STATEMENT BY SENIOR FACULTY OF THE ARIZONA CENTER FOR JUDAIC STUDIES REGARDING “ISRAELISM”

STATEMENT BY SENIOR FACULTY OF THE ARIZONA CENTER FOR JUDAIC STUDIES REGARDING “ISRAELISM”

9/29/2024

1. We wish to state that the choice of the video feature, “Israelism” does not serve the purpose of the series well. “Israelism” does not contribute to informing students and faculty about the Arab-Israeli conflict; it is not about Palestinians directly, but rather about American Jews, and hence falls well outside of MENAS’ area of expertise.  Worst of all, the video is lacking the integrity we expect in any academic discussion. We regret that this video was chosen for the series 

2. “Israelism” (which deals with the education of young  American Jews about Israel) is ostensibly a documentary, but in practice carries an abundance of manipulative elements, including half-truths, multiple elisions, facts out of context, invidious inaccuracies, and specious word-choice) that turn it into a straightforward propaganda piece. The video therefore misses what could be an interesting debate. (For anyone interested, a detailed analysis of “Israelism” will be posted to the website of the Arizona Center for Judaic Studies in the coming hours.)

3.⁠ ⁠Unfortunately, the choice of a video feature that does not help viewers to understand the Palestinian-Jewish dimension of the Arab-Israeli conflict and does not address the important story of Palestinian society. The film replicates the worst dynamics of the conflict by de legitimizing the “Other” rather than shedding a nuanced light on a multi-layered and complex situation. We believe that the purpose of an academic discussion is to go against these destructive dynamics and contribute to a better understanding rather than to a partisan, populist discourse which divides a complex world into “good” and “evil”. Considering the loss of so many lives in the past year, achieving this goal is especially important and urgent.

4.⁠ ⁠We respect academic freedom and hence decided not to remove our co-sponsorship of the series, but would like to emphasize that in this situation, this freedom was abused for the purpose of polarization rather than education.

A CRITICAL TAKE ON "ISRAELISM"

A CRITICAL TAKE ON “ISRAELISM”

By David Graizbord, ACJS

October 8, 2024

Introduction

A few weeks ago, our esteemed colleagues from the Center for Middle East Studies (CMES) contacted my academic unit, The Arizona Center for Judaic Studies (ACJS), regarding the CMES’s plan to organize a series of public events on the Israeli-Arab conflict in the wake of the attacks of October 7 and the ensuing war in Gaza.  Specifically, CMES requested that the ACJS co-sponsor the series, and asked us to recommend a film or video that CMES might screen as part of that series that would represent an Israeli-Jewish perspective. 

We recommended a video essay by the Israeli videographer Jasmine Kainy, entitled “Beyond October 7.” CMES will show that work at the UA campus in early November of this year.

CMES also invited a faculty member of MENAS (the School of Middle Eastern and North African Studies), to select a video for the series, presumably one that would provide a Palestinian Arab perspective. The faculty member chose a “documentary” essay entitled “Israelism.” He/She has characterized the video feature as sensitive, insightful, and displaying, in his/her words, a “light touch.”

Our Center, the ACJS, has fielded several concerns regarding (1) the upcoming screening of “Israelism,” as well as (2) the selection of that feature. We offer a critique and our reasons for here. A summary of the critique’s main points is below.

Why is the ACJS Critiquing “Israelism”? 

A principal aim of this critique is not only to reply to the outcry that the ACJS has heard from various corners, including from parents of Jewish Wildcats. Our goal is also to model informed analysis based on our expertise in Jewish (including Israeli and American Jewish) history and cultures. 

By presenting a critique, I also hope to help move current discussions of free speech at the UA—a core principle to which our university is committed in any event—toward a focus on what I regard as a (more) pressing problem:  Namely, the low and sometimes abysmal quality of free speech in our campus regarding Israel and the Israeli-Arab conflict. 

As we specify in the present critique, there is ample evidence that, for some its interviewees’ youthful earnestness and good intentions, “Israelism,” as a whole—though not necessarily in all its details—constitutes free speech of lamentably low quality. 

