Jewish Voice for Peace: Not Jewish, Not Peaceful (Part 2)
During a previously analyzed May 19 Washington, DC, Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP) event at Busboys and Poets K Street location, Noah Habeeb declared that he wants to “build a very strong diasporic Judaism that is separate from Zionism.” He and his fellow radical panelists with hardly any ties to Judaism promoted the warped belief that the Jewish people would benefit most from a permanent Babylonian exile, rather than a reestablished national home in Israel.
Among the panelists, all contributors to the new book, Reclaiming Judaism from Zionism, Carly Manes excoriated Israel’s “colonization, state violence, and repression.” These remarks should upset her recent employers at the progressive National Council of Jewish Women (NCJW). NCJW resolutions namely support the “survival and security of the State of Israel and the establishment of a just and permanent peace.”
Manes contrastingly praised the New Synagogue Project where “there is no Israeli flag ever present.” Her fellow book author, former Temple University professor Carolyn L. Karcher, is also enthused about “synagogues that are no longer Zionist.” “Our liberation as diasporic and Israeli Jews is bound up with that of the Palestinian people. I believe in a joyous, diasporic Jewish people, I believe in a free Palestine,” stated Manes.
While Manes discussed how she came to support BDS in 2015 as a University of Michigan student, little in the background of this “Millennial abortion-rights activist” suggests a profound attachment to Judaism. As the Michigan Daily wrote, this former Planned Parenthood Young Leaders Advisory Council member was a “self-proclaimed ‘condom-queen.” Her “accomplishments include placing condoms in the vending machines across University residence halls.”
Panelist Yael Horowitz exhibited how leftism can draw Jews to increasingly radical, anti-Semitic organizations while discussing her upbringing in the Zionist socialist movement Habonim Dror and Wesleyan University student days. She declared that she is a “white Jew who benefits from white supremacy every day” in the politically correct identity politics lingo that falsely categorizes Jews among those with “white privilege.” At Wesleyan she joined the university chapter of the not so “pro-Israel” J Street, where she discovered that many members like her, opposed J Street’s rejection of Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) against Israel.
Horowitz later joined the extremist Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) and eventually becoming a JVP chapter founder. Unintentionally revealing how radical JVP is, Karcher reiterated her past support for SJP. Many JVP members were originally in SJP, although it is “continually vilified as an anti-Semitic organization.”
Chris Godshall, who noted that his mother is Jewish, but not his father, also described how he had “made a pit stop in J Street as well” but then became a JVP chapter founder at Columbia University. As Godshall has discussed before, he related his negative impressions from his Birthright trip to Israel during which his group met a longtime Jewish-American resident of a kibbutz alongside Israel’s border with Lebanon. This man appalled Godshall and many in the Birthright group with harsh comments that he “would shoot anyone who came on the border, even a child.” Yet war’s cruel necessities can make even women and children military targets when brutal jihadist groups indoctrinate and exploit these persons as fanatical combatants.
Meanwhile Godshall’s fellow speaker, the lawyer Charlie Wood, was an activist with the radically anti-Israel, terrorism-promoting International Solidarity Movement (ISM). Strangely for a book and an event discussing Jews’ relationships with Zionism, no mention has ever appeared of any relationship between him and Judaism. He read from his book contribution relating his 2009 experience in Jerusalem’s Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood.
Along with other far-left protesters from both Israel and abroad, Wood had attempted to prevent evictions of Arab families living in homes that Jordanian troops dispossessed from Jews during Jordan’s 1948 conquest of East Jerusalem. He distorted the Israeli police raid that removed protesters like him from a house as part of the “continued de-Arabization of East Jerusalem.” However Jerusalem’s Arab population has grown considerably both in absolute and percentage terms since Israel united the city after expelling Jordanian forces in the 1967 Six Day War.
Wood also ignored the lengthy court battles that have preceded such evictions as well as various legal protections for the Arab families living in these former Jewish homes. If the inhabitants have paid rent since 1967, they may continue living in the expropriated properties, a condition the Arab family in the case of his eviction protest had not satisfied. Additionally, Jewish groups had actually repurchased the expropriated homes from their Arab owners.
The alienation of the panelists from Judaism and Israel even extended to the claim of Godshall, who has written in favor of a “Jewish identity…that excludes Israel,” that “there is no one Jewish people.” He commented upon his vision to “dismantle this idea that is so prevalent in Western culture generally that Jews are a particular people.” DNA studies of Jews, among numerous other facts, completely contradict his claims.
Panelists like Horowitz argued that Yiddish or other Jewish subcultures are “really threatening to Zionism” and that therefore Zionism, as exhibited in past Zionist efforts to suppress Yiddish in favor of Hebrew, had inhibited Jewish diversity. Karcher likewise noted increasingly fading discriminationin Israel against Mizrachi Jews, who came from diaspora communities in the Muslim-majority Middle East and North Africa (MENA). She noted past pressures in Israel such that Mizrachi “Arab Jews are forced to deny their Arabness” and stop speaking Arabic.
By contrast, Mizrachi Jewish organizations have adamantly rejected JVP’s attempts to appropriate Mizrachi struggles for defaming Zionism. Mizrachi Jews overwhelmingly support Zionism’s Jewish national liberation, as Muslim-majority societies with their historic rabid antisemitism give Jews from the MENA diaspora no alternative to living in a secure Israel. Mizrachi Jews also firmly rejectKarcher’s characterization of them as merely “Arab Jews,” a term that, like the anti-Semite Marc Lamont Hill’s description of Mizrachi as “Palestinian” Jews, denies Mizrachi Jewish identity. Likewise, a Yiddish revival in Israel indicates that this Jewish subculture has better prospects for survival in Israel than in the diaspora, particularly considering how World War II Nazi genocide destroyed Yiddish’s core community in Eastern Europe.
Polling data documents that the panelists’ views have almost no support among Jews, as the Washington, DC, JVP chapter leader Shelley Cohen-Fudge indicated in her audience comments. She complained that “even some of the most progressive members of the House” are anti-BDS, like her congressman Jamie Raskin, who met with her on the very day he decided to cosponsor the anti-BDS House Resolution 246. The “language in it is amazingly destructive and demonizing…and full of lies,” she stated, “this is about social justice, and this is not anti-Semitic,” a falsehood that Germany’s parliament recently refuted in an anti-BDS resolution. She worried that this anti-BDS “equivalent of the Hollywood blacklist” means BDS supporters “are very in danger of our livelihoods, of our careers.”
Such cheerleading for BDS, among many other factors, during JVP’s farce of a “Jewish” event at Busboys and Poets should once and for all end any claim that JVP is a reputable Jewish entity. As the book launch audience with not a kippah in sight showed, JVP has simply found a few radical figurehead individuals with strained links to Judaism to front for hatred of Jews and Israel from non-Jews. Anyone who gives any credibility to JVP’s non-kosher fraud is simply meshuga.
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