MEMBERS OF Chicago Youth Liberation for Palestine
protest at a local Starbucks coffeehouse on Sunday, amid anti-Israel
protests across the US.
We are currently witnessing what many would not have believed to be a
possible scenario until October 7, 2023: the mainstreaming of Hamas in
the United States. Thousands of protesters across American cities
and more than 200 university campuses have been calling to destroy the
small democratic Jewish majority state instead of advocating for a
peaceful Palestinian one alongside Israel.
Pro-ISIS, pro-Hamas protesters are demonstrating for “resistance”
against the Israeli “oppressor,” which they have branded an apartheid,
Nazi genocidal state that should be destroyed. And to be clear, since
the October 7 massacre, tens of thousands of American university
students, faculty, and supporters have been chanting, “From the river to
the sea, Palestine will be free,” a call for genocide and politicide to
replace the only Jewish-majority democratic nation-state with the 23rd
Muslim Arab majority one.
This
public, proud, and demonstrative call for genocide against the Jewish
people living in Israel is not self-evident. Since 1993 and the launch
of the Oslo Peace Accords, the Western discourse was primarily defined
by an internationally-witnessed and guaranteed peace process designed to
establish an independent Palestinian entity – an independent
government, security forces, and international diplomats in more than
100 countries.
But
what has become clear over the past 30 years of the Oslo process is
that the Palestinian Authority (PA) and its leaders, Yasser Arafat and,
subsequently, Mahmoud Abbas, have created and amplified a narrative of
jihad (holy war) and Nazi and Soviet conspiracy theories against Jews,
not merely Israel. Furthermore, the PA’s policy of paying incentive
annuities for murdering Israelis has, over the past three decades,
fashioned a generation and a half of Palestinian youth who have become
radicalized and ready to commit murder for money and sacrifice
themselves as shahids (martyrs).
Counterprotestors shout behind Harvard Law Students participating in
the National Day of Action organized by Law Students for a Free
Palestine, a coalition of students from 38 law schools around the
country, at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, US, November
16, 2023. (credit: BRIAN SNYDER/REUTERS)
Ironically,
the current genocidal antisemitism sweeping Western capitals and cities
in the name of a progressive agenda stems from the deep,
above-mentioned, Islamist roots.
The malicious Students for Justice in Palestine Students
for Justice in Palestine, a Hamas-linked group, was founded by a Hamas
political refugee, Professor Hatem Bazian from the University of
California, Berkeley, who now heads the Zaytuna Islamic College. Bazian
had chaired the organization American Muslims for Palestine (AMP), which
was a primary funder of SJP since AMP’s founding in 2005.
SJP
is no grassroots student organization. That has become clear since the
October 7 Hamas atrocities. Aside from the “river to the sea”
incantation heard across nearly 200 campuses, it is today quoting or
echoing slogans and rhetoric from the 1988 Hamas Charter and Hamas
leaders.
Years of genocidal rhetoric on university campuses
have now come full circle to hunt and to haunt US Jewry. Both official
Israel, Israeli NGOs, and the diaspora Jewish leadership have failed to
counter decades of a massive campaign to vilify, delegitimize, and
dehumanize Israel. Many in the pro-Israel community justified and
legitimized this Israel-erasure campaign, characterizing its rhetoric as
simply legitimate political criticism.
October
7 provides the context and the evidence for the convergence of this
discourse of Israel’s destruction together with the eradication of
Israelis and Jews wherever they live. Jihad’s genocidal rhetoric is not
limited to Israel. It knows no boundaries. Those listening carefully to
Hamas leaders may have heard the intention to commit the October 7 mass
murder “again and again.”
Ghazi
Hamad, a member of the Hamas political bureau, said: “The Al-Aqsa Flood
is just the first time, and there will be a second, a third, a fourth.”
Another senior Hamas official, Mahmoud al-Zahar, has threatened to
target Jews “wherever they are.” Hamas’s rhetorical attacks have already
spilled over into the United States and other Western countries, where
pro-Israel and Jewish facilities and communities are now targets.
Hamas’s
Nazification of Israel and the Jews should be taken seriously. This
extremist ideology is inciting violence against Jews and Jewish
institutions across North America today. Hamas’s Nazi discourse today is
rooted in 50 years of these accusations against Israel.
Yasser
Arafat’s infamous 1974 speech at the UN accusing Israel of being a
racist and illegitimate state, his “gun-and-holster” speech was followed
by the notorious 1975 UNGA “Zionism is Racism” Resolution 3379, which
remained on the UN’s books for 16 years. The Israel-apartheid libel was
carried forward to the UN-sanctioned 2001 Durban I Conference that
recast Israel as a racist, genocidal war criminal state to be eliminated
from the community of nations.
Much
of Diaspora Jewish leadership failed to grasp the gravity of these
deadly accusations and the implication for the massive outbreak of
antisemitism and violence against Jews that we are witnessing today
across the United States.
In
the aftermath of the October 7 massacre, Israel and diaspora Jewry are
both targeted for elimination. We are on the same side of the coin, as
Israel’s Special Envoy for Combating Antisemitism, Michal Cotler-Wunsh,
said recently during a JCPA briefing.
Now
is the time for action. The 300,000-person march on Washington in
November 2023, was a good start. Now Israel must take the lead in
showing the October 7 atrocities video to every Jewish community across
North America to expose precisely why Israel is determined to take every
measure necessary to return its hostages and eliminate Hamas.
Now
is the time for unity. Israel must now work with US federal and local
officials to shutter every one of SJP’s campus chapters while enforcing
Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. This initiative must be maximized
by a massive media campaign in the US exposing the terrorist roots of
this jihadist-backed and supported organization that constitutes one of
the greatest threats to the young generation of Jews since the Nazi era.
Dr.
Dan Diker is president of the Jerusalem Center of Public Affairs.
Khaled Abu Toameh is a senior fellow at the JCPA and a distinguished
senior fellow at the New York-based Gatestone Institute.
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