Simply put, the work leaves out too much key information regarding not merely the Jewish anti-Zionist organizations it champions, but also regarding the discriminatory nature and destructive intent of anti-Zionism as a stance (including its adherents’ penchant for eliding, excusing, or explaining away Palestinian terrorism and anti-Jewish hatred as righteous “resistance.”).  Indeed, we conclude that the video feature is not a morally honest and genuinely informative essay, let alone an example scholarly, work. Rather, it is an example of highly specious—one might say, “chocolate-covered”—political propaganda. 

I define “propaganda” as the Oxford English Dictionary does, namely, as the systematic dissemination of information, especially in a biased or misleading way (for instance, through the deployment of half-truths and selective retellings of history) to promote a particular cause or point of view, often a political agenda. 

I stress that we do not consider “Israelism” to be propagandistic because I happen to be Jewish and because, unlike the filmmakers, I do not identify with the political movements, parties, and armed groups that have long led the Palestinian national cause. 

I firmly believe that some of the main themes that “Israelism” touches on—for instance, the cultural education of young American Jews; their understanding of being Jewish and of Jewish tradition; relations between Americans and Israelis, and between American and Israeli Jews; perceptions of Palestinian Arabs among American Jews, etc.—all these themes are worthy of serious analysis at UA and elsewhere, preferably by Judaic Studies experts in a different public series than the one under discussion. 

What I object to is the choice and low quality of “Israelism” as MENAS’s official contribution to what we at the ACJS hoped would be a serious attempt to grapple with complex issues after October 7, 2023, rather than promote a political cause—in this case, the cause of caricaturing Israel—and ultimately (although this, the filmmakers do not spell out) dismantling it, and replacing it by demographic or other means with an Arab-dominated state, along the lines of the popular Palestinian slogan, “From the water [river] to the water [sea], Palestine will be Arab!” (Min il-ṃayye la-l-ṃayye, Filasṭīn Arabiyeh!)* 

I also stress that this statement is not a call for censorship. I am not suggesting that CMES should have refrained from screening “Israelism.” At ACJS, we consider the screening precisely as an opportunity to engage in the sort of critical analysis that we hope will be salutary. Further, we do not believe that—except in cases of threats to physical safety and/or to the orderly, peaceful exchange of views, and cases of discrimination and intimidation against students, faculty and staff—banning anything is the solution to the presence of bad ideas at a university. Good ideas should counter bad ones. 

The ACJS supports our CMES colleagues fully in their efforts to provide the CMES’s various audiences with food for thought regarding the Israeli-Palestinian Arab segment of the broader Arab-Israeli conflict. We thank CMES colleagues for their unfailing collegiality and their support of freedom of speech. We especially appreciate the positive response of CMES’s Director, Prof. Mahmoud Azaz, to the concerns that one Israeli student group at UA, Mishelanu, has raised regarding “Israelism.” 

What I criticize here is the content of the film that was chosen. We further encourage a sustained discussion among UA academic untis to (re)assess criteria for evaluating the quality of material that UA will present to the public, especially when that material deals with potentially explosive subjects.  Our goal should be to keep UA above the petty polemics and propaganda wars that rage in public life. 

“Israelism” In a Nutshell

Israelism is a video documentary by Erin Axelman and Sam Ellertsen, two young anti-Zionist activists who are Jewish Americans. The work takes a sympathetic look at the story of young Jewish Americans who, like the filmmakers, have adopted anti-Zionism and pro-Palestinian activism as a political, cultural, and ethical stance. Both the filmmakers and their principal subjects are keen to show that they experience anti-Zionism as consonant with their Jewish identity. 

The film focuses especially on the experience of Simone Zimmerman, a young activist and co-founder of If Not Now, who leads the filmmakers on the ground in the West Bank and is interviewed for approximately 35% of the length of the documentary. She sometimes serves as the interlocutor of two Palestinian informants—Baha Hilo and Sami Awad (from the Holy Land Trust, a Pro-Palestinian activist NGO and political touring organization). 

