"When gay rights trample racial justice: Why the NYC Council should cancel its Israel junket"

QAIA's op-ed is in Mondoweiss today, just a week before NYC Councilmembers take off on their junket to Israel -- placing the Israel lobby clearly above their constituents. Lots of speculation about why they're doing it, and about how much they're squirming. This is by far not the first such junket to Israel, but it's the first time New Yorkers have really organized to say: WTF?? It won't be so easy for electeds to say yes to the JCRC next time around.
----
(Read the story on http://mondoweiss.net/2015/02/trample-justice-council to access the reference links behind the text.)

When gay rights trample racial justice: Why the NYC Council should cancel its Israel junket Activism 

By Emmaia Gelman

Recently, community groups called on New York City Councilmembers to skip an all-expenses-paid, eight-day junket to Israel. Much like the South Africa boycott, Palestinians have called on the international community to end “business as usual” that normalizes apartheid. The Councilmembers, many of whom are in the Progressive or LGBT Caucuses, are planning to violate the boycott when they travel in February.

Challenged on Israel’s racism, Councilmembers’ excuses quickly turned to gay rights. Bronx rep Ritchie Torres emailed Gay City News saying: “Which country in the Middle East is most protective of LGBT rights? In which country would I –– as an American, much less a gay one –– feel most at home? The answer to both questions is undoubtedly Israel.”

(Image: Anti-Defamation League)

Torres is gay, but the words weren’t his: they were practically verbatim from an Israel lobby group. In fact, it’s mostly right-wing (not LGBT) organizations writing the “gay rights” lines in support of Israel. By contrast, Palestinian LGBT groups say that Israel’s daily violence makes all Palestinians so unsafe that LGBT rights are not a matter for separate discussion. Arab LGBT voices assert that Israel preys on them even as it claims to support them.  New York LGBT organizations have made clear that queer justice and racial justice are inseparable, from Israel/Palestine to our own streets.

Torres’ insistence on separating them is telling. At home, he stands with #BlackLivesMatter and he’s a champion of racial justice challenging the NYPD. In Israel, he’s American and gay. There, he stands with the Jewish Community Relations Council (staunch defenders of Muslim surveillance and “brothers and sisters in blue”) – and a State of Israel where rights are allocated, and lives valued, according to race. The JCRC are defenders of a state that segregates housing, buses, citizenship, and indeed gay rights. Still more perverse: Israel’s iron-fisted policing, field-tested on Palestinians and Israeli dissenters, have shaped the NYPD’s approach to New Yorkers as a “human terrain” of threat levels.

To improve Israel’s image, lobbyists now tout Israel’s LGBT “tolerance” as often as they conjure anti-Semitism. In New York, the JCRC uses gay rights rhetoric, and political leverage over LGBT elected officials, to clamp down on LGBT criticism of Israel. In 2011, Palestine rights groups were meeting at the LGBT Community Center. Israel lobbyists, including the JCRC, weighed in with elected officials who pushed the Center to ban discussion of Palestine. When the ban prevented lesbian author Sarah Schulman from discussing her book, LGBT communities voiced outrage – and the situation was again managed by the JCRC. Gay City News found emails in which the JCRC approved LGBT officials’ new position: they could endorse lifting the ban while reiterating support for Israel as a matter of gay rights. The Center’s statement lifting the ban, and officials’ statement in support, were released within an hour of JCRC approval.

The JCRC has managed Councilmembers’ dealings with constituents on other occasions. In 2013 Councilmembers attacked Brooklyn College for hosting discussion of the Palestinian call for BDS. The JCRC appears to have vetted Councilmembers’ letter as it had before. (The letter illegally threatened to pull CUNY funding.) A decade earlier, a Jewish justice group was honoring the parents of an activist for Palestinian rights, and four elected officials were on the host committee. Working with the American Jewish Congress, the JCRC called Councilmember Christine Quinn, who quickly quit the host committee and pledged to “boycott” along with Councilmember Gale Brewer. The other officials also dropped out. All had been longtime supporters of the justice group. [NY Sun, “Synagogue Honoring PLO Supporter” 5/30/03] Later, Quinn characterized the JCRC as “keeping us on a daily basis in New York City focused and united in our support of Israel.”

