Joshua Clover

 
As of January 2020, Clover is a Professor in the English Department at the University of California, Davis (UC Davis).      

Calling for an End to the State of Israel 

In an article published on December 5, 2018, Clover referred to Zionism as “eliminationist nationalism”and said that “Israel is not a people.”

He wrote that “I am able to distinguish between the Jewish people, no small number of whom are in my family, and Israel, the settler-colonial project. The great majority of people are able to make this quite simple distinction. Some are not, and they are idiots. Some pretend not to be able to, and they are Zionists. My holiday wish for you is freedom from both, and also that Israel be ended.”

In the same article, Clover went on to write: “we must always be on the side of rock-throwers both imagined and real. Not so as to forge a new state where there was none, but, where the state is preserved by constant and absolute violence, to instead bring it to an end.” 

In an article published on April 17, 2019, while discussing how Jews in ghettos during the Holocaust fought against the Nazi “eliminationist ethnosate,” Clover wrote that “The Israeli national project must now be understood in these terms, as what must be fought back against.”

Clover also wrote: “There are reasons not to make any casual suggestions that Gaza, say, is identical to Warsaw. Still it is almost impossible, unless one is the most zealous of Zionists, to miss the inner and deadly character of the reversal, and the present circumstance of Palestinians.”

Trivializing Hezbollah

On March 30, 2019, Clover contributed a comment to a twitter thread, writing “i would want push back on the idea that Hizbollah has "150,000 rockets pointed at Israel." First of all, that is the very highest of all estimates, the number spread by Times of Israel, while other estimates often begin at 40,000.”

In a January 2019 interview with the Lebanese Al-Mayadeen station, Hizbullah Secretary-General Hassan Nasrallah, declared: “In a future war, all of occupied Palestine will be struck by our rockets.”

In the same thread, Clover wrote: “2nd of all, it makes it sound like that describes long range missiles that can be directed at the Knesset/a hospital/whatever. The *vast* majority of these rockets are small, unguided surface-to-surface artillery; shoulder-mounted stuff. It's an incredibly misleading claim.”

In a May 2019 speech, Nasrallah declared [00:02:27] Lebanon had enough precision missiles to change the regional balance of power.

In a July 2019 interview, Nassrallah suggested [00:01:40] that Hizbullah’s missiles target banks [00:01:27]in Israel and included [00:02:00] domestic airports, as well as [00:02:17] Israeli seaports, civilian industrial centers and [00:02:24] major commercial and economic centers, the stock market and civilian infrastructure. 

Demonizing Israel

On June 1, 2019, Clover tweeted: “Israel finally signifies the pure Right to Apartheid (as well as the right to have it funded toward controlling populations by the US state) and is thus truly a global beacon of unfreedom.” 

Clover’s tweet was in response to a photograph of an Israeli flag flying atop a confederate flag, allegedly taken “somewhere in West Virginia.” 

Clover signed an open letter, published on March 31, 2009, opposing the reinstitution of the UC Education Abroad Program (EAP) in Israel. 

Signatories of the petition claimed that "Israel has deprived hundreds of thousands of Palestinians of their right to education” and that “The designated site of UC’s EAP, Hebrew University (HU), has a longstanding and documented record of discriminating against Palestinian students.”

Clover also signed a letter, authored by JVP, opposing the inclusion of anti-Zionism as an “intolerant position” in the University of California’s proposed “Statement of Principles Against Intolerance.”

Signatories of the letter said they feared that criticism of Israel would be interpreted as anti-Zionism and argued that “The definition of ‘anti-Zionism’ as intolerance and/or bigotry is vague and overbroad.” 

Signatories added that “We believe that this formulation is now being revived by seeking to include ‘anti-Zionism’ as a form of bigotry and intolerance, and we urge you to reject that view.”

Endorsing Anti-Israel Agitators 

In March 2019, Clover signed a petition expressing support for U.S. Representative Ilhan Omar.


Signatories of the petition wrote that “There is absolutely nothing anti-Semitic about calling out the noxious role of AIPAC (the American Israel Public Affairs Committee), which spends millions each year to buy U.S. political support for Israeli aggression and militarism against the Palestinian people.”

The petition went on to applaud Omar for her “courageous support of the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) campaign” and concluded that “As long as the Israeli state continues to militarily besiege, economically choke, and incessantly dispossess the Palestinian people, and as long as it does so with the full backing of the United States government, we need to speak out against these crimes.”

Clover signed a petition published on August 21, 2014, by the BDS movement titled:“A Call to People of Conscience Not to Speak at the University Of Illinois Urbana-Champaign Until Chancellor Wise Honor [sic.] the Contract to Hire Professor Steven Salaita.”  

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.

Supporting BDS

Clover is a signatory to a list of individuals endorsing the US Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (USACBI).

Clover signed an open letter, published on April 19, 2015, expressing support for the cultural boycott of Israel.