The massive Pro-Hamas protests at Columbia University in New York City have not come as a complete surprise. Columbia has long been a hotbed of anti-Israel activism. Professors and PLO activists Edward Said, Rashid Khalidi, and Joseph Massad had for decades erased Israel's legitimacy in their Palestinian activist approach to Columbia's Middle East Studies. Since the late 1970's Said's "Orientalism", which became required reading in Middle East studies on hundreds of North American Universities, cast Israel and Zionism as the last outpost of Western Colonialism. Said, America's most recognized Palestinian voice until his death in 2003, rejected the 1993 Oslo Accords as a Palestinian "sell out" to White America and Israel. His sympathies for Hamas as Palestinian community builders punctuate his Palestinian Liberation legacy that today dominates courses and University discourses on Israel and the Palestinian cause.

What is surprising is how clearly Columbia's Israel-erasure studies helped lead to the October 7, 2023 massacres, mass rape, and kidnapping in Israel and transformed Columbia, Harvard, Yale, and scores of other US universities into hotbeds of Hamas Jihadi activism and support. October 7 has crowned Hamas over Mahmoud Abbas' and his Fatah-dominated Palestinian Authority as the true Palestinian leadership in Gaza, Judea, and Samaria ( former Jordanian-occupied West Bank) and across American campuses.

Hamas' refrain, From the River to the Sea Palestine Will be Free" – a clarion call from its 1988 charter to take up arms and destroy Israel today serves as Palestinian National and Islamic "Anthem" on hundreds of North American Universities. Massad called Hamas' October 7 Massacres "Awesome." Rashid Khalidi said Palestinians had "no alternative" than to commit the October 7 atrocities. One hundred Columbia professors signed a petition of support for Hamas' "'Military actions".  Major funding for these Hamas solidarity protests comes from far-Left organizations including American Muslims for Palestine, Students for Justice in Palestine, and even radical Jewish groups including Jewish Voice for Peace, and WESPAC its fiscal sponsor as well as Within Our Lifetime.

Hamas' long arm to US university Campuses

The mainstreaming of Hamas rhetoric on campus began well before October 7. For nearly two decades, Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and Marxist Leninist terror group PFLP that famously executed skyjackings in the 1970s and mass murders in Israel since the Al-Aqsa Intifada in 2000 and their US supporters have dominated Palestinian activism on North American University campuses. This has not been "pro-Palestine" activism: No mention of Palestinian statehood, no chants for two states for two peoples, and no demands to complete the peace process. Rather, today's calls for Jihad in Arabic and English, such as  "Israel is a settler colonial occupying state", "gas the Jews, "rape is resistance", and "Burn down Tel Aviv"  Death to Zionism" have characterized pro Hamas campus messages.

Hamas decade's longtime support on US university campuses via organizations such as Students for Justice in Palestine( SJP) and the Palestinian Solidarity committee explain campus sympathies for Hamas' mass rape, torture, and murder of some 1200 college-age students in Israel six months ago. Columbia protestors promised "10,000 more October 7^th massacres" as one keffiye-shrouded loyalist punched visiting Israeli Arab activist Yosef Haddad in the face.

This is only the beginning of a metastasizing phenomenon.  We are currently witnessing what many in Israel and the United States in the traditional Jewish and Christian communities would not have believed to be a possible scenario until October 7, 2023: the mainstreaming of Hamas in US Cities and campuses. This is the intersectionality of jihad:  Pro-ISIS, Pro-Qaida, Pro Hezbollah and pro-Hamas protesters are demonstrating for "resistance" against the Israeli "oppressor," which they have branded an apartheid, Nazi genocidal state that should be destroyed.

There are lessons to be learned from Hamas' PLO- PA's "education" of America that today targets not only Israel but Jews, America, and the West as a whole. Hamas leaders Yahya Sinwar, Ismail Haniyeh, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, and Yasser Arafat before them have for decades educated American Universities to jihad. For the  past 30 years of the Oslo peace process the  "Moderate" internationally legitimized  Palestinian Authority (PA) and its leaders, Yasser Arafat and, subsequently, Mahmoud Abbas, created and amplified a narrative of jihad (holy war)  Israeli apartheid Genocide and Nazi and Soviet conspiracy theories against Jews, not merely Israel. Furthermore, the PA's policy of paying incentive annuities for murdering Israelis has, over the past three  decades, fashioned a generation and a half of Palestinian youth who have become radicalized and ready to commit murder for money and sacrifice themselves as shahids (martyrs) and gaining support in the West as heroes

Israel erasure propaganda in America is more than 50 years old. Yasser Arafat's infamous 1974 speech at the UN accusing Israel of being a racist and illegitimate state, his "gun-and-holster" speech was followed by the notorious 1975 UNGA "Zionism is Racism" Resolution 3379, which remained on the UN's books for 16 years. The Israel-apartheid libel was carried forward to the UN-sanctioned 2001 Durban I Conference that recast Israel as a racist, genocidal war criminal state to be eliminated from the community of nations.

Years of genocidal rhetoric on university campuses have now come full circle to hunt and to haunt US Jewry. Both official Israel, Israeli NGOs, and the diaspora Jewish leadership have failed to counter decades of the massive campaign to vilify, delegitimize, and dehumanize Israel. Many in Israel and the pro-Israel community turned a blind eye and even legitimized this Israel-erasure campaign, characterizing its rhetoric as "legitimate political criticism".

October 7 provides the context and the evidence for the convergence of this discourse of Israel's destruction together with the eradication of Israelis and Jews wherever they live. Jihad's genocidal rhetoric is not limited to Israel. It knows no boundaries. Ghazi Hamad, a member of the Hamas political bureau, said: "The Al-Aqsa Flood is just the first time, and there will be a second, a third, a fourth." Another senior Hamas official, Mahmoud az-Zahar, has threatened to target Jews "wherever they are." Hamas' rhetorical attacks have already spilled over into the United States and other Western countries, where pro-Israel and Jewish facilities and communities are now targets.

Hamas' Nazification of Israel and the Jews must be taken seriously.  It constitutes a real threat not only to Israel and the Diaspora Jewish community. It targets America and the West. The new mainstreamed Jihadi discourse on US Campuses and cities encourages and energizes Hamas and other Islamic terror organizations to attack the West with impunity. It sets a precedent.  Hamas' extremist ideology rooted in Islamist, Nazi, and Soviet propaganda is inciting violence against Jews and Jewish institutions across North America today.

Over the past several decades, Israeli governments and many in the Diaspora Jewish leadership failed to grasp the gravity of these deadly accusations and the implication for the massive outbreak of antisemitism and violence against Jews.

Now is the time for unity and action.  Israel must now work with US federal and local officials to shutter every one of SJP's campus chapters while enforcing Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. This initiative must be maximized by a massive media campaign in the US exposing the terrorist roots of this jihadist-backed and supported organization that constitutes one of the greatest threats to Israel Jews and the United States itself since the Nazi era.

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There has been a tendency in the West to categorize Palestinian terror assaults on Israel as "intifadas." The nomenclature derives from the 1987 violence that raged across Palestinian Arab cities in Judea and Samaria, which were triggered initially by local Arab demands for greater socioeconomic freedom and a higher standard of living, similar to those of Israeli Arabs.

