At UC Berkeley, your choice is to be welcomed as a Jew, or to speak your mind on Israel

Not so much (Photo: Flickr / patriciadrury)

Bradley Burston in his Ha’aretz blog:

Now Berkeley, so often ahead of the curve, has distinguished itself once more. Its Jewish Student Union, founded expressly to provide a forum for communication and to unify campus Jewish organizations, has become the first such group in the country to have denied membership to the unapologetically pro-Israel, pro-peace J Street U. [...]

In a place like Berkeley, it takes guts for anyone, whatever their politics, to admit that they care about Israel. If their politics are progressive, if, like the J Street U people, they explicitly oppose both the occupation and the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions movement, one of the voters in the Jewish Student Union decision may take the trouble to denounce J Street in the Northern California Jewish newspaper as “anti-Israel” and, perhaps most damning, not “part of the mainstream Jewish community.”

What remains unclear is why, when Jews in Berkeley boycott fellow supporters of Israel, they believe that they are doing Israel, or the Jewish people, any good. [...]

Here in Israel, the war that is closest to us, the war that threatens us most directly, and perhaps, most permanently, is a struggle over exclusion. It is a war which, week by week, vote by vote, uses democracy to diminish democracy. One which, edict by edict, uses the institutions of Judaism to alienate and repel Jews, and the institutions of Zionism to alienate and repel supporters of Israel.

Every vote sends a message. It can build bridges, or burn them. It can foster communication, or deter it. For many people who have lived in Berkeley, it was in part because they found a welcoming, open, questioning, courageous, progressive community of Jews there, that they made a decision to come to Israel to live. Most, wherever they are now, are still actively working to make this a much better place.

I’ve got friends at J Street’s UC Berkeley chapter and to them I say: Keep fighting. Don’t close your mouths and keep voicing your desire to be pro-Israel and pro-peace, to be anti-BDS and anti-occupation. It’s terrible that people on our side of the aisle come up against this, but it’s important not to get despondent, as hard as it may be. Keep fighting the good fight. It’s worth it.

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