Israel Has Formed a Task Force to Carry Out Covert Campaigns at US Universities

A major Israeli news site says Israel’s foreign affairs and diaspora affairs ministries are behind the operation.

William I. Robinson-TRUTHOUT

March 23, 2024

https://truthout.org/articles/israel-has-formed-a-task-force-to-carry-out-covert-campaigns-at-us-universities/

(...From Part One)

In recent years, ground zero for the Palestine solidarity movement in the U.S. has been college and university campuses. While some of the lobby organizations operate throughout U.S. society, such as the Anti-Defamation League, AIPAC and StandWithUs, there are a number of groups specifically set up to operate on U.S. university campuses — among them The David Project, AMCHA Initiative, Canary Mission, the Israel on Campus Coalition, and Students Supporting Israel. These organizations have systematically targeted for persecution scholars, academics, and students who speak out on and off campuses against Israeli policies and for Palestinian rights.

As Maryam Griffin and I showed in our 2017 book, We Will Not Be Silenced: The Academic Repression of Israel’s Critics, scholars have been turned away from jobs, denied tenure and promotion, rejected for funding, expelled from institutions, maligned and vilified. Student organizations have faced harassment and sanctions. Individual students have been threatened with expulsion. Some have even been criminally investigated and prosecuted.

The playbook of tactics employed by the Israel lobby include character assassination, selective misquotation, the willful distortion of the record, the fabrication of falsehoods and a complete disregard for the truth, gaslighting, blacklisting targeted individuals, political and economic blackmail, and even threats of violence. Administrators are pressured and sometimes even blackmailed with a cutoff of financial donations by wealthy Zionist donors to censor and discipline the offending party, while politicians are lobbied to apply pressure on university officials. Zionist academics, administrators and politicians are often themselves part of these campaigns.

I myself was subject to a six-month long campaign in 2009 to have me dismissed from the University of California at Santa Barbara after I publicly denounced on my campus “Operation Cast Lead,” a massive 22-day assault of Gaza carried out from late 2008 to early 2009 that left thousands of Palestinians dead and injured. The then-director of the Anti-Defamation League, Abraham Foxman, flew from Washington to Santa Barbara specifically to meet with my chancellor, deans, and Zionist faculty members and demand from them that I be fired. (Five years later, in 2014, I published in Truthout an exposé of the campaign against me.)

Anti-Zionism Is Not Antisemitism

The Zionist narrative routinely condemns solidarity with Palestine as “antisemitism.” This conflation of anti-Zionism with antisemitism lays at the heart of Israeli hasbara and political persecution of the Palestine solidarity movement. Israel has made the definition of antisemitism an international political battleground in its efforts to suppress condemnation of its repression of the Palestinians, its ongoing violations of international laws and conventions, and Jewish supremacy inscribed into the legal and political structure of the Israeli state.

The claim may be a crude attempt to delegitimize solidarity with Palestinians and to rationalize intimidation and repression by the lobby, but it has nonetheless gained traction as a result of the support it has received from the U.S. Departments of State and Justice.

Antisemitism is historically considered to be discrimination against or prejudice and hatred of Jews, which would have nothing to do with the critique of Zionism and of a state based explicitly on racism and Jewish supremacy any more than a critique of anti-Black racism and white supremacy is “anti-white.”

The State Department revised its definition of antisemitism in the early 2000s to include “denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination, e.g., by claiming that the existence of the State of Israel is a racist endeavor,” “drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis,” and “blaming Israel for all inter-religious or political tension.”

In turn, Zionist activists and lobby organizations draw on the State Department’s “new definition” to silence those who criticize Israeli state practices and come out in support of Palestinian freedom by labeling them ipso facto “antisemitic.”

The charge of antisemitism is intended to have a chilling effect — and indeed, journalists, politicians, academics, even activists, are intimidated into self-censorship out of fear of losing employment and their reputation or of facing other sanctions. Jewish Voice for Peace has documented and condemned this manipulation of antisemitism, highlighting in particular “bullying inside the Jewish community” against the increasing number of Jews on and off campus who have come out against Israeli apartheid and occupation and in favor of the global boycott, divestment and sanctions movement.

