Israel Has Formed a Task Force to Carry Out Covert Campaigns at US Universities

By William I. Robinson , TRUTHOUT, March 23, 2024

A major Israeli news site says Israel’s foreign affairs and diaspora affairs ministries are behind the operation.

As worldwide protest escalates over Israel’s genocide of Palestinians in Gaza, academic freedom and free speech are under all-out attack on university campuses in the United States, not just from university administrations and pro-Israeli groups, but now directly from the highest levels of the Israeli state. In a story that has been largely ignored in the Western press, the Israeli news website Ynetnews, one of the largest media outlets in the country, reported that the Israeli government has launched what appears to be a wide-ranging covert campaign to harass and intimidate students, faculty, and administrators into silence.

According to the report, the Foreign Affairs and the Diaspora Affairs ministries have established a task force to carry out “shaming and pressuring” operations at U.S. universities. The task force, chaired by Foreign Minister Eli Cohen and led by senior government officials, drew up a multifaceted “action plan,” according to Ynetnews, involving political and psychological operations against its critics. The plan aims at “inflicting economic and employment consequences on antisemitic [read: pro-Palestinian/anti-genocide] students and compelling universities to distance them from their campuses.” The plan specifies that actions taken “should not have the signature of the State of Israel on it.”

The first plank in the plan is described as the “consciousness axis.” It calls for “personal, economic and employment repercussions for the distributors of antisemitism.” According to the plan, the inter-ministerial task force will carry out “naming and shaming” by “publicizing the names of those generating antisemitism on campuses — both students and faculty and impacting the employment of those identified as the perpetrators of antisemitism.” Those targeted “will struggle to find employment in the U.S. and will pay a significant economic price for their conduct.”…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….

Anti-Zionism Is Not Antisemitism

The Zionist narrative routinely condemns solidarity with Palestine as “antisemitism.” This conflation of anti-Zionism with antisemitism lays at the heart of Israeli hasbara and political persecution of the Palestine solidarity movement. Israel has made the definition of antisemitism an international political battleground in its efforts to suppress condemnation of its repression of the Palestinians, its ongoing violations of international laws and conventions, and Jewish supremacy inscribed into the legal and political structure of the Israeli state………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….

While Judaism is a religion of universal values, Zionism is a right-wing nationalist ideology that emerged from the wave of racial nationalism that swept Europe in the late 19th century, part of the same movement that gave rise to Nazism in Germany and Manifest Destiny in the U.S., and more recently to a resurgent white nationalism. Racial nationalism argued that all people belong to one or another “racially pure” groups that can be traced back to mythical origins that correspond to “racially pure” people/nations, and that each people/nation must have its own “racially pure” homeland. Racial nationalist campaigns of “blood and soil” set out to organize the world according to this ideology. The Zionist program legitimated its conquest of Palestine through ethnic cleansing and settler colonialism by converting a faith community among diverse cultures, places and histories into a “racially pure” Jewish people/nation who must return to their ancestral homeland……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….

Albert Einstein, then living in exile in the U.S., was offered the presidency of Israel upon its creation in 1948 but turned it down, instead characterizing the new state as fascist. He joined 27 of the most prominent Jewish intellectual, public and religious leaders at the time, including Hannah Arendt, Rabbi Jessurun Cardozo and Sidney Lens, in a letter to The New York Times, warning that:

Within the Jewish community the Zionists have preached an admixture of ultranationalism, religious mysticism, and racial superiority. Like other Fascist parties they have been used to break strikes, and have themselves pressed for the destruction of free trade unions. [The Zionists in Palestine] inaugurated a reign of terror. Teachers were beaten up for speaking against them, adults were shot for not letting their children join them.

This is why the Zionist hasbara in the U.S. has not been directed solely at non-Jewish supporters of Palestinian freedom. It has also been directed at the Jewish American community…………………………………………………
more https://truthout.org/articles/israel-has-formed-a-task-force-to-carry-out-covert-campaigns-at-us-universities/