University of Wisconsin, Madison students on April 29, 2024. Photo: USA TODAY Network via Reuters Connect

The student government of the University of Wisconsin–Madison is preparing to vote on a resolution to endorse the boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) movement against Israel, a measure for which Student for Justice in Palestine (SJP), the Young Democratic Socialists of America, and the Palestine Solidarity Committee (PSC) have tenaciously lobbied for several weeks.

The resolution, which if passed would call on the university to divest from Israel, accuses the Jewish state of “apartheid, genocide, and militarized violence … at the intersections of race, gender, religion, disability, and socioeconomic status.” It also compares Israel’s conduct in its defensive war against the terrorist group Hamas to the Rapid Support Forces of Sudan (RSF), a notorious paramilitary group responsible for a slew of war crimes and premeditated mass casualties of civilians.

Pushed by anti-Israel activists, the resolution demands that University of Wisconsin divest its holdings in BlackRock, a global investment organization over which anti-Zionists and conspiracists obsess because of its investments in Israeli bonds, valued at $65 million, and manufacturers of military weaponry and technology.

“The UW System invests at least $1 billion into various BlackRock index funds,” the resolution says. “The UW System pays account, asset management, and miscellaneous fees to BlackRock to manage the index funds, the amount of which is a proportion of the total funds invested, in addition to having investments in BlackRock.”

According to The Daily Cardinal, the university’s official campus newspaper, the measure has prompted concerns about the resolution’s potential effect on civil dialogue, as well as its emanating from SJP, which, as The Algemeiner has previously reported, largely led the campus assault on Jewish civil rights amid the war in Gaza by bullying, harassing, and assaulting students who support Israel. The resolution failed to advance to a vote when the student government considered it last Wednesday, even as SJP and its allies pressured the body to limit comment from the student body because the “proportion of Zios [sic] rises as the speaker list goes on.”

“Zio” is an antisemitic slur brought into prominence by former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke. While the term, derived from “Zionist,” has generally been deployed by white supremacists and other far-right extremists, it has more recently been used as well by anti-Israel activists on the progressive far left to refer to Jews in a derogatory manner.

“This resolution would completely shut down the important conversations that are being had on campus,” Erika Klein told the student government during the public forum held on Wednesday, according to The Daily Cardinal. “Students who have connections to Israel, including Israeli students and Jews, will feel unsafe and worried to speak out for fear of social consequences.”

Additionally, UW Madison’s administration has noted that, as a public university, the institution cannot boycott Israel anyway, as state law bars government entities from doing so. During the forum, the Cardinal said, UW Madison’s dean of students, Christina Olstad, said the SJP resolution is in “direct conflict” with the law.

Formally launched in 2005, the BDS movement opposes Zionism — a movement supporting the Jewish people’s right to self-determination — and rejects Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish nation-state. It seeks to isolate the country with economic, political, and cultural boycotts. Official guidelines issued for the campaign’s academic boycott state that “projects with all Israeli academic institutions should come to an end,” and delineate specific restrictions that its adherents should abide by — for instance, denying letters of recommendation to students applying to study abroad in Israel.

Leaders of the BDS movement have repeatedly stated their goal is to destroy the world’s only Jewish state.

The national SJP group, which has been linked to Islamist terrorist organizations, has publicly discussed its strategy of using the anti-Zionist student movement as a weapon for destroying the US.

“Divestment [from Israel] is not an incrementalist goal. True divestment necessitates nothing short of the total collapse of the university structure and American empire itself,” the organization said in September 2024. “It is not possible for imperial spoils to remain so heavily concentrated in the metropole and its high-cultural repositories without the continuous suppression of populations that resist the empire’s expansion; to divest from this is to undermine and eradicate America as we know it.”

The tweet was one comment in a series of revelations of SJP’s revolutionary goals and its apparent plans to amass armies of students and young people for a long campaign of subversion against US institutions, including the economy, military, and higher education. Like past anti-American movements, SJP has also been fixated on the presence and prominence of Jews in American life and the US’s alliance with Israel.

On the same day the tweet was posted, Columbia University’s most strident pro-Hamas organization, whose institutional recognition was revoked, was reported to be distributing literature calling on students to join the Palestinian terrorist group’s movement to destroy Israel during the school’s convocation ceremony.

“This booklet is part of a coordinated and intentional effort to uphold the principles of the thawabit and the Palestinian resistance movement overall by transmitting the words of the resistance directly,” said a pamphlet distributed by Columbia University Apartheid Divest (CUAD), an SJP spinoff, to incoming freshmen. “This material aims to build popular support for the Palestinian war of national liberation, a war which is waged through armed struggle.”

