Over 900 students and cultural staff primarily based in Israel, the Occupied Palestinian Territories, and across the globe have signed a letter denouncing Israel’s “apartheid” system. Titled “The Elephant in The Room,” the missive has been circulating during the last week amongst teachers and cultural staff, amongst them artists, arts professors, arts historians, and museum professionals.
“American Jews have long been at the forefront of social justice causes, from racial equality to abortion rights, but have paid insufficient attention to the elephant in the room: Israel’s long-standing occupation that, we repeat, has yielded a regime of apartheid,” the letter reads. Leading with a cartoon by Israeli illustrator and protest artist Ze’ev Engelmayer, widely known by his pink alter-ego Shoshke, it urges Jewish leaders within the United States to talk up and demand that elected officers assist finish Israel’s occupation of Palestine.
One of the petition organizers, Pennsylvania State University Assistant Professor of History and Jewish Studies Lior Sternfeld, instructed Hyperallergic that the response to the letter “shows that the moment is ripe to consider serious policy changes.”
“The big shift in this statement is that there are quite a few Israeli academics who signed the letter who previously would have refused to equate the occupation with apartheid,” Sternfeld stated, particularly pointing to the help from Israeli historian Benny Morris in addition to three retired Israeli ambassadors.
Sternfeld stated that he hopes the big selection of responses from Israeli and Jewish intellectuals “will put to rest the argument that criticism of [Israel’s occupation] equals anti-semitism.”
The textual content calls out the violent oppression and ethnic cleaning the Israeli authorities has constantly inflicted upon Palestinian individuals, together with the greater than 190 Palestinian people who’ve been killed by Israeli forces within the West Bank and Gaza for the reason that starting of 2023 alone. While the petition criticizes Israel’s “current government’s messianic, homophobic, and misogynistic agenda,” it additionally factors out how “Jewish supremacism” has been a rising power within the nation that extends previous to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s far-right management.
It additionally notes the position of the 2018 controversial “nation-state law” that completely gave Israel’s Jewish residents elevated rights over the nation’s Arab inhabitants, which is essentially composed of Palestinian individuals. In addition to selectively giving Israeli Jewish individuals the “right to national self-determination in the State of Israel,” the regulation additionally eliminated Arabic because the nation’s official language.
“Despite its obvious flaws, this statement, signed by almost 1,000 predominantly Jewish and Jewish-Israeli scholars, is a substantial step forward towards recognizing the comprehensive rights of the Indigenous Palestinian people and towards dismantling Israel’s 75-year-old regime of settler-colonialism and apartheid,” stated Omar Barghouti, co-founder of the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) motion that advocates for ending worldwide help for Israel’s oppression of Palestinians.
“The main flaw in the statement is its omission of the true elephant in the room — the UN-stipulated rights of Palestinian refugees, who constitute two-thirds of the Indigenous Palestinian people, to return and to receive reparations,” Barghouti stated, referring to the precise to return as established by UN Resolution 194 that’s one of the main demands of the BDS movement.
The signatories of the “Elephant in the Room” letter embrace dozens of cultural and create staff who’ve turn out to be “deeply unsettled” by the Israeli authorities’s “disregard for basic rights,” within the phrases of Eyal Landman, an architect and artist primarily based in Tel Aviv.
“The idea that Israel can still be seen as a democracy is getting harder and harder to swallow,” Landman instructed Hyperallergic, including that the state’s “excuses being used to downplay the violent apartheid situation just don’t hold up, especially with the recent and future changes in the legal system.” Israeli-American artist Nadav Assor, at present an affiliate professor in Connecticut College’s Studio Art division, defined to Hyperallergic that he signed the letter as a result of he has discovered it “doubly painful” to look at the US authorities and American-Jewish establishments “prop up a ‘regime of apartheid.’”
“As an artist and educator who teaches their students to critically consider underlying messages and causes, I find it disingenuous and dangerous to not fully acknowledge the painful and extremely undemocratic reality that over a third of the inhabitants of this land have experienced for many decades, while rightfully protesting its further decline into total authoritarianism,” Assor stated. Israel-based multidisciplinary artist and trainer Avivit Ballas Baranes, who additionally signed onto the letter, instructed Hyperallergic that “the situation in Israel is deteriorating day by day.”
“I strongly believe that Jews in the US can play a role here as a wake-up call for the Israeli government to stop,” Landman went on in his correspondence to Hyperallergic, underscoring the significance of “using the right words to describe what’s happening [in Israel and Palestine], even if it’s hard to swallow.”
