Joining Forces to Campaign Against the Occupation Is No Danger for the Jewish Community
David
Bernstein is right – in the spirit of intersectionality, more activist
groups are embracing BDS in solidarity with the fight for Palestinian
liberation. But the Jewish community can't – and shouldn't – isolate
itself from them.
Henry Rosen, Max Fineman Jan 05, 2016 11:38 PM
In
his recent opinion piece entitled “The anti-Israel trend you’ve never
heard of”, in which he denounces intersectionality as fueling the growth
of BDS, David Bernstein, president and CEO of the Jewish Council for
Public Affairs, misrepresents the motivations and principles behind
Palestine solidarity activists’ work to ally themselves with other
social justice causes.
Bernstein's
argument, and the policies of many Jewish communities when it comes to
Israel, leads Jewish communities to put themselves on the wrong side of
history, sacrificing their commitment to supporting various struggles
for justice for defending the increasingly indefensible policies of the
Israeli state.
Bernstein’s
argument distorts the concept of intersectionality, dismissing its use
as a term to describe the connections between various forms of
oppression and painting it as a mere “community relations strategy.” As
black legal theorist Kimberlé Crenshaw, who first coined the term
intersectionality, explains, “intersectionality is an analytic
sensibility, a way of thinking about identity and its relationship to
power”.
Intersectionality
is not simply about the banding together of multiple marginalized
groups in order to amplify their voices, although it does make it easier
for groups to unite in coalition to build their power.
Intersectionality is a framework of analysis that recognizes people
hold multiple forms of identities and addresses the connections between
various forms of marginalization and oppression.
An
intersectional framework enables social justice advocates to challenge
interlocking oppressive structures of power in a holistic way. As Audre
Lorde said, “There is no such thing as a single-issue struggle, because
we do not live single-issue lives.” For example, feminism that does not
account for how race and class influence women’s experiences of
oppression fails to address the needs of poor women and/or women of
color. Crenshaw’s introduction of the framework of intersectionality
seeks to combat the erasure of people or aspects of their identities
from single-issue movements.
Intersectionality
is not merely a tactic for “building alliances, and using those
relationships as an opportunity to sell their cause,” as Bernstein would
have people believe. Our struggles against oppressive power structures
are interconnected, and we must challenge them collectively. Activists
who do Palestine solidarity work ally with other groups and deploy an
intersectional framework in order to ensure that these patterns of
social and systemic marginalization are not reproduced within spaces
that seek collective liberation. Our vision is one of freedom, dignity
and equality for all people, and that collective liberation can only be
won by uniting to challenge the ways that imperialism, racism,
patriarchy, police violence, or other systemic inequities that shape our
lives.
Bernstein
calls on the Jewish community “to establish our own intersectionality
with groups on the mainstream left” and “strengthen ties to these more
moderate groups”. But Bernstein’s proposed strategy is just that: a
strategy, and one that blatantly co-opts the language of social justice
movements to actively oppose the liberation of marginalized peoples.
Intersectionality
is not a public relations strategy or a base-building tactic for BDS or
pro-Israel advocates to deploy in order to gain popularity. It is a
worldview and tool of political analysis, rooted in Black feminist
thought, which seeks to root out oppression in all its multiplicity and
complexity. By definition, this concept cannot be co-opted by Israel’s
defenders to attempt to divide the very groups intersectionality seeks
to empower.
The
activist networks that embrace intersectional politics are not a threat
to the mainstream Jewish community. Anti-racist and anti-sexual assault
groups employ an intersectional framework to recognize the shared
patterns of oppression that operate in the Israeli occupation and in
their own local contexts because they see the resonances and even direct
connections in those varied contexts. The framing other movements
fighting systematic oppression as “bad for the Jews” creates an
artificial and undesirable opposition between Jewish safety and fighting
for the justice of oppressed groups. We need to commit, as a community,
to exploring and understanding the links between our multi-layered
identities and those of groups fighting against structural violence
across the world.
The
threat Bernstein and many other pro-Israel leaders see in
intersectional politics is that activist groups are increasingly
embracing BDS and standing in solidarity with students fighting for
Palestinian liberation. If these movements are beginning to embrace the
Palestinian struggle because of their commitment to collective and
universal liberation, the Jewish community’s answer cannot be to isolate
itself from those movements.
We
believe it is necessary to think about intersecting identities within
Jewish communities as well. Jews are not and have never been homogenous,
and as such there is no way to approach issues affecting Jewish
communities without bearing in mind that sexual assault survivors,
people of color and other people of marginalized identities also exist
in Jewish spaces.
As
Jewish students involved in the Palestine solidarity movement, we value
intersectionality as a principle that grounds our work in the reality
that people inhabit multiple identities and thus people experience
multiple oppressions simultaneously. Working in support of the
Palestinian call for BDS from a Jewish perspective grounded in
intersectional politics should not be deemed ‘dangerous’ to the Jewish
mainstream. Rather than creating barriers and drawing red lines, our
Jewish communal leadership should be listening to and thinking carefully
about the motivations and principles of those involved in
intersectional political movements.
Our
work as Jewish students in solidarity with Palestine is first and
foremost to support Palestinians in their struggle for liberation and an
end to the occupation. And in addition, we are seeking to transform our
own Jewish communities, to center values of justice and collective
liberation rather than exceptionalism and isolation.
Henry Rosen is a junior film and Jewish studies major at Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, New York.
Max Fineman is a sophomore philosophy major at Columbia University in New York City.
Both are members of the Jewish Voice for Peace Student Network.
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