The police murders of Michael Brown, Eric Garner, and an alarming roster of Black people of all genders and ages, have brought racial justice to center stage. Also, public support for Israel has crumbled after last summer’s war on Gaza, and is falling further as Palestinians now freeze to death in demolished homes. It’s to be expected that the JCRC cultivates officials in communities of color and LGBT communities, using them to repaint Israel’s liberal veneer. For the first time, though, New Yorkers are resisting the JCRC’s demands. It may take courage to resist the politically powerful Israel lobby. But ignoring Israeli apartheid is a dangerous game. Public officials who were slow to join the call for South African divestment are still tarred with that failure. Those who refuse to recognize Israeli apartheid should fear the same fate.

Palestinian LGBT voices are not hard to hear, nor are New York’s voices for racial justice. Instead, City Hall seems to be inviting American Israel lobbyists to tell LGBT people of color in the Middle East what’s good for them, and then repeating their words. We’re left to wonder what the JCRC has whispered in the ears of Progressive and LGBT Caucus members to make them stray so far from their principles – and their voters.

Read more »

New Yorkers ask City Councilmembers to skip racist Israel junket

QAIA joins with the 65+ New York City community groups calling on our elected officials -- many of whom are in the LGBT and Progressive Caucuses of the NYC Council -- to skip a trip to Israel. Below is the text of the letter.

The 9-day junket (!) is paid for and organized by the Jewish Community Relations Council and the United Jewish Appeal. NYC Councilmembers who are planning to go on the Feb. 15 junket are: City Council Speaker Melissa Mark-Viverito and Members Mark Treyger, Brad Lander, Antonio Reynoso, David Greenfield, Rafael Espinal, Darlene Mealy, Mark Levine, Helen Rosenthal, Corey Johnson, Ritchie Torres, Andrew Cohen, Donovan Richards, Eric Ulrich, and James Van Bramer.

------
OPEN LETTER 

As a diverse coalition of concerned New Yorkers and grassroots social justice groups, we urge you to exercise the responsibility entrusted to you as elected officials by declining to accept an all-expenses-paid trip to Israel, scheduled for February 2015 and sponsored by the Jewish Community Relations Council of New York and United Jewish Appeal, which inaccurately claim to speak for the Jewish community. Do not neglect your official responsibilities to our diverse city by touring an apartheid state.

In light of the 2014 massacre in Gaza that killed over 2,300 people, including over 500 children, (1) injured over 10,000 (2), and left countless others displaced and psychologically scarred (3), this trip would be an exercise in misinformation. You will not see Israel’s Apartheid Wall, four times longer and twice as high as the Berlin Wall. Nor will you traverse the labyrinth of military checkpoints that West Bank Palestinians encounter daily. You will not walk Gaza’s decimated streets to speak to residents about their murdered families, or the poverty imposed upon 1.8 million people, mostly refugees, in an open-air prison one-third the size of New York City. (4)

As New Yorkers, we recognize that the struggle for social and racial justice in our own city is deeply connected to that of the Palestinian people. Israel’s callous disregard for international human rights norms and the impunity enjoyed by Israeli police and occupation forces cannot be viewed apart from the near-total lack of accountability mirrored by the NYPD and other police forces as they target communities of color in the United States.

In recent weeks, many of us joined demonstrations to protest the killings of countless Black people by police forces across the country. Members of City Council also protested these killings. However, these gestures are wholly incompatible with participating in a private tour funded by special interests hoping to legitimize Israel’s laws discriminating against its Palestinians citizens and the violence it inflicts upon Palestinians under military occupation. To demonstrate in support of racial justice while participating in a tour of apartheid is a fundamental contradiction.

International law requires Israel to protect the civilian population in the occupied West Bank, including East Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip, yet it has repeatedly failed to do so. The world has witnessed Israel’s increasingly horrendous war crimes, from the fatal shootings of protesters in the West Bank (5) to the horrific slaughter in Gaza. Strengthening cultural, business, and educational ties to a state engaged in these ongoing transgressions is not a proper goal for our city.