The arc of the story of the protagonists of “Israelism” goes like this: 

• After being “indoctrinated” by “The American Jewish Establishment” and becoming supporters of Israel during their childhoods and/or early adulthoods, the young protagonists later encountered a real-life Israel that is arbitrarily cruel, unjust, rapacious, and therefore, in their view, un-Jewish
• Thus, the protagonists acquired a stinging awareness that the selfsame “American Jewish Establishment” that educated them (presumably including Jewish schools, NGOs, summer camps, and the subjects’ own families) had lied to them, or at least woefully underinformed them
• As a consequence of this realization, the protagonists became anti-Zionists, joining activist organizations such as “Breaking the Silence,” “IfNotNow,” and “Jewish Voices for Peace.”  All of these organizations embrace Palestinian liberationism, support Palestinian “resistance” and militant organizations such as the PFLP in principle (including, in many cases, attacks that target Jewish civilians), and regard Palestinians as the indigenous population of the territory that now comprises Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza. 
• (Oddly, the video feature does not indicate—and does not have its subjects discuss—whether Jews are an aboriginal population of Israel/Palestine.  In fact, in a few instances the video insinuates that they are not.)   

What “Israelism” Claims

Zimmerman’s experience, as well as that of the other Jewish anti-Zionist informants, serves the filmmakers to give voice to several related contentions: 

1. Young people who are educated as Jews in the US within Jewish communal environments and institutions—people who experience a “traditional Jewish upbringing” (in Zimmerman’s words) are victims of an American-Jewish “fixation” or “obsession” with Israel. 
    
2. That education “gets in your blood,” so much so that it renders it difficult for these young Jews to separate their Judaism from Israel. 
    
3. In addition, pro-Israel educations in the US give young American Jews little-to-no idea of who or what Palestinians are, and of how Israeli policies have victimized and continue to victimize Palestinians. Further, Jewish education in the US encourages young Jews to dislike and fear Palestinians merely as dangerous, violent enemies, rather than as victimized humans and the native inhabitants of the land that Israel claims as its own.
    
4. In this regard, a principal (if not the main message) of legacy Jewish organizations (such as the ADL) in the US is “We [Israelis, Jews] cannot be safe unless Palestinians are not safe.”
    
5. Loving Israel thus amounts to being brainwashed into “playing cowboys and Indians” so that Palestinians are forced to live under “apartheid.” 
    
6. However, brave young Jews are waking up to the “brainwashing” to which they have been subjected, are speaking out, and, assisted by “progressive” rabbis and other enlightened, consciousness-raising leaders such as Cornell West and Peter Beinart, are now affirming a Jewish “prophetic tradition” that renders paramount these young Jews’ support for the Palestinian cause and their (categorical?) opposition to Israel.   
    

CRITIQUE

1. “Israelism” is, at base, a film about American Jews and an intra-Jewish dispute, not about Palestinians. The video feature does not provide the “Palestinian” perspective (much less one that addresses the attacks of 10/7/23 and the current War in Gaza and Lebanon).  Only two Palestinian informants appear in the film. They feature in very few of the video’s 80-90 minutes.
    
2. MENAS has no expertise in American Jewish culture. For MENAS to offer this film is to wade into terrain that is foreign to it.  ACJS might, by the same logic, screen films about Islamist, anti-Jewish hatred as an endemic phenomenon of Palestinian Arab education.  Indeed, anyone may present any program they wish, on whatever subject, in the name of free speech, yet cannot legitimately do so in the role of an “expert” unless one is indeed an expert.  As academics, we must beware of ventures into amateurish, raw partisanship and political advocacy, masquerading as “scholarly” analysis. (Would MENAS consider it appropriate for UA/Judaic Studies to endeavor to discredit Palestinian Arabs in the US and their organizations—for example, to detail the fact that the Council on American Arab Relations [CAIR] was founded by known and current members of Hamas, people whom the FBI recorded plotting to sugar-coat Hamas’ image in the US with language amenable to liberal tastes? Is this—open political warfare—where we wish discourse on campus to go?)
    
