As of this morning, UCLA’s SJP chapter has posted a series of screenshots to their Instagram story originally posted by the account savesheikhjarrahnow.
One post reads that “the notion of a good ‘Israeli’ settler is every bit as absurd and contradictory as the myth of a ‘good’ slaveowner.” Following, the post reads “These systems are only ever truly dismantled by the application of brute force by the oppressed.”
Another story post says that “Anyone who places hope in the ‘good’ settlers who are against ‘apartheid’ is a normalizer. If an Israeli is pro-Palestinian, then they’ll renounce that identity altogether.” The post provides that “this contradiction will ultimately have to resolve itself in a definitive way- and it won’t be done through the pseudo-democratic mechanisms of a colonial ethnostate.” One need not read between the lines, or be familiar with SJP’s history of pro-Hamas rhetoric, to understand that the “definitive way” SJP prescribes is characteristically violent.
There is a term for such behavior: hate speech on the basis of national origin. SJP’s rhetoric unambiguously demonizes and discriminates against all who identify as Israeli, demanding that they renounce their Israeli identity even if they were born in the state of Israel. By encouraging brute force- SJP promotes violence as the only solution to achieving their goals. This isn’t just a strategy to achieving their goals in the Middle East, but a call for a globalized intifada aimed at all Israelis and the 80% of American Jews who feel connected to Israel.
Likening Israelis to slaveowners is flat-out ahistorical, and a strawman tactic that simplifies the complexity of the Israel-Palestine conflict to a binary of oppressed versus oppressor. It not only dehumanizes Israelis but serves to justify violence against them. To say that “Israel and Palestine are bound in a dialectical unity of opposites and that the latter can only exist at the total expense of the former,” utilizes this reductonistic framework to call for the total destruction of Israel.
Such messaging on a day that some SJP chapters have termed “Day of Rage” is at best ominous, and is at worst direct incitement of malice to our Jewish and Israeli community on campus.
The views expressed in this post reflect the views of the author(s) and not UCLA or ASUCLA Communications Board.
