In our blog posting on January 12, 2021 we mentioned that in the winter issue of the New Mexico Jewish Link Stanley Hordes “on behalf of the Jewish Voice for Peace – Albuquerque” published (“Conflation of Anti-Zionism and Antisemitism is Wrong” see page 4) a supposed rebuttal to SFMEW Chairman Halley Faust’s op-ed from the New Mexico Jewish Link Fall issue (“Can You Be Jewish and Antisemitic?” see page 6), which argues, with examples, of why someone can be both Jewish and antisemitic.
Interestingly first Hordes explicitly agrees with Faust – Hordes says about Faust’s assertion that you can be both Jewish and antisemitic: “The answer to the question posed in [Faust’s] title, of course, is yes.” But inexplicably Hordes then goes on to claim Faust actually argued something else – you can read Faust’s and Hordes’ articles yourself and see how Hordes misleads the reader by claiming Faust really argued “if you are anti-Zionist, must you be considered to be antisemitic?” He then goes on to produce tiresome, old and historically false assertions about Israeli policies, which are indeed not genuine Israeli policies. His assertions explicitly conform with the 2016 International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s (IHRA) working definition of antisemitism. The irony: Hordes is explicitly using antisemitic tropes, while disclaiming that JVP is not antisemitic.
The IHRA definition has been adopted by the European Union’s Council, Parliament, and Commission; the US Department of State; the European Commission against Racism and Intolerance; the Organization of American States; and 27 other countries including Germany, Canada, the United Kingdom, Spain, Greece, France, and Austria.
If Hordes is genuinely reflecting JVP’s positions then he clearly is furthering Faust’s point and adding a corollary: it’s not just can you be a Jewish individual and antisemitic, but can you be a Jewish organization (JVP) and be antisemitic?
TAKE ACTION
Use one of the points below to write a letter to the Link‘s editor, Sara Koplik, of the Jewish Link correcting the record. Hordes’ article should never have been published by the Link. Though JVP is a radically left wing organization, the op-ed could just as easily been written by a right wing antisemite. Keep your letter short and to the point.
The Link states: “Letters to the editor, articles, or other information to be considered for publication must be sent with return address and phone number and signed by the author. E-mail submissions are preferred.” Send to sarakoplik@unmhillel.org. Submissions must be in by February 22nd to make the next (Passover) edition. If you want to write an op-ed it should be limited to 700 words.
Here are some points you can make about how Hordes and JVP go wrong:
1. Assertion: “One can be critical of Israeli policies […] without being antisemitic.” Response: Faust never argues against this point. Indeed he says, “Of course, not all Jews and others who criticize Israel are antisemitic, but some do utilize antisemitic tropes in their criticism of Israel.” Faust then goes on to argue that often those who write op-eds or letters to the editor should make sure that they are critical of what is truly Israeli policy, not false or misleading depictions of policies. The JVP-sponsored murals put up on Old Pecos Trail a year ago are examples of misleading depictions of Israel Defense Forces policies, and were fabricated photos that were defaming of the IDF and Jews in general.
2. Assertion: “…one can be strongly pro-Israel and antisemitic.” Response: Individuals are pro-Israel for various reasons. Again, this is not a point Faust argued one way or the other; it’s a straw man argument by Hordes and does not negate any of Faust’s arguments.
3. Assertion: Israel took the Palestinian lands away from them in 1948 (Nakba) and 1967 (Naksa). Response: any fair-minded and accurate historian knows that the wars of 1948 and 1967 (started by the surrounding Arab countries and Palestinian militias) caused the Palestinian refugee situation because of at least three complicated causes: perhaps one-third of Palestinians left their villages because of the war itself (people flee war-torn areas for their own safety, as we’ve seen so severely with the Syrian civil war in the past 10 years), one-third because the leaders of the Arab countries encouraged them to leave so those countries could “throw the Zionists into the sea” and then the refugees could reclaim their land/houses, and perhaps one-third (or less) were relocated at the forceable urging of the Israelis themselves. The exact numbers are in dispute, but the three mechanisms are not. There are, of course, examples of Israeli leaders personally begging Arabs not to leave Israel during those wars. Hordes doesn’t bother to mention those attempts. See more in our response to Elena Ortiz’s inaccurate New Mexican MyView from last year here.
4. Assertion: Israel defense forces (IDF) “intrudes at will in the occupied West Bank. Gaza […] is described as the largest open-air prison in the world, because Israel controls how much electricity is provided, how much and what Gazans get to eat, and who gets to enter and leave.” Response: this is one of the biggest lies Hordes claims. Yes, Israel supplies electricity to Gaza. So does Egypt. Yes Israel controls the northern/eastern border of Gaza, AND Egypt controls the southern/western border. The control of food, travel, electricity, etc. can is also restricted by Egypt – why doesn’t he protest Egypt’s ways?
Israel permits tons of food and other goods into Gaza daily – so long as the goods can’t be used for missile production and other weapons against Israel. Hamas is the ruling party of Gaza. It could choose to make nice with Israel, stop building tunnels, stop hiding weapons under hospitals and schools, and show it wants to live at peace with Israel. Instead it lobs rockets, incendiary balloons, and attempts to breach the Gaza fence with Israel. It refuses to enter into peace negotiations with Israel (as has the Palestinian Authority in the past 8 years – not just during the Trump years). If Hordes wanted to be fair here, he could have introduced some of the not-so-nuanced reasons that Israel has tightened the border that it controls.
