A plan to eliminate a population of five million Jews, by murdering some and, presumably, so terrifying the rest that they flee in fear of their lives, is properly called anti-Semitic.

 

But what if a Jew proposes such a plan?  And not an apostate Jew.  What if a professing Jew proposes such a plan?  Is it still anti-Semitic?

 

This is neither an historical nor a hypothetical question. 

 

The International Solidarity Movement, its American, student affiliate the Palestinian Solidarity Movement, and other radical left-wing groups label every inch of Israeli territory as “occupied Palestine,” advocate destroying the Jewish State by “any means necessary,” and openly condone terrorism and Muslim suicide bombers as a means for accomplishing this goal.  These groups are working to eliminate a population of six million Jews.   

 

The ISM/PSM has never set forth a plan for the future of Israel’s Jewish population.  What they have done is to argue consistently in favor of a Palestinian State “from the River to the Sea,” a plan that leaves no space for a Jewish State.  One can only surmise that the Solidarity Movement’s “plan” is to force the Jews to flee the Holy Land as they were forced to flee Iraq, Syria, Iran, Egypt and other Muslim lands (Turkey and Morocco excepted.)

 

There are several terms for a advocating the forcible expulsion of a population from its home.  All of them are ugly.

 

Ora Wise bills herself as [1]  “The daughter of a rabbi and a Hebrew schoolteacher” who was “born in Jerusalem and has lived there on several occasions” and who now “teaches Jewish Studies at a synagogue in Brooklyn.” Wise maintains that if she, as a Jew, calls for the destruction of the Jewish State, it is not anti-Semitism. 

 

Ms. Wise is among the leaders of Jews Against the Occupation, a group that “stand(s) in solidarity with the Palestinian people in their struggle for freedom. “ [2] Jews Against the Occupation advocates the right of all descendants of Palestinian refugees to return to the homes that their ancestors fled. Although it does not discuss what will become of five million Israeli Jews should that happen, one surmises that they would have to leave.   This would not be a problem, according to Wise’s organization, since “Judaism is a cultural and religious identity.”   The Jews, in other words, have no legitimate national identity and no entitlement to a nation-state.   Five million Jews can go live elsewhere.   The Palestinian Solidarity Movement, for which Wise is an officially designated spokesperson, condones the use of terror bombing.[3]

 

On October 13^th, Ms Wise issued a press release in the name of Jews Against the Occupation.    It is apparently intended as a preemptive strike against the inevitable charge that the Palestinian Solidarity Movement Conference scheduled for Ohio State on November 7, 8, and 9 is anti-Semitic.   According to Ms. Wise, “Those who oppose the Conference have “indiscriminately” applied the label "Anti-Semitic" to the participants’ positions.” 

 

Actually, the accusations leveled against the conference have been far from indiscriminate, but I have not found any charges of anti-Semitism except in questions from reporters.  An email to Ms. Wise asking who has called the Solidarity Movement conference anti-Semitic elicited the response that: “There have been plenty of charges of anti-Semitism from Zionist counter demonstrators outside of both of the past two conferences and quoted in articles about the conference.”

 

This is accurate.   Since the PSM advocates destroying the world’s lone Jewish State and openly condones terrorism targeted at Jews, people do tend to charge them with anti-Semitism.  In discussions of the Ohio State Conference, however, the charge that has been raised is support for terrorism.

 

According to the Governor of Ohio, Bob Taft, the Palestinian Solidarity Movement “condones terrorism and should be opposed by civilized people everywhere.”[4]    AMCHA, the Coalition for Jewish Concerns, is circulating a petition already signed by over 10,000 residents of Ohio.  The petition charges the PSM with racism on roughly the same grounds mentioned by the Governor.   It also makes the point that delegates at last year’s conference chanted “Kill the Jews.”[5]   A second petition, circulated by Ohio State Alumni Against Terrorism, cites PSM support for terrorism. [6]   The Dayton-based War to Mobilize Democracy, LLC opposes the granting of permission to this Conference to meet at Ohio State on the grounds that this the PSM supports terrorism.[7] These are specific, not indiscriminate, accusations.

