Rhonda Wainshilbaum: Deshelving campaign misinformed, antisemitic

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Published: 10-30-2024 4:32 PM

The effort to ban Israeli products at the River Valley Co-op is misinformed and racist. Israel is not an apartheid/colonial state. It is a democracy with equal rights for all citizens. Israel has affirmative action policies to help Arab Israelis. The BDS movement is based on intentional misinformation designed to demonize Israel.

The “Apartheid Wall” that separates the West Bank from Israel was built not because of racism, but to stop terrorism after over 1,000 Israelis were murdered and thousands injured in the second intifada. The Gaza blockade was a response to unrelenting terrorism and rocket attacks after Israel withdrew from Gaza in 2005.

The war in Gaza is horrible. Gazans are being used as human shields by Hamas, which started the war, perpetuates it, and could end it. The Hamas charter calls for the total destruction of Israel, and worldwide subjugation of Christians.

Israel is 20% Arab, 30% Ashkenazi Jews, and 50% brown-skinned Jews who were forcibly expelled from Arab countries. Palestinian-Arabs stay in Israel because it is the only country in the Middle East where everyone, including women and gay people, enjoy freedom of expression and a high standard of living. LGBTQ people flee from Palestine to Israel for their lives.

Israeli hospitals took in thousands of Syrian refugees and Iraqi women who suffered sanctioned violence, and has treated thousands of Gazan patients, saved Yahya Sinwar’s life, and treated the grand-niece of the late Ismael Haniya. Do you think those countries would take in Israeli victims of violence? This is hardly how a racist, genocidal, apartheid nation acts.

Over a million Muslim Uyghurs are in concentration camps in China. Hundreds of Ethiopians have been killed at the Saudi border. In most Muslim majority countries, women have no rights and LGBTQ people are imprisoned or murdered. In Iran, women are raped, tortured, and imprisoned for showing their hair. In Africa, gay people are killed and slavery is common. In North Korea, 200,000 political prisoners face torture and execution. Russia targets journalists and kills dissenters. Turkey oppresses Kurdish minorities. Palestinians living in Lebanon have no rights.

It is antisemitic to single out the one tiny Jewish country struggling to survive, while ignoring abuses everywhere else.

Rhonda Wainshilbaum

Leyden