3. “Israelism” is a work of non-fiction, yet it is not a genuine “documentary” in the sense that it provides little nuance and does not inform viewers by documenting reality deeply. Rather, it under-informs viewers by presenting aspects of reality tendentiously and impressionistically, that is, without paying attention to much more than scant, cherry-picked interpretations—indeed, sound-bytes.  The work employs rhetoric, not dialectical analysis to tell a story. It selectively portrays what is a relatively marginal political cause to celebrate it and advocate in favor of it, not to analyze it.
    
4. “Israelism” leaves out any acknowledgment, let alone a discussion, of the destructive intent and specific prescriptions of the anti-Zionist organizations it champions, such as Jewish Voice for Peace. These organizations are on record as (1) justifying and otherwise supporting Palestinians’ violations of Jews’ human and national rights, and (2) ignoring and/or rationalizing violations of Palestinians’ national and human rights that have been perpetrated by anyone other than Israeli Jews and their allies. 
    
5. Specifically, the video essay vaguely trumpets the platitude of Palestinian “freedom” as its protagonists’ political goal. Yet, “Israelism” does not provide even a brief explanation of what the filmmakers’ favorite Jewish anti-Zionist organizations mean by that word.  What they mean, as their own statements show, is the dismantling of Israel via demographic and other means (including violence). These omissions have a manipulative effect. 
    
6. Anti-Zionism amounts to the categorical denial of Jews’ right to national self-determination in their historic homeland. Anti-Zionism is the official position of leading Palestinian political parties and other organizations.  Yet, “Israelism”  does not even mention Al-Fatah, Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, the BDS movement, —or, if they are mentioned, these bodies receive no sustained attention. Avoidance of this information is highly deleterious to the video’s credibility.  (Besides, it takes a special kind of gall to complain that Jewish organizations such as the ADL are whitewashing Israel when one is whitewashing Palestinian national movement.) 
    
7. “Israelism” displays a deep ignorance of the wide variety of Jewish perspectives within and outside mainstream Jewish American organizations that support Israel, none of which have ever, to our knowledge, espoused the idea that Palestinians must be insecure for Jews/Jewish Israelis to be secure. By and large, our experience as citizens and scholars suggests that mainstream American Jewish organizations, for all their internal diversity, do not, as matter of principle, regard Jewish and Palestinian rights as mutually exclusive.
    
8. The video feature presents Jewish organizations—including children’s schools, summer camps, and Hillel centers—without furnishing any evidence other than its informants’ unverified claims and interpretations—as a mendacious, manipulative “Establishment” that not only whitewashes Israel knowingly, but actively suppresses all information that would reflect negatively on Israel and Israelis. Invidious assertions without evidence to support them are just that; they do not make for an “argument.” 
    
9. In tandem, “Israelism” approaches any critiques of anti-Zionism as bad-faith attempts to malign and silence dissent.  This approach breeds contempt, not knowledge, and promotes a caricaturesque view of organized Jewish life and intra-Jewish discourse in the US, which is nothing if not contentious and diverse. Further, the video presents the mundane (for instance, lessons in Jewish history for children) in dark, nefarious tones, as if totally quotidian aspects of children’s Jewish education were designed to malign Arabs and breed contempt towards them. 
    
10. As to the claims of the film’s informants that they did not learn “anything” about Palestinians, or simply learned to fear and despise them:  These claims may well speak to various imperfections or simple failures of these informants’ Jewish education as they and others received it. We cannot say. Yet, the claims may equally speak of the students’ own naivete, of their underdeveloped awareness of the fact that life is not a bowl of cherries, or of the fact that they were bad students. 
     
