by Richard L. Cravatts
The cognitive war on the Jewish state seeps down from university campuses into public schools.
No sooner than Israel had initiated its campaign to suppress Hamas’s
rocket fire from Gaza, resulting in some 3400 rockets targeting
southern Israeli towns during the 11-day conflict, than students and
faculty at universities around the country began their noxious, though
predictable, effort to once again slander the Jewish state, issuing
statements of solidarity with the ever-aggrieved Palestinians and
denouncing Israel for its alleged aggression, continued ethnic
cleansing, oppression, and immorality for the inevitable deaths of Gazan
civilians, including children.
The cognitive war against Israel has been waged on university
campuses for more than a decade, during which time activist groups such
as Students for Justice in Palestine have promoted the Boycott,
Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) campaign against Israel and have sought
to galvanize anti-Israel support—especially at those times when Israel
is forced by Palestinian aggression to suppress hostilities in defensive
military maneuvers.
But the liberal worldview in which there are oppressors like Israel
and oppressed like the Palestinians has seeped into public school
systems now, as well, where woke elementary and high school teachers are
suffused with concepts of the intersectionality of oppression,
post-colonial views of the world, and the Left’s perennial notion that
victims are guiltless and hegemonic powers (such as Israel and the
United States) are founts of imperialism, militarism, and racism.
On May 19th, as one troubling example, the 6200-member United
Educators of San Francisco teacher’s union passed a grotesque
“Resolution in Solidarity with the Palestinian People” which, in
addition to calling on the Biden administration to end all aid to
Israel, denounced Israel’s alleged “forced displacement and home
demolitions” of Palestinian Arabs in Jerusalem and its imposition of “a
regime of legalized racial discrimination.” Like many other statements
issued during this latest conflict, Israel was denounced as an
aggressive, militaristic oppressor whose military capriciously murders
Arabs, seemingly without provocation. “Since May 10 the Israeli Defense
Force (IDF) has began [sic] an intense campaign of bombing and mortar
fire on the territory of Gaza,” the resolution reads, and “nearly 200
people, more than a quarter of them children have been killed. Over
1,300 have been wounded, and 40,000 Gazans have lost their homes.”
Conveniently missing from this language, of course, is any mention of
Hamas, the terrorist group of psychopaths who have been lobbing rockets
and mortars at southern Israeli towns for over 15 years now, some 20,000
of them (and 3400 alone in this latest skirmish), with the express
purpose of murdering Jews. The fact that each time Hamas
indiscriminately fires one of these rockets into civilian neighborhoods
constitutes a war crime has seemingly never occurred to these woke
educators, who only condemn Israel’s efforts to defend its citizenry, as
any sovereign nation would do, from being murdered by terroristic foes.
In the way that Israel’s critics chronically do, the union only
singles out Israel for punishment and condemnation, not its enemies who
seek the extirpation of the Jewish state. “As public school educators in
the United States of America,” the resolution sententiously proclaims,
“we have a special responsibility to stand in solidarity with the
Palestinian people because of the 3.8 billion dollars annually that the
US government gives to Israel, thus directly using our tax dollars to
fund apartheid and war crimes,” a statement that, of course, is a
complete inversion of the truth. The U.S. gives billions of foreign aid
and military assistance to Afghanistan, Egypt, Pakistan, and a host of
other countries whose records on human and civil rights do not compare
with that of Israel and whose use of U.S. aid is never given the same
moral audit that the hate-Israel crowd is wont to do when the Jewish
state is involved.
And lest there be any doubt about the Union’s mistaken attitude
about Israel, and the lie it promulgates by claiming that Israel
perpetrates racism and apartheid against Arabs, the resolution concludes
by committing its membership to sign on with the anti-Semitic BDS
campaign itself, stating “that UESF endorse the international campaign
for boycotts, divestment, and sanctions against apartheid in Israel,”
thereby becoming the first K-12 teachers’ union in the United States to
endorse the BDS movement.
