Post on New Voices: Open Dialogue

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Open Dialogue at Hillel?

OP-ED, OPINION | NOVEMBER 18, 2012 BY SANDRA KORN | 1 COMMENT

Could it be that posters like this are dangerous at Harvard Hillel?
Credit: Progressive Jewish Alliance

Last week, it became painfully clear to the Harvard College Progressive Jewish Alliance (PJA) that Hillel is moving farther and farther from being “the foundation of Jewish campus life” that it claims to be.

As an affiliated group of Harvard Hillel, PJA tries to promote dialogue and discussion between Jews and Palestinians on campus and to bring progressive voices on the Israel-Palestine conflict to the Hillel community. As such, we planned an event for this Thursday, “Jewish Voices Against the Israeli Occupation,” to feature two Jewish pro-peace activists speaking about their work in non-violent anti-occupation organizing.

After originally approving the event, the executive director of Harvard Hillel, Jonah Steinberg, told us that he had been pressured by groups including the Combined Jewish Philanthropies and Hillel International to forbid us from hosting our event within Harvard Hillel. The rationale? We are co-sponsoring the event with the Harvard College Palestine Solidarity Committee (PSC), a student group that supports the 2005 call for an international boycott of, divestment from, and sanction (BDS) of Israel. They believe this is a means of pressuring it to end its occupation and halt discrimination against Palestinians. According to Hillel International’s Guidelines for Campus Israel Activities, Hillels may not host, affiliate with, or invite speakers from any groups that “as a matter of policy or practice” support BDS. In fact, the guidelines also forbid Hillels from partnering with those who do any of the following: “deny the right of Israel to exist as a Jewish and democratic state with secure and recognized borders,” “delegitimize, demonize, or apply a double standard to Israel,” or “exhibit a pattern of disruptive behavior towards campus events or guest speakers or foster an atmosphere of incivility.”  We believe these are vague guidelines that could be applied to many Jewish and Palestinian pro-peace groups.

The “Jewish Voices Against the Occupation” event, since relocated to another building, will go ahead–and will still be sponsored by both PJA and PSC. Yet removing this event from Hillel sends the message that the organized Jewish community on campus rejects cooperation with Palestinian groups. Too often, Palestinian voices are silenced from discussions about their own right to self-determination. Hillel International’s policy perpetuates this, ensuring that most on-campus Palestine groups, like Students for Justice in Palestine, can never co-sponsor with or even walk into Hillel.

We are disturbed that a conversation about non-violent organizing for peace could not happen in Hillel, nominally a campus center for Jewish life and discussion about Israel. If it truly wishes to allow students to engage critically with American and Israeli politics, Hillel International should have no policy on the political affiliation of groups, organizations, and speakers that it partners with, houses, and hosts.

As the pro-peace movement evolves, Hillel International’s narrow political restrictions are increasingly unrepresentative of the opinions of the wider American Jewish community. For example, avowed Zionist Peter Beinart advocates for a boycott of products produced in Israeli settlements in the West Bank as a means of protest against Israel’s expansionism, for he argues that such expansionism both infringes on the rights and future statehood of Palestinians and endangers Israel’s own long-term security. Hillel’s policies led Brandeis’s Hillel to reject the appeal for membership of the Brandeis chapter of Jewish Voice for Peace, because JVP advocates for divestment from companies that profit from the occupation.

On Monday, PJA sent an open letter to the Harvard Hillel community in which we noted that “we feel less welcome and included in a community that sets a political litmus test to determine which Jewish students and groups will be allowed in.” Casting all calls for boycott as essentially “anti-Semitic” and unilaterally removing them from conversation actually excludes Jewish as well as Palestinian voices from the Hillel community, and can only hamper efforts to achieve peace in Israel and Palestine.

In the coming weeks, we will be joining with pro-peace students at Hillels across the country to ask Hillel International to change its policy so that Hillel can truly be a campus center of dialogue about Israel and Palestine. No matter what our personal political views are, we know that true peace can only be achieved through open discussion, cooperation, and inclusion. Excluding Palestinian voices and pro-peace Jewish voices from Jewish campus centers is not a move towards peace. Learning from others may be.

Harvard students Emily Unger and Rachel Sandalow-Ash also served as co-authors for this op-ed.