11. The canard that American Jewish institutions teach young people nothing of value regarding Palestinians, and certainly nothing that may encourage compassion towards them, bears little relation to the realities we know not only as experts in Jewish life, but as members of Jewish communities in the US and elsewhere.  In our experience, Jewish schools, summer camps, and other educational institutions and youth-oriented programs habitually present demonstrably true and compassionate information regarding Palestinians, though doing this is not a main goal of theirs, just as it is not the main goal of Arab and Arab-American educators to show to their students that Jews are humans with national and political rights in the Jews’ ancestral homeland.  (Consider: Would anyone expect the education of Palestinian Americans to refrain from making them proud that they are Palestinians, or to prevent them from becoming attached to their people’s homeland, Palestine? Would anyone expect Palestinians’ education to consist of lessons regarding the myriad injustices and violations of international law that Palestinians that have perpetrated and continue to perpetrate against Jews?  Is the natural goal of Palestinian-Arab education to turn Palestinian-American youth into Zionists?)
     
12. For instance, a few weeks ago, one of our B.A. students who teaches in a local synagogue’s Sunday (Hebrew) school fielded several questions regarding Palestinians from her second- and third-grade students.  The students were asking her anxious questions about the massacres of October 7, 2023. Among other things, our student told the children that some “bad people” were oppressing Palestinians in Gaza; that those same people had killed many Jews on October 7; and that many, many innocent Palestinians were suffering unjustly, both as Hamas’ human shields and as casualties of Israeli bombings, in the mire of the current war.  Our student told her students that she hopes the Palestinians as a group will one day be free so they can live their lives in peace and prosperity alongside Israeli Jews and Arab citizens of Israel.  She purposely did not demonize Palestinians or treat them all as “terrorists,” or (to cite Eitan) as “Indians” whom it would be fun for Jewish “cowboys” to shoot. 
     
13. As noted above, the video feature delivers its negative portrayal of mainstream, organized American Jewish communal life via a few blanket assertions and claims by its protagonists, not by considering or even alluding to any body of unbiased evidence. Further, the video avoids any consideration of the possibility that many young American Jews’ deep immersion in Israeli life may in fact have led these Jews to support Zionism, rather than to reject it. In fact, studies suggest that the deeper diaspora Jews’ familiarity with Israel, the stronger their support of it. (Read on.)
     
14. “Israelism” presents wide-ranging American-Jewish support for Israel as the product of educational malfeasance, not of “real” education and of genuine attachment. This is self-serving and perhaps flattering to the protagonists of the film, yet it amounts to an unsophisticated reading of a complex historical and cultural phenomenon that has, in fact, produced various forms of Zionist motivation, from extreme Right to extreme Left.
     
15. For instance: Informants in Prof. David Graizbord’s book, The New Zionists report that attending Jewish summer camp as youngsters showed them that being Jewish and being a “Zionist” did not consist of blindly supporting Israel.  Indeed, these former campers learned from their Israeli camp counselors that being an Israeli can mean espousing a wide variety of political perspectives, from the hard-Left to the hard-Right; that not all Israeli citizens are Jews; and that being an Israeli patriot entails, among other things, voicing trenchant disagreements with—and issuing scathing critiques of—not only the Israeli government, but of mainstream American Jewish organizations such as AIPAC, as well as of Israel as a state. 
     
16. In any event, it is for scholars of Jewish diaspora culture and education to evaluate young Jews’ education responsibly. To have, instead, a faculty member from an academic unit such as MENAS, which has no expertise in Jewish matters, make propagandistic hay of real and alleged imperfections in Jewish education by platforming the invidious interpretations of members of a political movement, smells of raw, hostile partisanship, not of an attempt to understand anything.  The same would be true of UA/Judaic Studies were to show a film on the mobilization of UN and other resources for the education of Palestinian children to hate Jews and to murder them.
     
17. American Jews, like Palestinian-Americans, patronize institutions and programs that will educate their children to love their respective national homelands and their respective political causes. American Jews, like Palestinian Americans, have every right to do this. From that it does not follow that the national love and pride that Jewish and Arab children in the US grow up to feel is the product of manipulation by some evil “Establishment.” Emotional attachment to nation and nation-states is multifaceted and can develop from multiple sources and stimuli, including parental guidance. To last, however, that love must be at least partly ratified by the lover’s experience in some way. In other words, strong emotional attachments are not merely “engineered.”  And yet, “Israelism” does not bother to consider whether the positive, affectionate attachment that most young American Jews feel toward Israel (despite many of these Jews’ own criticisms of the country) is or is not ratified by experience. “Israelism” asserts that reality does not justify that attachment. How is a viewer of ‘Israelism’ to judge whether this latter position is accurate? 
     