Other sections of the pamphlet were explicitly Islamist, invoking the name of “Allah, the most gracious” and referring to Hamas as the “Islamic Resistance Movement.” Proclaiming, “Glory to Gaza that gave hope to the oppressed, that humiliated the ‘invincible’ Zionist army,” it said its purpose is to build a global army of Muslims.

Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.

When California Gov. Gavin Newsom told Politico in an interview on Tuesday that he regretted using the term “apartheid” in reference to Israel earlier this month, I wasn’t at all surprised. Anyone who cared to listen to the podcast in which he supposedly made the accusation could understand that his critics were twisting the meaning of his less-than-articulate wording. (Israel, he said, is discussed by some “appropriately as sort of an apartheid state.”)

That’s what happens when the Israeli-Palestinian conflict becomes, in the public eye, less about working toward a solution and more about scoring political points or drawing eyeballs to endless social media feeds.

Who cares what someone really said when I can score a point for my side? Who cares what a person really means when I can spin it to boost likes?

As Newsom explained on Tuesday, he used the term “apartheid” in reference to a New York Times column by Thomas Friedman, who warned that if Israel continues down the parth of annexing the West Bank, it runs the risk of becoming an apartheid regime.

“And that is a legitimate concern I have, that I share with Tom,” Newsom told Politico.

That is not a radical idea. It is, to borrow a cliche, an inconvenient truth that too many American Jews who are supportive of Israel refuse to confront.

Israel’s creeping annexation of the West Bank, advancing a longstanding goal of many members of the current Israeli government, would result in a state whose boundaries contain about 7 million Jews and 7 million Arabs. That would mean the loss of Israel’s Jewish identity, if all incorporated Arabs are given full rights. If they aren’t — at this point the much more likely scenario — it means apartheid.

The vast majority of American Jews, and Americans, support Israel as a Jewish democratic state. The “democratic” part of that is not optional. Apartheid nations, aside from being immoral, are pariah nations.

You know who else knew that?

David Ben Gurion, for one. Israel’s founding prime minister, right after the 1967 Six-Day War, got on the radio and said that Israel must not take control of the Palestinian territories, “or it risks becoming an apartheid state.”

Yitzhak Rabin reiterated that point in a 1976 interview, during his first term as prime minister. ​​​​“I don’t think it’s possible to contain over the long term, if we don’t want to get to apartheid, a million and a half Arabs inside a Jewish state,” he said.

Many other more contemporary Israeli leaders share that concerns. Meir Dagan, former chief of the Mossad, said on Israeli TV in 2015 that “in the Palestinian arena,” Netanayhu’s “policy will lead … to apartheid.”

I understand that “Newsom calls Israel an apartheid state” is an alluring headline — both for some Israel-supporters, who’d prefer a 2028 Democratic presidential candidate who treats the “A” word as verboten, and for Israel haters looking to pile on. It certainly has more dramatic appeal than “Newsom’s thoughts on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict are identical to Rabin’s.”

Yes, the governor could have expressed his views more coherently from the beginning. But anybody who spent a second parsing his word salad would know what he meant — and that he was dead on.

Unfortunately, we live in a world that monetizes rage. That’s why, even when Newsom set out to repair the damage from his first interview, he refused to identify as a Zionist.

“I revere the state of Israel,” he answered when asked if he considered himself a Zionist. “I’m proud to support the state of Israel. I deeply, deeply oppose Bibi Netanyahu’s leadership, his opposition to the two-state solution and deeply oppose how he is indulging the far-right as it relates to what’s going on in the West Bank.”

The word “Zionist” itself has become rage-bait, as much if not more so than “apartheid,” and Newsom refused to take it.

To some, “Zionism” refers to the current policies of the current government, which in fact many Israelis and American Jews find anathema to, well, Zionism. (That sense may be part of why only a small fraction of American Jews identify with the word “Zionist,” despite maintaining a strong sense of investment in the state of Israel.) To others it means nothing less than the expulsion and oppression of Palestinians.

To others still it means Jewish sovereignty “from the river to the sea,” or the right of Jews to self-determination in their ancestral homeland.

Better to describe what you think about Israel than adopt a label that will be defined for you. And what Newson was saying was exactly what needs to be said: if you support Israel, you must oppose the creeping annexation of the West Bank and Gaza, which Meir Dagan, the former Mossad director, said would spell, “the end of the Zionist dream.”