The trip is especially worrisome given the NYPD’s long history of cooperation with Israeli forces, including its 2012 establishment of an office in Kfar Saba, just outside of Tel Aviv, funded with our taxes. (6) NYPD officers, including former Commissioner Ray Kelly, have joined at least 9,000 US law enforcement officials on trips to Israel. (7)

These junkets have an undeniable effect on NYPD policies. A former official described the Department’s notorious Demographics Unit, disbanded in April after outrage followed revelations of its unconstitutional surveillance of Muslim communities, as “modeled in part on how Israeli authorities operate in the West Bank.” (8)

At a time of public outrage over police brutality, participation in a delegation ignoring Israeli policies that inspired and reinforced unjust tactics of the NYPD can only aggravate New Yorkers’ concerns. Any trip in support of Israel conflicts with a concern over domestic police abuses. Finally, accepting this invitation would breach a request for solidarity from Palestinian civil society organizations, who have called for boycott of, divestment from, and sanctions against Israel until it “meets its obligation to recognize the Palestinian people’s inalienable right to self-determination and fully complies with the precepts of international law by:

1. Ending its occupation and colonization of all Arab lands and dismantling the Wall
2. Recognizing the fundamental rights of the Arab-Palestinian citizens of Israel to full equality; and
3. Respecting, protecting and promoting the rights of Palestinian refugees to return to their homes and properties as stipulated in UN resolution 194.” (9)

These demands, which have inspired a robust movement with international support, call on citizens and public officials alike to do their part in bringing comprehensive justice and peace to the region. Being part of this trip is the equivalent of crossing an international picket line. In a year when the people across the world have been inspired by the Palestinian people’s resistance to an unjust occupation, and at a moment of heightened political tension in our city, participating in an all-expense-paid vacation to a country committing war crimes enabled by United States tax dollars would be viewed by many as entirely inappropriate.

  In the spirit of the progressive values you espouse, we urge you to withdraw from this delegation. We are eager to dialogue and will follow up with your offices in the coming weeks.

Sincerely, The Undersigned Groups


SIGNERS ON THE OPEN LETTER (as of Jan. 10, 2015)

Jewish Voice for Peace - New York
Adalah-NY: The New York Campaign for the Boycott of Israel
Direct Action Frontfor Palestine
Queers Against Israeli Apartheid
Jews Say No!
Granny Peace Brigade
CUNY for Palestine
Students for Justice in Palestine Chapters: Hunter, Brooklyn College, Pace, NYU, Columbia, CUNY School of Law, College
of Staten Island, John Jay
CODEPINK NYC
Women in Black Union Square
NYC Solidarity with Palestine
We Are All Dominican
Committee for Open Discussion of Zionism
Librarians and Archivists with Palestine
New Day Church
Existence is Resistance
Queens Families Speak Out
MADRE
Center for Constitutional Rights
Palestine Solidarity Legal Support
Laborfor Palestine
International Jewish Anti-Zionist Network - New York
New York Association for Gender Rights Advocacy (NYAGRA)
Al-Awda NY: The Palestine Right to Return Coalition
New York City Labor Against the War
Boricuas for Palestine
People Power Movement
Brooklyn For Peace
Malcolm X Grassroots Movement
New Yorkers Against the Cornell-Technion Partnership (NYACT)
US Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation
VirtualBoricua.org
Trinity Lutheran Church (Brooklyn)
American Muslimsfor Palestine
Palestinian Youth Movement (PYM)
Breakaway
National Lawyers Guild, NYC Chapter
North Manhattan Neighbors for Peace
West-Park Presbyterian Church
Act Now to Stop War and End Racism (ANSWER) Coalition
International Socialist Organization (ISO)
Committee Against Anti-Asian Violence (CAAAV)/Organizing Asian Communities
Free Mumia Abu-Jamal Coalition (NYC)
Campaign to End the New Jim Crow-NY
Freedom Road Socialist Organization, NY/NJ District
(continued)St. Michael's Task Force on Israel Palestine
Park Slope Food Coop Members for BDS
Irish Queers
Rising Tide NYC
Critical Resistance, NYC Chapter
YaYa Network
Washington Heights Women In Black
Queens Peace Council
War Resisters League, National Office
Justice Committee