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Within months, the intifada was co-opted by Tunis-based Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) leader Yasser Arafat as a continuation of his decades-long commitment to total warfare to destroy the Jewish and democratic state, as stated in the 1968 PLO charter. The brand "intifada" would be carved onto the consciousness of the international media. It would also be misapplied to future suicide terror campaigns by Hamas, Fatah, and Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) in the 2001-2004 second intifada. That campaign was known as the "Al-Aqsa Intifada"–an Islamic war centered on the 100-year-old Palestinian claim that the Jews were defiling the Al-Aqsa mosque, as the first Palestinian clerical leader, Haj Amin al-Husseini, had declared in the 1920s.

In 2023, the latest upsurge in Palestinian terror in the northern Samarian cities of Jenin and Nablus is easier to recognize. That's because Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has openly called for the regime's Islamic revolution to be exported to the hills of northern Samaria. This is no intifada. It's a premeditated Iranian regime "pincer" war now executed from the northern Samarian hills.

Iran now outflanks Israel on three sides: From Gaza in the south, Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) operatives Hamas and PIJ have targeted Israel with tens of thousands of rockets and terror tunnels. From Israel's northern neighbors Lebanon and Syria, IRGC Quds forces and Hezbollah's proxy terror army have about 180,000 rockets and laser-guided missiles directed at Israeli cities. Hezbollah has even set up outposts on Israel's side of the border with Lebanon.

Now, the Iranian regime has taken its 44-year-old war to the Samarian hills that overlook Ben Gurion Airport and Israel's main cities along the Mediterranean coast.

The evidence is overwhelming. The week of June 18, 2023, Hamas and PIJ leadership visited Tehran for a meeting with the Quds force, the foreign arm of the IRGC, to discuss the IDF's Operation Shield and Arrow in Gaza and to coordinate militant actions against Israel, continuing the multi-arena strategy devised by former IRGC commander Qassem Soleimani, who was killed by a US drone strike in 2020 but whose strategic legacy remains.

The high-level meetings coincided with a surge in terrorist attacks in Judea and Samaria, including some perpetrated by PIJ and Hamas. It encouraged Iran, which seeks to establish Judea and Samaria as an additional battleground in its escalating war against Israel. A recent terror attack that killed four Israelis at the entrance to the Eli community in Samaria is just the latest Iran-backed assault. Since Jan. 2023, about 30 Israelis have been killed in Iranian-backed terror attacks.

Iran's terror campaign isn't occurring in a vacuum. Historical context is important. Since 1979, Iranian leaders have branded Israel "the Little Satan" and vowed its destruction. The Iranian regime has persisted in that aim. For years, the IRGC has supplied weapons and directed PIJ and Hamas. The IRGC weapons ship Karine A (2002); Calypso (2003); and Klos (2014), sent to supply the PLO and Hamas in Gaza with thousands of tons of weaponry, were soon forgotten by the international community.

Until recently, the Iranian regime's IRGC and its Quds terror-export force mostly focused their presence in the Gaza Strip, where IRGC agents have been on the ground since the 2014 Gaza war, assisting Hamas in drone and rocket production. Soleimani advised Hamas on its Great March of Return campaign, paying Gazan teens thousands of dollars to commit suicide by storming the Gaza-Israel border fence, drawing Israeli fire. IRGC terror operatives were also involved in the building of Hamas' terror tunnels, built to kill or capture Israelis, of which it currently holds four in captivity.

Significantly, Iran views the collapse of the secular, Fatah-dominated Palestinian Authority's governance as an opportunity to pounce on Samaria. Ironically, recent Palestinian polls reflect public support for Iranian-backed local terror militias such as Lion's Den as a function of public frustration with the highly corrupt PA Since the aging Abbas is unlikely to have a clear successor, chaos will ensue as these armed groups vie for control, while Iran will exploit the power vacuum to its own advantage.

The Iranian penetration in northern Samaria marks the most far-reaching sign that Iranian terror forces have penetrated Israeli territory and posed a strategic threat. IRGC officials assured PIJ leader Ziyad al-Nakhalah that Iran would smuggle additional weapons to Judea and Samaria through Jordan and that PIJ would receive more financial support. Iran also demanded the establishment of rocket production facilities in northern Samaria.

Nakhalah praised Iran's unwavering support for the Palestinians, saying, "No other country in the world takes such a stance so explicitly", which is "a testament to Tehran's support for the Palestinian resistance factions" that also "highlights strong ties between PIJ, Hamas and the Islamic Republic." Nakhalah also met Mohammad Baqer Qalibaf, the Majlis (Iranian parliament) speaker, on June 17.

Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh has met with Supreme Leader Khamenei and Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi. Haniyeh stated that the June terror attack in Eli that killed four was "just the beginning" of a renewed campaign against Israel. Haniyeh's deputy, Saleh al-Arouri, the head of Hamas' military wing in Judea and Samaria responsible for the attack, has also been to Tehran.

In Iran, Hamas official Osama Hamdan mentioned the important role of Israeli Arabs in the battle against Israel, evidenced in events during IDF's Guardian of the Walls operation in May 2021. He said Judea and Samaria were entering a new stage of "resistance," referring to Iran's creation of 20 to 30 new "battalions" of 2,000 militants in Samaria, which aim to spread to the area around Ramallah.

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As intelligence analyst Micky Segal has noted in a recent Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs analysis, Khamenei reiterated the importance of Judea and Samaria, saying that "Gaza is the center of resistance, while the point that will bring the enemy to its knees is the West Bank". Khamenei, who meets often with PIJ, said, "The growing power of the resistance groups in the West Bank is the key that can bring the Zionist enemy to its knees, and it's crucial that we continue along this path."

Israel isn't standing idly by. The IDF has been planning for the IRGC terror encampment and campaign on its three borders. The IRGC's penetration into the hills above central Israel will probably be met in the near term with a massive, uncompromising counterterror campaign to secure Israel's major cities and protect its citizens from Iran's jihad.

Featured on JNS.org, this article was first published by the South African Jewish Report and Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs.

The post Iran's pincer war on Israel is no intifada appeared first on www.israelhayom.com.

The Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps is mandated by Iran's constitution to pursue "an ideological mission of jihad in the way of Allah, that is, extending sovereignty of Allah's law throughout the world."

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This mandate is not theoretical or merely declarative. The IRGC is actively involved in terrorist operations around the globe and has therefore been deemed illegal by the US government. Great Britain and Europe should follow suit.

Since the founding of this paramilitary force in 1979, the IRGC has emerged as the principal organization advancing the Iranian regime's revolutionary Shiite Islamist ideology within and beyond the regime's borders. Over the past four decades, it has been linked to terrorist attacks, hostage-taking, maritime piracy, political assassinations, human-rights violations and the crushing of domestic dissent across Iran. It was more recently responsible for the bloodshed on the streets of Iran in Nov. 2019, leaving 1,500 people dead in less than two weeks.

