{"id":82596,"date":"2020-12-15T17:05:59","date_gmt":"2020-12-15T15:05:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/?p=82596"},"modified":"2020-12-08T18:56:38","modified_gmt":"2020-12-08T16:56:38","slug":"15-05-57","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/?p=82596","title":{"rendered":"Students for Justice in Palestine Rewrites and Distorts Jewish and Israeli History"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>Students for Justice in Palestine Rewrites and Distorts Jewish and Israeli History<\/a><\/strong><\/span><\/h5>\n

Ben Stone<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

Perkins Library at Duke University in Durham, NC. Photo: Wikimedia Commons.<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

Over the summer, Duke University\u2019s Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) chapter published erroneous claims about the nature of Zionism in one of\u00a0its Instagram posts.<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

According to the\u00a0ADL<\/a>, Zionism is \u201cthe Jewish national movement of self-determination in the land of Israel \u2014 the historical birthplace and biblical homeland of the Jewish people.\u201d But Duke SJP falsely claims that Zionism is the establishment of a sovereign Jewish state in the \u201ccountry of Palestine.\u201d Not only is this a gross distortion of historical reality, but there was never a country of \u201cPalestine\u201d as SJP refers to it. A Palestinian national identity only formed in the wake of Israel\u2019s founding \u2014 not prior to it.<\/span><\/p>\n

SJP also claims that Zionism can\u2019t be a legitimate movement of national liberation, because Jews are merely a group of settler-colonialists who displaced the \u201cindigenous\u201d Arabs.\u00a0SJP puts it thusly<\/a>: \u201cNational liberation movements can best be characterized as the struggle of an indigenous population attempting to remove an occupying power and regain its independence. Zionism \u2026 is a colonial-settler enterprise based on the mass expulsion of the Palestinian people and the usurpation of their properties.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

This is false.\u00a0Jews are indigenous to the Levant<\/a>, and have maintained a continuous presence in Israel even after their exile in 70 AD. When SJP slurs Jews as colonialists, this isn\u2019t just factually wrong, but an antisemitic attempt to paint Jews as alien invaders in their indigenous homeland.<\/span><\/p>\n

Furthermore, SJP\u2019s \u201cmass expulsion\u201d claim does not withstand scrutiny. Between World War I and World War II, the\u00a0population of Arabs in the land increased dramatically<\/a>, due largely to immigration from surrounding countries. Yet, SJP does not dub these immigrants \u201csettler-colonialists\u201d; they reserve that term solely for the Jews who immigrated to the region \u2014 a clear double standard. Furthermore, there was no forced expulsion of a single Arab until the 1948 war, which was not started by the Zionists \u2014 but instead by the \u201cPalestinians\u201d and five surrounding countries that sought to exterminate all of the country\u2019s Jewish residents.<\/span><\/p>\n

Perhaps most ironically, certain segments of SJP\u2019s propaganda end up affirming the Jews\u2019 peaceful intentions. SJP charges: \u201cThe methods [of Zionism] included promoting mass Jewish immigration and acquiring tracts of land.\u201d How is this damning? Should Jews be shamed for seeking a better life in their ancestral homeland? Is SJP anti-immigration?<\/span><\/p>\n

The Duke SJP chapter isn\u2019t the only one that decided to use the summer months to push lies.<\/span><\/p>\n

In\u00a0one post<\/a>, the\u00a0Harvard College Palestine Solidarity Committee<\/a>\u00a0wrote that the Nakba, or \u201ccatastrophe\u201d \u2014 what Palestinians call the Israeli War of Independence \u2014 was an attempt to \u201cethnically cleanse Palestine.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

This claim is plainly false. The main causes of Palestinian flight are still highly debated among historians, and no singular reason has been pinpointed.\u00a0Many saw the Palestinian elite flee and followed suit.<\/a>\u00a0Many were urged to do so by Arab military and political leaders, others tried to escape the fighting, and in some cases, were forced from their homes by the Jewish army \u2014 although it was clearly stated by their leaders in July 1948 that \u201cit is forbidden \u2026 to expel Arab inhabitants from villages, neighborhoods and cities, and to uproot inhabitants from their places without special permission or explicit order from the Defense Minister in each specific case.\u201d What expulsions did occur were few in number, and do not nearly account for the mass exodus of Arabs from the land.<\/span><\/p>\n

SJP also conveniently forgets to mention that Israel did not launch this war, but that the Palestinians and\u00a0five surrounding Arab nations<\/a>\u00a0did. Claiming that a country full of Jewish immigrants from North Africa, the Middle East, and Holocaust-torn Europe would try to ethnically cleanse the land of Arabs, who were led by the\u00a0Mufti Amin al-Husseini, an ally and close friend of Hitler<\/a>, is a claim that is antisemitic to the core.<\/span><\/p>\n

My own family\u2019s story highlights the Jewish people\u2019s yearning to return to the land of Israel.<\/span><\/p>\n

My paternal family immigrated to the United States in the early 1900s, like many other Eastern European immigrants. Hailing from Ukraine, Georgia, Poland, and the Russian empire, they arrived at Ellis Island at the same time as the Second Aliyah, a period from 1904-1914 when many Eastern European Jews moved to what is now Israel.<\/span><\/p>\n

My mother\u2019s family remained in Europe for longer. My maternal great-grandfathers, both of whom were Romanian, followed Theodor Herzl\u2019s Zionist vision and purchased land in Israel, hoping to one day thrive there. My mother\u2019s father spent World War II in a concentration camp in Transnistria, and settled in France only after he escaped. He would later visit Israel and lay eyes on the plot of land that had been purchased by his family, yet had never been inhabited. By contrast, my maternal grandmother\u2019s family did make it to Israel after World War II. Her parents spent a year at an internment camp in Cyprus, her mother falling ill with typhus. Eventually, they settled in Israel, and my grandmother served in the IDF for a year. After a few years, they went back to Europe, where my grandmother met my grandfather in Paris.<\/span><\/p>\n

The flame of Zionism and connection to Israel is something that will never be extinguished in the Jewish people. My family\u2019s story is just one of many. The desire to return to Israel has been shared by European, North African, Middle Eastern, Ethiopian, and Yemenite Jews, and is still present today.\u00a0Aliyah from France has ballooned in recent years<\/a>, and some 2,000 members of the\u00a0Ethiopian community will make aliyah in early 2021<\/a>.<\/span><\/p>\n

Although SJP\u2019s attempt to erase Jewish connection to the land of Israel is a minute hurdle compared to what we have endured throughout the last two millennia, it should not go unnoticed on Duke\u2019s campus.<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

Ben Stone has been a CAMERA on Campus Fellow for the last two years. As a Duke Undergraduate, he studied Evolutionary Anthropology and Decision Sciences, and is now completing his Masters at the Fuqua School of Business. He is also a varsity fencer and has competed nationally and internationally for over 10 years, including at the 20th Maccabiah Games in Israel, where he brought back Gold with Team USA.\u00a0<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

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Students for Justice in Palestine Rewrites and Distorts Jewish and Israeli History Ben Stone Perkins Library at Duke University in Durham, NC. Photo: Wikimedia Commons. Over the summer, Duke University\u2019s Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) chapter published erroneous claims about the nature of Zionism in one of\u00a0its Instagram posts. According to the\u00a0ADL, Zionism is […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[6],"tags":[26,24],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/82596"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=82596"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/82596\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":82605,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/82596\/revisions\/82605"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=82596"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=82596"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=82596"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}