Nonviolence? For a BDS group, fuhgeddaboudit

When Islamists and other anti-Israel groups gather, they’ve learned to use euphemisms. They don’t call for Israel’s annihilation, they just lock on to a “right of return” that would destroy it demographically. They use slogans like “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,” which leaves no room for Israel.

The usual demonization was present last weekend in St. Paul, when the U.S. Campaign for Palestinian Rights (USCPR), an umbrella group leading the BDS push to boycott Israel, held a major conference.

It is common for pro-Palestinian activists to sanitize terrorist attacks as “legitimate resistance,” but three USCPR speakers openly made a case for violence. Two are university professors, one of them a frequent CNN pundit. One made a point of praising a murderer. The other diminished nonviolent protest, saying “this nonviolent thing” can be too limiting and raising the question of “what legitimate resistance looks like.”

That was Marc Lamont Hill, a Temple University professor, BET host and CNN contributor, who warned his audience against adopting “a civil rights tradition which romanticizes nonviolence. That’s the challenge … How can you romanticize nonviolence when you have a state that is at all moments waging war against you, against your bodies, poisoning your water, limiting your access to water, locking up your children, killing you. We can’t romanticize resistance.”

This gross misrepresentation of the conflict ignores the role of Palestinian incitement and intra-Palestinian political struggle in fueling the conflict today. But even so, Gandhi grappled with that challenge and prevailed. Martin Luther King Jr. and his followers — men, women and children — endured murders, terrorist attacks, beatings, police dogs and fire hoses. But with that “romanticized” principle, they ended school segregation and secured passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1964 and the Voting Rights Act in 1965.

“The aftermath of nonviolence is the creation of the beloved community,” King said, “while the aftermath of the violence is tragic bitterness.”

For Palestinian advocates, “nonviolent protest” includes throwing grenades and using kites to spark wildfires. But, as Hill said at the end of the clip, “we have allowed this nonviolent thing to become so normative that we’re undermining our own ability to resist in real robust ways.” The audience embraced his comments.

USCPR is considered a leader in the BDS movement, with member organizations including Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP), American Muslims for Palestine (AMP), Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), and Code Pink. In June, Tablet magazine reported that USCPR “is the fiscal sponsor of a group called the Palestinian BDS National Committee (BNC), the main West Bank and Gaza-based cohort advocating for sanctions against Israel.”

Next, Palestinian writer Miriam Barghouti reminded the USCPR conference that “Palestine from the river to the sea is our demand.” Like Hill, she tried to cast Palestinian violence as rare, but sometimes valuable.

“When the knife attacks were happening in Palestine a few years ago — 2015? 2015. You know, Palestinian youth were out in the streets carrying out knife attacks and I’d hear Palestinians and Palestinian representation scurrying away from this topic,” she said. “No one really wanted to talk about it because it shatters the image of the approachable nonviolent Palestinian that’s standing bare-chested in front of Israeli soldiers that are carrying arms. And suddenly we were confronted with anger and that made us uncomfortable. And it’s this discomfort with anger, this discomfort with violence that has created a huge gap when we speak about Palestinian resistance.”

The approachable, nonviolent Palestinian? The Palestinian Authority doesn’t name community centers and schools for heroes of nonviolence. It names them for terrorists who kill Israeli civilians. It pays the families of dead and imprisoned terrorists on a sliding scale that rewards more violent attacks.

The USCPR conference featured no talk about peaceful negotiation. No talk about pressuring Hamas to devote its resources to improving the quality of life in Gaza. But it did feature praise for a killer. George Mason University Assistant Professor Noura Erakat opened the conference by hailing Rasmea Odeh, who helped blow up a Jerusalem grocery store in 1969, killing two Israeli college students. Odeh is not a terrorist, Erakat said, but “our dear sister [and] freedom fighter.”

President Trump, Erakat said, “for better or for worse has further entrenched the question of Palestine into a progressive-left movement driven by intersectional analysis. This trend is best exemplified by the case of our dear sister, freedom fighter Rasmea Odeh [applause], who I had the recent pleasure of being with in Amman, who is shining everywhere she goes, who teaches us what survival and thriving looks like. So, if we all just collectively send out energies to Rasmea. Rasmea is a freedom fighter, a former political prisoner.”

In fact, Odeh’s prosecution for naturalization fraud took place before Trump took office. After an appeal overturned her conviction, Odeh pleaded guilty in April 2017 and was deported to Jordan. In her plea agreement, she admitted that she had lied about being arrested and convicted in the Jerusalem bombing, “and not as a result of any mistake, Post Traumatic Stress Disorder or any other psychological issue or condition or for any innocent reason.”

In another session, the audience learned what to do if asked whether they support Hamas. Evade the question. Say you support Palestinians living in Gaza. When an audience member described the strategy, Tanya Keilani, from the Institute for Middle East Understanding (IMEU) endorsed it wholeheartedly.

“Reminding people of the root cause is super important, right?” she said. “Also noting that throughout history people have responded to oppression in various ways, right? But we all know that nothing justifies this form of oppression, right? … No one needs to know the details of the Hamas charter.”

The USCPR conference comes weeks after the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA) held a convention featuring an admonition not to “humanize” Israelis, a denial of Palestinian incitement, and anti-Semitic conspiracy theories.

Like ISNA, the USCPR conference makes it clear the goal is not peace, but tragic bitterness.