Although support for Israel in Congress is unprecedented, there’s a growing movement on the American Left seeking to delegitimize the Jewish state.
More than 275 American university professors have for the first time endorsed a national campaign calling for an academic boycott of Israel. This spring, “Israeli Apartheid Week” took place in dozens of communities, with organizers calling for a boycott of Israeli products and divestment from companies doing business in Israel. And anti-Israel activism is at an all-time high on college campuses.
Such attempts to single out Israel as a pariah state or deny to Jews -- and Jews alone -- the fundamental right of sovereignty that’s accorded to all other peoples of the world expose the rank hypocrisy of the anti-Israel Left. For how can it be that people ostensibly committed to human rights, civil liberties, feminism and gay rights malign the one country in the Middle East that has all of these things, while supporting governments that permit none of them?
The call to boycott Israeli universities as a reaction to Israel’s policies toward the Palestinians represents a stunning betrayal of the Left’s commitment to academic freedom. Besides, if the real goal of the boycotters is to “end the Israeli occupation,” as opposed to ending the Zionist enterprise altogether, why blacklist Israeli universities, the very places where ideas for peace are developed and taught?
It’s even harder to fathom why anyone who champions political freedom would side with Israel’s autocratic neighbors against the Jewish state, where Arab citizens can run for elected office and criticize the government without fear of retribution. For example, newly elected Knesset member Haneen Zoubi, one of 13 Israeli Arabs in the parliament, openly refers to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as a “fascist” and does so with impunity.
What do you suppose happens to Egyptian citizens who publicly insult Hosni Mubarak? Then there’s Gaza, where so far this year at least 30 political opponents of the regime have been executed by Hamas gunmen and countless others tortured.
With freedom of religion, it’s no different. How ironic that the only Middle Eastern country where the Arab Christian population has grown in the last half century is the Jewish state, largely because of the freedom they enjoy to practice their religion. In the West Bank and Gaza, by contrast, the Christian population is rapidly dwindling as Christians are increasingly subjected to harassment, extortion and land expropriation by Muslim militants.
And should I even bother mentioning Saudi Arabia, which remains on the U.S. State Department list of countries that severely violate religious freedoms? But who from the Left is protesting the millions of dollars this medieval theocracy pours into Middle East Studies programs across America, greatly contributing to the negative image Israel has on many campuses?
With regard to the struggle for gay and women’s rights, the Left has always been in the forefront. Yet, the anti-Israel Left attacks the only country in that region where gay rights are enshrined in law. Hamas, on the other hand, makes being gay a capital offense.
Israel’s Supreme Court chief justice is a woman; so, too, one out of every six Knesset members. Palestinian women, by contrast, endure various forms of repression and cultural restrictions. In Saudi Arabia, women are prohibited from leaving the country without permission of a male relative and can be arrested and flogged if their clothes reveal too much of their face or ankles.
In the upside-down world of the anti-Israel Left, a country that grants equal rights to an ethnically diverse citizenry and rescues black Sudanese refugees is labeled an “apartheid state.” But when Palestinian leaders express “solidarity” with Sudan’s genocidal president or shut down a youth orchestra because it performed for Jewish Holocaust survivors, the arbiters of human rights don’t even raise an eyebrow.
This selective moral outrage should trouble not just Israel’s supporters but also the mainstream Left. After all, the hijacking of the human rights agenda by the Israel bashers to further their divisive political goals not only harms Israel; it makes a mockery of the whole concept of human rights and undermines the Obama administration’s positive focus on moving the peace process forward.
Robert Horenstein is community relations director for the Jewish Federation of Greater Portland.