Iran targets its neighbors in its race for regional hegemony in service of its nuclear weapons program and radical Shi'ite eschatological vision. Through the IRGC, it spreads terrorism globally and subverts governments in the Middle East and Africa. The IRGC provides financial and other material support, training, technology transfer, advanced conventional weapons and guidance to a broad range of terrorist organizations including Hezbollah, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, Hamas, Kata'ib Hezbollah in Iraq, al-Ashtar Brigades in Bahrain, the Yemeni Houthis and other terrorist groups in Syria, the entire area of the Persian Gulf and Africa's Sahel region.

Within its borders, Iran has also harbored Al-Qaeda terrorists who have transferred money and fighters to South Asia and Syria. In 2016, the US Treasury Department identified and sanctioned three senior AQ operatives residing in Iran and known to the regime. These operatives included 9/11 hijackers transiting its territory on their way to Afghanistan for training and operational planning.

The US government considers Iran to be the foremost state sponsor of terrorism – spending more than $1 billion on terrorist financing annually – and there are between 140,000 and 185,000 IRGC-Quds Force partner forces in Afghanistan, Gaza, Lebanon, Pakistan, Syria and Yemen. In its efforts to export the Islamic Revolution across the Middle East, the IRGC advances radical Islamist groups, both Shiite and Sunni, around the globe, including Iraq's Asaib Ahl al-Haq, which it armed, funded and directed to conduct more than 6,000 attacks on American and British forces in Iraq between 2003 and 2011. Iran continues to threaten Israel openly, with its ideology centered on the destruction of Israel.

IRGC terror in the United Kingdom and continental Europe

The IRGC has been involved in extraterritorial activities targeting Iranian dissidents and opposition figures beyond Iran's borders, resulting in a chilling effect on freedom of expression and political participation among Iranians residing in the West. The IRGC is responsible for the kidnapping, and the extraterritorial and extrajudicial execution, of journalists and dual nationals outside of Iran.

In the United Kingdom, dual British-Iranian citizen Alireza Akbari, who had previously held a senior position in the Iranian government, was lured back to Iran in 2022, arrested, incarcerated and then executed on spurious espionage charges, an act condemned by both UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak and Foreign Minister James Cleverly as barbaric.

On Jan. 12, the House of Commons voted unanimously in favor of a measure calling for the UK to proscribe the IRGC as a terrorist organization. In February 2023, the chief of MI5 reported foiling or exposing at least 15 kidnapping or assassination plots by the IRGC targeting UK citizens since January 2022 alone.

On the European continent, Germany also uncovered 10 IRGC operatives involved in a terrorist plot within German borders and convicted another IRGC agent for surveilling a German-Israeli group. Germany is also pursuing prosecution against IRGC operatives who plotted attacks against synagogues in the state of North Rhine-Westphalia in Jan. 2018. In Belgium in 2022, an Iranian diplomat was convicted on terrorism charges for his role in a 2018 plot in Paris, and authorities in Georgia reportedly prevented the IRGC's attempted assassination of an Israeli-Georgian businessman in Tbilisi.

In addition, the IRGC supplied arms and drones to Russia in its war with Ukraine and in 2020 was responsible for shooting down Ukrainian Flight 752 with two surface-to-air missiles, killing 176 passengers and crew.

IRGC penetration of the United States

The US Department of Justice unsealed indictments against IRGC operatives in several murder-for-hire schemes on American soil, including the targeting of former US National Security Adviser John Bolton and former US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. In 2011, the IRGC Quds Force plotted an attack against the Saudi ambassador to the US on American soil.

Additional IRGC assassination attempts in the US include those against Iranian-American human rights activist Asih Alinejad and Indian-Iranian author Salman Rushdie, whom the Iranian regime offered a $3 million reward for his death in 1989 upon publication of Rushdie's book The Satanic Verses.

Though the Iranian regime denied ordering the stabbing of Rushdie in 2022, it offered farmland in Iran as an award to the young American who stabbed him, thanking him "for his brave action in carrying out the historic fatwa of Imam Khomeini."

The IRGC's hand in the Middle East

The IRGC has targeted Arab countries and Israel for decades via its Hezbollah, Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad and Houthi proxies, among others. The IRGC has targeted Saudi Arabia via its proxy Hezbollah al-Hejaz, which carried out its first attack at the Hajj in Mecca in 1987. More recently, the IRGC has fueled Hamas rocket wars against Israel, with senior Iranian operatives maintaining a physical presence in the Gaza Strip since 2014 to advise Hamas operatives on drone operation and rocket production.

The IRGC has done the same for Houthi rebels in Yemen targeting Saudi Arabia, Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates, creating havoc in the Gulf. In Jan. 2022, the Houthis attacked the Emiratis using Iranian drones and exploded three fuel tanks in an attack on Abu Dhabi airport.

The IRGC funds and directs Bahrain's Saraya al-Ashtar, the military wing of Hezbollah Bahrain, which aims to destabilize the kingdom by radicalizing its domestic extremists.

In June 2023, Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei instructed the IRGC to intensify its attacks via Palestinian terror proxies Islamic Jihad and Hamas from Judea and Samaria, an area that overlooks Israel's main cities. IRGC officials assured PIJ Secretary-General Ziyad al-Nakhallah that Iranian weapons and cash would be smuggled to his organization and to Hamas in the West Bank, and demanded that rocket facilities be set up in northern Samaria, near Ben-Gurion International Airport overlooking the greater Tel Aviv area.

The IRGC also significantly supports Syrian President Bashar Assad's government militias by providing them with military advisers, training, arms and force coordination. The Syrian government and its allies, including the IRGC, have caused the deaths of over half a million Syrian civilians, displacing over 10 million people and creating a refugee crisis.

In Turkey in 2022, IRGC operatives were foiled in their plan to murder Israeli tourists and assassinate Yosef Levi-Sfari, the former Israeli consul in Istanbul. The IRGC has also employed criminal gangs in various countries, including Turkey, for terrorist operations. The IRGC also fuels tensions and war in Hamas-ruled Gaza, with its operatives involved in terror tunnel assaults against Israel. IRGC's Quds Force has made efforts to arm Palestinian terrorists in the West Bank on the orders of their Supreme Leader Khamenei.

In Aug. 2022, following the IDF's Operation Breaking Dawn against Islamic Jihad in Gaza, IRGC Maj.-Gen. Hossein Salami and PIJ leader Ziyad al-Nakhallah met, resulting in an agreement to enhance PIJ's activities in Samaria.

Besides conventional warfare via proxy, IRGC-backed Hamas operatives have engaged in espionage, monitored Iranian-Israeli Jews' social networks and obtained their personal details, which were submitted to Iranian intelligence with the aim of recruiting them into Iranian espionage rings.

IRGC intervention and narco-terrorism in Latin America

The IRGC has developed a major presence in Latin America, primarily in Venezuela, Nicaragua and Cuba, where Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi recently visited, calling his visits "strategic" against common enemies. The IRGC has long ratcheted up its presence in Latin America's tri-border area where Argentina, Paraguay and Brazil meet. During the visit, Venezuela's President Maduro declared his intention to install a bust of former IRGC leader Qassem Sulemani, killed in an American drone strike in 2020.

