Jewish Voice for Peace?

by Gary Fouse

Last week, the inappropriately-named, pro-Palestinian, anti-Israel organization, Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP), sent out a tweet commemorating the First Intifada. (In Arabic, intifada is loosely translated as “rebellion” or “uprising”.) The blog, Pro-Israel Bay Bloggers has the tweet up on their web site. 

What an obscenity, especially from a Jewish organization. The First Palestinian Intifada lasted from late 1987 to 1991 or 1993 depending on which account you read. If you think it consisted of just protests and rock-throwing, you would be mistaken. Over 270 Israelis were murdered, including many civilians. Naturally, the military fought back, and many more Palestinians (about 1,100) died in the fighting.  Disproportionate? No, that is the way it should be when terrorists attack you. (Hundreds of Palestinians were put to death by their own “authorities” for being suspected of collaborating with the Israeli military.)

The Second Intifada began in September 2000 when Ariel Sharon visited the Temple Mount and lasted to about February 2005.

Of course, if you Google “First Intifada”, you will come up with a highly pro-Palestinian Wikipedia entry and the first several pages of other links will be dominated by anti-Israel articles. If you want to believe the spin, you would think it was somewhat akin to the French resistance during the occupation of France in World War II.

You might ask how a supposedly Jewish organization in America or anywhere else could glorify anything that resulted in the deaths of Israeli citizens and soldiers. I ask myself that question as a gentile fighting against anti-Semitism. All these years I have been confounded by certain misfit Jewish Americans who march arm in arm with the very people that want to destroy them. That is what JVP does. By the same token, how can any American Jew support the BDS movement (Boycott, Divest and Sanctions) against Israel? That is what JVP does.

I saw first-hand what this organization was all about when three of their leaders came to speak at the University of California at Irvine, where I was teaching in 2011. One of them, a young character named Matan Cohen, an Israeli, no less, told us that any pro-Israel speech on campus was “useless discourse”.

Translation? It shouldn’t be allowed.

Similarly, when I attended a University of California Regents meeting at UCLA in 2015 as they were attempting to draw up a statement of principles against campus anti-Semitism, there was JVP there to speak against it on the grounds it would stop the free speech of pro-Palestinian activists on campus (a false charge). They were joined by the usual collection of faculty radicals, including the UCLA Near Eastern Studies Department.

Jewish Voice for Peace is not for peace. How can they be for peace when they celebrate the intifadas? They are for the destruction of the Jewish state. If, God forbid, Israel were overrun and Israeli Jews slaughtered, JVP would be right there dancing with the Palestinians and their motley assortment of supporters in the US.

Like everyone else, JVP enjoys their right of free speech in America. At the same time, the rest of us are free to hold them up to the light. As a gentile, I leave it to Jews to debate who the “self-hating Jews” are. But I will say this about JVP: They are a despicable organization.