Jewish Voice for Peace: Not Jewish, Not Peaceful (Part One)
Fighting “Zionism is just one particular manifestation of this larger fight against white supremacy and colonialism,” stated Chris Godshall at a May 19 Washington, DC, Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP) event. He spoke as a contributor to the new book Reclaiming Judaism from Zionism, whose launch at Busboys and Poets K Street location added yet more damning evidence about how JVP “Jew-washes” anti-Semitic hatred of Israel.
Well-known personalities in the capital area’s Israel-hating community contributed to an audience of about 60 who filled Busboys and Poets’ events room to listen to a panel of Godshall and his fellow contributors. Local JVP chapter leader Shelley Cohen-Fudge joined her gentile Episcopal anti-Zionist associates Steve France and Tom Getman. Zeina Azzam, Philip Farah, and Jamal Najjab represented the local Palestinian-American community.
Copious past evidence indicates that the book’s online description would have immensely pleased this audience. “Today Jews face a choice,” the promotion read, “between Judaism as a religion and the nationalist ideology of Zionism, which is usurping” the “ethical imperatives at the heart of Judaism.” The book’s collection of personal essays on how various individuals came to condemn Zionism intended to “demolish stereotypes of dissenting Jews as ‘self-hating,’ traitorous, and anti-Semitic.”
The Busboys and Poets panelists made a mockery of this contention, as they demonized and de-legitimated Israel, now the home of a plurality of world Jewry, or 43 percent of over 14.5 million Jews. The panel began with retired Temple University professor Carolyn L. Karcher, who has described in a previous interview about the book how since 2010 JVP has “become my main focus and activity.” She had falsely denounced Zionism as a “settler colonial movement” that solely “grew up in the late 19th century as a quest for safety” for Jews, as if they had not historically sought cultural self-determination as well as security in Israel.
While Judaism is intrinsically connected to its ancestral homeland of Israel, the interviewed Karcher had absurdly claimed that “Jewish identity…does not depend on identifying with a Jewish state.” This “fetishization of Israel” involved for Jews a “land that you were not born in and have no real connection to.” Rather, Muslim-majority Arabs, a population that developed following seventh-century Islamic conquests of the wider Middle East, are the “Indigenous people” of “Palestine.”
The interviewed Karcher had mentioned that several book contributors, “including me, were brought up as Zionists,” although she qualified her Jewish heritage by noting that people like her “grew up in completely secular families.” This ally of the radical anti-Israel group Code Pink further solidified her fringe Jewish status when she approvingly noted that some Jewish book contributors had been members of the likeminded, anti-Semitic Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP). She also ridiculously praised as among “Palestinian leaders of the nonviolent resistance” Bassem Tamimi, a Palestinian who, along with his family, has incited and supported violence against Israel.
Unlike Karcher’s past comments, her fellow panelist, the leftist American University School of International Service professor Catherine Schneider flatly declared that “I was never a Zionist.” Her parents had been Communists and Socialists who had protested against the Vietnam War as an expression of their anticolonial beliefs. Joining Karcher’s slanders of Zionist Jewish national liberation as colonialism, Schneider thus claimed that her parents’ views on Israel “seemed really contradictory to everything they believed.”
Schneider has previously signed a petition against the Shalom Hartman Institute’s (SHI) Muslim Leadership Initiative (MLI) that brings Muslim leaders to Israel. The petition condemned MLI for “ignoring Palestinian calls to isolate Israel” with Boycott, Sanctions, and Divestment (BDS) in affiliation with SHI, an “organization involved in efforts to thwart BDS.” With questionable commitments to open dialogue and academic freedom, the petition signatories made the
pledge to not give a platform to any MLI participant to speak about their experiences at our community centers, places of worship, and campuses and call on a complete boycott of MLI.
On the other hand, Schneider joined with other professors in signing a petition calling upon Israel authorities to allow the student Lara Alqasem to enter Israel. Later overruled by Israel’s Supreme Court, authorities had prevented her from entering Israel to study at Hebrew University due to her BDS ties. “Denying entry to foreign students based on political beliefs or ethnic heritage is an attack on academic freedom,” stated the petition.
Schneider’s fellow panelist Emily Siegel, who declared that she did not have “Judaism as a key part of my life as a religion,” is also a BDS supporter and, like Godshall, has previously compared Zionism to white supremacy. She is program director for the anti-Israel organization Eyewitness Palestine (EP), an organization that conducts propagandistic tours of Palestinian society that carefully observe BDS calls to boycott Israeli institutions or businesses. The radical anti-Zionist Jew Mark Braverman is indicative of the company EP keeps.
Panel speaker Noah Habeeb has perhaps even more tenuous connections to Judaism and Zionism, something that “never felt truly real to me” for a person who hardly understood Hebrew. Although he has written about his “Jewish American family,” he has also previously specified that his “father is of Lebanese descent and my mother is Jewish,” the basis of a “unique identity” that is “both Arab and Jewish.” Yet his “family is not very religious, and my suburban childhood synagogue of over 1,500 families always felt too large to be a genuine community,” thus so “long as I can remember, my family has been unsatisfied with our Jewish experience.”
Israeli authorities reciprocated this dissatisfaction in 2017 when they prevented Habeeb and his fellow anti-Israel activists, JVP’s Alissa Weiss and Shakeel Syed, from boarding their Israel flight at Washington, DC’s Dulles Airport. The latter has supported BDS against Israel’s “discriminatory, segregationist practices” and peddled anti-Semitic tropes that “America’s treasure is bled away to support the tyranny of the Israeli occupation.” He is also a national board member for American Muslims for Palestine (AMP) and executive director of the Islamic Shura Council of Southern California (ISCSC), two radical Israel-hating, pro-jihadist organizations.
The JVP member Habeeb has defamed the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), a “self-proclaimed ‘civil rights’ organization,” for organizing “deadly exchanges” of American-Israeli police training exercises. Like former EP tour members, he has propagated the blood libel that Israeli police incite their American colleagues to commit human rights abuses. The ADL is “in the business of training two of the world’s most racist, repressive and violent police and military forces,” he has written.
Habeeb and his fellow book contributors at Busboys and Poets want to destroy what they see as Israel’s irredeemably evil Jewish state. This undeniably anti-Semitic betrayal of Judaism would pose grave dangers to Jews in Israel and beyond were the book authors ever to achieve their goal of replacing Israel with an Arab/Muslim-majority single Palestinian state. Yet this prospect leaves the authors, who even include non-Jews, blissfully unconcerned. They advocate the delusion that Jews can survive by forgetting Zion and living in a permanent diaspora exile, as a concluding article will examine.
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