Iran has engaged in narco-terrorism and the use of organized crime – including drug trafficking, trafficking in illegal products, counterfeiting of products, human trafficking, smuggling of weapons, smuggling of immigrants, money laundering and gambling – using profits for military, organizational and terror operations.

The IRGC's narco-terrorism extends from Western Europe to Latin America. The IRGC is extensively connected to the Afghan drug trade and other international criminal syndicates to develop a network for distributing narcotics, especially heroin, to Western countries via Eastern Europe.

Using its local Lebanese expatriate connections, the IRGC's top proxy Hezbollah is involved in narco-terrorism mainly in Colombia and Mexico. These funds enhance Hezbollah's military and assist Iran, allowing Iran to claim plausible deniability.

Narco-terrorism also includes terror attempts on the ground. In 2011, an Iranian spy attempted to recruit a member of a Mexican drug cartel to assassinate the Saudi ambassador in Washington, DC This Iranian agent also intended to attack the Israeli embassy in Washington, as well as the Saudi and Israeli embassies in Argentina.

The IRGC has also targeted Israeli diplomats and facilities in Argentina, India and Thailand, bombing the Israeli embassy in 1992 and the AMIA Jewish community center in Buenos Aires in 1994, killing 85 people.

IRGC human rights violations

Within Iran's borders, the IRGC suppresses political dissent with deadly force, limiting freedom of speech and stifling peaceful protests within Iran through the use of physical and psychological torture of detainees and other violent means, violating international human rights standards such as those against arbitrary arrests, prolonged detention without charges, limited access to legal representation and coerced confessions.

The IRGC violates freedom of expression by arrest and detention without trial of journalists, bloggers and social media activists, contributing to a climate of fear and self-censorship. The IRGC has been implicated in the execution of political prisoners, often after unfair trials, extrajudicially and extraterritorially.

There have been allegations of the IRGC targeting Iran's ethnic and religious minorities, including the Baha'is, Kurds, Arabs and Baluchis. The IRGC has played a role in enforcing strict interpretations of Islamic law, leading to limitations on women's rights and gender equality in Iran, including restrictive dress codes, limitations on participation in public life and discrimination in areas such as divorce, custody rights, and inheritance. The death of Iranian Kurd Mahsa Amini at the hands of Iran's morality police in 2022 and the protests that followed only drive this point home.

The IRGC Quds Force: Incitement, subversion, destabilization and radicalization

In 1989, Iranian leader Ayatollah Khamenei established the Quds Force – symbolically named after the Arabic name for Jerusalem, Israel's capital, as an act of political warfare.

Quds was founded as an extraterritorial "Islamic army" unit of the IRGC to "export the revolution overseas" by radicalizing foreign Muslims into the Iranian Shiite brand of Islamism to fight the "Great Satan" of the West and "liberate Palestine" by destroying Israel, which the clerical regime describes a "cancerous tumor" and the "little Satan" of the Middle East.

Similar to ISIS, the IRGC and Quds are ideologically-motivated movements. Inspired by messianic Mahdism, Quds seeks to trigger the return of the 12th divinely-ordained Shi'ite Imam, Muhammad al-Mahdi, a descendent of the prophet Muhammad. The IRGC recruits are taught that Israel's existence is the greatest barrier to the Mahdi's return, and that Shi'ites must battle against the Jews and destroy the Jewish state as a prerequisite for his arrival.

Iran has continued to arm and train Shi'ite militants through its Quds Force. Quds has provided advanced armed drones to Hezbollah in Lebanon, trained and funded more than 100,000 Shi'ite fighters in Syria, supplied ballistic missiles and drones to Yemen's Houthis and helped Shiite militias in Iraq build missile capabilities.

Iran has also continued to develop ballistic missiles, which, according to the United States, violates U.N. Resolution 2231. In response, the US continues to impose sanctions on Iran's ballistic missile program and the IRGC through the Countering Iran's Destabilizing Activities Act of 2017 and the Countering America's Adversaries Through Sanctions Act.

The US secretary of state designated the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and Quds Force as a Foreign Terrorist Organization in 2019 as it "continued support to and engagement in terrorist activity around the world."

Quds was deployed to Syria in 2011 and by 2014 hundreds of their operatives, including force commanders, gathered intelligence and were directing logistics for Assad's government. In May 2018, Quds forces on the Syrian Golan Heights were alleged to have fired around 20 projectiles towards Israeli army positions, an action repeated in January 2019, for which the IDF retaliated. In April 2021, prominent Syria-based Quds operative Brig. Gen. Mohammad Reza Fallahzadeh became Quds Deputy Commander.

Quds' radicalization of Muslims in Europe

Outside of Iran, Quds' messianic fervor has infected recruits in the West and elsewhere, with a surge of activity since 2015. IRGC propaganda has nurtured extremism in the same way as ISIS and Al-Qaeda. Over half of the IRGC training budget is invested in their cult-like militaristic and apocalyptic indoctrination of recruits through the dissemination of terror-glorifying extremist propaganda in mosques, charities and schools.

The discovery of an Iranian-linked bomb factory in London in 2015, as well as the successive chain of terror plots across Europe from 2017 to 2018, suggest that IRGC interests go beyond the Middle East, underscoring the urgency in countering their movement.

In 2018, a plot to bomb an Iranian opposition group's conference in Paris, attended by British MPs and citizens, was foiled. By 2022, MI5 announced that there had been ten threats to kill or kidnap UK-based individuals that year.

Outlawing both the political and military wings of the IRGC

There is a tendency in the West to differentiate between the political and military wings of terror organizations such as Hezbollah, Hamas and the IRGC. This distinction is erroneous.

Sheikh Naim Qassem, deputy secretary-general of the Iranian regime's Hezbollah proxy, has declared repeatedly that there is no difference between its political and military wings. Qassem stated in 2012, "We don't have a military wing and a political one; we don't have Hezbollah, on the one hand, and the resistance party, on the other."

Both wings follow the directives of Vilayat-e-faqih, or the rule of the Islamic jurisprudent, meaning Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

As shown above, the IRGC cannot be separated from Quds – the two organizations work hand-in-hand to wage a hybrid political and military war using criminal, terrorist and human-rights violations as means to the same end.

Building on the momentum to proscribe the IRGC

The intensifying Iranian regime repression and its threat to the Middle East and the West in the shadow of its nuclear weapons program have appeared to move Europe and the UK to increase pressure to proscribe the IRGC.

The UK's January 2023 vote to proscribe the IRGC was an important development. Significant statements of condemnation by Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, UK Minister for State Security Tom Tugendhat and UK Foreign Minister James Cleverly set an important standard for the West.

The stakes are high. A prospective agreement between the United States and Iran for sanctions relief in exchange for the cessation of Iranian uranium enrichment would inject some $20 billion into the Iranian regime's IRGC terror operations.

The United States, Israel, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain and most recently Sweden in May 2023 have proscribed the IRGC. US Congress members urged Prime Minister Sunak on May 11, 2023, to proscribe the IRGC, adding an additional level of momentum to the House of Commons' earlier vote.