18. Extant data indicate that most American Jews feel a strong attachment to Israel. By contrast, the radical anti-Zionist informants of “Israelism” are relatively few—albeit loud.   Yet, the filmmakers are clearly not interested in testing their theses; they trumpet them a priori, and they presume that everything they show in their film supports those theses.  That is why they do not bother to ask young, pro-Israel Jews, much less to explore, why so many majority of them support Israel—and why even those young American Jews who become estranged from organized Jewish life (not to mention Zionism) during their young adulthood tend to become closer to Israel in their later years, as they build Jewish families (as Theodore Sasson argues in his book, The New American Zionism). 
     
19. Were “Israelism” actually trying to engage viewers’ minds and not just lionize its protagonists and applaud their politics, it might have interviewed young Jews at length about the reasons that support Israel despite the many problems that the country continues to have—including violations of human rights—in its relations with the populations of the West Bank (especially areas B and C), and Gaza, and with Israeli citizens who are Palestinian Arabs.
     
20. One aspect the film does not explore with anything resembling fair-mindedness pertains to American Jews who have immigrated to Israel and have served in the Israel Defense Forces.  “Israelism” features one such subject, Eitan, who became disenchanted with the IDF and has since denounced his military service in the West Bank.  On camera, Eitan relates that he saw his fellow soldiers brutally, and for no apparent reason, abuse an unarmed Palestinian detainee whose hands were tied. The implication is that IDF soldiers (all of them?) are bigoted savages.  As a result, and presumably in response to other, similar incidents that the filmmakers do not disclose (why not?), Eitan now works with an NGO that sees Israel as a whole as inhumane, and he denounces the IDF often, and tearfully, in public. 
     
21. Whether Eitan knew anything worthy of an adult concerning the Arab-Israeli conflict before he joined the IDF is at best unclear.  We must take it on faith from his statements that his Jewish education was totally worthless, even fraudulent.  For instance, did Eitan know—or does he now know—of any instances in which IDF soldiers acted humanely toward Palestinian civilians?  Does he know why Israeli soldiers are present in parts of the West Bank in the first place (and no, the full answer is not “To support imperialism by radical, messianic settlers who wish to have Israel annex the territory.” There was a war in 1967 that was preceded by Al-Fatah’s attacks upon Israeli targets from that land—but no discussion of this occupies the film).  Is Eitan aware that according to the Oslo accords, which were supposed to spur a transition to full Palestinian rule in the West Bank, provides for the Palestinian Authority’s ruling over some 95% of all Palestinian residents of the West Bank since the 1990s? More to the point: Do the makers and interviewees of “Israelism” believe that the entire history of the Arab-Israeli conflict from the 1880s to this day has any bearing on present realities? Do they even acknowledge the possibility that the conflict has long required “two to tango”—in other words, that the conflict is the product of two countervailing national movements, and not a simple story of Jewish invaders arbitrarily and callously victimizing innocent natives always already and forever? According to the caricaturesque morality of “Israelism,” such questions are not even worth asking.
     
22. It is at best unclear how one or more incidents of cruelty justify Eitan’s and Israelism’s leap in logic:  We, righteous Jews, are aghast at violations of human rights, therefore everything we have been taught Israel is a sham; Jews have no right to live in their ancestral homeland as a sovereign people, and (presumably) Israel must surrender and be dismantled as the Jews’ internationally-recognized nation-state.  One wonders: To whom, exactly must Israel surrender? To the PA? To Hamas? And are there any Palestinian violations of Jewish rights worth mentioning? Would these violations merit a similar, categorical disavowal of Palestinian rights? 
     
