amateur ramblings

Background: On Nov 13, 2008, three members of the Zionist Freedom Alliance, including current ASUC Senator John Moghtader, stormed up several flights of stairs in Eshleman Hall to confront three Palestinian students who silently held Palestinian flags on a balcony  above a ZFA event to protest the group’s anti-Palestinian message. An altercation ensued in which the Palestinian students claim they were attacked by the ZFA members, and the ZFA members claim the opposite. UCPD recommended charges be filed against the ZFA members, but the DA did not press charges. Now the Zionist Organization of America intervenes, likely at the request of members of the  ZFA or Tikvah.

A few days ago, Morton Klein of the Zionist Organization of America (ZOA) issued a press release urging UC Berkeley Chancellor Birgeneau to address “Campus Anti-Semitism and Israel-Bashing.” The phone contact was in the 212 area code, nowhere close to Berkeley. Remember that, because it tells us much of what we need to know to see how flawed the ZOA’s press release and letter to Birgeneau (which reads like the pre-cursor to a lawsuit) are.

There are many contentious and mostly false claims made in the ZOA’s press release, but I will focus primarily on the sections related to the Nov 13 attack on Palestinian students as well as the ensuing recall election of John Moghtader, the Senator who was kicked out of the SQUELCH party, president of Tikvah, and sponsor of the ASUC bill funding the Zionist Freedom Alliance (ZFA) concert.

I will disclose, if it is not obvious already, that I believe in the victims’ narrative of what happened, that after they silently hung a Palestinian flag in protest on a balcony above a concert for the ZFA–an organization which openly advocates the “elimination” of Palestinians–three ZFA organizers, including Moghtader, ran up several flights of stairs to confront the Palestinian students on the balcony. I will concede, however, that besides people close to either “side” of this encounter, who tend to believe their friends, no third party in Berkeley has really bothered or felt confident enough to take a stand either way. That includes the Daily Californian, the Berkeley Daily Planet, Jewish News Weekly SF, the Dean of Students, Chancellor Birgeneau, and the District Attorney, all of whom agree on only one thing: that they can’t decide who to believe because the evidence consists of diametrically opposed stories coming from the attackers and the victims. Someone is lying, but nobody can decide who.

It is a wonder, then, that the Zionist Organization of America–area code 212, New York City, on the other side of the country–somehow came up with a conclusion it now dares to present as fact as it attempts to intrude into internal campus affairs. The ZOA states, as fact, that “Jews were physically assaulted at a campus hip-hop concert on November 13, 2008.” It states, as fact, that the three attackers simply “went up to the balcony to request that the SJP remove its flags” where they were “struck” by an SJP member after which they had to “defend” themselves. Then the ZOA states, as fact, “John Moghtader did not participate in the scuffle” but “reportedly broke it up.” So, Morton Klein, of the NYC area, somehow managed to conclude 3,000 miles away from the scene what actually happened on the night of November 13, 2008, while every major 3rd party right here in Berkeley, CA remains on the sidelines. Phenomenal!

How did Klein and the ZOA come to this conclusion? I asked the three victims whether the ZOA had made an attempt to contact them. They said that it had not. Instead, both the letter and press release appear to be based solely on the testimony of members of Tikvah and the ZFA, perhaps only those involved in the attack, as it reads identically to Tikvah’s press release of several weeks ago. Why not interview the others, if the ZOA is genuinely concerned with getting to the bottom of this incident?

Why would the ZOA interview them? They’re Arabs and Palestinians, they’re never going to tell the truth about anything involving Jews! It sounds crazy, but that is the racist logic underlying the ZOA’s reporting strategy regarding this incident. It assumes and implies guilt of Palestinian and Arab students simply because of their backgrounds, relying exclusively on the privileged word of the members of ZFA. Indeed, that is why “Israel-bashing” is named as a synonym for “anti-Semitism” in the headline for the release, and also the reason why the letter to the Chancellor is replete with unsupported claims like “Israel is not an apartheid state” and other such apologetics for Israeli state racism and violence. Its aims are political and have little to do with civil rights or fighting racism, though it attempts to masquerade itself as such.

