Calling for Respect, Freedom, and Security for All Is Not Antisemitic

“Daughters of Jerusalem, do not weep for me, however weep for yourselves and for your kids.”(Luke 23:28

Last April, while classes were still in session, I was all of a sudden contacted us to an immediate conference with Dean Doug Elmendorf at the Harvard Kennedy School, where I have actually been teaching management, arranging, and action for the last 30 years. When he informed me I was to be examined on charges of antisemitism, I was shocked. When he made it clear this was not a bad joke, awe paved the way to anger. For years, I have actually taught big, popular courses at the school, challenging my trainees to discover with one another by engaging hard concerns of worths, identity, threat, nerve, and controversial politics of all kinds. It is extreme and fulfilling mentor. And in my deal with the ground with teachers and organizers in Israel, Palestine, Jordan, and somewhere else over the last 25 years, this charge had actually never ever come my method. In my arranging years in the 1960s and ’70s in Mississippi and rural California, I was consistently called out as a Jew Communist outside agitatorNow, I was being examined at the Kennedy School? As an antisemite?!

My life has actually been deeply rooted in Jewish worths and customs. My dad was a conservative rabbi; my mom, an instructor, an active civil liberties supporter. Their moms and dads had actually immigrated from Eastern Europe in the 1900s, driven by the pogroms. My excellent uncle was killed in Auschwitz throughout World War II. Maturing, I enjoyed the informing of the Exodus story at the yearly Passover Seder: the strenuous journey of ancient Israelites from slavery in Egypt in a look for flexibility in a land of pledge. Challenged to be informed as a kid that I was a servant in Egypt, I lastly determined that this story was not of the past however today. Each generation needed to choose: Who are you with? Pharaoh’s warriors attempting to return individuals to slavery? Or individuals attempting to break totally free? Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. explained the civil liberties motion as just the most recent chapter in the informing of that tale.

At 20, my understanding of what this Jewish custom needed moved me to leave of Harvard College, where I was an undergraduate, to deal with the brave young SNCC organizers in Mississippi, combating to win regard, security, and liberty for their individuals, the Black neighborhood. 2 years later on I signed up with Cesar Chavez, arranging a farm employees union, battling to win regard, security, and liberty for his individuals, for the many part Mexican immigrants. Along the method, I discovered my own calling, that is, dealing with individuals to establish their management, arrange their neighborhoods, and create the ethical, political and financial power to form a world in which regard, security, and liberty was the great deal of the numerous, not the couple of: the guarantee of democracy. After 28 years of arranging, I went back to Harvard to deal with a much deeper understanding of this work, this calling. At the age of 49, I completed my senior year, then made an MPA at the Kennedy School and a PhD in sociology. To my surprise, I found out another method to honor this calling even more by taking part in a pedagogical discussion with the increasing generation– a lot of whom are having a hard time to revitalize, recover, and restore this democratic guarantee, in their own time, in their own world, and in their own method. That has actually been my work for the last 30 years. I likewise discovered I might provide continual assistance to my trainees in the continuous advancement of their own management in their practice, neighborhoods, and companies well beyond their official graduations.

This was the world in which I was charged with antisemitism. That term, 127 trainees from 30 nations had actually registered in my spring “People, Power and Change” class. In this class trainees interact to form values-based management groups, deal with a neighborhood on behalf of a shared function, and plan how this neighborhood can turn its resources into power it requires to attain objectives, lined up with their shared function. That term our trainees introduced 27 such management groups.

Among the groups included 3 Israeli experts at midpoints in their professions– among whom was a worldwide spokesperson for the Israel Defense Forces, connected to the prime minister’s workplace. These trainees mentioned that their function was to arrange Israelis “structure on a shared principles of Israel as a liberal-Jewish democracy.” I asked to think about whether the principle of a “Jewish democracy” is a contradiction in terms and whether this framing of their function would be handy or damaging to the task’s objective of bringing individuals into an arranging motion. A Jewish state is something. A democratic state is another. A state that restricts complete citizenship to a particular ethno-religious group, basically a racial test, rejects the omitted from that ethno-religious group the equality of voice that provides democracy its authenticity.

As a useful matter, the pedagogical objective in this big course, complete of abundant racial, nationwide, and cultural variety, was to make it possible for every trainee to find out to arrange. The function of the course was not to discuss Israel/Palestine. A project specified by these 3 trainees as a project to promote Israel as a “Jewish democracy” was inflammatory, as shown by a strong unfavorable response lots of trainees revealed to the mentor personnel after these 3 trainees very first provided this framing of their task. The trainees would be smarter, I argued, to reframe their group’s declaration of function. They declined my recommendation, keeping their declaration as initially prepared. The trainees were not penalized or disciplined in any method for that option, nor suffered any scholastic effects, and the class carried on. From that point on, to promote the knowing of the whole class, our mentor group did its finest to moderate the responses of trainees who were, in reality, angered by the trio’s declaration, and to avoid the class from degenerating into a dispute over the scenario in Israel and Palestine.

