washington | Speakers at the Palestine Solidarity Movement conference, held at Georgetown University, exhorted anti-Israel activists to enlist Jews in the effort to divest from Israel.
At least two speakers at the fifth annual divestment conference, held Feb. 17-19, suggested the tactic as a way to gain legitimacy for the movement, which intensified its call for universities and institutions to sever economic ties to Israel and companies that do business with the Jewish state.
“There are many obstacles that confront us,” said Philip Farah, a senior economist and featured speaker at the event in Washington. “One of the most important of course is the claim that divestment is anti-Jewish. For that, my advice is very, very important: Work with progressive Jews and Israelis.”
Farah endorsed the tactic as a way to “inoculate yourself from the charges of being an anti-Semite.” Another speaker, Noura Erakat, legal advocate for the U.S. Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation, echoed Farah’s suggestion.
“It works better and to our favor to make allies with sympathizers, with Israelis themselves,” she said.
Farah said that churches are also key to success in the divestment movement.
“It’s one thing for marginal radicals to oppose Israel’s occupation; it’s quite another thing when activism reaches the churches,” Farah said, noting the critical role churches played in the Vietnam War, the civil rights movement and the South African struggle.
Over the three-day period, 376 student and community activists from 90 universities and organizations attended the conference, according to Nadeem Muaddi, the spokesman for the Palestine Solidarity Movement.
Erakat lamented the decline in divestment activism on American campuses, and attributed the setbacks to poor activist turnover. In addition, she said that the Palestinian struggle has been overshadowed by the “so-called war on terror.”
Panelists condemned the international community’s response to the election of a Hamas-led government in Palestinian elections last month.
Ali Abunimah, co-founder of the Electronic Intifada news service, censured the European Union, Japan, Canada, Norway and “all of these do-gooding countries who claim that they are there to support peace when in fact what they’re doing is subsidizing and propping up the occupation.”
Abunimah teamed up with Mohammed Abed, a philosophy lecturer from the University of Wisconsin, to propose a binational state encompassing and replacing Israel, where Palestinians would make up the majority.
Speaker Sue Blackwell, who led the boycott by British academics of Israeli institutions last year, stated as a goal “letting the world know Israel is a pariah, apartheid state who should be treated exactly the same way as apartheid South Africa.”
David Friedman, the regional director of the Anti-Defamation League, one of several organizations that helped organize counter-events, said he was not surprised that the conference speakers would “attempt to create a false veneer of legitimacy” by trying to recruit Jews and Israelis to promote their cause.
“It doesn’t matter who is speaking; what matters is the content of the message, and that message of an analogy between South African apartheid and Zionism is false and extreme,” Friedman said.
The conference speakers said they were opposed to violence of any kind — but absent were calls to urge Hamas to recognize Israel’s right to exist, disarm Hamas or to support a two-state solution.
“What was so depressing was that all the speakers I heard, many of whom seem highly intelligent, reduce all the problems in the region to Zionism,” said David Sinkman, a law student at Georgetown Law Center.
Sinkman was one of a small number of pro-Israel Georgetown students to attend the conference, which was open to the public. The university also sponsored an open house for pro-Israel students on Saturday. Jonathan Aires, chair of the school’s spring pro-Israel festival, said 40 attended the informal event.