On Jan. 23, 2023, the European Union imposed sanctions on more than 30 Iranian officials and organizations, including the IRGC, over their "brutal" crackdown on protestors, which included human-rights abuses.

Iranian-British activist Vahid Beheshti's 72-day hunger strike opposite the British Foreign Office in London, calling for the British government to formally proscribe the IRGC, captured the imagination of many in Britain, inside Iran, among its Sunni community, and around the world.

Most significantly, for the first time the IRGC warned the UK government to cancel a rally in support of Beheshti on April 29, 2023, which brought thousands into the streets of London in support of his struggle to proscribe the IRGC.

Both the European Union and the British government have been called upon by their publics to proscribe the IRGC, which has become the world's leading sponsor of state terror. With the IRGC actively involved in Iran's ballistic weapons development and the regime's near breakout status – enriching uranium at close to 90%, weapons-grade – time is of the essence.

Featured on JNS.org, this article was first published by the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs. 

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The international BDS movement has intensified its domination of university campuses. On Friday, April 29, Melbourne University in Australia passed a boycott, divestment and sanctions movement's resolution accusing Israel of "ongoing ethnic cleansing, apartheid, attacks on innocent worshippers", and characterized "Zionism as a racist, colonial ideology".  This "Nazification" of the democratic nation-state of the Jewish people which reflects BDS's basic position, should not surprise anyone who has researched the BDS movement and its core claim that Israel should never have been reestablished in 1948, and should now be dismantled and replaced by a 23rd Arab Muslim majority state..

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The Crimson Editorial board's April 29^th editorial In Support of Boycott Sanction and a Free Palestine legitimizes and normalizes BDS's core claim and above mentioned genocidal rhetoric. While it claims to oppose all forms of antisemitism, the Crimson's uncritical embrace of Harvard's Palestine Solidarity Committee thrusts Harvard's daily paper into a cauldron of the new Israel-targeted antisemitism, rendering the Crimson either unschooled or willfully blind to the radical roots and extremist ends of the PSC and the two-decade international BDS Movement.  Notwithstanding the Crimson's Jewish editorial board chairperson, Orlee Marini Rapoport's April 30 tweet of self-adulation, "I'm so proud to be part of this thoughtful group", she and the Crimson's board exhibit either stunning ignorance of BDS's political ideology or malice of forethought in endorsing the PSC's totalitarian goals.

In the context of the recent holocaust remembrance day, the Nazis massacred six million Jews rooted in a discourse of racial inferiority. The PSC's BDS crusade seeks the annihilation of the Jewish state "in the name of human rights and our common humanity" as former Canadian Justice Minister Irwin Cotler warned in a recent zoom expose of BDS. Omar Barghouti, a co-founder of the BDS and a stalwart Harvard PSC guest, has repeated ad nauseum that BDS does not seek a two-state-for-two-peoples compromise; It seeks Israel's destruction. Barghouti's support for policide can be found in a May 20, 2021 Arabic language podcast as reported by Israel Hayom on June 2, 2021.

A few questions for the Harvard editorial board may help us clarify the nature of its "proud" endorsement of the PSC, a group that works for the dissolution of Jewish state using the deceptive slogan, "From the River to the Sea Palestine will be free". This chant can be heard on some 250 campuses across the US where PSC and Students for Justice (SJP) led by former Hamas affiliate Hatem Bazian maintain branches.

Does the Harvard Crimson Editorial board agree with PSC's goal of dismantling the Jewish and democratic state to "free Palestine"? One indication that it does support the PSC's rejection of Israel can be found on in a simple scroll down Harvard's PSC website. It features a 2019 solidarity panel featuring Rutgers Professor Mark Lamont Hill and former Harvard Professor Cornell West both of whom have "canceled" the Jewish state as apartheid and called for its dissolution. Lamont Hill called for "a "free Palestine from the River to the Sea in a speech to the United Nations on November 29 2018.

Is the Crimson board aware that the PSC as an affiliate of the BDS National Committee in Ramallah are fellow BDS members together with US and EU designated radical Islamic and Marxist-Leninist groups?

The PSC's BDS Israel "apartheid" narrative and Holocaust "inversion" of the Jewish state date back to a 1961 declaration by then PLO Chairman Ahmad Shukeiry in a UN Committee meeting.

PSC's Israel eliminationism can be traced further back to the 1928 emergence of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood the mother organization of Hamas, It published an Arabic translation of the classic Russian-authored antisemitic tract the Protocols of the Elders of Zion and distributed it widely to the Arab and Muslim world.

In the 1930s, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini, the first Palestinian Arab leader, agitated Muslims to attack Jews using anti-Jewish tropes and conspiracy theories in his mosque sermons. In the 1940s he encouraged the Nazis to bomb Tel Aviv, and impose the "final solution" on the Jews of Palestine. Is this the "free Palestine" that the Crimson editorial board advocates?

Regrettably, the Crimson's endorsement accedes to decades of Palestinian political warfare tactics schooled by their Soviet, Chinese sponsors, and other Marxist Leninist movements of the1960s and 1970s promoting disinformation to counter Jewish indigeneity and sovereignty. General Giap of the Viet Cong advised Arafat to market his cause as one of "human rights," which Arafat used in his infamous 1974 UN Israel apartheid speech that led to the approval of the UN's 1975 "Zionism is Racism" resolution which anchors the PSC and the BDS movement today.

In 2019 The German Bundestag unanimously condemned the BDS movement as antisemitic, resolving that a boycott of the Jewish state is reminiscent of the Nazi propaganda and its Juden boykott of the 1930s that led to the massacre of six million Jewish children, their parents, relatives and neighbors.

The Harvard Crimson Editorial board owes an explanation to the Harvard community and its alumni clarifying its "proud" support for the Palestine Solidarity Committee.

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A new Amnesty International report, called "Israel's apartheid against Palestinians: a cruel system of domination and crime against humanity," is the latest in a series of political assaults on Israel by various "human rights" organizations, among them B'Tselem and Human Rights Watch.

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The 211-page indictment is a voyage into an alternate reality. It concedes facts and ignores context. Its conclusions appear to have been drawn by its London-based, activist-investigators before any research was conducted.

Amnesty's use of "segregation," "brutal repression" and "domination" to justify its "apartheid" labeling of Israel is reminiscent of Soviet- and Communist China-led political warfare campaigns of the 1970s. Amnesty's premeditated use of the term "apartheid" is meant to deny the Jewish people indigeneity in the land of Israel, and recast Jews as the latest version of the Dutch Boers, who colonized and segregated black-majority southern Africa.

This subversive language, which formed the basis of the former Soviet-sanctioned international anti-Israel disinformation crusade, is employed throughout Amnesty's report. Politicized pseudo-legal buzzwords, such as "OPT" – "occupied Palestinian territories" – could have been taken out of the Soviet playbook.

Perhaps most significantly, the report reflects the decades-old strategy by Palestinian groups – whether Fatah, Islamic Jihad, Hamas or the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine; whether Islamist, nationalist or Marxist-Leninist – which have devoted the past six decades to assaulting and subverting the existence of the only democratic nation-state in the Middle East. Their goal has been to replace the sole Jewish state with another Muslim-majority one, in line with Islamic law.

