According to Francis Bacon, “Knowledge is power.” According to Yitzhak Santis, campus Israel advocates could use a little more of both.
Santis, the Jewish Community Relations Council’s director of Middle East affairs, was one of the featured speakers at a Sunday afternoon Israel advocacy workshop at Berkeley’s Hillel. On a campus where pro-Israel students claim they have to argue for the Jewish state’s right to exist on nearly a daily basis, campus Israel advocates said the teach-in offered a powerful alternative to empty rhetoric.
Campus pro-Palestinian groups play on “buzzwords, rhetoric and ill-fitting analogies, not really on facts,” said Maya Aizenman, a U.C. Berkeley senior. “You can beat back a buzzword easily with the power of facts and literature. Facts are the alternative to buzzwords, which is important at a university where students are supposed to be critical.”
Roughly three dozen people — the vast majority of them U.C. Berkeley students — attended the workshop, which was organized by the campus’ Israel Action Committee and sponsored by Hillel, the pro-Israel lobby AIPAC, the S.F.-based Israel Center and the JCRC.
Santis, as well as Jewsweek.com senior editorial writer Avi Davis and AIPAC regional field director Sara Gershamn, cited the historical claims they say pro-Palestinians have taken out of context, obscured or fabricated.
One audience member told the panel that an anti-Israel protester claimed that Israelis had popularized the practice of hijacking planes when they boarded and took over Syrian crafts.
Santis urged pro-Israel advocates faced with similar confrontations to “challenge the person, make him cite the source. When somebody makes a claim, we need him to back it up.”
Davis deadpanned that “the only thing Israelis have done with Syrian planes is shoot them down.”
Discussing the orchestrated nature of the expulsion of Jews from Arab nations in the 1940s, Santis said the much-discussed “right of return” for Palestinian refugees is a misreading of U.N. Resolution 194. He placed much of the blame for the ongoing refugee crisis on the Palestinian leadership and politicking of the Arab world.
“The Palestinians could be resettled in Arab states. Some want to be returned [to Israel], especially the original 1948 refugees, who make up about 10 percent of the population,” he said.
“For humanitarian purposes, and we’re talking about human beings here, the use of the Palestinian refugees as pawns in these cynical and Machiavellian policies has got to stop. That message is one, as a pro-Israel activist, you need to hammer home again and again and again. And that is not going to be popular on this campus.”
Even campus Israel activists who considered themselves knowledgeable about Israel and the Middle East said they learned a lot at the workshop.
Anat Resnick, a U.C. Berkeley junior, was shocked by the vast numbers of Jews expelled from Arab nations. Inna Parhizer, a freshman, had never before heard of Palestinian leader Hajj Amin Al-Husayni’s alliance with Hitler and plan for the extermination of Jews in Arab nations.
Erik Martinez, a freshman at De Anza College in Cupertino, said he considered himself a novice when it came to Israeli history, but he felt he’d picked up much in an afternoon.
“I thought this was a lot more productive than sitting around chanting and hyping people up with rhetoric,” he said, referring to tactics of pro-Palestinian activists. “Their politics meet the headlines. They aren’t interested in telling both sides of the story. That’s not to say all Palestinians are wrong or their cause is wrong. But the way they’re going about it is totally ridiculous.”
Many of those at the event said U.C. Berkeley is considered one of the most anti-Israel campuses in the nation. David Singer, a sophomore, claimed that in the recent past, anti-Israel protesters have labeled all Jews as conniving and told him that Jewish people only became involved in the civil rights movement for personal gain.
Gershamn encouraged Israel advocates to write letters to the editor and establish correspondences with their representatives in congress and the senate.
Daniel Neves, a San Leandro construction worker, took her suggestion to heart.
“A lot of the articles I’ve seen concerning Israel give a picture of the Middle East that Israel is the bully and the Palestinians are getting beaten up. But we need to see who starts those fights every morning,” he said.
“I want to start a relationship with my senator and congressman, and let people know that I read these articles and I think they’re not balanced. I want to find out where politicians stand, and tell all my friends to not make the mistake of voting for someone who doesn’t seem to support Israel.”