The following was written in response to the Dec. 8 piece “EIPAC Declaration on Israel-US Alliance.”
On Dec. 8, the Wheel published a statement by Emory-Israel Public Affairs committee (EIPAC) regarding the Israel-U.S. relationship. EIPAC’s piece of blatant propaganda (for that’s really what it is, for lacking demonstrable facts and having been written by a “Public Affairs Committee”) states the organization’s and campus representatives’ support for the “continuing prosperity of the U.S.-Israel relationship as a mutually beneficial alliance that furthers world peace, global health and security among all nations.” It was signed by a sizeable number of student leaders, including the presidents and vice presidents of both the Student Government Association (SGA) — College senior Raj Tilwa and College junior Max Zoberman — and College Council (CC) — College seniors Alyssa Weinstein and Sheena Desai. We don’t intend to argue against the egregious politics of this piece, which should be obvious enough. Rather, we want to briefly reflect on its entirely ideological nature and condemn our “student leaders” for co-signing this baseless puff piece of a statement.
First, we can note that this statement came about after our leaders met with the president of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD), which the article describes as a “national security think tank.” With stated goals of “democracy and counterterrorism education, strategic communications and investigative journalism,” even a cursory look at the statement co-signed by Emory student leaders exposes the FDD as a propaganda outlet. The “unbreakable bond” between American and Israeli interests the article supports, backed by a lobbying group that consistently and influentially backs American intervention in the Middle East, should be subjected to scrutiny by our campus leaders rather than acknowledged with unqualified, unquestioning support.
Clifford May, the president of FDD who met with the group who co-signed the statement, regularly publishes editorials faulting American leaders for insufficient military/financial support of the Israeli state and, with even more frequency, pushing increased hawkishness in the “war on terror.” The violence May supports becomes, in EIPAC’s statement, “the vast amount of military, security and intelligence cooperation that makes the United States and Israel safer and stronger.” In lacking any substantive explanation of what this “support” is, despite referencing its immense size and appealing to its inherent benefit to “shared Western values of equal rights,” the vagueness of the statement is not only blatantly ideological, but also a dangerous lie. To call its co-signing by campus leaders “careless” would be a vast understatement; it is a support of violence through blatant falsehood.
Furthermore, a brief skim of the article reveals the lack of anything resembling a factual statement. In the first paragraph of EIPAC’s “Declaration of Support,” the writers state that their support for the bond between the United States and Israel stems from their “shared Western values of equal rights for all people regardless of race, gender, creed, ethnicity, religion or sexual orientation.” This is a completely meaningless statement. America and Israel are not singular entities that can have one particular set of values; they are nation states governed by numerous politicians often with competing sets of interests. Furthermore, even the most cursory look at a history book will show that the American and Israeli governments often work directly against the idea of “equal rights for all,” whatever that means. Was Israel expressing its love for equal rights when it entered into a military relationship with apartheid South Africa for much of the 1970s? What about the United States with its historical support of right-wing paramilitary groups throughout South America? Or, to move on to the declaration’s other buzzwords, is America a “symbol of freedom” when its incarceration rate is one of the highest in the entire world? And is Israel, when it has over 300 Palestinian children imprisoned?
Was Israel acting as an “oasis of liberty” when, in response to the refugee crisis, its Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu declared his intention to surround the country with a “security and barrier fence” to stop Israel from being “flooded with infiltrators, migrant workers and terrorists?” How much freedom did America create through its various interventions in the Middle East that have largely led to the horrendous circumstances we find ourselves embroiled in today? These examples are only to show that vague appeals to freedom and rights are completely insufficient and can only obfuscate concrete questions of politics.
For instance, the United States has given Israel more than $124.3 billion in aid since the country’s founding, with almost all of it in the form of military assistance. EIPAC’s statement would have one think that this aid, a product of the U.S.-Israel relationship, goes toward fighting for freedom and liberty. However, glancing at a United Nations report shows that, during the summer conflict of 2014, Israeli forces killed more than 1,000 Palestinian civilians. According to the report, “Many fatalities involved multiple family members, with at least 142 Palestinian families having three or more members killed in the same incident.” After Israeli bombing destroyed a U.N. school in the Gaza Strip, the organization went on to accuse Israel of violating international law. Again, we do not need to even make a political argument here against EIPAC’s declaration. We can just say that these are facts that are not so easily absorbed into the idea that Israel and America are anything resembling “an oasis of liberty.” Furthermore, if we are to take appeals to the values of freedom, equality and democracy seriously, this calls for us to think critically about America and Israel, not hold them up as paragons of virtue.
EIPAC’s “Declaration of Support for Israel at Emory University” offers no reason why we should support the alliance between the two countries besides ideological mystifications appealing to our shared “Western values.” If this was just another thoughtless editorial published in the Wheel we could, as usual, snicker and move on. However, with the presidents and vice presidents of both SGA and CC signing the statement, we feel compelled to criticize the utter carelessness shown by our representatives in signing this blatant piece of propaganda. Just as former President George W. Bush justified the disastrous Iraq War on the basis of defending “our freedoms,” this statement’s ideological vagaries mask immense amounts of violence that is directly counter to the liberal values they claim to defend.
We are ashamed that our student representatives would sign such an obvious piece of right-wing propaganda. The interests of this piece, from the lobbyists who initiated it to the campus groups that back it, are clearly political, yet the vagueness of the piece evades the politics in which it is so clearly enmeshed. If our campus representatives are going to back statements with obvious political weight, they should at the very least engage and question the politics they support rather than obfuscate them.
Benjamin Crais is a College senior from Atlanta, Georgia. Jamison Murphy is a College sophomore from Savannah, Georgia.
Well-written and argued. Everyone who signed that statement should be ashamed of themselves, perhaps even rethink their lives, move to a volcano.
The sizable Jewish population that stands with Israel at Emory seems to say otherwise. Cherry-picking facts does not create a conducive argument. For example, the UN investigation into the Israeli airstrike of a UN school in Gaza lead to the realization that Hamas established an important telecommunication system inside the school… Two sides to every story. I support the student leaders’ decision to take a stand.
TIL hamas invented a telecommunication system SO IMPORTANT that destroying it was worth the lives of 20 palestinians