After the course ended, the 3 trainees took their complaint to the Brandeis Center, a conservative pro-Israel legal advocacy company (inapplicable with Brandeis University). Submitting an official claim with the Harvard General Counsel, their legal representatives argued that by having a discussion with them about their operate in the class, where I pressed back on their meaning of the state of Israel, was to victimize them based upon their identity as Jews and Israelis. Instead of follow the Kennedy School’s composed policy for resolving complaints with professors, the school developed an advertisement hoc procedure, working with a private investigator who performed a query into the accusations. I was not provided the chance to talk about the matter with skilled associates at any phase, and I had no voice in selecting the private investigator and no right to legal counsel at the same time. No professors were associated with making the evaluation of whether my pedagogical options were proper. The dean functioned as grand jury, district attorney, detective, and judge. The outcome was a finding (which I absolutely decline) that I had actually victimized these 3 Israeli trainees based upon their identity as Jews and Israelis by asking to alter how they framed their arranging job.

That was not the end of it. After October 7, the Brandeis Center signed up with others in a project weaponizing antisemitism. The methods are extremely comparable to those utilized by Senator Joseph McCarthy in the 1950s, just in his case it was the “Reds.” Now, groups like the Brandeis Center jumped to call anybody who slammed Israeli policies an antisemite, followed by an attack on any organization or company viewed to have actually offered such voices the area to be heard. Not pleased with convincing the dean that I had actually victimized the Israeli trainees by challenging their view of Israeli politics, the Brandeis Center released a letter it sent out to Harvard slandering me as a “civil liberties lawbreaker” and asking Harvard to advertise its private workers choices connected to my case and “openly knock” my expert engagement with these trainees.

To be a critic of the Israeli state– which I am– is not to be an antisemite. Nor is it antisemitic to support a nonviolent boycott of the Israeli state, the boycott, divestment, and sanctions project, although advocacy groups like the Brandeis Center convinced 11 states to make it unlawful. It has actually ended up that my case was just a sneak peek of a nationwide project that protected the resignation of 2 university presidents, including our own (after 6 months on the task), Claudine Gay.

The truth is that the disaster of October 7 did not start on October 7. That stunning attack on civilian Jewish males, females, and kids by Hamas can never ever be warranted. It was an intimate, individual, and particularly dreadful brand name of violence: The wrongdoers dehumanized their victims enough to cause such atrocities on them– and by doing so, lost their own humankind. In a flash, the security assured to its Jewish residents by the Israeli state was gone. The “iron wall” of the IDF had actually been broken. And for Jews, this minute of extreme vulnerability in what was to be their own “homeland” stimulated memories of centuries of pogroms, ghettos, and obviously the Shoah. Counting on walls to keep us safe exposes that in case of a breach, the worry is all still there.

And in the method a death spiral works, Israel responded by drastically intensifying the scale, speed, and depth of what has actually been a continuous dehumanization, dispossession, and decimation of Palestinian individuals– introducing a war on Gaza in which countless civilian males, ladies, and kids are being killed indiscriminately daily, and are rejected food, water, and energy to sustain life, even access to treatment. These scaries likewise revitalize the injuries of Palestinians, for whom the attack on Gaza is just the most recent chapter in the story of a 76-year-old battle.

The task of Palestine as a Jewish “homeland” started in late-19-century Europe as an option to the “Jewish issue.” A liturgical yearning for a go back to Jerusalem overlapped with nationalist beliefs before and after World War I that “an individuals without a land” might not truly be an individuals. The claim was that Palestine might become this land due to the fact that it was “a land without an individuals.” Other than it wasn’t. And when an individuals without a land seeks its own regard, security, and flexibility by taking that land from another individuals who desire the exact same thing, it can just do so by coercive force– by contacting the power of a state to control those it wants to eliminate, even remove them. My precious story of the Jewish individuals– the Exodus– states how individuals had a hard time to break bonds of slavery in look for a land of pledge in which they might deal with regard, security, and flexibility. And in making that story of one individuals’s freedom real, Palestine was taken by the “individuals without a land” by force.

But does it need to be in this manner?

