority citizens like that and that most Palestinians living in the West Bank are under the jurisdiction of the Palestinian Authority (PA).

The real apartheid, Feldman argued, is the anti-Zionists’ notion that “Jews have no right to live in their ancestral land.”

Feldman then said that anti-Zionists tend to appropriate the Holocaust, going as far as claiming that Anne Frank would have been pro-Palestinian, a sentiment that her own family has denounced. “That is absolutely crossing the line,” Feldman said.

Feldman pointed out that Adolf Hitler allied with Haj Amin al-Husseini, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem during the Holocaust and that al-Husseini pledged to “provide SS troops from the Muslim world to Hitler’s militias.”

Ethnic cleaning and genocide can’t be applied to Israel, Feldman said, because “Israel is the only country in the Middle East where all the minority populations are going up and up.” The Palestinian populations in the West Bank and Gaza are also increasing.

The final “stolen narrative” discussed was the idea that Jesus was a Palestinian, which Feldman said is a talking point stemming from the PA’s attempt “to deny Israel’s right to exist by distorting Jewish history.” Feldman highlighted Matthew 2:1 in the Bible, which states: “Jesus was born in Bethlehem, in Judea.”

Feldman concluded the presentation by saying, “We can defeat woke-washing [appropriating social justice] and its effects on grassroots activism.”