The attacks are a threat to academic freedom and the criticism of Israeli human-rights abuses. CNN should immediately reinstate its former commentator; it should not cave in to the idea that criticizing Israel is anti-Semitic or hate speech.
In a nakedly political move, Jeremy Corbyn's right-wing critics are painting the lifelong anti-racist's criticism of Israel as anti-Semitic. Corbyn’s wing of the Labor Party is accused because criticism of Israel is now defined as anti-Semitism.
Israel sees the international boycott campaign as an existential threat to the Jewish state. Palestinians regard it as their last resort. The Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement against Israel has been driving the world a little bit mad.
Two books posit the BDS movement fighting Israeli aggression against Palestinians as the worthy extension of more than a century of opposition to white supremacy, colonialism, and the kindred pariah status Jews suffered under European fascism.
We cannot ignore the structures of oppression within Zionism. A recent article in the Forward that asserts, claiming most Jews support Zionism, if you leave out Zionism from social justice struggles, then you are saying Jews aren’t welcome.
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By performing in Israel, the orchestra provides musical accompaniment to the world’s last settler-colonial state, at a time when other artists are canceling appearances there following the Palestinian call for a global boycott (BDS) of Israel, modeled after the South African anti-apartheid boycott.
What Israel fears more than suicide bombings, Hamas rockets, and stone throwers, is a genuinely nonviolent resistance movement that insists on self-determination, democracy, equality, peace, and justice for all.
I am the Jewish teenager who wore the Star of David to make sure everyone knew she was a Jew. I am my mother, who taught her children that no one is free unless everyone is free... For all those Jews, for Israeli Jews, for Palestinians, and for the world, I am the anti-Zionist Jew.
For the time being, the MLA has taken an extreme and ethically untenable position by endorsing the idea, promoted by a group of members who were openly "assisted" by outside groups, that it is illegitimate for professional groups to protest Israel's policies towards its Palestinian subjects.
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