5. Assertion: Israel subjects Palestinian youth to the military judicial system, arrests “children” in the middle of the night, and coerces them into signing confessions. Response: Israel is obligated by international law to use the military judicial system in the West Bank areas under its control. There is no peace treaty and the territories are administered by the IDF according to international law. Israel does not as a policy arrest children, keep them from their parents, etc. unless the “children” (often what JVP means as “children” are older adolescents who are engaged in serious harm-attempting or harm-producing behavior like stone throwing, knifing, using slingshots, etc.) have been involved in serious behavior.
Stone throwing is not innocuous. Many of these Palestinian “children” are predominantly in their later teen years, are of age to drink, vote, and be militants in the Hamas or Palestinian Authority forces, and are solicited and encouraged by the Palestinian authorities to commit violence against Jews. They are not attempting to obtain asylum to move into Israel for economic reasons like US immigrants, or simply playing tag or soccer in their fields. Like US juvenile offenders, these Palestinian teens are taken to jail like others who violate the peace.
The 500-700 teens arrested in the Palestinian territories annually account for about 0.02% of the West Bank population. During a single year, an estimated 2.1 million youth under the age of 18 are arrested in the United States. This is about .65% of the population. And not all of these arrests are for physical harm-causing offenses like stone throwing. Though overall rates have been declining over the past years, approximately 1.7 million delinquency cases* are disposed in juvenile courts annually. 27% of the 1.7 million (or .02%) are arrested for “public order offenses” that may be more like the Palestinian teens engaging in violent, harm-producing acts against IDF soldiers or denizens of Judea and Samaria.
As we noted before (here), Palestinian teens are treated the same way American teens are treated. If a Santa Fe teen started throwing stones at Santa Fe police they’d be detained, arrested, perhaps released under recognizance and control of their parents, and told to show up in court. If they were recidivist teens they’d probably be remanded to juvenile detention. Same in Israel (see here).
6. Assertion: Anti-Israel Rep. Betty McCollum’s bill (in the last congress HR 2407) is a fair and important one. Response: We’ve written about this absurd bill before: The legislation is based on false information, well-documented by NGO Monitor. After 2 years the legislation has only 23 co-sponsors, including the known antisemitic members of congress Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. None of the New Mexico Members of Congress have signed onto this bill. And they shouldn’t – it fits the IHRA’s definition of antisemitism to a “T.”
7. Assertion: Finally, Hordes says we should expect Israel to exhibit even more moral behavior than other countries because we support its military financially. “Is it not reasonable to expect better behavior from such a beneficiary of our largesse?” Response: And finally, again, Hordes and JVP exhibit clear antisemitic positions by expecting better behavior than even the US exhibits with its own teens and toward immigrants. And the US folks who attempt to come into the US illegally or are US criminals are not (generally) trying to eliminate the US as a country, as the official Hamas and Palestinian Authority charters claim to desire.
There’s much more that could be said about Hordes’ article, which basically takes the line of Palestinian propaganda, not historical accuracy or fair-minded or ethical argument. Make your voice heard – TAKE ACTION – by writing today.
Coda: a number of mostly US-based self-defined “progressive” organizations, members of the Progressive Israel Network (PIN), have argued against the developed world’s agreement on what antisemitism is. They recently (January 12, 2021) produced a statement against codifying the IHRA’s definition because they didn’t like the examples used within the definition. They are trying to influence the Biden administration through this statement.
You might want to consider re-thinking your involvement if you are a member of one of these radical organizations of PIN: Ameinu, Americans for Peace Now, Habonim Dror North America, Hashomer Hatzair World Movement, Jewish Labor Committee, J Street, New Israel Fund, Partners for Progressive Israel, Reconstructing Judaism, and T’ruah.
As promised in our January 12, 2021 blog posting, the contact information for New Mexico Members of Congress and their staffs have been updated as of January 28, 2021 under the tab “NM Elected Officials” on the SFMEW website.
SFMEW is a beneficiary of the Jewish Federation of New Mexico. Please be sure to maximally contribute to the Federation when you are solicited later in the winter or early spring.
Why should you ask a newspaper, TV station, or other media outlets to make corrections? CAMERA’s Tamar Sternthal gave an excellent talk about this recently. Here’s an excerpt:
In recent years, as news outlets faced severe cutbacks and were forced to close foreign bureaus, the wire services like the Associated Press, United Press International and Deutsche Presse Agenteur have become increasingly influential as news outlets have been forced to become more dependent upon them for content. [Blog editor’s note: see the discussion with Matti Friedman co-presented by the Santa Fe Jewish Film Festival and SFMEW on the sidebar.]
That means when one of these agencies makes a mistake, that mistake does not appear in just one media outlet. It appears in many media outlets. As a result, that one piece of misinformation becomes even more damaging, potentially reverberating far and wide.
By the same token, when CAMERA compels one of these news agencies to correct, the correction takes on an amplified importance, reaching at times scores of media outlets.
With our office in Jerusalem, working on the same time zone as bureaus here in the region, CAMERA’s staff in Israel is able to monitor the wire service stories as they appear and prompt correction within the same news cycle. In other words, we are able to preemptively prevent the misinformation from appearing online and in print in media outlets around the world…
As a result, secondary media outlets from ABC, to Canadian Press to the Northern Advocate of New Zealand published the correct information and did not perpetuate the false charge[s.]