Notes:
1) Ma’an News Agency | maannews.net/eng/ViewDetails.aspx?ID=751290
2) UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs | ochaopt.org/documents/ocha_opt_sitrep_04_09_2014.pdf
3) Washington Post | wapo.st/1uq7cHK
4) British Broadcasting Company - Profile: Gaza Strip | bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-19975211
5) Amnesty International | amnesty.org/en/news/trigger-happy-israeli-army-and-police-use-reckless-force-west-bank-2014-02-27
6) Al Monitor | al-monitor.com/pulse/security/01/09/nypd-kfar-saba-branch-new-york-p.html
7) Al-Akhbar | al-akhbar.com/content/occupation-%E2%80%9Coccupy%E2%80%9D-israelification-american-domestic-security
8) Associated Press | ap.org/Content/AP-In-The-News/2011/With-CIA-help-NYPD-moves-covertly-in-Muslim-areas
9) BDS National Committee | bdsmovement.net/call

Read more »

Dueling op-eds: NY Post & NY Daily News

Can it be that that the doomed, wrongheaded effort to repress speech at a City University has ended decades of blackout on public debate on BDS, queers, silencing criticism of Israel and EVERYTHING!!!? Today, Omar Barghouti talks gentle sense in the Daily News! Alan Dershowitz spews victimology and hate (targeting CUNY again, and queers too) in the NY Post! The floor is open, people.

Barghouti:

"Our opponents call us “Jew haters.” That is a lie and a slander. BDS advocates equal rights for all and consistently opposes all forms of racism, including anti-Semitism. In fact, many progressive Jewish activists, intellectuals, students, feminists and others participate in and sometimes lead BDS campaigns in Western countries. The increasing impact of Israeli supporters of BDS has led the Knesset to pass a draconian anti-boycott law banning advocacy of any boycott against Israel or its complicit institutions..."

"...Building on its global ascendance, the BDS movement is spreading across the U.S., especially on campuses and in churches. Multi-million-dollar campaigns by Israel’s foreign ministry to counter BDS by “rebranding” through art, science and cynically using LGBT rights to “pinkwash” Israel’s denial of basic Palestinian rights have failed to stem the tide."

Dershowitz:

"Are the media supposed to be so impressed with Israel’s pro-gay policies that they no longer cover the Palestinian issue? Well, that certainly hasn’t worked.Are gays around the world supposed to feel so indebted to Israel that they no longer criticize the Jewish nation? That surely hasn’t worked, either — witness the increasingly rabid anti-Israel advocacy by some radical gay groups..." 

"...But to the anti-Semite, it doesn’t matter how Jews manage their supposed manipulations. The anti-Semite just knows that there’s something sinister at work if Jews do anything positive. The core characteristic of anti-Semitism is the certainty that everything the Jews do is wrong, and everything that’s wrong is done by the Jews."

Read more »

This is wild: Center "lifts moratorium", NYC electeds bid to reimpose it.

Check out this announcement from the NYC LGBT Center, posted about 15 minutes ago... and the racist, repressive press release from NYC electeds (below), posted about four nanoseconds later.

STATEMENT ON CENTER SPACE USE POLICY FROM GLENNDA TESTONE, EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR, AND THE BOARD OF DIRECTORS OF THE LESBIAN, GAY, BISEXUAL & TRANSGENDER COMMUNITY CENTER

February 15, 2013 – In 2011 the Center was thrust into a controversy involving the Israeli/Palestinian conflict about which we took no position, but were forced to expend significant resources to address. This controversy placed substantial strains on management resources and front line staff, and created an environment that interfered with our ability to assist those in our community who needed our services. In response, we imposed a moratorium on renting space to groups that organize on all sides of this conflict, which, while itself controversial, allowed things to cool down and gave us time to rethink the Center's space use policies.

Our resulting Space Use Guidelines, Terms and Conditions will govern the use of our space going forward, and, accordingly, the moratorium is no longer in effect. The Center does not endorse the views of any groups to which it rents space. We adamantly believe in and defend free speech and the open exchange of ideas, but we deplore the rhetoric of hate and bigotry. As stated in our guidelines: "no group utilizing space at the Center shall engage in hate speech or bigotry of any kind." Therefore, all groups wishing to utilize space at the Center must agree and commit to our Pledge of Nondiscrimination and our above-described prohibition on hate speech and bigotry.