The surprise– and even wonder– is that when the Jewish individuals lost their land, state, and liberty to Rome in 136 CE, they did not lose themselves as an individuals. Regardless of 2,000 years of roaming, organized antisemitism, ghettos, and pogroms, this “individuals without a land” endured, and even, sometimes grew. Just in the last century, before and after World War I, throughout the separation of the Ottoman, Austrian, and German empires, did a more comprehensive belief settle that a “individuals without a land”– and without a state– might not be an individuals, not benefit regard, not reside in security, and never ever take pleasure in flexibility. It was just after another individuals hungering not just for more land however for the real elimination of the Jewish individuals– genuine antisemitism– drove the genocide of 6 million Jews, and at the exact same time killed some 8 million Poles, Russians, Roma, and others, that a relentless seriousness connected to the claim that no individuals can make it through, much less grow, without a land, a state, of their own. For the enduring Jews, this was to be the state of Israel.

Palestine was not a land without an individuals. It needed to be taken by force, held by force, and hung on to with ever higher force. That procedure got underway in 1917 with the assistance of the British occupiers; was combined in 1947 with the Nakba; once again in 1967 with profession of the Sinai, the Golan Heights, the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, and East Jerusalem; and once again in 2023. The Israeli federal government made it through as a state– even grew– however at the expenditure of Palestinian individuals whose land, security, and flexibility it continues to take. Given that 1974, completely 700,000 males, females and kids have actually been eliminated to end up being roaming refugees, a paradoxical echo of the Jewish experience of 136 CE. Those who might stay in the land needed to accept a second-class status, likewise an echo of Jewish experience. And those who resided in the lands recently taken in 1967 were restricted to robustly built ghettos in the West Bank and in Gaza as a well-articulated apartheid program took shape. And in spite of UN resolutions, demonstrations, intifadas, and settlements, the arrive on which Palestinian individuals might really live just kept diminishing.

Earlier or later on those rejected flexibility will discover methods to make their voices heard. In the words of the American poet, Langston Hughes, who in 1951, was assessing the state of his own Black neighborhood, composed:

What occurs to a dream delayed?

Does it dry up
Like a raisin in the sun?

Or fester like an aching–
And after that run?

Does it stink like rotten meat?
Or crust and sugar over–
like a syrupy sweet?

Perhaps it simply droops
like a heavy load.

Or does it blow up?

This brings us to October 7. Due to the fact that of this history, mainly unacknowledged in the West, it is not unexpected that in much of the Arab world the Hamas attack was experienced less as the homicidal occasion it was, than as an effective– practically incredible– attack on the invalid power of the Israeli state, embarrassment of its military, and a remediation of the Palestinian cause to the world program regardless of the last 20 years of settlements, the last 56 years of profession, and the last 76 years of Nakba.

And much to the surprise of Western powers, worldwide assistance for the Palestinian cause has actually emerged, amongst youths, individuals who understand racial injustice in their own lands, and individuals who wish to hold their own federal governments accountable not just for failure to support for Palestinian cause however likewise for actively opposing it, particularly in the United States. As assistance for the Palestinian cause grew, so did ethical and political criticism of the Israeli state. In reaction, pro-Israel advocacy groups, like the Brandeis Center, strongly redefined any review of Israel or assistance for Palestinians as prima facie proof of antisemitism. Antisemitism is and has actually been genuine. This project worked by deflecting attention from the decimation of the Palestinian individuals to focus on discrimination versus Jewish individuals in the United States. The redefining of genuine political criticism as antisemitism has actually developed a domestic witch hunt in which every critic of the Israeli state gets identified an antisemite, an experience to which I can testify. And yet criticism of Palestinian individuals or the pro-Palestine motion is not considered as Islamophobic; those who make anti-Palestinian declarations aren’t disciplined at work or transported before Congress for public shaming.

Why do I review the Israeli state? My commitment to review the Israeli state originates from my own Jewish custom, a custom that needed to protect itself from real antisemitism. Till the early 2000s, my arranging, mentor, and knowing had actually remained in North America. I initially went to Israel in 1981 with fellow organizer Jessica Govea as a visitor of the Histadrut, the Israeli labor federation, and representing Cesar Chavez and the United Farm Workers. While personally deeply relocating lots of methods, consisting of finding household I had not understood existed, this journey likewise raised lots of concerns. The vans then utilized to carry Palestinian employees without any right to arrange to tasks in Israel corresponded the vans utilized to transfer Mexican employees without any right to arrange to tasks in the United States. We demanded a check out to the occupied West Bank, ultimately supplied by a noticeably armed taxi driver. We likewise required a conference with the Palestinian Israelis who were associated with farming cooperatives south of Haifa. A clear line in between those with rights and those without them was painfully apparent.

