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News > Israel

Israeli Lobbies Fund Efforts to Destroy Intersectional Solidarity With Palestine: Report

  • Israel is against intersectional solidarity among oppressed groups who also campaign for Palestine.

    Israel is against intersectional solidarity among oppressed groups who also campaign for Palestine. | Photo: Reuters

Published 16 July 2019
Opinion

Israel and its advocates view solidarity between Palestine and other oppressed groups as threats and suggested ways to break up the intersectional coalition.

Pro-Israel lobbies are founding ways to break up intersectional solidarity with Palestine and identifying progressive Jews who are critical of Israel, a new report by Israeli research organization the Reut Group has revealed.

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Israel and its advocates view solidarity between Palestine and other oppressed groups as threats and suggested ways to break up the intersectional coalition. 

Israel’s Reut Institute and the U.S.-based Jewish Council for Public Affairs warned that intersectionality “undermines Jewish communities’ agendas, including support for the State of Israel.”

Last year Al Jazeera’s leaked censored documentary on Israeli influence in the United States showed Israeli officers gloating about targeting Black Lives Matter and convincing Martin Luther King's friend to write pro-Israeli propaganda.

Black Lives Matter (BLM) supports the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement (BDS). According to the documentary, their adoption of the movement's platform exposed them to the Israeli government's anti-BDS efforts.

This intersectionality had been applauded by the Palestinian-American congresswoman Rashida Tlaib Saturday. 

She said that solidarity among different oppressed groups towards Palestine shows that young people are understanding the crimes against the occupied population. 

“When I see young Black Lives Matter activists with t-shirts that say “Free Palestine,” and I’m wearing the Black Lives Matter t-shirt, I know it’s working,” she said. 

This solidarity is perceived as a threat to Israel which has been carrying out its racist policies towards Palestinians since 1948. 

The report talks about the increasing “challenge of intersectionality” due to “Corbynization” which  “is spreading through segments of the political left” and that “UK-based anti-Israel groups have been inspiring liberal and progressive elite circles worldwide.”

“Corbynization” refers to Britain’s Labour party leader Jeremy Corbyn who is a vocal critic of Israel and for decades has been a Palestine solidarity campaigner. He and members of his Labour party have been called anti-Semites for protesting Israel’s brutality towards Palestinians. 

The report also equates anti-Semitism with anti-Zionism. The later means standing up against Israel’s racist state policies. 

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The “Corbynization” also affects the U.S. Democratic Party according to the report and hence there is a “great decline” of support for Israel. 

This decline in support for Israel is on the rise as progressive Democrats like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC), Bernie Sanders, Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib are campaigning for the rights of Palestinian. Their campaign also makes them targets of U.S. President Donald Trump who is an avid supporter of Israel. 

Trump said Monday that the “squad” of AOC, Rashida Tlaib, Ilhan Omar, and Ayanna Pressley “hate Israel with a true and unbridled passion” and “they have made Israel feel abandoned by the U.S.”

However, Trump’s blind support for Israel was not taken well according to the Reut report. Israel’s alliance with white supremacists like Trump or the Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban “have driven liberals and young millennials to question whether traditional ties to Israel are deserved or beneficial.” 

The report also analyzed political and social trends among the U.S. Jews and their eroding support for Israel and its Zionist project. Four types of Jews were identified in the report. They range from unquestioning support for Israel and “moderate critics” to “harsh critics” and “radicals.” 

It also outlines ways to win back the youth of the community who “feel deceived because Jewish organizations provided them only a simplistic view of the conflict.”

For example, for the “harsh critics,” the lobbyists should “not seek to transform them into Israel advocates, but to make them less susceptible to anti-Israel influence.”

However, the “radicals” who support the BDS movement should be outrightly delegitimized. 

“The goal of the Jewish community should be to delegitimize Jewish Radicals anti-Zionists [sic] in mainstream progressive circles,” the report said. 

It also urged Jewish communal groups to form own “intersectional allies” to co-opt progressive members of the community. 

They suggested trying to “drive a wedge between ideological adversaries and their solidarity supporters” and to “develop a counter-intellectual narrative, by partnering with key intersectional theorists.”

All these ideas to win back young members of the Jewish community or to delegitimize intersectional solidarity are not new. The Reut group had suggested the same strategies a decade ago. 

Nonetheless, in 2017, a leaked secret report by the same institute and the Anti-Defamation League revealed that the efforts of Israeli lobby to stop the “impressive growth” of the Palestinian solidarity movement had failed despite massive spending.

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