 

Ms. Wise says in her press release that the conference cannot be called anti-Semitic since “The Conference Organizers explicitly state on their web site that the Conference "rejects any form of hatred or discrimination against any group based on race, ethnicity, religion, gender, or sexual orientation.""[8]

According to Ms. Wise, then, even if a group advocates destroying the Jewish State “by any means necessary,”  chants “Kill the Jews” in a rally at its National Conference, and  condones the targeting of Israeli Jews for murder by terrorists, it is not anti-Semitic as long as it issues a statement  rejecting “any form of hatred.”  Or, perhaps, what Ms. Wise is really saying is that it’s all right to advocate killing Jews as long as you can find a Jew willing to stand up and say that you are not an anti-Semite.   Ora Wise’s logic can be hard to follow at times.

 

The basic premise, however, is easy to grasp.  Jews make excellent cover if you want to do or say something anti-Semitic without being labeled an anti-Semite.

 

On October 13^th, the day Ms. Wise issued her press release, the Newark, Ohio Advocate ran a story about the Palestinian Solidarity Conference at Ohio State under the headline “OSU Conference Brings Charges of Anti-Semitism.”[9]  The reporter gave Ora Wise three paragraphs in which to assert that “There is no legitimate basis for these accusations of anti-Semitism."

 

Ora Wise has been building something of a career as a mouthpiece for anti-Semitic positions.  She first came to national attention at last year’s National Convention of the Palestinian Solidarity Movement, held at the University of Michigan.   There was a press conference with leaders of the Solidarity Movement, a number of members of the movement stood nearby.   Inevitably, the question of anti-Semitism was raised by a reporter.  At that point, Movement spokesmen brought their Jew, Ora Wise, a 21-year-old student from Ohio State University, forward “as a Jew” to “categorically reject the accusation of anti-Semitism.”[10]

 

Ms. Wise spent this past summer traveling the country on a tour sponsored by the Solidarity Movement.  According to press accounts, she went from city to city telling lies about Israel.

 

Wise also described how Palestinians are kept under restrictive curfews and lockdown 24 hours a day. According to Wise, Palestinians are not allowed to open their stores, leave their houses or attend school. If they "so much as poke their head out the door," they will be shot, she said. Often, many are shot inside their homes as well, she said.  Wise also described how Israeli troops walk through the cities "randomly shooting inside homes.”[11]

 

In the spot on earth most intensely covered by journalists, if anything like soldiers “randomly shooting inside homes” or killing people who “poke their heads out the door” were going on, it would be reported.  Instead, we find the United States Army holding the IDF up as a model of urban warfare that is exquisitely careful of protecting civilian lives.

 

Ora Wise’s position on Israel is so radical, so filled with irrational hatred of the Jewish State, with misstatements of fact, and with an utter inability to see any justice in the Israeli position or any injustice in even the most extreme organizations of Israel-haters, that it seems difficult to believe that the biography she provides to the press can be true.  Unfortunately, it all checks out.  She is, indeed, the daughter of a Rabbi and of a Hebrew School teacher.[12] 

 

More shocking, since while none of us can control what our adult children choose to do or to say, synagogues do get to choose who teaches in their Hebrew Schools, is the fact that Congregation Kolot Chayeinu in the Park Slope neighborhood of Brooklyn confirms that they do indeed employ Ora Wise as a teacher of Jewish Studies to middle school students.  

 

Ms. Wise’s employment as a mouthpiece for organizations that seek to destroy Israel is not surprising.  According to their own report, anti-Israel activists associated with the Palestinian Center for Rapprochement - the group that spawned the International Solidarity Movement -  “specifically recruited Jewish Americans” to come to Israel in the summer of 2001.[13]

 

Since the beginning of the Suicide War on the Eve of Rosh HaShanah 2000, groups of anti-Israel westerners have been traveling to the Palestinian Authority territories to work as “human shields,” “non-violent, direct action activists,” and “media monitors.”  At first, they traveled under the auspices of the Alternative Tourism Group, an organization originally set up to expose Western tourists to anti-Israel literature and to give tours of the poor conditions in the refugee camps.  In December, 2000, Ghassan Andoni and George Rishmawi, the directors of Alternative Tourism, who also run the Palestinian Center for Rapprochement, founded the International Solidarity Movement.