As early as 1961, Ahmad Shukairy, the PLO's first chairman, a former Saudi ambassador to the United Nations, declared to the UN General Assembly that Israel was practicing the "apartheid of South Africa." He also "Nazified" Israel, by accusing it of embodying Adolph "Eichmann in a state."

Amnesty's report parallels Shukairy's denunciations of Israel, which preceded Israel's so-called "occupation" of the West Bank by half a dozen years. In both cases, it's Israel's reestablishment in 1948, not its surprise victory in the 1967 Six-Day War over Arab marauders and unexpected winning of Jerusalem and historic Judea and Samaria from Jordan, Gaza from Egypt and the Golan Heights from Syria, that's at the root of the delegitimization and defamation.

Yasser Arafat, Shukairy's successor as PLO chief, would continue the assault on the fragile, practically indefensible, Jewish State. He internationalized Israel's criminalization, likening it to apartheid South Africa.

In his infamous 1974 UN "gun and holster" address, Arafat compared Zionism to apartheid and referred to them as the remaining evils of the 20th century. He and his Soviet sponsors successfully mobilized Third World and non-aligned countries to pass UNGA Resolution 3379, "Zionism is Racism," demonizing the notion of Jewish self-determination a mere three decades after the Nazi genocide of six million Jews.

The Amnesty document's cancellation of Israel's legitimacy mirrors the 1975 UN resolution, which constituted a key part of the PLO's Marxist-Leninist "long war" strategy. The Soviet-backed and -directed disinformation campaign sought to isolate and undermine Israel as a "colonialist and imperialist" implant in the Middle East.

Arafat skillfully and deceptively branded Israel as a racist Western power, uprooting its identity as an indigenous Near Eastern civilization, in order to coalesce the Third World and nonaligned countries, and specifically African nations. By that act, he planted the seed of the "racialization" of Israel as a white-supremacist entity that has borne fruit in today's Western discourse.

He successfully fused Israel with apartheid South Africa, around whose condemnation and isolation the international community coalesced. The language, intent and much of the content in the Amnesty report reflect the PLO's revolutionary strategy, based on its 1968 charter and later on its 1974 "plan of stages."

Fast forward to 2001. Arafat mainstreamed his strategy at the first UN-sanctioned "World Conference against Racism," hosted in Durban, South Africa. He and his nephew, the Palestinian Authority's UN envoy, Nasser al Qudwa, guided the Durban NGO forum to declare Israel a "racist" and "apartheid" state.

Mahmoud Abbas, Arafat's deputy and current PLO and P.A. chairman, has continued Arafat's legacy of labeling Israel an apartheid state, as was evident in his UN address in September.

The Amnesty report's condemnation of Israel's reestablishment in 1948 as a "system of oppression and domination" and "segregation" of Palestinians is also reminiscent of Abbas's attempt in 2016 to sue Great Britain for its sponsorship of the 1917 Balfour Declaration and later by the Council of the League of Nations. which reaffirmed the historic connection of the Jewish people in "Palestine" and their right to "reconstitute" their national home there.

Abbas and the Palestinian leadership's decades-old rejection of Jewish sovereignty fits neatly with the Amnesty report. It further echoes a statement last month by BDS leader Omar Barghouti, who has led the international campaign to eliminate Israel from the region. Barghouti reiterated that "Israel cannot be, as a settler-colonial apartheid state … [it] cannot be a normal part of this region."

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The Amnesty indictment of Israel has unmasked the organization once again as a racist agency that engages in anti-Jewish bigotry in the name of human rights. This time around, its "findings" reflect, both in letter and in spirit, the 60-year-old PLO eliminationist strategy of criminalizing and racializing Israel as a colonialist entity since its reestablishment in 1948.

Amnesty, like the PLO, continue to work towards their shared final solution: the cancellation of the one and only democratic Jewish majority nation-state, and its replacement with a 23rd Muslim-majority Arab state of "Palestine."

Reprinted with permission from JNS.org.

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This intensifying and increasingly mainstreamed "cancel culture" that has targeted Israel for moral and ideological annihilation has negated Jewish collective liberty and sovereignty that were uniquely affirmed twice last century, by both the League of Nations and its successor, the United Nations via its founding charter. That formal international legal recognition of Jewish historical rights that formally noted, "close settlement of the land" West of the Jordan River would anchor Israel's Declaration of Independence. The regrettable reflexive response by some journalists at home and many more abroad to the US administration's unprecedented recognition of Israel's legal presence over the 1949 armistice lines overlooks, ignores, and frequently defies these internationally sanctioned Jewish historical, legal and collective human rights. In so doing, misinformed and misguided denunciations of Secretary Pompeo's embrace of Israel misrepresent at best and disfigure at worst the historical record. These errors also falsify the complex reality of the current legal and diplomatic status of Israel and its Palestinian neighbors.

Pompeo's visit to Psagot was also reflected the agreed legal and diplomatic framework of the 1995 Oslo Interim Accords that were internationally witnessed and guaranteed by the United States , Russia, Egypt, Jordan, Norway, and the European Union. The accords affirmed in no uncertain terms that Israeli and Palestinian Authority construction and building rights in areas under their respective jurisdictions would continue until the final status negotiated disposition of the territories. That was the legal and diplomatic backdrop for Pompeo's declaration of a US policy of "reality-based diplomacy". It is regrettable that some uninformed and other willfully blind journalists commentators took the liberty of recasting Psagot and other Jewish communities east of the 1949 armistice lines as "illegal". And in the tradition of Orwellian doublespeak, these same media experts have legitimized as "freedom of political protest and speech", BDS cancellation warfare and its support for Nazi-era labeling of Jewish products. Its worth remembering that in May 2019, the German parliament decried both BDS and product labeling as central to Germany's legal determination of BDS as anti-Semitic.

Instead, Pompeo's visit and his statements were correctives to these errors of judgment in reporting and commentary. Facts still matter. Pompeo's visit reminds the international community of a truth that every Israeli government since 1967 has attempted to convey to the world, albeit unsuccessfully. Simply put: Psagot and Petach Tikvah share the same legitimacy. The secretary's visit marks the first time that a United States administration has formally recognized this equality of Jewish sovereignty.

This US recognition of collective Jewish human rights parallels the principle of secure Jewish collective life that every Israeli government has recognized since the Jewish people's reestablishment of sovereignty in 1948. The International community had formally recognized those same rights to Jewish sovereignty in 1920 at the international San Remo Conference. The principal powers of the League of Nations formalized San Remo's declarative recognition in 1922 of the Right of the Jewish People to "reconstitute their National Home In Palestine". The League of Nations further called for "close (Jewish) settlement" establishing and unanimously approving the Mandate for Palestine, that anchored the Jewish collective human right to collective freedom and sovereignty and ultimately led to Israel's Declaration of Independence and policy of every Israeli government Since 1967, sanctioning rights to Jewish community building on both sides of the 1949 armistice lines on state land.

