Eve Spangler
Overview
Eve Spangler is the author of an anti-Israel textbook and an activist with the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement.Spangler is an “active member” of Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP), as described by the anti-Israel Mondoweiss publication. She is also the faculty advisor for the Boston College (BC) chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP).
Spangler has demonized Israel and has expressed support for Hamas-affiliated anti-Israel activist, Imad Ahmad Barghouthi.
Spangler is an associate professor in the Department of Sociology at BC.
Anti-Israel Textbook
In 2015, Spangler authored an anti-Israel textbook titled "Understanding Israel/Palestine: Race, Nation, and Human Rights in the Conflict."In her textbook, Spangler promoted an anti-Israel zoological conspiracy theory that claimed Israeli settlers release wild boars onto Palestinian farmland in order to destroy their crops.
Spangler also claimed in her book that Israel is, “engaged in ‘pinkwashing’ (claiming that Israel is distinctively gay friendly) while expecting their own Orthodox Jewish Women to ride at the back of the bus.”
BDS Activism
Spangler appears as a “possible speaker” in an instructional packet titled: “Anthropology Boycott of Israeli Academic Institutions: Everything You Need to Run a Teach-In.”In the packet, published in September 2015, Spangler is referred to as a speaker who “can address the myth that BDS is anti‐semitic.”
In an interview published on November 16, 2015, Spangler was quoted describing her perspective on Israel, Zionism and the BDS movement.
“Spangler elaborated on her opinions of Zionism by noting the three achievements that the state of Israel wishes to achieve: a Jewish state, a democratic state, and all the land between the river and the sea. ‘These three things don’t go together absent of the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians,’ Spangler said.”
Spangler then went on to encourage Americans to join “the Boycott Divestment and Sanctions movement against Israel.”
In 2011, Spangler signed a petition, published by the US Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (USACBI), demanding that Trader Joe’s, an American supermarket, remove all products made in Israel.
Signatories of the petition claimed that “Israel engages in the oppression of Palestinians and ethnic cleansing of Palestinian people, including the continued theft of Palestinian land for the expansion of illegal Israeli settlements and construction of the Segregation Wall.”
Spangler signed a petition, published in March 2011, calling on the financial consultant company, TIAA-CREF, to “divest from Israeli occupation.” The petition provided a list of Israeli companies from which signatories demanded TIAA-CREF divest its funds.
Demonizing Israel
In a Mondoweiss article published on January 19, 2017, Spangler wrote that “the political Zionists, almost from the very start, were dedicated to creating an ethno-religiously exclusively Jewish state in Palestine. This required the ‘transfer’ of Palestinians out of the path of the Zionist project.”Spangler went on to state that “The logic of the Zionist project is so deeply etched into the fabric of Israeli politics that it seems as if every Israeli leader begins each day by asking ‘what can I accomplish today, in the current environment, to promote an Arab-free greater Israel?’”
In a September 2015 interview, Spangler accused Israel of carrying out an “ethnic cleansing” of Palestinians, and continuing to do so by portraying itself as a “victim.”
Spangler cited Israel’s Operation Protective Edge (OPE) as an example, omitting the terrorist actions of Hamas. Israel implemented OPE to destroy Hamas’ attack tunnels and to stop Hamas rocket attacks from Gaza — that increased dramatically in the weeks prior to the operation.
In an August 2015 interview, Spangler depicted Zionism as a “political project which seeks to create an ethno-religiously exclusive state.”
She went on to accuse Israel of committing a “sociocide” against Palestinians and “killing the viability of the community that those [Palestinian] bodies need in order to survive.”
Finally, Spangler charged Israel with attempting to expel Palestinians by hiring foreign workers to take their jobs thereby incentivizing them to emigrate.
In March 2013, Spangler was a featured speaker during SJP Tuft’s Israel Apartheid Week (IAW), at which she was scheduled to spend her time “sharing her experience as an anti-Zionist Jewish woman and will discuss the changing face of the Palestinian-Israeli Conflict as it is discussed on college campuses.”
According to an article chronicling the event, Spangler “interwove her own personal narrative as a Jewish descendant of Holocaust survivors.”
Supporting Imad Ahmad Barghouthi
Spangler signed an open letter, co-published by JVP and USACBI to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on behalf of Imad Ahmad Barghouthi.The letter called upon Prime Minister Netanyahu “to order the immediate release of Dr. Imad Ahmad Barghouthi from Israeli military custody.”
Al-Quds University Astrophysics Professor Imad Barghouthi was sentenced to seven months in prison for incitement to violence.
Barghouti is a vocal supporter of Hamas’s military wing — the Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Brigades — and has called for killing and being killed in the name of Islam.
An October 22, 2014 video showed Barghouthi at an Al-Quds university Hamas rally, draped in a Hamas banner, [00:00:33] urging students to design precision guided missiles, and sniper rifles as [00:01:11] “weapons of the resistance” to [00:02:35] kill “zionist soldiers” in their bedrooms.
SJP
SJP is a student organization engaged in anti-Israel activity on North American college and university campuses.
The first chapter of SJP was founded in 2001 at the University of California at Berkeley by Professor Hatem Bazian. Bazian has spread classic anti-Semitism, reportedly promoted religious anti-Semitism and defended the Hamas terror group. In 2004, Bazian called for “intifada” in America.
SJP organizes anti-Israel campaigns, including running annual Israel Apartheid Weeks, often in collaboration with Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP) and Muslim Students Association (MSA) campus chapters.
SJP has been a major force in pushing the anti-Semitic Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement on campuses. Chapters have initiated dozens of BDS resolutions in student governments, which have been proposed on or around Jewish holidays, a time when many Jewish students are off-campus.
SJP activists have reportedly physically assaulted, intimidated and harassed Jewish students, disrupted pro-Israel campus events and demonized pro-Israel campus organizations.
Chapters have often endorsed and campaigned for numerous terrorists and whitewashed terrorism.
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.
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 value.”
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.”