The hasbara propaganda machinery has turned comparisons between Zionism and Nazism into a taboo, yet the comparison is historically and analytically important.

In my 2014 article in Truthout, I noted, “Zionists and defenders of the Israeli state take great offense at this analogy between the Nazis and Israeli state actions, including the charge of genocide, in part, because the Jewish Holocaust is used by the Israeli state and the Zionist political project as a mechanism of legitimation, so that to draw such analogies is to undermine Israel’s legitimating discourse. It is crucial to point this out, because that discourse legitimates genocide at the present time.”

While Judaism is a religion of universal values, Zionism is a right-wing nationalist ideology that emerged from the wave of racial nationalism that swept Europe in the late 19th century, part of the same movement that gave rise to Nazism in Germany and Manifest Destiny in the U.S., and more recently to a resurgent white nationalism.

Racial nationalism argued that all people belong to one or another “racially pure” groups that can be traced back to mythical origins that correspond to “racially pure” people/nations, and that each people/nation must have its own “racially pure” homeland. Racial nationalist campaigns of “blood and soil” set out to organize the world according to this ideology.

The Zionist program legitimated its conquest of Palestine through ethnic cleansing and settler colonialism by converting a faith community among diverse cultures, places and histories into a “racially pure” Jewish people/nation who must return to their ancestral homeland.

In this endeavor the Zionist movement engages in a form of profound trauma manipulation in which Jewish grief and memory of the Holocaust are weaponized. In order for Jews to be swept up into Zionism, they must be made to feel that there is an existential threat from which they can only be protected by uncritical defense of Israel, even if this means support for genocide.

Palestinians must be dehumanized if the endeavor is to succeed and Israel’s critics must be criminalized. This Zionist strategy has generated since the creation of the state of Israel in 1948 a significant mass constituency among Jews in the U.S.

However, before that constituency could be brought into existence, anti-Zionist Jewish voices had to be marginalized and repressed. Albert Einstein, then living in exile in the U.S., was offered the presidency of Israel upon its creation in 1948 but turned it down, instead characterizing the new state as fascist. He joined 27 of the most prominent Jewish intellectual, public and religious leaders at the time, including Hannah Arendt, Rabbi Jessurun Cardozo and Sidney Lens, in a letter to The New York Times, warning that:

Within the Jewish community the Zionists have preached an admixture of ultranationalism, religious mysticism, and racial superiority. Like other Fascist parties they have been used to break strikes, and have themselves pressed for the destruction of free trade unions. [The Zionists in Palestine] inaugurated a reign of terror. Teachers were beaten up for speaking against them, adults were shot for not letting their children join them.

This is why the Zionist hasbara in the U.S. has not been directed solely at non-Jewish supporters of Palestinian freedom. It has also been directed at the Jewish American community.

The Zionist ideology and the resultant steadfast support for Israel gained hegemony among this community over the decades, and formed a key mass constituency for the Israel lobby. (Another major constituency are far right Christian fundamentalists who believe a new Jewish kingdom must be consolidated before it can then be destroyed so that the Christian Messiah can return.) But in recent years, anti-Zionist Jews, especially among Jewish youth, have taken the lead in fighting against Zionism and for Palestinian rights.

Jewish Voice for Peace — the largest anti-Zionist organization in the world — along with Never Again Action, the American Council for Judaism, and other anti-Zionist Jewish organizations, have been at the forefront of the current mass movement against the genocide. This also helps explain why the Israeli government action plan targets anti-Zionist Jews as much as it does other anti-genocide activists.

Now is the time for social justice activists to step up their resistance. The Israeli government would not have bothered to develop its action plan were the mass movement not having a mounting impact on the U.S. and the world stage in turning the political tide against the genocidists.

The action plan makes clear that wresting the public narrative from these genocidists and their Western backers is as important as the balance of forces in the streets. At stake, along with the defense of Palestinian lives, is the very existence of academic freedom and free speech.