Jew-free zones at Berkeley are bad; but something much more sinister is going on: Opinion

The Gateway Pundit, picking up on a Jewish Journal headline, reported that “College Leftists Create Jew-Free Zones on Berkeley Campus – the Home of Free Speech.” The controversy was sparked when U.C. Berkeley’s Law Students for Justice in Palestine (LSJP) encouraged other student groups to pass a bylaw promising to  never allow any supporter of “Zionism [or] the apartheid state of Israel …” to speak before their group. 

Reeducation camps

Nine law student groups at the law school, out of more than a hundred, amended their bylaws in accordance with the demand, which also requires groups adopting the rule to agree to undergo ideological training by LSJP operatives in how to relate to these issues.

Not all Jews

Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of the law school and himself Jewish, noted that he, like some 90% of Jewish students in his estimate, could not be invited to speak to those student groups due to his support for “the existence of Israel”. Who are the 10% or so of Jewish students who would be allowed to speak?

Members of Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP) would be welcome. JVP supports the transfer of the mountainous region of Judea and Samaria (also known as the West Bank since it sits to the west of the Jordan River) to the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), despite the fact that the PLO pledged to use that very land to launch an invasion of what would be left of Israel in an attempt to destroy its Jewish population. That would officially be the second step of the PLO’s phased plan to destroy Israel, according to their published plans:

Once it is established, the Palestinian national authority will strive to achieve a union of the confrontation countries, with the aim of completing the liberation of all Palestinian territory, and as a step along the road to comprehensive Arab unity. [Emphasis added].

Interestingly, the JVP also supports the immediate absorption, with voting rights, of over five million people claiming to descend from Arab residents of Palestine who fled the bombing of Palestine that was carried out by Egypt, Iraq, Transjordan, Lebanon and Syria in 1948-49. This would quickly lead to the same result. The PLO, would use its influence over many of the people to be absorbed, to come to power over all of Israel. 

Indifference to Arab suffering

That Jews would suffer from PLO control of Israel is obvious. But what of its Arab residents? Unfortunately, their fate would likely be dismal as well, as revealed in this report on the PLO. Note that the PLO was formed in 1964, three years before Israel gained control of Gaza and the West Bank, allegedly to “liberate” Israel’s Arabs: 

For many years, the PLO had already been directing many of its terrorist attacks against palestinians and Arabs in general. . . . Terror squads receiving money and orders from the PLO, Islamic Jihad, and Hamas attack people they accuse of collaborating with Israel, although the PLO itself admits the majority of such accusations are false. As one journalist has described it, the purpose is purely to intimidate: “Palestinians live in daily terror of these squads. Some common murder techniques are beheading, mutilation, gouging out eyes, cutting off ears or limbs, and pouring molten plastic or acid on a victim’s face.” Often the victim is shot or stabbed in broad daylight, in full view of palestinian bystanders. 

The PLO has used this violence to force the population under its control to appear to support it:

Merchants who fail to close their shops when a strike is called, or who do not pay taxes to the PLO, have their shops burned to the ground; buses that carry palestinians to work in Israel are also burned, keeping the workers from earning the money to feed their families. Some one thousand palestinians have been killed by the terror squads, and many others injured.

Why would any group, Jewish or not, want to subject any population to such torture and murder?

Real objectives

JVP, the anti-Zionist Jewish group, partners with Answer Coalition, a Marxist anti-war organization, as well as with  Code Pink, whose own website boasts that it supports “A prominent political activist and member of the Marxist-Leninist organization Popular Front for Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) . . .”

Likewise, Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), the national group behind the banning of Zionist speakers, has a rich background in Marxism:

Principal backers of SJP include founders, financial patrons and ideological supporters who have been connected to Islamist terror organizations such as Hamas, Hizbullah, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and the marxist Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP).

In fact, SJP was cofounded by Snehal Shingavi, “a Marxist and member of the International Socialist Organization.” SJP’s other cofounder “called for an intifada in the United States.”

What’s wrong with Zionists?

While Zionism can be divided into competing subcategories, the most significant one has been Socialist Zionism, also known as Labor Zionism.

From the beginning of the twentieth century, Labor Zionism dominated the political philosophy of the Jews who went to resettle in Palestine, both during the British Mandate and then as the philosophical banner of the dominant political party in the new State of Israel until the parliamentary elections of 1977. Its leaders are considered the founding fathers of the Jewish state, the architects of its most distinctive social and economic institutions.

Why then, do organizations with Marxist backgrounds like JVP and SJP want to see the demise of the Zionist State? Quite simply, because the PLO is more Marxist. 