23. The film’s Jewish informants are presented as virginal innocents or brave, tearful penitents without there being any discussion of how their personal disillusionment, itself partly a product of their late discovery of Israeli violations of human rights, merits the position—implicit or explicit—that anything of significance that young Jews have ever been taught regarding Israel is a sham, and that this justifies the complete and absolute negation and condemnation of Zionism and hence of Israel, which is what the interviewees’ organizations espouse. Do a country’s violations of human rights mean that that self-same county is categorically illegitimate and must therefore be taken apart, and its citizens disenfranchised? By this standard, virtually all states “should” cease to exist, including any prospective “State of Palestine” led by Fatah and/or Hamas. The (il)logical leap that the video implicitly takes on this score is staggering. 
     
24. At the ACJS we are privy to many stories of Americans—including several of our own former UA students—who have immigrated to Israel and served in the IDF in frontline and administrative capacities. These experiences have brought our former students into direct contact with Arabs in the West Bank. Unlike the activists featured in “Israelism,” these Americans have experienced Palestinian violence and remember well the three times, from 2001 to 2009, that Israeli Prime Ministers offered their Palestinian counterpart, Mahmoud Abbas, ca. 100% of the West Bank and the eastern neighborhoods of Jerusalem (including the Temple Mount and land swaps) so that the territory might serve as the platform of a Palestinian State.  “Israelism” does not even mention these offers.  Instead, it portrays Israel and Zionism as hell-bent on the domination and humiliation of Palestinians from the very start of Israel’s history.  (Could it be that the informants and filmmakers are so young that they simply don’t remember—or did not internalize—the Oslo Process and its denouement?) 
     
25. Thus, the ACJS can attest to many stories, both like and (mostly) unlike that of Eitan.  A vast majority of our former students who now reside in Israel are critical of the country and its policies, but without going to the naïve extreme that Eitan does. In other words, our former students are still Israeli patriots who perceive that Israel must continue to exist as the democratic nation-state of and for the Jewish people with equal civil rights for all its citizens. Virtually to a person, these former Wildcats support Jewish and Palestinian self-determination and dignity under the terms of a “two states for two peoples” solution.     
     
26. The subjects of UA Prof. David Graizbord’s The New Zionists: Young American Jews, Jewish Nationality, and Israel (2020), run the gamut from relatively care-free graduates of Jewish summer camps and JCC programs in the US, who support Israel as one would a sports team, to hyper-informed new Israelis—from right-wingers to left-wingers.  Unlike Eitan, the new Israeli subjects were not utterly confused by the adult reality of their adopted country. The more these new Israeli subjects know about Israel from within, as independent adults (as opposed to from heritage tours and ideologically prefabricated tours such as those organized by the Holy Land Trust, Sami Awad’s organization), the stronger, more deep-seated and more nuanced their Zionism.  Notice: Contrary to what “Israelism” claims, as regards Israel, real familiarity does not necessarily breed contempt.
     
27. The filmmakers tell their story as if the feature’s protagonists were the only righteous young Jews who care about Palestinians and their dignity.  This is simplistic, patently false, and borders on slander.  From its inception, modern Zionism has been conscious of the Arab inhabitants of the “common home” (as Vladimir Jabotinsky called it), that Palestinians and Jews share. Zionism’s many adherents have proposed numerous ways to engage in relations between the groups. “Israelism” and its protagonists may be sincere, yet they obviously wish to elide, or simply lack a thorough education in, these and other aspects of the history and prescriptions of Zionism.
     
28. Just as Palestinians hardly feature in the video, so too, Israeli Jews (and Israeli Palestinians) are almost entirely faceless and voiceless in “Israelism.” It is as if the filmmakers believed that the Palestinian-Israeli dimension of the wider Arab-Israeli conflict only pitted “foreign” American Jews against native local Palestinians. This is not only myopic; it also avoids dealing with the very people with whom Palestinians have to deal in their lives, namely, Israeli Jews.  Convincing 100% of American Jews to be anti-Zionists would still not eliminate the need for Palestinians to grapple with the existence and rights of Israeli Jews.  Avoiding any discussion of those rights suggests an attempt to avoid grappling with them.   
     
