Every vote sends a message. Last week, when the Berkeley Jewish Student Union voted to bar J Street's student organization from membership, the message it sent was regrettably clear:
The choice is up to you -- you can be welcomed as a Jew, or you can speak your mind on Israel.
Now Berkeley, so often ahead of the curve, has distinguished itself once more. Its Jewish Student Union, founded expressly to provide a forum for communication and to unify campus Jewish organizations, has become the first such group in the country to have denied membership to the unapologetically pro-Israel, pro-peace J Street U.
Trends matter. The Berkeley vote lends momentum to a wider tendency -- the exclusion, over political tensions, of more and more Jews from the already shrinking tent called the American Jewish community.
Places like Berkeley matter. It was in Berkeley and other like-minded towns that a surprisingly large number of young people forged a lifelong commitment to work for the ideal of an Israel true to values of democracy and prophetic justice.
It was in places like Berkeley, with its tradition of respect for universal rights, where they learned that support for Israel need have nothing to do with support for occupation or settlements or defaming Palestinians or refusal to compromise. That support for Israel could have everything to do with support for strengthening democracy there, freedom there, equality there, and genuine self-determination for both Jews and Palestinians.
It was in places like Berkeley, with its tradition of activism and freedom of expression, where they learned that there is no contradiction in being critical of Israel's failings while acknowledging its merits and dangers, and believing in its potential.
It was in places like Berkeley, with its tradition of coalition-building, where they learned that Israel needs all the help and support it can get.
What Israel does not need, is a decision which cuts that support.
In a place like Berkeley, it takes guts for anyone, whatever their politics, to admit that they care about Israel. If their politics are progressive, if, like the J Street U people, they explicitly oppose both the occupation and the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions movement, one of the voters in the Jewish Student Union decision may take the trouble to denounce J Street in the Northern California Jewish newspaper as "anti-Israel" and, perhaps most damning, not "part of the mainstream Jewish community."
What remains unclear is why, when Jews in Berkeley boycott fellow supporters of Israel, they believe that they are doing Israel, or the Jewish people, any good.
Does the Berkeley vote truly reflect the kind of community that Jewish students at the University of California want? An intellectual ghetto, walled off from debate, bricked up against nuance, a trompe l'oeil of democracy, of openness, of communication?
Here in Israel, the war that is closest to us, the war that threatens us most directly, and perhaps, most permanently, is a struggle over exclusion. It is a war which, week by week, vote by vote, uses democracy to diminish democracy. One which, edict by edict, uses the institutions of Judaism to alienate and repel Jews, and the institutions of Zionism to alienate and repel supporters of Israel.
Every vote sends a message. It can build bridges, or burn them. It can foster communication, or deter it. For many people who have lived in Berkeley, it was in part because they found a welcoming, open, questioning, courageous, progressive community of Jews there, that they made a decision to come to Israel to live. Most, wherever they are now, are still actively working to make this a much better place.
To the members of the Berkeley Jewish Student Union, just this: Take a moment. Do something for your community, and for Israel. Vote again.
___________________________________
Originally published on Haaretz.com
Follow Bradley Burston on Twitter: www.twitter.com/bradleyburston
Brent E. Sasley: Are Christian Zionists Replacing Mainstream US Jews?
Rabbi Adam Jacobs: The Jewish American Gut-Check
Rabbi Shmuley Boteach: The Rebellious Man of Faith
I fear most of the commenters used the forum to repeat old worn out complaints about Israel/Palestine, It's the same stuff that gets trotted out every time anything or anyone makes the news in Israel or Palestine or anywhere in the area. Maybe if people tried talking with each other instead of at each other they might get somewhere.
Time to stand on your own, Israel--let's see how well you do.
When one considers that the US help to Israel comes with cables -rather than strings- attached, it may be better for the Middle East if the US kept its money and stopped mandating that Israel use 2/3 of the "donated" funds to purchase American made weapons, while inundating liberally the PA, Jordan, Egypt, and Lebanon with absolutely free money.
