Johanna Fernandez

Overview

Johanna Fernandez has demonized Israel and has conflated racial prejudice in the United States with Israeli policies. She is a supporter of the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement.

Fernandez has expressed support for anti-Israel radical Imad Ahmad Barghouthi and defended activist-professor Rabab Abdulhadi.

Fernandez is a professor in the Department of Black and Latino Studies at Baruch College (Baruch). 

Demonizing Israel

In 2016, Fernandez took part in the “Prisoner, Labor and Academic Solidarity Delegation to Palestine,” led by anti-Israel Professor Rabab Abdulhadi.

Following the trip, the delegation published a statement titled “We Stand with Palestine in the Spirit of ‘Sumud’,” which Fernandez signed.

In the statement, members of the delegation declared that “We stand with the growing worldwide movement for Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) of Israeli settler colonialism and apartheid.”

Delegation members went on to state that “Settler colonialism in Palestine aims at the destruction of Palestinian life through a complex colonial network… This attempt at destroying the social and economic fabric of the Indigenous population is the modus operandi of a Zionist state.”

In 2017, Fernandez published an article describing her experience on the Delegation Trip, titled “Structures of settler colonial domination in Israel and in the United States.”

In the article, Fernandez claimed that “deployment by Israelis of Holocaust-like instruments of control against Palestinians—shocked the conscience. Although Zionist policies have not yet reached the Final Solution organized at Wannsee 1942, they certainly do resemble Kristallnacht 1938…”

Fernandez went on to say that “while Gaza is not yet the Auschwitz death factory, it does resemble the Warsaw Ghetto.The current stage of Israeli genocide can easily reach those later Nazi manifestations. And even if they don’t, it's still genocide.”

Fernandez posited various conspiracy theories, charging that “the Israeli military freezes the bodies of... dead children in massive blocks of ice and refuses to release them to their parents. Fernandez also alleged that “the Knesset, put out an open call for the assassination of Omar Barghouti, a leading member of the Boycott, Divestment, Sanction movement.”

In the same article, Fernandez described “a project of ethnic cleansing through the displacement of Palestinians from their lands, which the Jewish working class supports and on which its living standard depends.”

She then claimed that Palestinians villages are “subject to demolition to make room for impressive European-style condominiums with shopping malls and luxuries of all kinds that the state of Israel builds to house the continuous flow of Zionist settlers from Europe that it lures into Palestinian lands.”

The article also alleged that “The European colonial project in the Americas, whose strategies Israelis have studied and deployed against Palestinians, is the architect of racism and white supremacy.”

Conflating Israeli Security Policies with Racism in the U.S.

On July 15, 2016, Fernandez was a featured speaker at an event titled “Imprisoned Resistance,” whose purpose was “highlighting prisoners’ struggle and resistance from the US to Palestine.”

The event was part of a larger international campaign calling for the release of  Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) terrorist Bilal Kayed who was incarcerated for 14 years for terrorist operations committed during the second intifada.