NJ Anti-Zionist Minyan: Reject IHRA and Attempt to Dictate an End to First Amendment Protected Free Speech at Rutgers University
Editor’s Note: The following statement has been provided by the NJ Anti-Zionist Minyan group in response to attempts by members of RUSA to promote an apparent false definition that fraudulently suggests antisemitism to include opposition to Israel and its policies, including genocide. Please read and share and support the efforts of NJ Anti-Zionist Minyan to protect the free speech of Rutgers students by opposing a fascist fictional conflation definition of anti-Semitism, not based upon the faith of Judaism but based upon loyalty to Israel.
Zionist organizations at Rutgers are trying to ban Anti-Zionist speech by labeling it as antisemitic. But you can stop them!
The problem with the IHRA definition of antisemitism
The problem is simple. The State of Israel does not represent Jewish self-determination. Criticism of Israel should not be repressed, but encouraged, just like criticism of any colonial power should be.
Israel was founded on stolen Palestinian land that was seized through violent means starting in the 19th century and culminating in the Nakba in 1948. This unceasing violence includes forced expulsion, ghettoization, and the murderous genocide of Palestinian people that has reached new levels of cruelty in the past year.
RUSA is pushing a bill that will suppress pro-Palestine activists’ outcry against the genocide. With this bill criticisms of Israel’s actions are labelled as “denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination”.
This is an outrageous claim that we as Anti-Zionist Jews refuse to allow to become normalized.
The IHRA definition is not meant to protect Jews
Institutions do not adopt the IHRA definition of antisemitism because they want to protect Jews. Instead, they are distorting a legal process meant to protect marginalized groups from hate speech to silence all criticism of Zionism.
Our organization of Anti-Zionist Jews is proof of this. The language we use to criticize the actions of the genocidal Zionist government would be in violation of the RUSA bill:
BE IT FURTHER RESOLVED, upon passage of this resolution, all members of RUSA commit to fighting all forms of antisemitism, anti-Zionism, and anti-Israeli racism on campus;
It is an embarrassment that RUSA representatives would be so foolish to construct their bill claiming to counteract antisemitism which does not protect ALL Jews including those who take a stand against genocide.
If Jews are not allowed to take a stand against Zionist Israeli policy, then who can? This bill was drafted to protect only the Zionist Jews.
Why are Zionists pushing this bill now?
In April 2024, Rutgers became the first school in the United States to adopt a comprehensive definition of anti-Palestinian racism thanks to our movement’s tireless organizing.
Zionists refute that the Rutgers community coalescing to affirm the dignity of Palestinian students is an act of solidarity with students who are victims of hate. Choosing to see this act of unity as an attack on their bigoted ideology. They accuse RUSA of having a “double-standard” for Jews and Israelis. This senseless reaction is indicative of Zionist philosophy.
On 10/8/24, Students Supporting Israel (SSI), Hillel, and Chabad invited an extremely Islamophobic speaker and Mossad asset, Mosab Hassan Yousef, to speak on campus. AZM participated in a counter-demonstration. We were successful in proving Rutgers did not welcome a hateful figure such as Yousef, and the event cancelled by the organizers. Additionally, RUSA passed a bill condemning SSI’s actions.
In an embarrassing, fragile, and angry reaction, Zionists have proposed a bill which seeks to redefine antisemitism to use it as a guise to call for more policing on campus and subjecting “administrators, faculty, staff, RAs, and RUSA members” to ideological “sensitivity training”
There is no such thing as Anti-Israeli racism.
Racism against a group of people can only exist when there are malicious structural forces, such as in government and commerce, that prevent the advancement of that group’s success and autonomy. Black communities argue that anti-white racism is impossible, because white people are structurally advantaged in all ways.
Israel was established by Zionists who thought that Jews were fundamentally superior to the indigenous Palestinians. Every lever of power in Israel is made for only Jewish-Israelis to access.
Israel has enough political capital thanks to its patron, the US, to ignore the orders of the UN and ICC which have both labelled its actions as being against international law. Israel is so ingrained in the infrastructure of neoliberal global politics that the international governing bodies that it is essentially above the law. This seeps into media coverage of Israel in America which is constantly inventing excuses to justify its war crimes.
Conflating Israelis with groups that are oppressed by racism when they receive every advantage thanks to these same institutions they claim they are victims of is a distortion of the truth.
