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Delegates react to then-Vice President Joe Biden s speech during the closing night of the 2012 Democratic National Convention held at the Time Warner Cable Arena in Charlotte, N.C., on September 6, 2012. (Jared Soares/PBS NewsHour/CC BY-NC 2.0)
Since launching in January 2019, the lobby group Democratic Majority for Israel (DMFI) has marketed itself as the flagship organization for those wanting to integrate “progressive values” with support for Israel. But a recent series of offensive social media posts made by two DMFI board members, coupled with a history of other troubling statements, has undermined the group’s attempt at laying such a claim.
J Street Goes on Offense, Carefully
AT THE J STREET ANNUAL CONFERENCE on April 20th, Sen. Elizabeth Warren took the virtual stage and called for the United States to take “immediate steps” to push for peace negotiations between Israel and Palestine. “If we’re serious about arresting settlement expansion and helping move the parties toward a two-state solution, then it would be irresponsible not to consider all of the tools we have at our disposal,” she said. “One of those is restricting military aid from being used in the occupied territories.”
While there was no audience to applaud, the conference’s virtual chat lit up with approval. “We love aid restrictions!” wrote one attendee. “She’s got a plan for American pressure to end the occupation!” said another. In a session that evening, Reps. Pramila Jayapal, Alan Lowenthal, and Ro Khanna, as well as conference headliner Sen. Bernie Sanders, all echoed Warren’s appeal, calling for the US to ensure that i
What Happened to IfNotNow?
This feature appears in our Spring 2021 issue. Subscribe now to receive a copy in your mailbox.
ONE FRIDAY AFTERNOON in June 2019, the anti-Israeli-occupation group IfNotNow sent its roughly 2,000 members an unusually candid email. “First and foremost: we owe you all, the leaders and members of IfNotNow, an apology,” it began. Part strategy document, part confessional, the email signed by IfNotNow’s full-time staff responded to discontent that had been brewing for months. IfNotNow had become too hierarchical, many members said, leaving local chapters unsupported while paid national staff pursued projects in which the rank-and-file had little say. The staff email committed the group to a process of teshuva, or repentance, borrowing a Jewish religious concept that requires an offending party to repair, to the degree possible, the damage they have done. But for many disgruntled IfNotNow members, it was too late to fix an organization that had veere
Temple University Speaker Calls For Israel To Be Replaced
In the event, Ajlouny began by accusing Israel of being “created on a false premise of a land without people, through ethnic cleansing, massacres, and forcing over 700,000 Palestinian to flee.”
YouTube screenshot of the online event
Last week, the Feinstein Center for American Jewish History and Congregation Rodeph Sholom of Philadelphia invited Joyce Ajlouny to share her hate of Israel. During the April 20 event, titled “The Weaponization of Discourse: Where is the Line Between Anti-Israel and Anti-Semitism on Campus?”, Ajlouny asserted that she favors “a secular, democratic state” which, in plain English, means the elimination of Israel.