Later on, in the early 2000s, now teaching at Harvard, I was welcomed to go to Israel two times. The very first was to accompany Harvard Hillel Director Bernie Steinberg on his yearly, 10-day “Netivot” (paths of knowing) check outs with some 20 undergrads. I was likewise welcomed by the Harvard Israel Wexner Fellows to help with development of an association to sustain the neighborhood created throughout their time at Harvard. Because 1989, the Wexner Foundation has actually sponsored some 10 Israeli civil service experts and their households, as they make an MC-MPA degree at the Harvard Kennedy School. (On October 17, 2023, the Foundation canceled the 34-year-old program in reaction to Harvard University’s response to October 7.) This developed into a two-and-a-half year cooperation with Shatil, a progressive Israeli NGO, to release a university-based organizer training program with Jewish and Palestinian Israelis, based upon the program I had actually started here in the United States. The effort appeared so out of sync with the instructions in which the nation was going that we did not figure out how to make it work. This experience provided me a bit more insight into how Israel worked, the Palestinian world stayed all however unnoticeable to me.

It was not up until 2007 that I really started to see Palestinian individuals, their cause, and their land in a clear light. I had actually started to deal with a Palestinian mid-career trainee, Nisreen Haj Ahmad, long active in her motion. She presented me to the Israel Palestine Negotiations Project (IPNP): a law school task that registered yearly accomplices of an equivalent variety of Palestinians and Israelis associated with the settlements to come to Harvard for training– not to work out, however to discover how to work out. The objective was to boost the abilities of the mediators and to produce a backchannel interaction network that might be really useful– as long, obviously, as there were settlements. Training them in management and public story, I worked carefully with coworkers and individuals in this task, here and in the Middle East. In 2009, an associate and I checked out Jerusalem to lead what ended up being the last IPNP workshop. The settlements had actually stopped. Did IPNP.

Nisreen, now back in Amman, had actually worked as a mentor fellow because workshop. On its conclusion, she welcomed me to the West Bank, where her household lived, and started my tutorial in reality under Israeli profession. It shook me up. The Israeli state was sealing Arabs from Jews, other than at common check points, where 19-year-old Israelis with weapons policed unarmed Palestinian males, ladies, and kids, and with little or no responsibility. In Mississippi, I had actually found out how intimate contact in between the ones who had weapons, and were licensed to utilize them, and the ones without weapons, yet underwent instant violent attack, concretized words like “oppressed” and “oppressor” into an enduring life experience. There were different highways for Palestinians and Israelis and militarized hill “settlements” growing gradually in number, permanence, and weapons. We went to the long-term “short-lived” refugee camps, similar to camps in which my own nation had actually focused Japanese people throughout World War II– however those had actually lasted just 4 years. At the time I checked out these refugee camps, in 2010, some had actually lasted 85 years, considering that the Nakba in 1947. Most significantly, I fulfilled individuals, genuine individuals, human beings, with names: kids, moms, dads, other halves, spouses, and seniors, no more best than any of us, each with his or her hopes, and anguish, their own injuries and scars, their own happiness and griefs, their own minutes of guts and worry. And, like any of us, warranting regard, needing security, and yearning for flexibility– and, for lots of, sustaining the desire to combat for it.

Nisreen then welcomed me to deal with her and her associates, adjusting the practices of neighborhood arranging– establishing management, creating neighborhood, and developing power– to her world, her time, and her location: Palestinians residing in Palestine, refugees in Jordan, Lebanon, Syria and in other places, frequently making typical cause with others themselves having a hard time for regard, security, and liberty, and excited to find out.

I experienced this invite not just as a chance to contribute however likewise as a duty to my own calling and more essentially, to my identity as a Jew. I was called not just by the distance of our customs, languages, and faiths however likewise by regard for the sources of my own calling as an organizer, and by my dissatisfaction, sadness, and anger with corruption of that custom and in the very name of living it. Ever since, I have actually been an active advocate of what started as Nisreen’s cause and has actually grown to be the reason for the associates with whom she works, the management they have actually established, the projects they have actually run, and the discovering they share and are bringing alive in Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, and in other places in the Arab world. It might be hard for those in the West to comprehend, the heart that drives so much of that work is the battle of Palestinian individuals for their own regard, security, and flexibility– for their freedom. In this method I concerned see this battle as one with the earlier battles within which I had actually worked, discovered, and arranged. In this case the rejection of liberty was in the hands of the Israeli state itself, nominally dedicated to the worths with which I grew up. Unfortunately, like King David, and the kings that followed, they ended up being damaged by their own worries, their absence of responsibility, and their access to coercive force utilized in contradiction to these really worths. I might not assist however feel some duty for that.