The United States' top diplomat apparently did his legal and diplomatic homework. Apparently, he and his advisers studied the abovementioned international legal documents. His visit to Israel's Psagot winery and his accompany condemnations of BDS and anti-Semitic product labeling, reminiscent of the World War II-era, break the "glass ceiling" regarding formal US recognition of Israel's legal rights to sovereignty. US and Israel's alignment on Israel's rights to sovereignty safeguards the most fundamental Jewish collective human right today. Unfortunately, the cynical discrediting of Secretary Pompeo's alignment with the policy of all Israeli governments since 1967 reflects the lack of understanding of its critics rather than the well-reasoned positions of the current US State Department.

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Jewish leaders have similarly demonstrated solidarity. In the spirit of the 1960s black-Jewish unity in the civil rights movement, American Jewish leaders unequivocally condemned the Floyd killing. World Jewish Congress President Ronald Lauder denounced it as a "horrific racist act." The Union for Reform Judaism issued a statement that read, "Black Lives Matter is a Jewish Value." The Orthodox Jewish Union (OU) declared, "Racism is not a thing of the past or simply a political issue. It is a real and present danger that must be met head-on." Anti-Defamation League director Jonathan Greenblatt, declared, "We stand in solidarity with the Black community as they yet again are subject to pain and suffering at the hands of a racist and unjust system."

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Despite universal Jewish support for BLM, it failed to prevent a surge of anti-Semitic violence across the United States in the aftermath of the Floyd murder. Jewish storeowners were assaulted; Jewish-owned stores and restaurants were defaced and looted. Social media has been rife with anti-Semitic libel denouncing the Jewish state and delegitimizing Jews. In the Fairfax neighborhood of Los Angeles, demonstrators were heard screaming, "Kill the Jews." Synagogues were defaced with graffiti reading, "F**ck Israel," and "Free Palestine."

BDS organizations have exploited simmering racial tensions by accusing Israel of complicity in the Floyd murder. The BDS strategy is not new. The Jewish state has, for some years, been recast as an illegitimate "white oppressor." BLM leader Patrisse Cullors drew parallels between her view of the oppression of American blacks and Palestinians in "Palestine," referring to pre-1967 Israel, Judea and Samaria, and the Gaza Strip. Cullors referred to Palestine as "the new South Africa."

The new 'collective anti-Semitism'

Demonstrations across the United States and Europe have reflected a more profound, more worrying phenomenon that Steven Windmueller has called "collective anti-Semitism," in which the Jewish people as a whole and their nation-state have been targeted. These BDS-led accusations have moved from the margins to occupy the mainstream US discourse. For example, social media has been flooded with claims that Jews ran the slave trade.

Minister Louis Farrakhan, leader of the Nation of Islam and an avowed anti-Semite who has regularly traded in Nazi propaganda, has taken a lead role in disseminating these mendacious theories. His ideas have influenced BLM leaders and BDS activists. For example, BLM Los Angeles co-founder Melina Abdullah, a Farrakhan acolyte, accused CNN of "Standing with a Zionist Israel that murders and terrorizes the Palestinian people."

Farrakhan is not an exception. Linda Sarsour, a Palestinian American activist, has regularly incited against Israel's existence as a Jewish and democratic state in her work as a leader of the Women's March. Sarsour has also drawn a direct parallel between the United States' treatment of its black citizens to Israel's "racist" treatment of Palestinians. She has also publicly condemned Israel for American police brutality, claiming that US police were trained by their Israeli counterparts. BLM activists have also worked to export their campaign to Israel, pointing to tensions between the Ethiopian community and police as proof of "institutional racism" in Israel.

Ongoing demonstrations across the United States have reenergized the intersectional solidarity between those protesting anti-black racism in America and BDS organizations' demands to "Free Palestine from the [Jordan] River to the [Mediterranean] Sea" – a clarion call to dismantle the State of Israel. The BDS-BLM narrative rebrands Israel as it has the United States: as a paradigm for white supremacy. The BDS-BLM convergence, then, as it relates to the Palestinian issue, has removed the Palestinian-Israeli conflict from its territorial framework and has recast the Jewish nation-state as a racial issue – "apartheid" and illegitimate by definition.

BLM and BDS's participation in the July 1 "Day of Rage" demonstrations against Israel's proposed application of civilian law in areas of the West Bank as part of the US peace plan illustrate the point. "Day of Rage" protesters in Brooklyn declared, "Jaffa, Haifa, and Tel Aviv – were stolen." Nerdeen Kiswani, the Palestinian-American leader of "Within Our Lifetime," a BDS organization, declared, "We don't wanna go just back to our homes in Gaza and the West Bank. We want all of it!" The implication is far-reaching. It renders the Palestinian Israeli conflict unsolvable and irrelevant, rejecting both liberal and progressive approaches to the Israeli-Palestinian political impasse.

BDS-BLM solidarity first took root in 2014 and quickly spread. The BLM-aligned group "Dream Defenders" traveled to Israel on a Palestinian solidarity mission in 2015, triggering broad condemnation by liberal and progressive Jewish groups. BLM leader Patrisse Cullors and Temple University professor Marc Lamont Hill led the mission together with Carmen Perez, a Women's March co-chair. While in Israel, the group visited Israeli Arab cities such as Nazareth, where they underscored support for BDS calling for the "liberation" of pre-1967 Israel, the West Bank and the Hamas-governed Gaza Strip.

Groups acting under the BLM umbrella, such as "the Movement for Black Lives" (M4BL), championed by activists like Hill, accused Israel of genocide and apartheid in its 2016 policy briefs. These charges were subsequently shelved in its 2020 mission statement. Instead, M4BL watered down its current policy brief, noting that Israel contributes to the "shackling of our community." In the same brief, M4BL lists the BDS movement as one of its partners. M4BL leaders have not disguised their neo-Marxist ideological positions that prescribe the necessary dismantling of American institutions and the dissolution of the State of Israel. Cullors has openly admitted that she and BLM's co-founder Alicia Garza are "trained Marxists."

Hill, a professor at Temple University, has defined both the United States and Israel as examples of international "settler colonialism … requiring a violent response." Hill said during a June 2020 webinar on South African Youth Day:

"I'm listening to the radical calls from Palestine and the radical calls from the United States, and I'm super-energized by that. A friend of mine from Umm el-Fahm [an Arab city in northern Israel] texted me and said, 'I love that you all are tearing shit down.' And I'm all like, yes, this is exciting. And that kind of reenergized solidarity … So now we're talking about an international fight against settler-colonialism and imperialism and authoritarianism, and I couldn't be prouder and happier to be part of this moment because there's so much possibility in front of us."

Hill also referred to Israel as "48" – to delegitimize Israel's founding in 1948 – and described the Jewish state in neo-Marxist terms as engaging in "state violence," labeling Israel as "authoritarian, totalitarian, imperialist, and colonialist."

Hill and his fellow BLM and BDS activists' dedication to identity politics' universalist view of oppression thrusts Israel into the middle of the domestic US debate. Online petitions by various American organizations, including the anti-Zionist group Jewish Voice for Peace, that accuse Israel of training US law enforcement forces to abuse black Americans, have gone viral.

