Berkeley Jews Stand with Law Students for Justice in Palestine & the Right to Boycott Israel
We are Berkeley Jews for Palestine, a group of anti-Zionist Jewish students at Berkeley Law School who are committed to the liberation of Palestine. We are writing to condemn the violence against students at Berkeley Law who have supported Law Students for Justice in Palestine’s pledge to not invite speakers who support the state of Israel. This violence has been justified on the false grounds that these students are antisemitic. We firmly denounce the implication that the by-law and the students who support it are antisemitic.
Over the past few weeks, students — and overwhelmingly students of color — have been harassed, targeted, and faced death threats on and off Berkeley’s campus. Multiple Zionist organizations have sent trucks to campus blasting the names of student leaders and calling them antisemites. Muslim students have been harassed while walking to class and on internet blacklists. Black students have been bombarded with death threats in their inboxes. Faculty have canceled classes to protect the safety of our classmates.
This violence is unacceptable and grounded in a false reality. Zionists have often weaponized baseless accusations of antisemitism and the memory of the Holocaust to demonize supporters of Palestine liberation. And that’s exactly what’s happening on Berkeley’s campus.
These Zionist groups have claimed that they are defending the Jewish community at Berkeley by denouncing and harassing our peers for their commitment to Palestinian freedom. This could not be farther from the truth. These organizations are not keeping anyone safe; they have only incited violence against students of color on our campus. And they have unsurprisingly reproduced the narrative that Judaism and Zionism are one and the same. As Jewish students committed to Palestine liberation and opposed to Zionism, we are fighting for a world where the Jewish community can flourish beyond the artificial bounds of an apartheid nation-state.
We refuse to be baited into supporting a settler-colonial state that was founded on the forced expulsion, dispossession, and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians. We recognize the Nakba, which means “catastrophe” in Arabic, during which Israel forcibly expelled 750,000 Palestinians from their land in 1948. We honor Palestinians’ right to return to their homeland, and their right to self-determination. And we firmly support the Palestinian-led call for Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions.
Moreover, it is no coincidence that right-wing commentators and politicians have raised the false flag of antisemitism at Berkeley Law while white nationalism continues to grow as a political force in the US. White nationalists are fueled by antisemitism, and some of their loudest supporters have also received funding from pro-Israel groups like the American-Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), an influential lobbying organization founded to whitewash Israeli violence by spending millions each year on shoring up US political support for Israel. This fabricated moral panic around antisemitism at Berkeley has also distracted from the political ascendency of the Jewish Power Party, a far-right, Jewish supremacist, and theological movement that has explicitly called for settler violence against and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians. This movement is now the second-largest group in Netanyahu’s bloc since the most recent Israeli elections. Jewish Power understands itself not as a departure from Zionism but as Zionism at its highest form: “without stuttering, without weakness, without lies.”
These are the realities of Zionism that we and our peers are fighting against. We invite our Jewish community and all others to join us in our struggle against Israeli apartheid and toward a world where Palestine is free.