There is a problem with the ZOA’s story though. It neglects a few important facts that break its story to pieces. The way the ZOA tells it, the so-called “scuffle” involves nobody except one Palestinian man and two defenseless Jewish men who confronted the Palestinian after he forced them, against their will, to violence. We forget that there was another Jewish man on the balcony–John Moghtader–and two more Palestinian women. What were they doing? According to the ZOA, Moghtader was doing nothing, he “did not participate.” Except, somewhere in the middle of not participating, he also magically “broke up the fight.” How did he do that? Did he plea for peace from the sidelines? Did he manage to calm the fighters with a melody on a harmonica he happened to have on him? Did he touch anyone? What exactly did he do to “break up the fight” besides supposedly “not participating?” The ZOA doesn’t explain this paradox, even as it claims that the three men were victimized by physical assault and defamation because of their Jewish background.

Neither does the ZOA tell us anything about the two Palestinian women. We are led to believe either that they were not there or that their presence was insignificant. Maybe they were not involved and thus do not deserve mention. But what if they were? How would the ZOA respond–in its framing of the story–if we were to tell it that, well, one of the Palestinian women has medical documentation showing that she was bruised and injured during the attack, despite the fact that according to the ZOA, the ZFA, Tikvah, and Moghtader, only one Palestinian man and two Jewish men, excluding Moghtader, were involved?

Knowing the ZOA and the racist attitude it has employed throughout its whole story, I would not be surprised to hear the following “fix:” well, she was hit in self-defense. We think the Palestinian man used her as a human shield. He wanted to evoke the pity of the third-party observers, so after provoking the three peaceful, innocent, and harmless Jewish gentlemen who decided to kindly request the flags be removed after running angrily up several flights of stairs, he grabbed her, put her in the way, and intentionally let her take blows so that he could show the photographs to the examiners later. Is that too farfetched, when it sounds identical to the lies coming from the Israeli government’s propaganda–equally dedicated to the same racist premises as the ZOA’s–about the 800 Palestinians it killed in Gaza this week? The ZOA is part of that propaganda machine: it is dismayed that Barack Obama has yet to endorse Israel’s war on Palestine in Gaza.

Unfortunately, as it fails in Gaza, this defense will not work in Berkeley either. It is difficult to believe that the ZOA managed to believe in its own racism so strongly that it went public with the ZFA and Tikvah’s version of the story, apparently doing little investigation of its own. If it had paused, or called the Palestinian students, it would have known the following: that one of the Palestinian women received a medical exam the day following the attack documenting her injuries; that the same Palestinian woman identified to police the one Jewish man who the ZOA says was not involved, John Moghtader, as the individual who attacked her (perhaps while he was playing his harmonica, while being “uninvolved” yet managing magically to “break up the fight”); that the police reportedly recommended that charges be filed against the attackers, including Moghtader, with enhancement of a hate crime, clearly identifying the three ZFA organizers as the attackers and the three Palestinian students as the victims; and, perhaps, most importantly, that the ZOA cannot possibly reconcile these facts with its own narrative that pretends these two Palestinian women were not even present or played no significant role, when in fact one of them was struck and injured.

None of this should come as a surprise. Much of the ZOA’s press release and letter is nothing but anti-Arab and anti-Palestinian defamation, the recycling of decades old racist Zionist myths about Arabs, their angry disposition towards violence (oh, and using human shields), and their innate anti-Semitism. Here is a short list of only a few of the ZOA’s more egregious and utterly false claims:

1. The ZOA claims that SJP students harassed Jewish students at mock checkpoints. This is false. The only students involved in these events are those members of SJP–Jewish and non-Jewish alike–who volunteer and are trained before-hand. Random students are not asked for their ID cards. Random students are not yelled at by the soldiers. Random students are not asked to show their religion or race. I wish the same could be said about the real IDF’s actions in occupied Palestine, but it can’t, because there, random students are asked to do all of those things. Only we, in our mere imitation of the IDF, interacted only with students who volunteered and were trained to participate in the event. Passersby simply witnessed this scene, unless they voluntarily chose to engage in debates with participating students.
2. The ZOA claims that members of SJP “accused Israel of starting another Holocaust” at a die-in protesting the death of 32 Palestinians including 5 children at the hands of the Israeli Air Force. Of course, the ZOA ignores those civilians, and instead describes SJP as protesting “Israel’s decision to defend its people against Kassam rockets that Palestinian Arabs have been launching into Israeli towns from Gaza.” Interestingly the ZOA calls them “Palestinian Arabs,” when in the same letter it–rightly, in my opinion–criticizes a Daily Californian article that stated of the ZFA members involved in the Nov 13 incident that “all three men [were] Jewish.”Nevertheless, to return to the original point, SJP students in fact had the decency not to call the massacre a Holocaust after several internal discussions recognizing that such rhetoric could be inflammatory. Rather, one member held a sign which quoted Israel’s Deputy Defense Minister Matan Vilnai, who said on the eve of that same massacre, that the Palestinians were “bringing upon themselves a bigger shoah [holocaust].” Nobody could have confused this because SJP members repeatedly emphasized on a mepaphone the fact that Vilnai threatened a holocaust on the Palestinians, and that it was that very threat which we were protesting. It appears that whether or not members of SJP actually engaged in the accused behavior, they can be condemned. But the ZOA did not condemn Minister Vilnai when he engaged in the same behavior. More racist double standards?
3. The ZOA claims that “a male SJP member physically pushed a female Jewish student holding [a] sign” at the same die-in. If there is such a claim, it has never been reported, and I am not familiar with it. Nor has any member of SJP ever heard anything about this claim. It may also be a safe bet to say that no such report is on file at the UCPD or even with the Office of Student Conduct. In any case it is outrageous and cannot be let alone to stand without question and investigation.
4. The ZOA claims that “some SJP members made anti-Semitic comments such as, ‘The Jews are the chosen people, they don’t care about anyone else, etc.’” This claim is also false. In fact, the individual who made this comment was not a member of SJP or even a student. He was one of the widely-recognized hecklers regularly on Sproul Plaza insulting everyone who passes by. For political gain, the ZOA defames Arabs, Palestinians, and members of SJP on campus with false claims, implying that if there is anti-Semitism on campus, that Arabs and Palestinians are responsible for it. In this case, no member of SJP was responsible for the remarks in question. We would have actively condemned it.

Those are only four of the ZOA’s many false claims regarding SJP and its activities on campus. There are too many to count. While the ZOA is generous with its deceptions, it ultimately proves only its own ignorance about the incidents it cites, basing its entire publicity stunt on the erroneous and unverified testimony of students who had a grudge against SJP before any of the alleged incidents had even occurred. The manipulative behavior of those informant individuals has already been well documented, as this is not the first ruse they have coordinated.

Importantly, it also appears that the ZOA issued its statement without consulting with the wider Jewish community at Cal. Not a single prominent Jewish or pro-Israel organization on or around campus is cited in the report, except for anonymous members of Tikvah and the ZFA. Its disconnect from our campus is obvious in the way it defends Tikvah and the Zionist Freedom Alliance, which have not only ostracized themselves from our campus as a whole, but also from the Jewish community. To highlight this point, I should note that the Jewish Student Union ended its affiliation with Tikvah months ago after placing it on probation. I should also note that members of the Israel Action Committee–a pro-Israel organization I rarely see eye-to-eye with–blame the same members of Tikvah that the ZOA seeks to defend as responsible for creating “a divisive and destructive environment for the Jewish community and campus at large,”  for making “radical and blatantly racist” statements, and for raising the “level of concern for the safety of students on this campus.” The more one digs into the situation at Berkeley, the more it seems like the ZOA’s claims are actually completely opposite to reality.

Given the now apparent falsity of its claims, will the ZOA send an apology to SJP for its lies or intervene on behalf of our civil rights? Or–back to that apartheid logic again–is it not a problem when Arabs and Palestinians are accosted, injured, defamed, and intimidated on campus?

Likely not. From Morton Klein’s point of view, maybe I’m being a little too uppity for pointing all this out. Maybe Morton and the ZOA, like the ZFA spokesperson Yehuda HaKohen, think we need to be “put in our place.” We’d be much happier if they just stayed in theirs: off of our campus, and in their offices in New York.