Going forward, if members of the community feel that hate speech or bigotry has occurred at the Center, they are encouraged to submit a formal complaint in writing. The Center does not have the resources to "pre-vet" all content that comes through groups that rent space, and we encourage community members themselves to help us keep our space safe through this formal process. In the coming weeks, the Center will publish the details of a formal resolution process to address space use-related complaints.

Provided applicants agree in good faith to fully comply with our guidelines, we will process current and future requests for space, including from entities who were previously declined under the moratorium. And we encourage other groups or individuals of differing viewpoints to apply to rent space as well so that all voices may be heard.

The Center must move forward and remains strongly committed to serving the needs of our community as best we can. We hope everyone will join us in good faith.

------------------------

Joint Statement by NYC Council Speaker Christine C. Quinn, NYS Assembly Member Deborah Glick, NYS Senator Brad Hoylman, and NYC Council Member Jimmy Van Bramer

Re: New LGBT Community Center Space Use Guidelines

“We support the new Space Use guidelines, terms and conditions being implemented by the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Community Center. Their decision to allow groups to have open discussion and to create a resolution process to address complaints of potential hate-related speech is the correct approach. Under the Center’s new guidelines, all parties will have access to rent space to organize around LGBT issues, and the Center will remain a safe space, where hate-related speech will not be tolerated. This will allow the Center staff and board to promote its core mission of providing health and wellbeing services to our community, in addition to providing a safe and secure forum for issues relevant to NYC’s LGBT community.

That said, we want to make abundantly clear that we categorically reject attempts by any organization to use the Center to delegitimize Israel and promote an anti-Israel agenda. We adamantly oppose any and all efforts to inappropriately inject the Center into politics that are not the core of their important mission.

We vehemently oppose the absurd accusations by some groups that Israel is engaged in so-called “pinkwashing”. We find this charge offensive and fundamentally detrimental to the global cause of LGBT equality. These accusations should be understood as just one part of the arsenal of those who seek to completely discredit the state of Israel altogether. In fact, Israel’s highly laudable record in advancing LGBT rights deserves praise, not scorn. Given the very poor record of much of the world on LGBT issues, we should be celebrating Israel's – or any country's – LGBT equality advances. We must always encourage countries with strong records of achievement for our community to be rightly and publicly proud so they may set an example for others. We continue to believe that the boycott, sanctions and divestment (BDS) movement against Israel is wrongheaded, destructive, and an obstacle to our collective hope for a peaceful two-state solution.

We applaud the Center Board and staff for taking this important step. We now hope everyone will respect the Center as a safe space for open and safe discussions. We hope the Center can move forward and serve the LGBT community as it has always done.”

Read more »

Brooklyn College BDS: Judith Butler's remarks

QAIA folks who attended the Omar Barghouti/Judith Butler event on BDS at Brooklyn College were moved and strengthened by the talk. Judith Butler's remarks are archived at The Nation magazine. They cover BDS, the illogic of decrying BDS or anti-Zionism as anti-Semitism, and academic freedom.

http://www.thenation.com/article/172752/judith-butlers-remarks-brooklyn-college-bds


"...When Zionism becomes co-extensive with Jewishness, Jewishness is pitted against the diversity that defines democracy, and if I may say so, betrays one of the most important ethical dimensions of the diasporic Jewish tradition, namely, the obligation of co-habitation with those different from ourselves. Indeed, such a conflation denies the Jewish role in broad alliances in the historical struggle for social and political justice in unions, political demands for free speech, in socialist communities, in the resistance movement in World War II, in peace activism, the Civil Rights movement and the struggle against apartheid in South Africa. It also demeans the important struggles in which Jews and Palestinians work together to stop the wall, to rebuild homes, to document indefinite detention, to oppose military harassment at the borders and to oppose the occupation and to imagine the plausible scenarios for the Palestinian right to return.

