J Street U’s new president Amna Farooqi has made no secret of being a “Pakistani American Muslim.”
That’s how she described herself in a keynote speech this spring at J Street’s national convention in Washington, D.C., when she was a board member.
Still, Farooqi’s election to president at J Street U’s summer leadership retreat in August triggered swift backlash from Israel supporters online. Negative comments ranged from bemused (“Weren’t there any Jews running?”) to belligerent (calling her “an anti-Israel Muslim”).
J Street U is the campus wing of J Street, a liberal Israel lobby group that calls itself “pro Israel, pro peace.”
“I know that I’m not Jewish, and that’s very scary for a lot of people, and I do understand that in some ways. But I’m coming to this work because I care deeply about the people in Potomac [Maryland] and the people in Israel and the people in Palestine,” said Farooqi, 21, a senior at the University of Maryland.
She received supportive comments on social media as well, along with plenty of attacks from the other side of the Israeli-Palestinian divide.
Tali deGroot, a newly elected J Street U vice president, who is Jewish, said that four students ran for J Street U’s presidency: two Jewish and two not Jewish.
Farooqi said she has no plans to convert to Judaism, though she does consider herself “culturally Jewish,” having grown up in Maryland’s heavily Jewish Montgomery County.
Looking ahead, Farooqi said J Street U will continue to lobby American Jewish organizations to be more transparent about where their funding goes — especially if it’s crossing Israel’s pre-1967 borders — and to continue to press the larger Jewish community to “address the occupation.”
Farooqi reiterated that J Street U is opposed to the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement against Israel and does not co-sponsor Apartheid Week or similar events sponsored by Students for Justice in Palestine. She said she attended a meeting of the Palestinian rights group her freshman year and was “very turned off by the one-sided rhetoric.”
But that doesn’t mean she shies away from criticizing Israel. Her tweets about the occupation and less-than-flattering commentary on Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu have raised eyebrows and been cited by some as proof that J Street U is not “pro-Israel.”
Eric Rozenman, the Washington director of the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America, which challenges perceived anti-Israel bias in the media and is active on campuses, said that the hype regarding Farooqi’s election has been overblown — especially, he said, because she is not the first Muslim American college student to be vocally pro-Israel.
What would be more remarkable, Rozenman said, is if a Jewish Zionist student were elected to head a Muslim student association.
Sitting in a coffee shop not far from her parents’ home in this tony Washington suburb, Farooqi discussed her path to Zionism. Initially, she was far more sympathetic to the Palestinian cause.
“I knew that my parents were never anti-Israel because they were always sensitive that there are people in Israel who want peace, but they were critical of its policies, so I grew up knowing Israel as a place I did not have warm feelings toward. And I still came to love it.”
A frequent volunteer at the Misler Center, an adult day center in Rockville, Maryland, where her grandparents received Jewish Council for the Aging services, Farooqi said she overheard another volunteer criticizing J Street.
“I went on their website and it was pro-Israel, pro-Palestinian, two states, and I was like, this lines up with everything I believe in,” she said.
As a freshman at the University of Maryland, College Park, she began taking Israel studies classes at the Hillel. The director, Rabbi Ari Israel, recalled Farooqi getting in touch with him during her freshman year.
“I knew then and still know now that she is a unique individual,” he said. “She genuinely participates in Hillel activities and is warmly embraced by our diverse student population.”
Farooqi traced her full Zionist conversion to the spring of her freshman year, when she was picked to take on the role of Israel’s first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, in a seminar. In researching her role, she stumbled on “David Ben-Gurion: In His Own Words” in the stacks of the university library. Ben-Gurion’s message of communal responsibility resonated with her.
“Zionism stopped being certain political consequences,” Farooqi said. “It started being this entire ideology of taking responsibility for one’s people, and that’s something that really spoke to me.”
Farooqi spent the spring semester of her sophomore year at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
“I was meeting Israelis and Palestinians. I went into the West Bank a lot. I made Israeli friends. I wanted to actually understand,” she said.
Inspired by her time in Israel and disheartened by the breakdown of Secretary of State John Kerry’s Israeli-Palestinian peace talks, Farooqi threw herself into working for J Street U — first as a representative to the student board and then as a J Street U intern last summer in Jerusalem, helping to lead student tours.
“I’m very, very scared that we’re getting to a point where it’s going to be impossible to be pro-Israel because pro-Israel will become synonymous with oppression. And I want to do the work that keeps that from happening,” she said.
Farooqi plans to return to Israel when she graduates this spring with a degree in government and politics and a minor in Israel studies.
She’d love to go to graduate school at Hebrew University.
This article was distributed by JTA.