Joel Beinin
Overview
Joel Beinin is a founding member of Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP) and an enthusiastic promoter of the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement.
Beinin has, for many years, exploited his academic authority to demonize and spread lies about Israel at colleges, high schools, and middle schools. Notably, Beinin has claimed that "the U.S. government has given Israel nearly one trillion dollars" — a completely fictitious sum. When informed of his error, Beinin reportedly insisted, "The basic point still stands."
Under Beinin’s leadership at MESA, high school textbooks in a number of U.S. states were changed to include "class ‘exercises’ that pitted students in roles of ‘advantaged’ Jews against ‘disadvantaged’ Palestinian Arabs. Playing the role of a world power, teachers were instructed to unfairly oppose the ‘Arabs.’
Beinin is a professor of Middle East History at Stanford University and a former president of the Middle East Studies Association (MESA).
Rewriting History to Slander Israel
On January 3, 2015, Joel Beinin organized a roundtable discussion convened by the Mid-Atlantic Radical Historians' Organization (MARHO) on the subject: "What is the Responsibility of Historians Regarding the Israel/Palestine Conflict?” In his opening statement, Beinin lied that "Israel as a state and society is premised on the destruction of the history and living society of Palestinian Arab people as well as the history of the land of Palestine for most of the last 1400 years.”
In a January 2016 interview, Beinin doubled down, calling Israel a "settler colonial project." (16:20)
In an April 14, 2016, interview for Democracy Now, Beinin stated that “Israel has been the aggressor for most of its historical existence” and that Israel “aggressively attacked its neighbors in 1956, in 1967, in 1982” — omitting that Israel’s military action were in direct response to belligerent acts by surrounding Arab countries. Beinin also opined that “every other war the Israel has fought...did not need to be fought (24:20).”
Describing Israelis as "Blood Thirsty," Nazis, Fascists, and Terrorists
According to a Middle East Forum report, Beinin has stated that "visceral hatred" and "open bloodthirstiness" were "common" in Israeli society. The report also noted that Beinin was a signatory to a 2002 open letter suggesting that Israel would use the war in Iraq to engage in "ethnic cleansing" against Palestinians — “a charge that never materialized and for which no apologies nor retractions were ever issued.”
In a 2014 interview, Beinin lied that Israelis carry out “pogroms” against Arabs in East Jerusalem (22:04). In the same interview, Beinin referred to Israeli teenagers as “Nazis” for posting harsh comments on social media comments during the 2014 Gaza War (21:23).
In a podcast produced in February of 2014 and posted in January 2016, Beinin referred to the Israeli government as “fascist terrorists” (53:00).
Insisting Israel Should Allow Hamas To Bomb Israeli Civilians
In a July 14, 2014, interview about Israel’s Operation Protective Edge (OPE), Beinin thoroughly mischaracterized the terrorist actions of Hamas, as well as Israel’s response. Israel implemented OPE to destroy Hamas’ attack tunnels and stop Hamas rocket attacks from Gaza targeting Israeli civilians — that increased dramatically in the weeks prior to OPE.
Beinin claimed that OPE was “100% a war of choice by Israel. It didn’t have to happen at all,” and stated that real reason for launching OPE was a pretext for Israel’s displeasure with a new Fatah-Hamas unity government (15:04). Beinin went on to claim that the “most important things that people should take away” is that “Israel instigated a situation by intentionally provoking hysteria among its people” and that a “wave of racist sentiment is propelling the air assault on the Gaza Strip.” Paradoxically, Beinin added that “Israel is in no way, shape, or form acting out of self-defense, even if Hamas fires rockets at civilian targets, which they do.” (42:30)
Beinin stated that Israel destroyed Gazan medical centers (13:00), omitting that Hamas used Gaza’s Shifa hospital, and the al-Wafa hospital, as command centers. Hamas also used Shifa hospital repeatedly as a launching area for rockets during OPE.
Beinin also refused to condemn Hamas’ war crime of shooting rockets at Israeli civilians “because they haven’t killed any Israelis.” One day after Beinin’s interview, an Israeli civilian was killed by Hamas mortar fire. A number of other Israeli civilians have also been killed by Hamas rockets.