Debunking the “Jewish indigeneity” argument
“Indigeneity” (to be indigenous) describes the relationship between a settler-colonized people and their land. It refers to the various peoples who lived on a land before colonizers arrived and occupied the land. Indigeneity requires a cultural connection between the people and their land as well as a generational maintaining of these connections.
Zionism is a political ideology that calls for a Jewish state within Palestine, with a Jewish majority population. Theodore Herzl, “father of zionism”, drafted a letter to Cecil Rhodes, founder of the colonial project of Rhodesia, asking for his assistance in creating the state of Israel. In that letter he explicitly describes Zionism as “something colonial” akin to Rhodes’s endeavors in Africa. In other writings, he said Palestinian resistance should be expected since it follows the pattern of natives resisting colonial rule.
Although there were always Palestinian Jews they were a minority. To engineer a Jewish majority, inflating the Jewish population with settlers was the only option. This process erased Palestinian history, culture, and presence by having Jewish settlers “replace” the indigenous Palestinians.
It is antisemitic to conflate Judaism and Zionism
Part of antisemitic rhetoric is referring to Jews as a single monolith of culture and ideology. This ignores our people’s rich and diverse cultural and historical heritage that spans the entire planet. Not all Jews are Zionists today and there was never a point in time where that was the case.
One of Zionism’s goals is to amalgamate the Jewish people regardless of where they reside under one mono-culture that is united under the Israeli banner. This is not freedom for the Jewish people but fascism.
This is proven by Israels’ oppression of Jews that do not fit the Ashkenazi mold. In the case of Arab Jews that immigrated after they were expelled from their native lands after Israel’s “War of Independence” They were forced to emigrate to Israel and accept a subordinate position to white Jews.
Arab Jews were often forced into less desirable housing in the desert and or forced into crowded refugee camps “ma’abarot”, while Ashkenazi immigrants received far preferable treatment.
Even Zionists compare their ideology to fascism
IHRA says that any comparison of Zionist philosophy, and by extension the policies of Israel’s government to oppressive regimes is antisemitic. This ignores Israel’s most past leaders who have made the comparison themselves.
Golda Meir, born in 1898, became Israel’s fourth Prime Minister from 1969-1974. She visited Haifa, a thriving Palestinian port city, in 1948 and when witnessing the results of the Nakba had this to say:
“It is a dreadful thing to see the dead city. Next to the port I found children, women, the old, waiting for a way to leave. I entered the houses, there were houses where the coffee and pita bread were left on the table, and I could not avoid [thinking] that this, indeed, had been the picture in many Jewish towns [i.e., in Europe, during World War II]”
This was said by her when witnessing the aftermath of the Nakba and only three years after the end of WWII, when the horrors of the Holocaust had only recently been uncovered. After 76 years of additional conquest and genocide by the Zionist entity we have every right to compare Israel’s atrocities to others committed in the past.
Zionists are not against racism. This bill is racist.
“All Zionists are racist” and “Israel is a racist state” are simply true statements. According to common sense, and United Nations Resolution 3379, Zionism is a form of racism. This is easily
demonstrated in any conversation with a zionist, as well as in this bill itself.
WHEREAS, on April 4, 2024, RUSA hosted a town hall meeting with President Holloway which resulted in a mob of antisemitic, anti-Zionist, and anti-Israeli individuals violently taking over the event causing President Holloway to be escorted by Rutgers police and the Jewish students in attendance asking to be escorted out of the building, and some of the hateful rhetoric heard at the townhall included the following: “All Zionists are racist,” “Israel is a racist state,” “Settlers settlers go back home, Palestine is ours alone”;
Students who confronted President Holloway for his dehumanization of Palestinians during one of his only public appearances on campus last spring are referred to as a “mob” which is racially coded language. They falsely called our disruption “violent” when we did not hurt anyone. They mean to say that Muslims, Arabs, Palestinians, and all Anti-Zionists are inherently violent. It’s the single most widespread racist trope.
When discussing, really attempting to smear, the First Intifada, only the ~200 Israeli deaths are mentioned. During that uprising, the IOF murdered more than 1,600 Palestinians. The Intifada did not happen in a bubble. It was a result of 20 years of illegal military occupation and settler colonialism in the Gaza Strip and West Bank after the Naksa.
Right-wing antisemitism is an actual problem.
Here is a flyer for a Turning Point USA event hosted at Rutgers in 2022. The University refused to punish TPUSA for their mass publication of an antisemitic cartoon.