Op-Ed from the Crimson: An Open Hillel

Check out PJA's recent op-ed in the Harvard Crimson!
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An Open Hillel

By SASHA JOHNSON-FREYD, RACHEL SANDALOW-ASH, and EMILY S. UNGER

Last week, in an attempt to save money on kosher meals, Harvard University Dining Services put up a sign outside the Hillel dining hall stating that only members and invited guests of the Jewish community should eat there. In response, Hillel’s executive director, Jonah C. Steinberg, asserted that this externally imposed restriction “creates conflict with [Hillel’s] inclusive and welcoming environment.” Indeed, it is true that the Hillel community values the Hillel dining hall as an open space for all regardless of religious affiliation.

However, while this unfortunate situation is HUDS’s fault, not Hillel’s, Harvard Hillel hasn’t exactly proven itself a welcoming space for all in the past week. In fact, Hillel International policies have actively excluded important voices from Hillel—which is deeply disturbing to us, as members of the Harvard College Progressive Jewish Alliance, a Hillel-affiliated group.

Yesterday, PJA co-sponsored an event entitled “Jewish Voices Against the Israeli Occupation” with the Harvard College Palestine Solidarity Committee. The event featured two Jewish speakers—one Israeli and one American—involved in peaceful activism opposing Israel’s settlement policy in the West Bank. The speakers discussed the relationship between their Jewish identity and their present activism, as well as ways in which students going on Birthright could encounter a more diverse array of perspectives on their trip.

Originally, PJA planned to hold this event within Harvard Hillel, believing that the center for the Jewish community on campus would be an ideal location for an event featuring Jewish speakers and dealing with a very salient topic for young Jewish Americans. However, Hillel’s leadership forced us to relocate the event, explaining that according to Hillel International’s “Guidelines for Campus Israel Activities,” Hillel will not “partner with, house, or host organizations that... support boycott of, divestment from, or sanctions…against the State of Israel,” which PSC does. This policy prevents not only PSC but also Students for Justice in Palestine, the major Palestinian group on U.S. campuses with chapters at 50 colleges and universities around the country, from ever co-sponsoring events or even speaking in Hillel buildings. While Hillel International claims to “welcome a diversity of student perspectives on Israel” and to “create an inclusive, pluralistic community,” its guidelines encourage exclusivity rather than inclusivity and conformity rather than diversity.

As progressive Jews working for peace and justice in Israel/Palestine, we believe that a Hillel policy that encourages dialogue and collaboration with Palestinian groups is an essential step on the path toward peace. If we cannot reach across the divides of ethnicity, religion, and politics on our own campuses, how can we ever expect Israeli and Palestinian politicians to do so?

Many of those who defend Hillel’s current policy claim that the boycott, divestment, and sanctions movement—or BDS for short—is anti-Semitic. However, while some who advocate for this position may be anti-Semitic, the movement as a whole is not. If Hillel allowed its members and the members of PSC to engage and work together, more Hillel students might come to understand, as we have, that PSC members support BDS not out of prejudice but as a non-violent political strategy that aims to change Israeli policies that they find unjust. While PJA does not endorse the international BDS movement—we believe that there are better ways to promote a two-state solution and the rights of both Israelis and Palestinians—the fact that we or others disagree on a political position is hardly grounds for banning that view from Hillel.

Hillel must embrace the values of open discussion in order to be truly pluralistic and serve all Jewish students. As we explained in an open letter to the Hillel community, Hillel International’s current policies exclude not only Palestinian perspectives, but also many progressive Jewish viewpoints, including a wide variety of opinions that are more moderate and mainstream within the Jewish community than the International BDS movement. For instance, Brandeis Hillel rejected an appeal for affiliation from Brandeis Jewish Voice for Peace, because the group had held an “Israeli occupation awareness week” and advocates selective divestment from companies that profit off the occupation. Prominent liberal Zionist Peter Beinart, who supports a boycott of the Israeli settlements as a strategy to pressure Israel to preserve its democratic character, could also be prevented from speaking at Hillel under these policies. Jewish student groups that support his position could be excluded from organized Jewish campus life. As progressive Jews, we do not feel comfortable in a religious and cultural community that maintains such political litmus tests.

In the coming days and weeks, we will be reaching out to students at Harvard and other colleges and universities to petition jointly Hillel International to remove these ideological requirements for affiliated groups, organizational partnership, and invited speakers. We hope that the wider Jewish community will support us as we advocate for a more open and inclusive Hillel.

Rachel J. Sandalow-Ash ’15 is a social studies concentrator in Lowell House. Sasha Johnson-Freyd ’15 is a human evolutionary biology concentrator in Pforzheimer House. Emily S. Unger ’13 is an organismic and evolutionary biology concentrator in Quincy House. They are on the board of the Harvard College Progressive Jewish Alliance.

