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Timothy Paradis is the communications director of Maine Voices For Palestinian Rights. He previously served on the foreign policy staff of Sen. Edward Kennedy, as a corporate business consultant, and as a manager with a variety of Maine-based not-for-profit organizations.
In her Dec. 3 column criticizing the Belfast City Council resolution to divest from Israeli companies complicit in the war, Sara Colb of the Anti-Defamation League of New England offers shopworn rationalizations that Israel’s supporters have been using for decades: Israel is an innocent victim targeted by people stepping out of their “lane” out of antisemitism and a desire to destroy the Jewish state. After watching Israel’s abuses and impunity, we reject these rationales.
Colb’s position, like that of the entire Israel First lobby, is that holding Israel to account for its violations of international law and human rights is somehow an affront to peace. It seems that she and the ADL do not believe Palestinians deserve the same rights to self-determination or safety as Jews.
Look at a map. Although Israeli Jews and indigenous Palestinians are roughly equal in number, Palestinian-controlled land is delineated today like a few scattered holes in a block of Swiss cheese. For almost a century, Israel, after wars and annexations, has expelled Palestinians from their lands, bulldozed their homes and illegally seized their property.
Colb dismisses these violations of the Geneva Conventions and the U.N.’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights, as “certain actions of the Israeli government,” and bemoans protests against them. The protesters against Israel’s policies include Israel’s B’tselem human rights group, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and virtually all members of the United Nations. The charges go back years before the current genocide.
The Israeli military first occupied Gaza and the West Bank in 1967, after the Six-Day War. This might explain why the boycott, sanctions and divestment movement began in the 2000s, decades before the current conflict. While presenting scant evidence that supporters of divestment oppose “Israel’s right to exist,” there’s ample evidence that Israel’s current leaders are determined to eliminate the Palestinians or force them into exile as stateless refugees.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has declared that Israel will “never” allow a Palestinian state, and Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich says that Gaza should be emptied of “half” of its Palestinian population. In a campaign of collective punishment that has shocked much of the world, the Israeli military has damaged all of Gaza’s hospitals and destroyed all its universities, killed medics and journalists, and tortured and executed civilians, including children. Gaza has become a wasteland, and the Israeli military has no plans to stop the carnage. And please consider: Almost half of Gaza’s population is under the age of 18, with 40 percent younger than 14.
No wonder then that the world’s highest courts have ordered Israel to stop this potential genocide. The U.N.’s International Court of Justice has ruled that Israel is an “apartheid” state, that its campaign in Gaza a includes “plausible” acts of genocide, and that sanctioning Israel is mandatory for U.N. member states. The International Criminal Court recently issued arrest warrants for Netanyahu and former Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, along with a Hamas military chief.
Colb points to a rise in antisemitic incidents in the United States, but makes no mention of a similar rise in Islamophobia and attacks against Arab-Americans. Both should be condemned unequivocally. But I believe it is precisely the sense from Colb’s Anti-Defamation League that only Jewish lives and Jewish safety deserve priority that exacerbate “hate and isolation”; this is what truly harms our communities.
In reaction to the Holocaust in Europe, the watchwords among defenders of the Jewish people became “never again.” Today, we echo that call, as we stand with members of Jewish Voice for Peace, IfNotNow and the majority of Jewish American teenagers who express sympathy for the Palestinian people by adding two words: “never again, for anyone.”
The Belfast resolution matters. In the record of history, it will likely be asked who counseled silence and abetted genocide, and who spoke out in defense of justice and humanity. The residents of Belfast can proudly say they spoke for humanity.