From the beginning, the PLO has been a thoroughly Communist organization under the direct control of the Soviet KGB. Among its founding leaders was Ahmed Jibril, a Syrian army officer who founded the Palestinian Liberation Front in the 1950s. A self-proclaimed Marxist, Jibril was recruited into the KGB, trained in the Soviet Union, and supported by East Germany and Bulgaria as his group carried out bombings of airplanes, schoolbuses, and other Israeli targets. The PLO was organized around Jibril’s group⁶⁴ …

George Habash, another PLO founder, is an open Marxist-Leninist who started the Arab Nationalist Movement in the 1950s that imposed a Communist regime in South Yemen. Supported by the Communist governments of Cuba, North Vietnam, and China, Habash has since founded the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, another PLO group.⁶⁵

Abu Iyad also helped found the PLO, and has headed its Intelligence and Security Apparatus, making him the number two man in the organization. He has publicly admitted his allegiance to the teachings of Chinese dictator Mao Zedong and other leading Communists.⁶⁶

But the most famous PLO figure is its leader, Yasir Arafat. As a student at Cairo University in 1952, he became head of the General Union of Palestine Students, and in 1956 represented that leftist organization at the Communist World Festival of Youth, held in Czechoslovakia.⁶⁷ Arafat has studied the works of Mao Zedong and Che Guevara, and when he visits Moscow he meets with top Soviet Communists.⁶⁸ 

Marxist Zionists

This is not to say that Jews choose between Marxism and Zionism. Many simply follow both:

Many Jewish Marxists were committed to Zionism and the return to the Land of Israel, but they faced an inherent conflict between communism’s internationalist focus and Zionism’s nationalist focus. Jewish Marxists, therefore, worked to reformulate the Communist Manifesto to fit into a Zionist context . . . Marxist-Zionist ideology . . . was the basis of the kibbutz movement (which built communal villages and farms) and was a dominant force in Israeli politics for many years.

Progressive Zionists

After the horrors of the Soviet gulags, Pol Pot’s killing fields and Cuban torture chambers, the Marxist label suffered a loss of popularity and yesterday’s Marxist Zionists gave way to this generation’s progressive Zionists. In fact, the Berkeley Law School dean, himself a progressive Zionist, helped found the Progressive Jewish Alliance.

Not enough

Despite Chemerinsky attempt to prove his progressive credentials by criticizing Israel and the U.S., hard core progressives persist in rejecting his claim that he can be a progressive and a Zionist. The Washington, D.C., chapter of climate activist organization Sunrise tweeted last year, for example:

Given our commitment to racial justice, self-governance and indigenous sovereignty, we oppose Zionism and any state that enforces its ideology 

Not willing to accept the Left's admonishment that one cannot be both a progressive and a Zionist, progressive Jews demanded an apology from D.C. Sunrise, and received one. But the apology was simply for singling out Israel, and the statement went on to again bash Zionism. Nonetheless, progressive Jews still try to carve out a place for themselves in the progressive movements maintaining that every socialist group’s almost automatic rejection of Israel and its Jewish supporters is mere coincidence.

Not a coincidence 

A bit of research, though, reveals that lifelong socialist, Karl Marx, authored the essay Zur Judenfrage - literally, On the Jewish Question. In one edition, this has been translated as A World Without Jews to demonstrate Marx's antisemitism. Here is an excerpt: 

What is the worldly religion of the Jew? Huckstering. What is his worldly God? Money ... An organization of society which would abolish the preconditions for huckstering, and therefore the possibility of huckstering, would make the Jew impossible ... Money is the jealous god of Israel, in face of which no other god may exist. The bill of exchange is the real god of the Jew. His god is only an illusory bill of exchange … (Emphases added)

If one needed additional evidence that followers of Marx’s socialism are not coincidentally opposed to the Jewish nation, and if the full name of the perpetrators of the Holocaust (National Socialist German Workers' Party) is deemed to be insufficient proof, one could look to the essay Karl Marx's Radical Antisemitism:

Marx used the Bambergers to borrow money but showed contempt for them. In a derogatory fashion he referred to the father and son as “Jew Bamberger” or “little Jew Bamberger.” Similarly, Spielmann, whose name appears frequently in correspondence between Marx and Engels was referred to as “Jew Spielmann.” When on holiday in Ramsgate in 1879, Marx reported to Engels that the resort contained “many Jews and fleas.” In an earlier letter to Engels, Marx referred to Ferdinand Lassalle as a “Jewish n-gger.”

Is that enough to convince Jewish progressives to drop the fight to be accepted by anti-Zionist progressives in favor of a fight against Marxism?