In 2009, Beinin defended Hamas’ use of civilian human shields, a war crime Hamas repeated during OPE. Beinin commented “Of course Hamas hides among civilians. Gaza's a very small, densely populated place. Where else are they going to hide?”In July 30, 2014 blog post for Stanford University Press, Beinin doubled down on his claim that that the real motive behind OPE was Israeli racism. The post is titled “Racism is the Foundation of Israel’s Operation Protective Edge.”
Libeling the Jerusalem Police as "A Right Wing Mob"
During a July 17, 2014 interview, Beinin lied that two months earlier, American protester Lucas Koerner was unjustly arrested and beaten for “unprovoked aggression” by Jerusalem police at the annual Jerusalem Day Parade in East Jerusalem.**
In reality, Koerner was arrested by the Jerusalem police several years earlier, during the Jerusalem Day Parade held on June 1, 2011. In a widely shared video that garnered international attention, he is shown wearing a keffiyeh and a kippah with a Palestinian flag pin while standing next to the parade route filled with participants waving Israeli flags. Koerner is then shown speaking out against Israel and the U.S and waving his U.S. passport.
Koerner refused to hand over his passport to the police and was arrested for disturbing the peace. However, the heavily edited video shows his comments and arrest, but omits that he bit a police officer and failed to cooperate with the police. Koerner was detained and released less than 48 hours later. He left the country shortly thereafter at the urging of his lawyer.
Koerner later admitted that it may have been illegal for him not to hand over his passport. “Whether or not I was justified in refusing their request for my passport (I do not know the legal details) is entirely irrelevant to the circumstance of my actual arrest,” he said
Defending Professor Steven Salaita’s Anti-Semitic Tweets
During the January 3, 2015, roundtable, Beinin exhorted attendees to defend freedom of speech and academic freedom, and cited the case of anti-Semitic professor Steven Salaita’s “allegedly uncivil tweets” as an example.
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.
Endorsing Hate Speech and Libels
In 2016, Beinin signed a letter to Vassar College President Catherine Bond Hill defending Jasbir Puar, an anti-Israel Rutgers professor who gave a lecture at Vassar College in February 2016 titled “Inhumanist Biopolitics: How Palestine Matters.” Puar began her speech by calling for armed struggle against Israel. She went on to demonize Israel, suggesting 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 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 addressed to President Hill slammed objections to Puar’s libelous 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. The letter claimed the report revealed “the ways in which ‘a network of lobbying groups... funded by, working in coordination with, and/or staunchly supportive of the policies and practices of the Israeli government primarily drives efforts to silence speech on behalf of Palestinian rights’.” The letter also claimed “these groups… are supported or even initiated through many millions of dollars in donations from right-wing, hawkish Israel advocates…”
Promoting BDS
In 2015, Beinin supported a BDS resolution at Stanford and propagated BDS’ deception that the movement’s territorial objective stops with the end of Israel’s "occupation" of the “Palestinian territories occupied in 1967.” BDS’ website calls for Israel “[e]nding its occupation and colonization of all Arab lands … and promoting the rights of Palestinian refugees. As of 2016, the BDS site also promotes the compound lie — calculated to destroy Israel — that 7.25 million Palestinian refugees...are denied their right to return to their homes simply because they are not Jewish.”
In 2010, Beinin signed a petition encouraging the University of California (UC) system to divest from companies doing business with Israel. In 2014, Beinin signed a letter calling on "scholars and librarians within Middle East studies to boycott Israeli academic institutions." The letter further pledged "not to collaborate on projects and events involving Israeli academic institutions, not to teach at or to attend conferences and other events at such institutions, and not to publish in academic journals based in Israel.”
Beinin was also a featured speaker at University of California, Berkeley’s second annual Israeli Apartheid Week, in 2009.
Beinin has written a number of articles for the Israel-hating website Mondoweiss.
Beinin promotes the radical group Ta’ayush, a non-profit organization that supports BDS (57:45), as well as Anarchists Against the Wall. In 2015, Ta’ayush leader Ezra Nawi was filmed bragging about his entrapping and handing over Palestinians who sold their property to Jews — to be tortured and executed.Tag Stanford
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/joel.beinin
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/beinin-joel-7ab40537
Wikipedia:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joel_Beinin
- Status:
- Professor
- University:
- Stanford
- Organizations:
- BDS,
- JVP
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- Last Modified:
- 11/25/2024