Too bad that all the chatter around what Newsom believes obscured the eminent reasonableness of what he actually said.

The post Gavin Newsom isn’t waffling on Israel — he’s voicing sensible ideas in an era of outrage appeared first on The Forward.

(JTA) — Some critics of AIPAC are calling for it to be excised from electoral politics. Others are working to beat the pro-Israel lobby at its own game.

At least three groups have entered the scene this year as hopeful counterweights to pro-Israel lobbying groups, with an eye on progressive candidates. And they’ve borrowed some of AIPAC’s playbook to do so.

The Peace, Accountability and Leadership PAC, or PAL PAC, was founded in February by Margaret DeReus, executive director of the Institute for Middle East Understanding. It has endorsed nine congressional candidates so far this year, and its website funnels visitors to donate to their campaigns.

A second group, American Priorities, is led by Hannah Fertig, a strategist who worked on Bernie Sanders’ 2020 presidential campaign and is Jewish. Founded in January, the super PAC plans to spend “at least $10 million” on the midterms, according to Fertig, on candidates “who are very strong on our issues, both foreign policy and domestic policy.” In picking which challengers to back, Fertig said they look for “strong, credible, progressive” candidates — and ones whose incumbent opponents have taken donations from AIPAC.

The third group makes its antipathy clear in name: Citizens Against AIPAC Corruption PAC was founded by the duo behind social media watchdog Track AIPAC, which posts candidates’ AIPAC donation numbers in order “to end AIPAC and the Israel lobby’s stranglehold on American Democracy,” according to its website. CAAC was founded in 2024, though it only spent about $14,000 that cycle, all against the Jewish Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz.

This year, CAAC is “actively fundraising and willing to spend as much as we can raise seeking strategic victories,” a spokesperson wrote to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. Its candidates must meet a number of policy commitments that include recognizing “the genocide in Palestine,” supporting “recognition of the Palestinian state by the United Nations” and opposing policies that it says conflate “criticism of the government of Israel with antisemitism broadly.” The group has spent in two races this year, and with $273,000 in cash on hand as of the end of February, says it intends “to do more in upcoming races.”

Together, the PACs are trying to maximize the moment and elect pro-Palestinian candidates as Americans’ sympathy toward Israel wanes.

“We have a massive opportunity to be on the offensive this cycle, and increase the number of members of Congress who will challenge the status quo on Palestine,” Amira Hassan, PAL PAC’s political director, said in a recent radio interview. PAL PAC and American Priorities did not respond to requests for comment.

Patrick Dorton, a spokesperson for United Democracy Project, AIPAC’s super PAC, said in an interview that it’s “not good for American democracy” that these groups are popping up and “trying to silence pro-Israel voices in the Democratic party” — a critique that mirrors what pro-Palestinian activists say about AIPAC.

“This is the fringe left using dark money to advance an anti-Israel agenda,” he said.

Results of the groups’ spending so far have been mixed.

Two of the progressive groups’ handpicked candidates won primaries in New Jersey and Texas earlier this year, and another challenger in North Carolina narrowly lost after a wider defeat in 2022.

Last week, one of three PAL PAC endorsees in Illinois prevailed — as an unopposed incumbent. The group’s other endorsees fell short: Kat Abughazaleh, 26, finished second in the 9th Congressional District, although she drew more votes than the AIPAC-backed candidate, and community organizer Junaid Ahmed, who lost to AIPAC’s preferred candidate, Melissa Bean, in the eighth district.

The post-election quarterbacking had some critics of Israel wondering whether the new PACs could have done more.

Ryan Grim, a reporter for Drop Site News, which has an anti-Israel bent, called it a “huge miss” by American Priorities to resist “pressure to support” Ahmed. Grim suggested that it could have channeled more of AIPAC’s willingness to spend. The group had about $1.4 million in cash on hand as of Feb. 11, $1 million of which was spent in a North Carolina race.

“Results show they could’ve made a decisive difference,” he wrote about the race, which Ahmed lost by five points. “AIPAC almost never holds back, and didn’t here, and so notched the [win].”

Meanwhile, among the progressive groups’ candidates who did win, it’s not clear that the pro-Palestinian backing did anything to move the needle.

Analilia Mejia won a New Jersey special election and benefited from $35,000 in TV ad buys from CAAC PAC. But far more was spent in the campaign by the AIPAC’-affiliated United Democracy Project, which spent $2 million against the moderate Tom Malinowski because of his openness to conditioning military aid to Israel. That spending is widely seen to have inadvertently boosted Mejia, a former Bernie Sanders staffer.

