Judith Butler
Overview
The attacks left over 1,200 Israelis dead, hundreds kidnapped and thousands wounded. The war crimes against civilians included mass murder, torture, rape, beheadings and kidnappings. Israel retaliated with a war called “Swords of Iron.”
Butler is the Maxine Elliot Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley). Butler is also the Hannah Arendt Chair and professor of Philosophy at the European Graduate School (EGS).
Butler is a member of the anti-Israel Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP) Academic Advisory Council.
Butler is a leader within the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement and has endorsed the US Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (USACBI), which seeks “a full boycott of Israel, both academic and economic.”
In 2013, Butler promoted BDS at Brooklyn College, at an event organized by Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), and is a “veteran” of Israel Apartheid Week.
In September of 2012, Butler called for a boycott of Israel, while speaking at an event at the Berlin Jewish Museum in Germany.
In 2003, Butler condemned the former President of Harvard University, Lawrence Summers, for calling the “divest from Israel” movement anti-Semitic.
Support for Hamas Terrorists
On March 4, 2024, Butler appeared in a video on Twitter speaking about the October 7, 2023 massacre.Butler began [00:00:01]: “We can have different views about Hamas as a political party. We can have different views about, um…armed resistance. But I think it is, um…more honest and historically correct to say that the uprising of October 7th was an act of armed resistance. It is not a terrorist attack and it’s not an anti-Semitic attack, it was an attack against Israelis. And you know I did not like that attack, I have gone public with this, I have gotten in trouble for saying it was for me anguishing…”
Among Palestinians and anti-Israel activists, the term “resistance” can be a euphemism for nationalistic terror. It is often used to excuse or even glorify anti-Israel and anti-Semitic violence.
Butler continued [00:00:51]: “However, I would be very foolish if I then decided that the only violence in the scene was the violence done to Israeli people. The violence done to Palestinians has been happening for decades. This was an uprising…it comes from a state of subjugation and against a violent state apparatus.”
Butler concluded [00:01:18]: “Let us be clear…you can be for or against armed resistance, you can be for or against Hamas, but let us at least call it armed resistance and then we can have a debate about whether we think it is right or whether they did the right thing…it is an open debate.”
On Saturday, October 7, 2023, approximately 2,900 heavily armed Hamas terrorists breached Israel’s border with Gaza. They executed numerous war crimes on civilians, including mass murder, beheadings of children, rape of men and women, torture, kidnappings and mutilation. Hamas broadcast videos of their butchery on social media, often to victims’ accounts for families to see. Israel retaliated with a war called “Swords of Iron.” As of November 10, 2023, over 1,200 Israelis, the vast majority of them civilians, were murdered during the attacks. Hamas kidnapped 242 Israelis, including at least 30 children. At least 3,500 people were wounded, many severely.
Calling Terror Groups “Progressive”
Both the Hezbollah Program of 1985 and the Hamas Covenant of 1988 advocated for the annihilation of Israel. The Hamas Covenant also called for the genocide of world Jewry.
Demonizing Israel
A review of Butler’s 2012 book “Parting Ways: Jewishness and the Critique of Zionism” revealed a series of misquotations and false attributions leveraged to demonize Israel and Zionism.
In a February 24, 2010 interview, titled “Judith Butler: As a Jew, I Was Taught It Was Ethically Imperative to Speak Up,” Butler alleged that the Israeli government and media unfairly transformed all Palestinians “in the Israeli war imaginary, into pure war instruments.”
Butler also implied that Israel was morally bankrupt for associating emancipation of Diaspora Jewry with the reconstitution of Jewish sovereignty. — and insisted that Israel has no business expressing cultural identity.
Butler discussed her own refusal to speak at Israeli universities — as her personal expression of anti-normalization — while expressing her excitement to teach a seminar at Birzeit University (Birzeit).
Promoting Propaganda
In April 2016, Butler signed a letter demanding a major publishing company reverse its recall of textbooks that contained a deliberately misleading map distorting the history of the Arab-Israeli conflict. In October 2015, the U.S. cable news network MSNBC apologized for airing a similar series of maps and retracted them.During her February 28, 2013 talk at Brooklyn College alongside, BDS founder Omar Barghouti, Butler promoted the BDS line that the BDS committee was “formed in 2005 “with the support of over 170 organizations in Palestine.” and was the “the largest Palestinian civic movement.”
Butler also claimed that the true aim of BDS — to dismantle the state of Israel and radically alter Israel's demography, so that it becomes another Arab state — was to force Israel into complying with “international law.”
Butler was a signatory to a 2002 open letter suggesting that Israel would use the “fog of war” in Iraq to engage in "full-fledged ethnic cleansing" against Palestinians. No retractions were ever issued for the letter after its claims failed to materialize.
Delegitimizing Israel
During her February 28, 2013 talk, Butler also implied that Zionism — espousing that Jews have the right to self-determination in their own national home, and the right to develop their national culture — is an unethical form of racism, incompatible with Jewish values.This echoed Butler's February 24, 2010 interview, where she stated: “we have to get over the idea that a state has to express a nation.”