The ideology that inspired this union vote is revealing,
particularly if we look at the rhetoric of one of the resolution’s
authors, the self-proclaimed Socialist activist, Alex Schmaus, a middle
school instructional aide and UESF organizer. Writing on a “socialist
project” website, Tempest, Schmaus described the union’s vote
and revealed that, at least in his mind, Israel is an illegitimate state
to begin with and that Palestinian terrorism, so-called “resistance,”
is a justifiable reaction to occupation. “There was the explosion of
demonstrations in occupied Palestine,” Schmaus wrote, “the uprisings within the parts of Palestine that Israel seized in 1948 [emphasis
added], and massive demonstrations in solidarity around the world . . .
The union activists wanted to take a lead from an inspiring expression
of Palestinian resistance that was opening up new paths of struggle,” in
other words, that Hamas’s terrorism did not constitute war crimes and
violations of the Geneva Conventions which prohibit the targeting of
civilians and non-military personnel, but were, according Schmaus and
his fellow travelers, “. . . heroic resistance [that] was exposing the
racist nature and daily violent practice of Israeli apartheid, forcing a
change in consciousness around the world. Now was the time for
full-throated expressions of solidarity.”
That teachers of elementary and high school students publicly defend
terrorists, denounce a sovereign, democratic state defending itself,
and celebrate the murder of Jews through “resistance” seems especially
troubling, particularly when the union has been visibly silent about
famines, civil war, gender apartheid, human rights offenses, and other
suffering in many other countries they could have chosen as the object
of their condemnation.
Not to be outdone by its union brethren further north, chapter
chairs of the United Teachers Los Angeles, an affiliate of the American
Federation of Teachers and the second largest teacher’s union in the
country, also voted overwhelmingly in May in support of a statement,
almost identical to the San Francisco version, that expressed its
“solidarity with the Palestinian people and call for Israel to end
bombardment of Gaza and stop displacement at Sheikh Jarrah . .
, [called] on the administration of U.S. President Joe Biden to stop aid
to Israel [and endorsed] the international campaign for boycotts,
divestment, and sanctions against apartheid in Israel.”
The language of the UTLA resolution is characteristically unctuous
and one-sided, expressing “solidarity with the Palestinian people and
[a] call for Israel to end bombardment of Gaza and stop displacement at Sheikh Jarrah.”
Sheikh Jarrah, of course, is the neighborhood where Arab squatters have
been living in Jewish-owned property for years, some paying no rent at
all, but instead of looking at this as a landlord/tenant property
dispute to be decided in a court—as it would if it was happening
anywhere else in the world except Jerusalem and if the owners were not
Jewish and the tenants Arab—the union, and Israel critics elsewhere,
have seen the imminent and lawful evictions as part of Israel’s ongoing
ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians and emblematic of Israel’s
oppressive behavior of towards its Arab neighbors. Contrary to the
language of the resolution, however, Israel’s government is not involved
in the property disputes at all, and only in the mind of Israel’s
ideological foes are the evictions representative of any injustice. In
fact, Jewish owners are the actual victims here, not the Arab residents
who are illegally occupying the properties.
It is interesting how elementary school teachers, or English and
anthropology professors, or queer studies majors, or student
activists—many with no actual knowledge of the history of Israel and its
neighbors—feel free to make uncompromising determinations about
Israel’s acceptable behavior and give unwelcomed and unrequested advice
concerning Israel’s diplomatic, military, legal, and political
activity—frequently with no context or actual facts. The current legal
dispute about the Sheikh Jarrah properties is the perfect example,
especially since it is referred to as an example of Israel’s perfidy in
many of the anti-Israel statements circulated since the current Gaza
conflict.