The reason the US spends so much money in the Middle East is that it needs to buy as much influence as possible in the area, not out of generosity.
"All fair minded Jews around the world" would also like to see Israel judged with the same criteria as the rest of the world. IE: why not a voice is raised against the massacre of the Kurd, Chechen, Sudanese, Tibetan, Hungarian Gypsies, Australian Aborigines, Native Americans (from Alaska to the Amazon and beyond), etc. populations who are suffering a great deal more than the Palestinians and yet see their tormentors received as kings at the UN General Assembly while their plight is ignored?
I also don't think a Palestinian state is viable - not with two sections whose governments hate each other, separated by a country that hates both of them. The only solution that I can see is a West Bank Palestine independent of but associated with Jordan and Gaza also independent and associated with Egypt.
These Israeli demands that they be allowed to keep all manner of West Bank settlements as well as a military presence along the Jordan are as ridiculous as the Palestinian refugee demand of a "right to return." Sorry, folks. You were forced out. Your homeland is gone. Get over it.
The message they sent was refreshingly clear. Zionists have no use for J Street.
That is an embarrassing message to send, particularly for University students, but I agree with you it is a clear message.
I do not support the atrocities of Israel, but the atrocities of the Palestinians were worse.
But instead of worrying about past atrocities, let's stop future ones. We can start by not murdering all the Israelis. That is the ultimate aim of those funding the "Israel is bad" crowd.
Israel takes Palestinian land and builds settlements that are clean, modern and middle class. Millions of Palestinians are blockaded in Gaza denied medicine, food and building materials to rebuild their homes destroyed by Israeli bombing.
There is little doubt which side is the powerful and which is the powerless.
But what really sickens me is the idea that since some Palestinian radicals do terrible things that I deplore and condemn that so many think all Palestinians, millions, should be made to suffer.
It gets worse. During the last 5 years (since 2006) Israel killed 28 Palestinians for each Israeli killed. As for children, 76 Palestinian children for each Israeli child killed.
Source(s):
Israeli human rights group B'Tselem and Israel Ministry of Foreign Affairs
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palestine_i…
Not all students on campus are liberal and most are not activist, many students view various causes and protests as a distraction at best. A commonly expressed opinion on campus amounts to asserting that some students attend Cal specifically to participate in the 'protest' experience. The cynical (and possibly correct) implication is that a) the act of protesting fulfills participants' psychological want/need to belong to specific part of the nation's history and social/political grouping, and b) that fulfilling this need is the prime motivator for activism (and that the expressed purpose of a cause or movement holding a protest is secondary or even unimportant.)
The population of the City of Berkeley aside from the students is considerably more liberal and vocal than the student body, recent narrowly focused events notwithstanding. Free speech activism on campus came about and persists only because it has been persistently repressed.
The ASUC (the student gov't at Cal) is run in a manner that can only be described as a puerile, procedural farce. Don't be surprised, with Cal's campus administration both modeling and meddling absurdity is bound to ensue. Therefore it is not unexpected for a student organization to engage in behavior directly contradicting the stated purpose of said organization. Hypocrisy, witting and unwitting, is par for the course.
Was their mother Jewish?
Did they convert from another religion?
Are they Orthodox?
Can I vote on this the next time if I convert and go to Berkley?
What if I've always considered myself Jewish but have only gone to temple a few times?
The writer wants another vote.
The writer in Israel is concerned about Jewish inclusion.
The American university group supports a boycott of Israel for their lack of inclusion.
Israel boycotts rights to citizens based on religion and bloodline.
Israel is for all Jews, I am told.
Is Jewish a Religion that is closed?
Is Jewish a Race that can be determined?
Doesn't talking about how Jewish you are as a bloodline to determine rights sound as terrible an idea as it did 70 years ago in Europe?