JERUSALEM – The Sheikh Jarrah Solidarity Movement (SJSM), in cooperation with “flightilla†activists who are part of the Global BDS movement, [today] will hold a demonstration beginning at Jaffa Gate in support of a Palestinian unilateral declaration of independence (UDI) at the UN in September. The UDI represents the opposite path of direct negotiations between Israel and the Palestinian Authority to end the conflict, says Jerusalem-based research institution NGO Monitor.
“The SJSM and other groups are funded via the New Israel Fund, which promotes a two [state] solution and Zionist principles. In contrast, as Palestinian leader Abbas wrote in his New York Times op-ed, unilateral recognition via the UN ‘would pave the way for the internationalization of the conflict’ and for pursuing ‘claims against Israel at the United Nations, human rights treaty bodies and the International Court of Justice.’ This strategy is the antithesis of the direct negotiations necessary for a stable peace between Israel and Palestinians,†says Prof. Gerald Steinberg, president of NGO Monitor.
Here is how Ishay Rosen-Zvi of SJSM describes it:
This march will not be yet another demonstration in support of the negotiations; not a call for an end to violence nor for a bilateral two-state solution. We’ve had enough of those. This time Israelis, Jews and Arabs, will show our support for the unilateral Palestinian declaration of independence expected in September; a free state in the 1967 borders, with its capital in East Jerusalem. No more favors, thank you very much.
SJSM has been holding weekly demonstrations in Jerusalem for about two years in support of Arab squatters in the Sheik Jarrah / Shimon ha-Tzadik neighborhood, after Israel’s Supreme Court — normally very protective of Arab rights — decided that they could not continue to live rent-free in property owned by Jews.
However, their anti-Zionist ideology extends far beyond squatters’ ‘rights’. By calling for a UDI, they are in essence demanding that Israel surrender control of the territories with no agreement from the Arabs on
- security arrangements,
- recognition of the Jewish state,
- end of the conflict,
- end of Arab claims against Israel, especially for ‘right of return’.
And as Abbas explained, the Arab plan is to pursue its claims aggressively through international diplomatic and legal fora if and when ‘Palestine’ becomes a sovereign state. Judging by past experience, they will doubtless pursue them by terrorism as well, carried out by ‘extremists’ with whom they will disavow any connection, of course.
SJSM, like many anti-Western organizations populated by westerners, has an ideology suffused with obsequious worship of the ‘noble savages’ whose cause it is promoting. Get your barf bags out as I continue to quote Rosen-Zvi (who, by the way, is a “professor of Talmudic Studies in Tel Aviv university”):
This way is unequivocally better than yet another statement of support in negotiations, which in turn is nothing more than the continuation of the occupation by other means, that of negotiations without end. At the same time, we must ask what the role of the Jewish marchers is in this march. Is not the Palestinian state a Palestinian project? Is it not our role to just stand back and not interfere? Is it not better that we fight against the occupation, and leave the founding of the state to those whose state it will be? Is it not just slightly offensive? Hast thou conquered, and also rejoiced?
Please, spare me your public expressions of guilt. God forbid that we should ‘offend’ those whose aim is to destroy our state!
Not only is this Talmudist a fool, he has a remarkably counter-factual view of recent events:
We claim that the illusion that the end of the occupation will bring with it a separation from the Palestinians is the root of all evil. What lies behind the various “disengagement plansâ€, especially the greedy “separation wallâ€, if not the desire “not to see them anymore?†This land and its peoples have no future without cooperation. Not just because the opressor will be free only when the oppressed will be free (as Hegel well understood in his master and slave dialectic), but also because after their respective freedoms, the two sides are destined to sit together, to share a land, its resources and history. Solutions based upon separation (always unilateral), are bound to fail (see under: Gaza).
Unbelievable. We don’t want to see them? Could it be that we don’t want to see them blow us up or shoot us? He hasn’t noticed the 100-year Arab war against the Jews? He’s for cooperation? Then why does he think that the Arabs should give absolutely nothing in return for the territory that they claim? Wouldn’t it be more cooperative if they recognized Israel as a Jewish state?
But most outrageous is his reference to Gaza. According to Rosen-Zvi, the disaster that followed Israel’s unilateral withdrawal of every Israeli soldier, every civilian, and even the exhumation of every dead Jew from there, was Israel’s fault — probably because free passage was not granted to the terrorists who had to content themselves with firing thousands of rockets into Israeli towns instead of the up-close and personal forms of torture and murder that they prefer!
As NGO Monitor’s Steinberg mentioned, the New Israel Fund provides a conduit for tax-deductible contributions from the USA. Here’s a snippet from a 2011 SJSM brochure:
I am not sure of the legality of this arrangement, but certainly it should send a signal to the liberal Jews who support the NIF that perhaps this organization is not as pro-Israel as it claims to be.
In particular, I would like to ask — although I will not get an answer — Rabbi Richard Jacobs, the new president of the Union for Reform Judaism, who proudly described his participation in an SJSM demonstration last year in a Yom Kippur sermon — if he still supports SJSM and the NIF (of which he is a board member, albeit on temporary leave).
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