So where do we go from here?

We can acknowledge that this is not a battle over concerns, concepts, or ideologies. It is a battle of genuine humans whose lives are being taken and who are taking lives daily and in ever higher numbers given that October 7. Individuals themselves are the concern making it something of an existential crisis.

We can acknowledge that this battle is driven by options made by genuine individuals in both neighborhoods– and in other places– a minimum of considering that 1917, with higher repercussions after 1947, and even higher effects because 1967.

We can acknowledge that power matters. On what resources does it depend? Ethical, political, financial, military? Who holds those resources? How are they utilizing them? What result does their usage have on their users? It is self-evident which individuals hold the majority of the military and financial resources. They likewise hold a prevalence of political resources. Although they as soon as had a claim to ethical resources those have actually been slipping through their fingers more and more.

We can acknowledge that this battle is based upon a misconception. When upon a time there was an individuals without a land who thought that without a land they would never ever be appreciated, safe and secure, and complimentary– they may even disappear. This was the Jewish individuals. The land was called Palestine. It was a land to which the “individuals without a land” had an unique ancient accessory. Now they might “righteously” go there and, after 2,000 years, lastly make it their homeland. This land without an individuals was a dream. The land had plenty of individuals. It was taken by force, and it needed more and more force not just to take more, however even to attempt to keep it. And the more individuals who had actually held the land withstood, the more force it required to hold. 2 individuals, each attempting to reside in regard, security, and flexibility, locked into a zero/sum battle that has actually ended up being a death battle for all.

Which’s where we appear to be today. Fourteen million individuals now reside in Palestine; 6.7 million are Jews and 7.2 million are Palestinians. (Of 14.5 million Palestinians worldwide, 3.25 reside in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, 2.5 million live– or utilized to live– in Gaza, and 1.7 million within Israel, and 7.3 million reside in diaspora, 6.5 million in other Arab nations and 0.8 million somewhere else. Of 14.7 million Jews, 6.7 million reside in Israel, 5.7 million in the United States, and 2.5 million in other places.) Neither individuals copes with the regard, security, and flexibility it had actually looked for. It is not likely the millions who have actually made their home in this land will leave willingly. Reserving dispute about the authenticity of the Israeli state, what occurs to all these individuals? There is no lack of strategies, theories, and dreams. They both likewise have significant populations in diaspora in other states without whose engagement any steady plan likewise appears not likely. The very same chooses Jewish Israelis who do acknowledge the death spiral in which their state has actually caught them, likewise discovering assistance in their diaspora to go versus the grain. Can either envisage a steady circumstance in which one can be appreciated, and the other disrespected: one can be safe, and the other, insecure; one can be complimentary, and the other without liberty?

If we are to get anywhere, we need to prevent trapping ourselves in either/or absolutes. Any claim about all Jews or all Palestinians is on the face of it an extreme rejection of the complex truth within which we live, enjoy, and work. The exact same holds true of any absolutist positions we might take.

A resolution is most likely to be resilient if individuals themselves end up being owners of their own fates, not as victims, not as victimizers, however as humans in a defend their kids, their households, and their future. “outdoors” impact might be needed to challenge the power asymmetry, a unilaterally enforced “service” is not likely to work. And challenged it needs to be. It might can be found in the type of David-like tactical development, leveraging the challenger’s strength (and conceit) versus the challenger. It might come through reliable financial and political arranging in other places, particularly in those put on which the Israeli state depends, consisting of however not restricted to the United States. It is difficult to think of any resolution in the lack of an arranged Palestinian resistance able to set in motion assistance outside along with within. Genuine security, regard, and liberty is hardly ever won by constructing wall after wall and weapon after weapon however needs rather authentic connection rooted in truth, not in dehumanizing mottos rooted in racial or ethnic nationalisms.

This is the kind vital thinking I motivated in my class last spring when I welcomed my trainees to think about an alternate viewpoint and to believe thoroughly about what a word like “democracy” suggests for the arranging craft they registered to find out. An instructor asking such concerns, is not– and need to not be cast as– an antisemite. My life time of dedication rooted in Jewish worths teaches me this fundamental fact.

It will take genuine management, with genuine authenticity in their own neighborhoods, and genuine dedication to creating a course with sufficient knowledge, empathy, and assistance to “make the most of the present when it serves,” as Shakespeare composes in Julius Caesarlest everybody “lose their endeavors.”