From Los Angeles to Amherst

Zionist Smear Campaign Targets Pro-Palestinian Students

(Young Spartacus pages)

On February 22, vile posters appeared at the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) showing two gunmen standing over a hooded prisoner. The posters were labeled with the name Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) and the hashtag “#JewHaters.” Similar posters have been put up at campuses around the nation, from the University of Virginia to the University of Massachusetts at Amherst—the work of arch-reactionary provocateur David Horowitz, who has launched a “Jew Hatred on Campus” campaign. The purpose of this campaign, which targets at least 50 schools, is to slander pro-Palestinian groups such as the SJP as somehow supporting or “associated with known terrorist organizations” and furthermore to pressure university administrations to “withdraw campus privileges and university support from them.”

Horowitz, a one-time New Left activist turned rabid conservative hack, has a long track record of seeking to squelch leftist speech. His 2006 book, The Professors: The 101 Most Dangerous Academics in America, amounted to a call for witchhunts and purges of the academy across disciplines as varied as African American studies, law, journalism, and international relations. In 2001, he made a splash by placing advertisements in campus newspapers arguing that black people should be thankful for slavery, then turning on those who condemned his grotesque racism as opponents of “free speech” (see “Racism and Witchhunts On Campus,” WV No. 756, 13 April 2001). His current push is well-timed to intersect the climate of “anti-terror” hysteria the U.S. ruling class has been whipping up to foment support for imperialist atrocities and the further trampling of civil liberties.

To protest Horowitz’s vicious campaign, Spartacist supporters attended a February 24 meeting at UCLA co-sponsored by the SJP and Jewish Voice for Peace that had been called to promote the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) campaign. Throughout the UC system, SJP groups have been lobbying the UC Regents to adopt such measures by divesting from “companies engaged in the violation of Palestinian rights.” (See “‘Boycott Israel’ Campaign and Illusions in Democratic Imperialism,” WV No. 1045, 2 May 2014).

Solidarizing with the SJP against the Zionist slurs, an SL spokesman said that the posters were “meant to isolate defenders of the Palestinian people, to associate them with terrorism and set them up” for vigilante attacks as well as government repression. We likewise stand for the defense of the oppressed Palestinian people from Israeli state terror. With regard to BDS, our spokesman explained that Marxists oppose the BDS campaign because it sees bloody U.S. imperialism as a lever for pushing Israel into respecting the Palestinians’ right to national self-determination. The speaker added that Washington will support Israel as long as it serves the strategic interests of U.S. imperialism, regardless of “how many Palestinians are killed, how much of their land is stolen, how many are detained at checkpoints.”

The SJP has called on the UCLA administration and cops to “launch an investigation concerning the creation and distribution of the flyers” and asked the administration to make a statement “condemning the targeting of a student organization with hate-speech.” The representative of the capitalist class on campus, the administration has amply demonstrated its attitude toward pro-Palestinian activists. Three years ago, for example, the UC Irvine administration colluded with the Orange County district attorney to prosecute 11 Muslim students for interrupting a speech by war criminal Michael Oren, then Israeli ambassador to the U.S. (see “Overturn the Convictions of the Irvine 11!” WV No. 995, 3 February 2012). We warn that any appeals to the administration to ban “hate speech” or otherwise police political expression will only empower it in the future to turn on leftists and any perceived opponents of the capitalist status quo.

In contrast to liberal pleas to agents of the class enemy, the SYC stands for mobilizing students, faculty and campus workers to meet Horowitz’s provocations with protest and exposure. When he emerged from his rat hole in 2001 to make an appearance at UC Berkeley as part of a nationwide speaking tour to detestably prettify America’s history of black slavery, the Spartacus Youth Club initiated a united-front picket at which protesters denounced him as a racist ideologue.

The totally false equation of any criticism of Israel with anti-Jewish bigotry is pushed by a well-funded, well-oiled machine, supported by institutions ranging from university administrations to government agencies. The national antagonism between the Israeli Jews and the Palestinian Arabs stems from each nation’s legitimate claim to the same sliver of land—an antagonism that cannot be equitably resolved under capitalism. We seek to forge class unity between the Arab and Jewish workers of the region. To break the Jewish working class from its allegiance to Zionist ideology, and resulting loyalty to the racist Israeli rulers, will surely be very difficult. At the same time, Palestinian nationalism is equally an obstacle to the internationalist program needed to build fundamental class unity against the exploiters. Palestinian freedom can only be won in the struggle to shatter the Zionist state from within through working-class revolution, as part of the fight for a socialist federation of the Near East. The necessary condition for achieving this goal is building internationalist Trotskyist parties throughout the region and in the imperialist centers. The Spartacus Youth Clubs—as the youth auxiliaries of the Spartacist League, U.S. section of the International Communist League—are dedicated to the perspective of forging a revolutionary workers party here in the belly of the imperialist beast.