29. “Israelism” designates Palestinians as the native population of Israel/Palestine without even asking whether Jews too are aboriginal to that land. Why the tendentious omission? 
     
30. When one considers that Palestinian politics are dominated by autocratic parties and that their most prominent “civil society” initiative in the West, the BDS (Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions) movement, is bankrolled by the Qatari Emirate (a democracy?) among others, and is organized by leaders, such as Omar Barghouti,  who admit that BDS is part of an attempt to end Israel, not to forge peace with it, and not to secure the political dignity of two peoples via two independent states, one can see why the filmmakers’ vagueness on Palestinian politics and goals is convenient: It avoids having to delve into hard, political complexities, and keeps everything in the realm of righteous-sounding platitudes and specious, emotional appeals.  
     
31. “Israelism” reproduces propagandistic, easily discredited canards, such as the claim that there are roads in the West Bank on which only Jews may drive, or that Israeli government denies sufficient water to the residents of PA territory, or that Israeli Army checkpoints are only or mostly meant to harass ordinary Palestinians, not to address any legitimate security concerns.  Underlying these canards is the claim that everything Israelis do that is harsh or even inconvenient to Palestinians is entirely arbitrary, sadistic, and by extension that Israelis fabricate threats to their safety from armed Palestinian groups and individuals.  The upshot is that “Israel” is just nasty—a violent, bigoted entity, and nothing “it” does has any good reason behind it. At no point does the film name politically prominent Palestinian groups, all of which are on record as regarding Israelis as categorical “settlers,” and hence fit for murder. This is the approach of all the mainstream Palestinian organizations that have dominated the Palestinian national movement since the 1920s. 
     
32. The canard of “Apartheid,” features in “Israelism” almost as an axiom. The filmmakers fleetingly explain “Apartheid” as a situation in which there is “one set of laws for one group, and another set of laws for another”—presumably referring to the status of Palestinians in the West Bank. According to this vague and superficial explanation, which does not  seem even remotely aware of the contrasts between the status quo of residents of the West Bank and of Blacks in Apartheid-era South Africa (see here for a different, South African view), no relevant agreement between Israel and the PLO is worth mentioning, and Palestinians in the West Bank should presumably receive Israeli citizenship immediately (and—this is a contradiction—Israel should be dismantled). 
     
33. In fact, however, the Oslo accords lay out a status quo according to which Palestinians and Israelis in the West Bank are to be subject to two legal regimes: respectively, that of Israel and that of the PA (and of a future Palestinian state), until the final status of the territory is determined via mutual agreement between Israel and the PA; furthermore, neither of the parties is to take steps that would prejudice a future, negotiated settlement on citizenship or any other “final status” matter. That said, there is an overarching agreement that Israeli-administered areas of the West Bank are to “gradually [be] transferred to Palestinian jurisdiction.”  The latter already has jurisdiction and primary control over 95-97% of the Palestinian population of the West Bank.  Given that the PA has often announced that no Israeli Jews will be allowed to live in any future Palestinian state, it is at best unclear how the filmmakers believe that a binational “Kumbaya state” is to emerge, and why Israel should capitulate on the matter of legal regimes for West Bank residents when the PA does not intend to extend any rights to Jews who live in those of their ancestral territories that lie in the West Bank.

Conclusion

“Israelism” is self-serving, tug-at-the-heartstrings propaganda. It is not based on a fully informed and honest analysis of American Jewish affairs.  Its overarching characterization of Israel-attachment as the product of “brainwashing” is not evidence of “brainwashing”; it is simply an adolescent cry: “We do not like Israel-attachment, so it must somehow be illegitimate. Our elders lied to us. Only we see the truth. Because we believe this, we are heroic. Hurray for us!” 

The video is simply not worthy of the UofA.  “Freedom of speech!” is all well and good. Yet, if your speech is propagandistic, it is contrary to the principles that the University of Arizona ought to fulfill. And the ACJS will point this out.