Op-ed from The Crimson: The Illuminations of Birthright

My article about Taglit-Birthright Israel was published in The Harvard Crimson yesterday! Text below or online at The Crimson.

The Illuminations of Birthright

By SANDRA Y.L. KORN

This summer, I left North America for one of the first times in my life. On an El-Al jet surrounded by dozens of other Jewish college-aged students, I flew across multiple continents before landing in the Ben-Gurion Airport near Tel Aviv to embark on my “birthright”: an all-expenses-paid ten-day trip across Israel.

Unlike Crimson editorial writer Samuel Doniger, my compunctions about travelling to Israel were not about the safety of public buses or the loneliness of Israel’s desert terrain. Rather, I feared what I would learn on the trip: Taglit-Birthright Israel, the organization that currently sends 40,000 students and young adults per year on ten-day tours of the Holy Land, is notorious for its role in influencing the political ideology of American Jews. (After all, Birthright gets much of its funding from the right-wing Israeli government and right-wing American Jews like casino magnate and Romney supporter Sheldon Adelson.)

At first, I was surprised to find that my Birthright trip was less explicitly political than I had feared. Our tour guide, a young Israeli who is also a reserve officer in the Israeli Defense Forces, gave us a thorough and objective history of the Israeli border and otherwise seemed to focus on describing Israel’s tourist attractions, ruggedly beautiful landscape, and Jewish culture.

However, I soon realized that a trip around Israel aimed at fostering Jewish identity cannot avoid politics. From its name—“Birthright” implies that all Jews have the right to the land of Israel, while ignoring the Palestinian refugees who have been prevented from returning home for decades—to its itinerary—which includes ventures into the disputed Golan Heights, where participants gleefully take pictures of the ruined shells of “abandoned” Syrian homes—Birthright advances the political agenda of the Israeli and American right. The fact that it does so in an insidious way makes its messaging all the more dangerous.

As all Birthright trips do, my group travelled to the Holocaust history museum, the Yad Vashem. Most of the museum is centered around a long, dark tunnel with exhibits on each side detailing the horrors inflicted on Jews in Europe. The “light at the end of the tunnel,” the symbolic conclusion of the Jewish saga, is a balcony overlooking Jerusalem. The tour guide at the museum asked us, “Why did God let the Holocaust happen?” One American on my trip dutifully responded, “If it weren’t for the Holocaust, there might never have been a state of Israel.” The existence of a political state hardly seems to justify the extermination of over 10 million innocent people, but this was the message conveyed by the architecture of the Yad Vashem and seemed to be the narrative our tour guides desired us to understand.

At the end of our trip, our tour guide brought us to Mount Herzl cemetery, Israel’s national cemetery. At the area of the cemetery reserved for civilian victims of acts of terror, our guide told us why it was important for us as Jews to support Israel: because “Arabs are different from us,” and teach their children to hate in school. As members of my group supplied other examples of “Arabs” killing innocents—“Syria.” “Iran.” “Al-Qaeda, 9/11.”—we reflected on the necessity of defending Israel from the Palestinians, who, after all, have plenty of Arab brothers and sisters to support them, right?

Throughout the rest of our tour, we spoke to young IDF soldiers who dismissed human rights abuses against Palestinians as a forgivable consequence of a Jewish state. We spoke to older Israelis who informed us that Israel was the only place in the world safe for Jews, invoking the racism that seems to run unquestioned through Jewish Israeli public discourse—one told us, “there could be another Holocaust in America any time. Jesse Jackson, or another one of those black people…” Our trip leader supplemented these interactions with a quip about Israel’s thriving biotechnology industry: “Israel doesn’t have many natural resources, but we do have the Jewish mind.” We posed for a picture atop an old tank, shouting, “Israeli power!” And meanwhile, throughout the entire tour, we were encouraged to return to Israel, to make aliyah.

Zionists look to Birthright Israel as a way to inspire Jewish pride among largely assimilated, ethnically Jewish college students. Even liberal Zionist Peter Beinart, when he came to speak at Harvard last semester, critiqued Birthright only for failing to expose participants to a Palestinian perspective (it’s true: we didn’t speak to a single non-Jew during a full ten days in the Middle East).

But Birthright’s idea of engaging with Israel means supporting an illegal and oppressive military occupation, claiming citizenship to a state that deports African immigrants, glorifying “the Jewish mind,” and decrying all Arabs collectively for their hateful terrorist tactics. Simply introducing a Palestinian voice could not begin to correct for the fact that Birthright is firmly entrenched in right-wing rhetoric, from racism to militarism. If liberal American supporters of Israel truly hope for their children to engage with global Jewish politics in a meaningful way, they should stop sending them on a trip to Israel called “Birthright” and start teaching critical thinking about the role of Jews in promoting justice around the world.