Critics claim that the prospective evictions are tantamount to the
ethnic cleansing of Jerusalem by ethno-nationalist settlers, but this is
both a misreading of the law and an intentional distortion of what is
an entirely legal process on behalf of Jewish property owners. In a
paper entitled “Understanding the Current Sheikh Jarrah (Jerusalem)
Property Dispute,” for instance, Professor Avi Bell noted that “Contrary
to the claims of the critics, permitting private Jewish landowners to
exercise their rights in court does not constitute ‘illegal settlement
activity.’ No reasonable interpretation of the various provision of the
Geneva Conventions and other treaties cited with respect to the legal
dispute on ‘settlements’ could possibly lead to the conclusion that
international law requires stripping Jews of all private property rights
in land in areas that critics of Israel call ‘Occupied Palestinian
Territories.’ While critics of Israel like to pretend that international
law forbids Jews to reside in any lands claimed as part of the
‘Occupied Palestinian Territories,’ that claim has no foundation in
international law.”
But when Israel is involved, ideology is what matters, not facts,
just as lying about facts serves as a way to justify Hamas’s aggression
and terrorism against Jewish civilians. According to the union’s
defective resolution, Israel’s “pattern and practice of dispossession
and expansion of settlements has been found to be illegal under
international law” and “In response to Palestinian demonstrations
against these illegal practices and the forcible displacement of
families in Sheikh Jarrah, Israeli police attacked demonstrations in
many instances, injuring hundreds including a raid on the Al-Aqsa
Mosque, a place of worship.” There, of course, is no mention of
thousands of Hamas rockets targeting Jewish neighborhoods, no mention of
violent demonstrations and rioting on the Temple Mount where Arabs, on
their supposed third-holiest site, hurled rocks at Jewish visitors to
the site. There is no mention of the incendiary kites and balloons, the
knife intifada, the ramming of Jewish pedestrians by Arab sociopaths, no
mention of any Arab aggression, truculence, “Days of Rage,” and the
unrelenting campaign to drive Jews into the sea and destroy the Jewish
state. There is no context or historical background to any of the
union’s accusations and condemnations, and its selective outrage over
the actions of Israel—while ignoring a host of conflicts and human
rights crises elsewhere around the world raises the obvious question of
why the Jewish state, and always the Jewish state, is singled out for
opprobrium and condemnation.
California teachers have also been embroiled in a contentious
five-year process by which the state created its ethnic studies
curriculum to serve as a way of indoctrinating students on aspects of
critical race theory and how, allegedly, systems of oppression serve to
maintain a white power structure over oppressed people of color. Jewish
critics of the proposed curriculum, and there have been many of them
(with some 100,000 public comments being submitted during the drafting
of different versions of the curriculum) were particularly alarmed that
the Jewish experience was ignored in the initial drafts and that rather
than being presented as an oppressed minority themselves, Jews were said
to enjoy white privilege and, therefore, part of the white hierarchy
which has social, economic, and political control over people of color.
Judea Pearl, UCLA professor and the father of beheaded journalist
Daniel Pearl, understood that the proposed curriculum, by conflating
Jewishness with whiteness, transformed Jews from victims into
victimizers. By extension, the Jewish state became an oppressive
colonial occupier of people of color, and Pearl was “particularly
alarmed by its attempt to depict inter-ethnic relationships as an
irreconcilable struggle between racially-defined ‘oppressed and
oppressors’ and by the way it associates ‘whiteness’ with ‘oppression’
and ‘colonialism.’” Moreover, lesson plans in the ethnic studies
curriculum involve promoting the BDS movement as part of solidarity with
oppressed people and the liberation of colonized lands and often
promote the perception of Israel being an example of an oppressive
regime and imperialist power.
As has happened with other academic organizations, unions, and
student governments, a few radicals within the respective organizations
often push for extreme actions, including statements and resolutions
denouncing the Jewish state and calling for further sanctions and
punishment of Israel. That public school teachers are so biased and
one-sided against Israel, and that their attitudes are based on
falsehoods, lies, contortions of history and fact, analysis without
context, and, often, what appears to be rank anti-Semitism itself,
should frighten us all.
Richard L. Cravatts, a Freedom Center Journalism Fellow in Academic Free
Speech and President Emeritus of Scholars for Peace in the Middle East,
is the author of Dispatches From the Campus War Against Israel and Jews.
Source: https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/06/california-public-school-teachers-latest-dupes-richard-l-cravatts/
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