 

Adam Shapiro appears to have been part of the group that founded the ISM.  He is not, however, listed as a leader, cofounder, or spokesman for the movement in any early material regarding the Movement that I have been able to locate.  In a September 2002 conference schedule, for example, Shapiro is referred to as a “representative” of the Movement while Huwaida Arraf is listed as “Co-founder and Organizer, International Solidarity Movement.” [14]

 

There was a time lag between Adam Shapiro’s emergence onto the International Stage and the full realization by the Movement of how very useful he could be as a Jewish mouthpiece for extreme Palestinian positions.  In March of 2002, Israel ended a year and a half of remarkable self-restraint in the face of an onslaught of  terrorism and suicide bombing, by sending the IDF into the Palestinian Authority-controlled  towns that the bombers were coming from.  A group of Solidarity Movement “human shields” immediately rushed to grab the media spotlight by joining Yasser Arafat and a group of known terrorist leaders in the Palestinian Authority compound in Ramallah, the Mukatah.  Adam Shapiro became instantly famous as the Jewish boy from Brooklyn who had eaten breakfast with Yassir Arafat.

 

Within a year, Shapiro went from being “a volunteer coordinator with the International Solidarity Movement,” [15] to being regularly referred to as a Cofounder of the Movement.   In that position, Shapiro travels the world speaking in favor destroying Israel “by any means necessary.”[16]  Shapiro openly and specifically endorses terrorism “as long as it is targeting Israeli soldiers and Jewish settlers.” [17]  What he does not endorse is a peaceful resolution of the Israeli Arab conflict.    “We do not advocate adopting the methods of Gandhi or Martin Luther King, Jr. …  The Palestinian resistance must take on a variety of characteristics – both nonviolent and violent.” [18]

 

Adam Shapiro is hardly alone in working to destroy Israel.  Nor is he unique in supporting the targeting of Jews for murder by terrorists.  If an Arab or a non-Jewish radical activist said these things it would not, unfortunately, be sufficiently unique to be newsworthy.  If such statements in support of terrorism and of eliminating Jews did make it into a newspaper, everyone would recognize it as anti-Semitism.  Shapiro’s value as a mouthpiece for a Movement that works to destroy Israel is that because he is Jewish he can dupe some readers and perhaps even some reporters into accepting that such a view is less than racist.

 

Ora Wise is perhaps even more valuable because her resume is so much more compelling: daughter of a rabbi and a teacher of Jewish Studies at Congregation Kolot Chayeinu in Brooklyn.  The presumption of many will be that  a position taken by a Rabbi’s daughter who teaches Jewish Studies in a synagogue cannot be anti-Semitic. 

 

A long time ago it used to be possible to be anti-Zionist without being anti-Semitic.  In the nineteenth century, Zionism was an unfulfilled dream and the Jewish population of the ancient land of Israel, while substantial, was not positioned differently than were the large numbers of Jews and Christians who lived as second-class citizens throughout the Ottoman Empire.  It was respectable in those circumstances to be both a Jew and an anti-Zionist. 

 

Circumstances change.

 

With five million Jews actually living in a sovereign Jewish state, advocating the destruction of that state is anti-Semitic.   But the existence of Israel is not the only thing that changed. 

 

A century ago, Jews lived in every Arab country.   Over the course of the second half of the twentieth century, hundreds of thousands of Jews living in 2,600 year old Jewish communities were driven from their homes for fear of their lives.   The only Muslim lands where Jewish communities still exist are Morocco, Tunisia, Turkey, and Persia.   And only in Turkey can a strong argument be made that the future of the community is secure.   Jews were robbed of their property, killed, arrested, and forced to flee every other Muslim land.   In the light of this history, to call for the destruction of the Jewish State and its replacement by a Palestinian State is to call for five million Jews to be forced to flee for their lives.

 

Ora Wise calls for this and worse.   As a spokesperson for the Palestinian Solidarity Movement, an organization that condones terrorism, Wise is the mouthpiece of a Movement that endorses the murder of Jews.   Having her voice is so very useful to this movement that she is being put forward as a "media contact" for the upcoming Third National Conference of the Palestine Solidarity Movement at Ohio State.  [19]

 

The Movement recognizes Wise’s usefulness on several counts.   As an email from an ISM activist recommending Ora Wise as a speaker puts it: “She is young, female, articulate, Jewish, and very beautiful.” [20]  I have seen photos and can say that Ms. Wise is indeed a very beautiful girl. 

 

She is also an individual who seems, like Adam Shapiro, to be making a career out of alleging that as long as it is Jews who propose to ethnically cleanse the Levant of five million Jews and who endorse the use of terrorism targeted at the murder of Jews as a means to this end, such a program is not anti-Semitic.  Not racist.  Not wrong.

 

And that is a lie, even if a rabbi’s daughter says that it is true.

 

Footnotes

---