Sandra Y. L. Korn, a Crimson editorial executive, is a joint history of science and studies of women, gender, and sexuality concentrator in Eliot House.

Op-ed from the Crimson: Working Toward a Solution

This op-ed, written by Emily and Sandra, appeared in the Harvard Crimson today:

Working Toward a Solution

The One State Conference that took place this weekend at the Harvard Kennedy School triggered an outpouring of furious debate about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The conference, featuring speakers from various universities and diverse religious and ethnic backgrounds, explored a solution in which Israel and the Palestinian Territories would unite into a single secular state with equal rights for all. Some members of the pro-Israel Jewish community have declared the conference “anti-Semitic;” others, such as Harvard Students for Israel havedisagreed with the conference’s ideas but emphasized its right to take place. As members of the Progressive Jewish Alliance and supporters of a two-state solution, we believe that this conference raised important issues that have a valuable place in the campus discourse on Israel-Palestine, but are concerned by some of the extreme rhetoric that it has triggered.

As progressives, we believe in principle that ethnicity should not be intertwined with the state. All citizens should be treated as equals; no voting laws, housing laws, immigration laws, or indeed any laws should distinguish based on ethnicity. To do otherwise inevitably leads to inequity and social injustice. Even declaring an official state ethnicity without enacting discriminatory laws symbolically designates certain people as second-class citizens. Of course, this equality need not detract from the cultural diversity, which would continue to exist on a local and personal level. The state simply should not be in the business of privileging one culture or religion over another.

Unfortunately, it is sometimes difficult to enact progressive principles in a world mired in racism and oppression. Abolishing all ethnic state lines today would simply be impractical in a world where ethnic states abound, from Slovenia to Japan to Bangladesh. Moreover, historical attempts at multi-ethnic states have frequently failed dramatically and violently—consider, for example, the Balkan states and Sudan. Even in multi-ethnic states that haven’t broken apart, one group is often oppressed or discriminated against.

Attempting to enforce our ideal on states with a long history of ethnic and religious conflict would simply cause more violence and perpetuate violations of human rights. Thus, while we would love to see a peaceful and egalitarian one-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, we think it only practical to continue working toward a two-state solution. It is unfair to ask the Israelis and Palestinians who dream of having their own ethnic nation-states to give up these aspirations without demanding the same of every country in the world. While we theoretically admire the ideals of a one-state solution, in practice, a single state seems an ineffective and dangerous policy solution—and so we cannot endorse or advocate for it in today’s world. It is essential to end the oppression that many One-State Conference speakers noted occurs in Palestine today, but we doubt that a one-state solution could do this successfully. Thus, we hope that the Conference’s call for a re-envisioning of peace negotiations will galvanize those who truly support a peaceful two-state solution not to lash out, but to work harder for a truly just and effective path toward a two-state solution.

Although we cannot imagine that a one-state solution would effectively resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, alternatives to a two-state solution are legitimate topics of discussion, and the One State Conference was a good-faith attempt to propose a peaceful solution to the conflict in which all people are given equal rights. We understand the frustration that many—ourselves included—feel about the possibility of a two-state solution, as negotiations seem to be constantly unproductive and stalled. Indeed, fair negotiations are incredibly difficult given the current power dynamic in Israel and Palestine and Israel’s continued occupation of the Palestinian territories. These flaws have provided the impetus for academic conversation about other peace-making options, including the discussion that took place at the One State Conference last weekend. Thus, the conference should not be regarded as an attempt to delegitimize Israel but rather as an attempt, albeit an imperfect one, to resolve the problems inherent in the negotiations for a two-state solution.

While we believe that there should be space on campus for discussion of a one-state solution, we are concerned about the inflammatory responses it has elicited from some in both the pro-Israel and pro-Palestinian communities. No solution to the conflict will be possible unless people engage each other in meaningful dialogue instead of exchanging insults of “anti-Semitism” and “racism.” Any statement that seeks mainly to demonize the other side and blame the entire conflict on one group is a step away from peace. We hope that Jews and Palestinians alike can participate in respectful dialogue, seek to understand each others’ perspectives, and thereby work towards a practical, peaceful, and just solution to the conflict.

Emily S. Unger ’13 is an organismic and evolutionary biology concentrator in Quincy House. Sandra Y. L. Korn ’14, a Crimson associate editorial editor, is a history of science and studies of women, gender, and sexuality joint concentrator in Eliot House. Both are on the board of the Progressive Jewish Alliance.