CAAC PAC’s spending was modest compared to UDP’s in that race, but other groups are entering the midterms with deeper pockets.

American Priorities has pledged to spend at least $10 million boosting its preferred candidates this year.

“We want our foreign policy views to reflect where the Democratic base has moved, particularly on Gaza, and on unconditional U.S. military to Israel,” Fertig told Semafor.

A new NBC poll found that 57% of Democrats have a negative view of Israel, and 13% have a positive view of the country. In 2023, those numbers were just about dead even, with 35% of Democrats saying negative and 34% viewing Israel positively.

“We’re seeing this as a generational inflection point, and we launched because there’s a huge gap in the progressive spending ecosystem,” Fertig said. “We simply want to make sure that someone’s there to protect candidates who question these policies.”

As a super PAC, American Priorities’ role matches UDP’s. It cannot donate directly to campaigns or coordinate with them, but instead can make independent expenditures on things like TV ads and mailing fliers. Like UDP, its name indicates nothing about Israel or the Palestinians, and its ads focus on unrelated issues as opposed to the candidates’ views on Israel.

The first candidate to receive American Priorities’ support was Nida Allam, also a former Sanders staffer, who conceded after a tight race in North Carolina against incumbent Valerie Foushee. Allam’s campaign foregrounded her opponent’s past support from AIPAC and AI lobbies.

After getting about $1 million from American Priorities, Allam lost by less than 1% of the vote in a race that set records for outside spending in North Carolina. She had lost by 9 points to Foushee in 2022 and said “our movement sounded the alarm for future Democratic primaries throughout this cycle.” CAAC PAC also spent $23,500 in attack ads against Foushee.

On the same day as Allam’s race, the PAL PAC-endorsed Rev. Frederick Haynes III won the Democratic nomination in a Texas congressional primary. Haynes has praised Louis Farrakhan, the Nation of Islam leader who has a history of antisemitism, and criticized Israel for engaging in “apartheid” in a sermon the day after Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023 attack.

“We are sending someone to Congress who had the moral clarity to give this sermon on October 8th, 2023,” PAL PAC’s Hassan wrote after Haynes’ victory. American Priorities also spent $100,000 boosting Haynes, who won the primary handily.

Track AIPAC has spent multiple years posting online against the pro-Israel lobby. But the advent of the PACs signals an escalation of strategy.

“The idea of PACs backing ‘Squad’-type candidates, anti-Israel candidates, candidates that say cut off all aid to Israel and ‘stop the genocide,’ I don’t think we’ve seen that before,” said Eric Alterman, a historian and journalist who himself has been critical of AIPAC and the Israeli government. “And that’s an outgrowth of Gaza, where this position all of a sudden has become a mainstream position in the Democratic Party.”

The groups will have additional chances to prove themselves in the coming months. Eleven states are holding primaries in May, and some candidates in those races are making their views on AIPAC known.

In Pennsylvania, progressive state Rep. Chris Rabb — who is racking up endorsements, though not from any of the anti-AIPAC groups — said “F— AIPAC,” during a candidates’ forum.

PAL PAC is still making endorsements on a rolling basis and American Priorities has not disclosed which races it will spend in. PAL PAC’s latest endorsees are both running in June primaries: political adviser Saikat Chakrabarti in California, and State Assemblymember Claire Valdez in New York.

PAL PAC, which describes itself as “an allied organization” of the Institute for Middle East Understanding Policy Project, has also endorsed incumbent Reps. Rashida Tlaib, Ilhan Omar and Summer Lee, who are all vocal critics of Israel and its U.S. support.

In New York City, it has endorsed Valdez as well as Darializa Avila Chevalier, who was a Columbia pro-Palestinian encampment organizer as well as an organizing lead for Zohran Mamdani during the mayoral election.

AIPAC is also likely to keep spending heavily in the coming months. Its super PAC had around $95 million in cash on hand at the end of January, and even the most expansive estimates of its spending since then leaves it with tens of millions of dollars to spend.

Alterman said he doesn’t expect the new pro-Palestinian PACs to receive “the kind of money that flows to AIPAC” — but he isn’t sure how much that matters.

“Whereas it could have some impact on a few local races, I don’t think money is the place where this position is going to make itself felt,” he said, referring to the groundswell of Palestinian support among Democrats. “I think it’s in volunteers and door-knocking and activists and social media.”

This article originally appeared on JTA.org.

The post These pro-Palestinian PACs are trying to beat AIPAC at its own game appeared first on The Forward.