Virginia Tilley

Overview

Virginia Tilley was a regular contributor to the anti-Israel Electronic Intifada website, where she published articles demonizing Israel from 2005-2009. In her articles, Tilley accused Israel of ethnic cleansing and creating open air prisons. She has also compared Israel to Apartheid South Africa on several occasions.

Tilley co-authored a 2017 report with Professor Richard Falk for the United Nations, accusing Israel of implementing apartheid policies. This report was sub-subsequently discredited and removed from the U.N. website.

Tilley supports the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement.

Tilley is a professor of American Political Science at the University of Southern Illinois-Carbondale (SIUC).

Legitimizing Violence Against Israel

In an article published on May 27, 2007, Tilley wrote: "Palestinian civilians in a refugee camp are not capable of controlling and therefore not responsible for what some militants do to resist occupation, and resisting occupation is a human right in any case."

Demonizing Israel

On April 3, 2017, Tilley tweeted: "Competition among apartheids is unhelpful, but for record many S African apartheid veterans visiting Israel say Israeli version far worse."

In early 2017, Tilley co-authored a report for the United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Western Asia (UNESCWA) with Professor Richard Falk, entitled: "Israeli Practices towards the Palestinian People and the Question of Apartheid."

In this report, Tilley and Falk charged: "By developing discrete bodies of law… for each territory and their Palestinian populations Israel has both effected and veiled a comprehensive policy of apartheid directed at the whole Palestinian people."

The pair went on to claim that "Israel has exploited this fragmentation to secure Jewish national-domination."

The unsubstantiated nature of these accusations led to the rejection of his report by U.N. chief Antonio Guterres and other prominent members of the organization, as well as its erasure from the U.N. website.

On November 19, 2009, — following the Palestinian Authority’s unilateral declaration of statehood — Tilley published an article for Electronic Intifada that compared Israel to Apartheid South Africa, suggesting that the authority declaration was the result of a successful liberal Zionist conspiracy aimed at securing an apartheid-regime of supremacy over the Palestinians.

In the article, Tilley wrote: "In the back halls of the Knesset, Kadima political architects and Zionist liberals alike must now be waiting with bated breath, when they are not composing the stream of back-channel messages that is doubtless flowing to Ramallah encouraging this step and promising friendship, insider talks and vast benefits. For they all know what’s at stake… two-state solution is dead and Israel will imminently face an anti-apartheid struggle that will inevitably destroy Jewish statehood. So a unilateral declaration by the PA that creates a two-state solution… is now the only way to preserve Jewish statehood, because it’s the only way to derail the anti-apartheid movement that spells Israel’s doom."

On January 25, 2007, Tilley published another article comparing Israel to the apartheid regime in South Africa and describing what she termed the "ethnic cleansing that gave birth to Israel."

On May 27, 2007, Tilley wrote: "The entire Israeli state system… is implicated in a grand demographic strategy to exclude, imprison, and subjugate some 50 percent of the state’s own territorial population solely on the basis of their ethnic identity. This distinguishes Israel from other states behaving badly by casting it into the particular moral abyss of an apartheid state."

She went on to claim that Israel’s "occupation is slipping conceptually, if not yet legally, into an apartheid model."

Later in the same text, after offering the United Nations’ definition of apartheid, Tilley stated that "If this package does not sound like Israel’s military rule over Palestinians, it is hard to imagine what apartheid outside South Africa would look like or how the Convention might ever be applied again."

In an article published on August 7, 2006, Tilley accused Israel of "continual attacks on Palestinian civilians," “torture of prisoners” and “sealing off the West Bank and Gaza Strip as open-air prisons for millions of people whose only real crime is that they are not Jewish.”

In that same article, Tilley continued drawing comparisons between Israel and Apartheid South Africa, stating that "open official racism and its attendant violence casts Israel into the ranks of pariah states, of which South Africa was the former banner emblem."

Tilley went on to accuse specific Israeli professionals, including "lawyers who defend the occupation regime and run its kangaroo ‘courts’... doctors who treat the tortured so that they can be tortured again…[and] historians and sociologists who make sense of a national society while preserving official lies about its own past."

In an article published in April of 2006, Tilley argued for a comparison between Israel and Apartheid South Africa.

Denying The Jewish Connection to Israel

In an article published on August 7, 2006, Tilley accused Jews of falsifying their connection to the land of Israel, claiming that: "All historical and geographical facts are provided to create a total mythical world in which Jews have rights to the land and Palestinians have none."

Tilley specifically identified "Hebarized maps carefully drawn up by the Zionist movement" as a tool of this falsification.

Promoting BDS

In a May 27, 2007 article, Tilley endorsed the boycott of Israeli academia, stating: "In democratic countries where human rights abuses abound as rampantly as in Israel, it is not tenable that faculty entertain and promote the notion that their institutions — cranking out the architects and professional foot soldiers of occupation — have no role in those abuses and can join in mixed company as fine upstanding members of the international scholarly club."

Later in the same article, Tilley claimed that "Israeli academic arguments are indeed too reminiscent of apartheid South Africa to escape the comparison."

Tilley went on to write that Israeli researchers "cannot pretend that such collaboration [between Israeli and Palestinian researchers] is apolitical when Palestinian research partners are held captive under draconian military rule by his own government and the occupation is wrecking their families’ hopes and lives, their institutions’ viability, and their entire community’s basic safety."

On August 7, 2006, Tilley published an article proclaiming: "the time has come for a full-fledged international boycott of Israel... A coordinated movement of divestment, sanctions, and boycotts against Israel must convene to contain not only Israel’s aggressive acts and crimes against humanitarian law but also, as in South Africa, its founding racist logics that inspired and still drive the entire Palestinian problem."

Later in the article, Tilley named specific ways to boycott Israel, calling on her readers to "boycott any sports event that hosts an Israeli team… avoid collaborating with Israeli professional colleagues… [and not to] invite any Israeli academic or writer to contribute to any conference or research."

Tilley has continued to compare Israel to Apartheid South Africa and advocate for BDS on Twitter.

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/vqtilley

Twitter: https://twitter.com/unpetrifiedop