Several prominent BDS groups, including Students for Justice in Palestine, also penned a petition directly linking accusations of racism in the United States to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. The "Justice for Black Lives" petition reads, "the knee-to-neck choke-hold that [Derek] Chauvin used to murder George Floyd has been used and perfected to torture Palestinians by Israeli occupation forces through 72 years of ethnic cleansing and dispossession." These accusations by BDS groups, though easily refutable by a review of Israeli counter-terrorism and policing policies and methods, have nonetheless become part of the mainstream American media discourse.

Palestinian BDS groups exploit US racial tensions

Leaders and activists from both US-based Palestinian and other pro-Palestinian BDS groups have leveraged spiking tensions in the wake of the Floyd murder. Organizations including the US Campaign for Palestinian Rights, Students for Justice in Palestine, American Muslims for Palestine, Al-Awda, Samidoun Palestinian Prisoner Solidarity Network and Within Our Lifetime organization have exploited frustration and anger characterizing the national mood across the United States and Western Europe by accusing the Jewish state of being complicit in Floyd's murder. This network launched the "We Can't Breathe" campaign to demonstrate support for BLM, fusing black and Palestinian "resistance."

US-based Palestinian BDS organizations have also exploited the protest momentum. Samidoun held a "Day of Rage" recently opposite what their event publicity poster called the "Zionist" consulate in Los Angeles to protest the Trump plan and "Israel's land theft."

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The BDS movement has long used intersectionality arguments to cement black-Palestinian solidarity in recasting Israel as the world's meta-civil rights violator. It has equated George Floyd's murder with the accidental death of Eyad Hallaq, an autistic Palestinian teenager who was mistaken for an armed terrorist and tragically killed by Israeli police on May 30. US-based anti-Israel groups have also co-opted the Arabic term intifada, connoting armed uprising, and injected it into BLM protests.

BDS's appropriation of BLM protests has also revealed the backing of Palestinian Marxist-Leninist terror organizations. For example, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, a member organization of the PLO and a terror group so designated by the United States and the European Union, issued a public statement of support. This tactic is not new. It also occurred in 2014 when the Ferguson violence in Missouri following the police killing of Michael Brown coincided with the Israel-Hamas war in Gaza.

At that time, Khaled Barakat, a member of the PFLP, wrote in the San Francisco Bay View National Black Newspaper, "When we see the images today in Ferguson, we see another emerging intifada in the long line of intifada and struggle that has been carried out by Black people in the US and internationally." BDS co-founder Omar Barghouti, a resident of Israel, noted that he was "proud" that the PFLP sits as a full member of the BDS National Committee in Ramallah.

The current wave of anti-Semitism and Israelophobia in the United States in the shadow of the Floyd murder continues in this vein. In recent years, Sarsour and Hill have been prominent advocates of the "Israel apartheid" libel, casting the Jewish state as complicit in violating the civil and human rights of black Americans and blaming US military support of Israel for diverting government funds away from black communities.

Hill, Sarsour, and their intersectional neo-Marxist fellow travelers' goal is to build a broader political base for the America-Israel racist-colonialist narrative. Hill has called for "rebellion," "revolution" and "resistance" against the American government and its institutions in the wake of Floyd's death. Similarly, BDS leader professor Hatem Bazian of UC Berkeley, founder of Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), has called for an intifada in America.

Hill's infamous "from the river to the sea" speech at the United Nations on Nov. 28, 2018, underscored his goal of international solidarity for the radical and racial "Ferguson-to-Palestine" linkage. Hill has employed classic Marxist nomenclature against Israel: "colonialist," "imperialist," "fascist" and "racist," forming the basis for the apartheid libel against Israel, most recently in a webinar after the Floyd murder, along with Palestinian and South African anti-Israel activists. Similarly, IfNotNow, a Jewish anti-Zionist organization, recently tweeted an article encouraging solidarity between the BDS and BLM movements, in the shadow of the Floyd killing.

Implications for Israel and the Jewish Diaspora

BDS-BLM intersectionality, as the face of the current deepening identity-politics phenomenon in the United States, mobilizes racial minorities against what they see as a white-supremacist established order they seek to replace. In parallel, the BDS and BLM movements share a vision for the replacement of Israel, which they see as an extension of the white United States – inherently unjust, racist, and illegal. In this view, Israel is the result of a historical sin – an error that can be corrected only by Israel's replacement by Palestine.

This deepens the challenge to Israel and American Jewry posed by BDS, BLM, and Antifa, who demand the dismantling of the United States and Israel and their rebuilding from the ground up. The rebranding of Israel as a white supremacist entity also categorizes Diaspora Jews as "white supremacists" by extension, unless they disavow Israel as a centerpiece of their American Jewish identity.

This new radicalized discourse demands that American Jews sacrifice their liberal and progressive worldviews. Traditional Jewish affiliations accept the existence of the Jewish state, yet they are deemed unacceptable by this more extreme, unforgiving American dialogue. The refusal of the 2018 intersectional Women's March to allow Jewish progressive Zionist women to march despite their unequivocal support for women's rights serves as a case in point.

These attitudes have begun to penetrate some progressive Jewish circles. In July 2020, Peter Beinart, former editor of the liberal New Republic, authored an opinion piece titled, "I No Longer Believe in a Jewish State," which appeared on the first page of the international edition of The New York Times. This was a truncated version of an 8,000-word treatise that appeared in Jewish Currents, where Beinart today serves as a senior editor. Beinart's denunciation of Israel as the nation-state of the Jewish people places him in the same ideological orbit as Hill, Sarsour, and the BLM-BDS movements. Israel adversary Sarsour applauded Beinart's recent disavowal of Israel. She praised Beinart for legitimizing Palestinian rejectionism of Jewish sovereignty, saying, "Maybe Zionists will listen to one of their own. Peter has evolved over the years, and I welcome his evolution."

This Israel "cancellation" discourse is a dangerous development for Diaspora Jews because it positions Israel, not as a solution to anti-Semitism, but rather as a primary cause of anti-Semitism. The BDS-BLM alignment also erases Jewish indigeneity in the Middle East and Israel's 3,000-year-old Jewish history in the Holy Land. In short, it spawns a political replacement theology that Palestinian activists have been propagating for years, claiming to be the descendants of the original Canaanites, charging the Jews stole "Al-Quds" (Jerusalem) from them, and denying that the Al-Aqsa mosque was built on the remains of the Jewish Temple.

This inversion of history is a necessary reconstruction to anchor the allegations against Israel of "white supremacism, imperialism, and settler-colonialism." This assault against the historical and international legal legitimacy of the nation-state of the Jewish people also delegitimizes, criminalizes and dehumanizes Diaspora Jews by extension. According to the BDS-BLM narrative, any Jew who supports Israel's existence is automatically branded a "racist robber of Palestinian land." If left unchallenged and uncorrected, this increasingly mainstreamed and radicalized narrative poses one of the gravest dangers to the American and European progressive and liberal Jewish communities since the end of the Holocaust and the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948.

This article was first published by the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs.

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