I was on my way to our biweekly CHALLENGE sale when one of my comrades informed me about an event Hillel was having in conjunction with the Italian club. “Israeli ambassador on campus at 1pm. SJP [Students for Justice in Palestine] is planning to disrupt.” He needn’t say more. Hillel, the largest Zionist campus organization in the world admitted, “Israel is at the heart of Hillel’s work.” It was bringing in an Israeli diplomat Gideon Meir to speak. I gathered my CHALLENGEs and met with SJP and other student organizers on campus. In a classroom of fifteen people, eight of us entered and sat in the back row. We were a group of , North African, Palestinian, brown and white students. While waiting for the racist Meir to arrive, I read the CHALLENGE article (11/27)  “Jews, Arabs, Africans Unite: Rip Israeli Rulers’ Racist Neglect, Segregation.” I then passed a stack of CHALLENGEs. “Turn to page five. Pass it down,” I said.
As soon as diplomat Meir began speaking, one didn’t need any background information on the Israel-Palestine conflict to realize what a racist this Israeli politician is. His first sentence was an attack on Palestinians, declaring them terrorists in a land that was given to the Jewish people as “the biblical promise of god.” I wanted to yell at this man who used religion and nation-building language to justify an apartheid system. I had just met these SJP and organizer friends. So, I passed a note asking to chant, “Racist Israel, you can’t hide. We charge you with genocide.” Half of the group agreed, “but later,” they wrote back.
During the Question-and-Answer period, those of us who questioned him were labeled propagandists and Palestinians. When asked about racism and displacement of families, he yelled, “This is the way of your people. That’s why we don’t have peace.” The Jewish and Italian students first tried to ignore our presence and then tried to silence us. He refused to call on me and when I began speaking, “Israel is system based on racism. It is a watchdog for the United States —”
He called us Arabs. I continued to chant raising my brown fist in the air. Our group finally walked out and I began the Israel-Genocide chant. My new comrade chanted with me. When I later asked why didn’t we simply expose the racist for what he is, one organizer told me, “We are playing the game of who is the biggest a**hole.”  They were hesitant to chant so as not to appear militant and dismissive.
Earlier the diplomat Meir said, “We do everything according to democracy and laws.” The truth is Israel’s actions reflect the bosses’ laws. The very existence of a nation and a discourse based on ethnicity is racist. Borders are meant to protect the exploitative class in power and screw those who fall outside that imaginary line. That’s what a state does: consolidate power to manage and ensure the flow of capital.
While at the Zionist event, I wondered, how do I expose the Israelis while refusing to legitimize Mahmoud Abbas, the president of the Palestinian state? By showing how nations and racism hurt all workers: Jewish, Arab, and North African, as written in that CHALLENGE article. No worker benefits from a nation state or racism. We must struggle with these new friends to win them away from a “progressive nationalism” discourse to a communist one.
After having a conversation with SJP, I invited them to our rally at the Board of Trustees the following Monday (see CHALLENGE 12/11). It will be awesome if we can build with these new friends to join the anti-militarization campaign and bring them to May Day!
College Red