"The point of the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement is to withdraw funds and support from major financial and cultural institutions that support the operations of the Israeli state and its military. The withdrawal of investments from companies that actively support the military or that build on occupied lands, the refusal to buy products that are made by companies on occupied lands, the withdrawal of funds from investment accounts that support any of these activities, a message that a growing number of people in the international community will not be complicit with the occupation. For this goal to be realized, it matters that there is a difference between those who carry Israeli passports and the state of Israel, since the boycott is directed only toward the latter. BDS focuses on state agencies and corporations that build machinery designed to destroy homes, that build military materiel that targets populations, that profit from the occupation, that are situated illegally on Palestinian lands, to name a few.

"BDS does not discriminate against individuals on the basis of their national citizenship. I concede that not all versions of BDS have been consistent on this point in the past, but the present policy confirms this principle..."

Read more »

QAIA reportback from Brooklyn College

From Brad Taylor

Judith Butler and Omar Barghouti’s presentation at Brooklyn College on Thurs. night (Feb. 7) lived up to all the incredible hype that preceded it.  They were informative, engaging, appealing, constructive – as much as their full-capacity audience wanted and expected.  They were sometimes funny – Judith paused wryly in her remarks about hearing and listening, allowing the sound of the anti-BDS crowd chanting outside to punctuate her comments.

Both speakers mentioned the barrage of scurrilous charges of anti-Semitism, threats of funding attacks on Brooklyn College from public officials – the panoply of false accusations, character assassination and assaults on their intent and dignity - that they suffered in the lead-up to Thursday’s event.   And both were visibly tired and saddened by the pitch and timbre of the unfriendly and unsavory reception that some in New York had in store for them.   But, undaunted, they elucidated the objectives and strategies of the BDS movement, backgrounded the current moment in the campaign, and noted numerous very substantial recent successes of the boycott - among those, the recent endorsement of BDS from the African National Congress, a landmark development.

One thing about the evening’s discussion that I found particularly notable was the grace and generosity with which both Barghouti and Butler received questions from the audience members which were designed to challenge the strategic fairness or effectiveness of BDS.  These questions required tenacity of the questioners in the decidedly pro-BDS surround – and they were sometimes questions which were so blank, so generic that they were actually somewhat inappropriate in the setting.  Like one gentleman asked, essentially, what was the point of BDS? – when that had been the whole substance of the conversation which had been going on for two hours when he asked the question.  Omar and Judith fielded every question with respect, with generosity, and found a way to answer each one much more substantively than many would have felt that the questions merited. 

That’s, I think, the hallmark of a good spokesperson – the ability to cover a concept inclusively, in a way that belittles no-one and avoids the censorship and malice that, unfortunately, the speakers themselves encountered in Brooklyn.

Read more »

Paisley Currah on standing up to NYC's "Progressive Except Palestine" Councilmembers

Paisley Currah writes in the Chronicle of Higher Education about the furor over Brooklyn College's Poli Sci department co-sponsoring a talk on BDS.

http://chronicle.com/blogs/conversation/2013/02/05/a-melee-grows-in-brooklyn/

"...The usual suspects—New York State Assemblyman Dov Hikind, the Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz—piled on, and the rhetoric escalated. “We’re talking about the potential for a second Holocaust here,” one assemblyman told The Daily Beast. I’ve gotten hate mail and a death threat. I’ve been attacked in the media—I’m a “coward,” says Hikind; I’m an expert not on government or politics but on “transgender rights” (apparently that’s an insult), writes a conservative columnist in the New York Post.
...
"But late last week, the game changed when President Gould received two letters from elected officials. The first, from Congressman Jerrold Nadler and 18 other self-identified “progressive” legislators (including three other members of Congress and leading mayoral candidates) describes the BDS movement as “wrongheaded and destructive” and calls “for Brooklyn College’s political science department to withdraw their endorsement of this event.” The second, from Lewis Fidler, assistant majority leader of the New York City Council and nine other city councilors, is even more chilling:

'A significant portion of the funding of CUNY schools comes directly from the tax dollars of the people of the State of New York. Every year, we legislators are asked for additional funding to support programs and initiatives at these schools and we fight hard to secure those funds. Every one of those dollars given to CUNY, and Brooklyn College, means one less dollar going to some other worthy purpose. We do not believe this program is what the taxpayers of our City—many of who [sic] would feel targeted and demonized by this program—want their tax money to be spent on.'"

Read more »