Defending Hate Speech
Puar opened by calling for armed struggle against Israel. She suggested that Israelis harvest the organs of dead Palestinians. Puar also claimed that Israel was maiming and “stunting” Palestinians via food restrictions — despite Gaza having one of the highest obesity rates in the world.
Puar also opined that the reason Israeli Jews have not killed all Palestinians is “[t]hey need the Palestinians alive in order to keep the kind of rationalization for their victimhood and their militarized economy.”
The letter Butler signed slammed objections to Puar’s incitement against Israel, as attacks on freedom of speech and the integrity of “an invited guest.”
The letter also cited an October 2015 report by the Center for Constitutional Rights and Palestine Legal that conjured anti-Semitic conspiracies of a powerful Israel lobby controlling the U.S. government and silencing legitimate criticism of Israel.
Defending More Hate Speech
In 2014, The University of Illinois withdrew an offer of employment to Salaita after becoming aware of his anti-Semitic tweets. One tweet, posted shortly after Hamas kidnapped three teenage Israeli high school students, read: "You may be too refined to say it, but I’m not: I wish all the f**king West Bank settlers would go missing.” In 2017, Salaita posted to Facebook: “People ask if I would go back in time and change anything. I would not…I will die unapologetic.” In February 2019, Salaita stated that he had become a school bus driver in the Washington, D.C., area.
JVP
JVP was founded in Berkeley, California in 1996, as an activist group with an emphasis on the “Jewish tradition” of peace, social justice and human rights. The organization is currently led by Rebecca Vilkomerson and its board members include Israel critics Naomi Klein, Judith Butler, Noam Chomsky and Tony Kushner.
JVP, which generally employs civil disobedience tactics to disrupt pro-Israel speakers and events, consists of American Jews and non-Jewish “allies” highly critical of Israeli policies. A staunch supporter of the BDS movement, JVP claims to aim its campaigns at companies that either support the Israeli military (Hewlett-Packard) or are active in the West Bank (SodaStream).
Although several Jewish groups critical of Israeli policies, like J Street and Partners for a Progressive Israel, make efforts to operate within the mainstream American Jewish community, JVP functions outside. The group is often criticized for serving as a tokenized Jewish voice for the pro-Palestinian camp and is widely regarded as the BDS movement’s “Jewish wing.”
JVP denies the notion of “Jewish peoplehood” and has even gone so far as to refer to its own Ashkenazi (Jews who spent the Diaspora in European countries) leadership as “white supremacy inside of JVP.”
The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) has accused JVP of being “the largest and most influential Jewish anti-Zionist group in the United States,” and said the group “exploits Jewish culture and rituals to reassure its own supporters that opposition to Israel not only does not contradict, but is actually consistent with, Jewish values.”
The ADL also claimed that “JVP consistently co-sponsors rallies to oppose Israeli military policy that are marked by signs and slogans comparing Israel to Nazi Germany, demonizing Jews and voicing support for groups like Hamas and Hezbollah.”
According to the ADL website, JVP “uses its Jewish identity to shield the anti-Israel movement from allegations of anti-Semitism and provide it with a greater degree of legitimacy and credibility.”
BDS
The Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement was founded by Omar Barghouti in 2005 to challenge “international support for Israeli apartheid and settler-colonialism.” BDS is an allegedly “Palestinian-led movement,” although leading BDS activists have admitted [00:01:01] this is not true.
One of the demands of BDS includes [point 3] what is generally known as the “right of return,” a demand discredited as a way to eliminate Israel. Barghouti said the “right of return” is a means to “end Israel’s existence as a Jewish state.”
Barghouti has said that BDS “aims to turn Israel into a pariah state, as South Africa once was.”
In his activism, Barghouti has also said [00:05:55] regarding Israel: “Definitely, most definitely, we oppose a Jewish state in any part of Palestine. No…rational Palestinian, not a sellout Palestinian, will ever accept a Jewish state in Palestine.”
The movement has been linked to numerous terrorist organizations and received a public endorsement from Hamas in 2017.
BDS initiatives include calling on institutions and individuals to divest from Israeli-affiliated companies, promoting academic and cultural boycotts of Israel, and organizing anti-Israel rallies, protests and campaigns.
The movement’s most notable achievement has been the infiltration of university campuses through lobbying for “BDS resolutions.” In these cases, student governments and student groups, backed by their own anti-Israel members and affiliates, have proposed resolutions on some form of boycott of, or divestment from, Israel and Israeli-affiliated entities.
Boycott resolutions, although non-binding, have been passed by student governments on numerous North American campuses.
BDS activity is often aggressive and disruptive. It has been noted that universities that pass BDS resolutions see a marked increase in anti-Semitic incidents on campus. On one campus, when the student government debated a BDS resolution, reports emerged of violent threats against those opposing it.
Social Media and Weblinks
Facebook:https://www.facebook.com/pages/Judith-Butler/105727479461225
- Status:
- Professor
- University:
- California-Berkeley
- Organizations:
- BDS,
- JVP
- Related Profiles:
- Hatem Bazian,
- Last Modified:
- 05/04/2026
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