{"id":9238,"date":"2012-03-06T09:59:34","date_gmt":"2012-03-06T09:59:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/gaza.haimbresheeth.com\/?p=9238"},"modified":"2012-03-08T09:57:30","modified_gmt":"2012-03-08T09:57:30","slug":"march-6-2012","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/haimbresheeth.com\/gaza\/2012\/03\/06\/march-6-2012\/","title":{"rendered":"March 6, 2012"},"content":{"rendered":"

WATCH: Jewish activist disrupts AIPAC breakout session<\/a>: +972<\/h3>\n

Monday, March 5 2012|Roee Ruttenberg
\nWASHINGTON \u2013 Liza Behrendt, a 22-year old Jewish-American activist, accused the American pro-Israel lobbying group AIPAC and its supporting organizations of stifling debate on Israel and particularly on settlements.<\/strong>
\nOn Sunday, the first day of the 2012 Annual Conference, Behrendt attended a breakout session called \u201cThe Struggle to Secure Israel on Campus.\u201d\u00a0 Wayne Firestone, CEO of Hillel (the largest Jewish organization on American campuses) was among the speakers at the session.\u00a0 Behrendt accused Firestone\u2019s organization of denying membership to her group (which criticizes Israeli occupation of the West Bank and the presence and construction of settlements on that land) while she was a student at the predominantly-Jewish Brandeis University in Boston.\u00a0 She said she was not allowed to speak about Israel at Hillel.\u00a0 The event was filmed and broadcast on youtube:
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\nAccording to the group OccupyAIPAC, last year Firestone \u201cissued controversial guidelines barring Hillel groups from partnering with organizations that support any facet of the BDS [Boycott, Divest, Sanction] movement or that lack a specifically Zionist stance.\u201d\u00a0 After the incident, Behrendt told OccupyAIPAC:
\nI felt it was necessary to confront Wayne Firestone, whose condescending guidelines barred my Brandeis University chapter of Jewish Voice for Peace from joining Hillel last spring. Hillel\u2019s guidelines are part of organized efforts to enforce an ideological status quo among young Jews on Israel, but they are completely out of touch with what\u2019s happening among young people.
\nDisruptions of AIPAC events by activists \u2013 even Jewish ones \u2013 are nothing new.\u00a0 However, the outbursts are usually reserved for big headlining events, like the speeches of Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu.\u00a0 AIPACers have gotten so used to the interruptions that they now collectively respond by instantly rising in applause to drown out the yelling activist.\u00a0 At the 2011 Conference, a number of activists who were critical of Israeli policy interrupted Netanyahu\u2019s address before the AIPAC gathering, but were immediately escorted out \u2014 in a matter of seconds \u2014 by security.\u00a0 This footage I filmed last year shows one such incident:
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\nThe smaller breakout sessions are rarely interrupted, presumably for two reasons.\u00a0 First, admission to the AIPAC conference is relatively pricey.\u00a0 A ticket to the 3-day event costs about $400 per person, so if one is going to make a splash, one would likely want to do it in front of as many people as possible and as visibly as possible.\u00a0 There\u2019s only one chance!\u00a0 Second, the interruptions at the keynote addresses are so frequent that, as a result, there is an abundance of security on-hand ready to drag the heckler out, much to the amusement of AIPACers.\u00a0\u00a0 Im comparing the two clips above, one can note that Behrendt had a much longer window of time to state her case before security arrived.\u00a0 Even the small number of people in that particular breakout session were caught off-guard by the action.
\nSadly, most of the people at AIPAC who saw this incident or, more likely, heard about it from someone else, will completely ignore the point of what Behrendt was saying.\u00a0 Namely, the American Jewish community is defensive when it comes to tackling the real moral issues facing Israel.\u00a0 These debates are frequently happening within Israeli societies and, of course, on websites like +972, but most American Jews are made uneasy by outbursts like these.\u00a0 They find themselves under attack, which, ironically, feeds into the narrative they are being fed.
\nOne may disagree with the tactic used to raise such an issue, but that does not negate the subject or its merits.\u00a0 As 972\u2032s Ami Kaufman pointed out, missing from President Barack Obama\u2019s speech on Sunday was any real recognition of the more urgent issues facing Israel.\u00a0 Syria was practically a non-issue, and the word \u201cPalestinian\u201d was only uttered by President Obama five times.\u00a0 And this isn\u2019t new: Iran has been the top issue on the AIPAC agenda for the last half-decade.\u00a0 So why are American Jews not demanding these conversations?\u00a0 Why are they not insisting that these issues be addressed by their leaders?\u00a0 So long as that continues to happen, activists like Behrendt are vital.\u00a0 Even if you don\u2019t like they way they are saying it, at some point you have to at least try to listen to what they are saying.<\/p>\n

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WATCH: Jewish activist disrupts AIPAC breakout session: +972 Monday, March 5 2012|Roee Ruttenberg WASHINGTON \u2013 Liza Behrendt, a 22-year old Jewish-American activist, accused the American pro-Israel lobbying group AIPAC and its supporting organizations of stifling debate on Israel and particularly on settlements. On Sunday, the first day of the 2012 Annual Conference, Behrendt attended a … Continue reading March 6, 2012<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[12],"tags":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/haimbresheeth.com\/gaza\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9238"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/haimbresheeth.com\/gaza\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/haimbresheeth.com\/gaza\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/haimbresheeth.com\/gaza\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/8"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/haimbresheeth.com\/gaza\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9238"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/haimbresheeth.com\/gaza\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9238\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9242,"href":"https:\/\/haimbresheeth.com\/gaza\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9238\/revisions\/9242"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/haimbresheeth.com\/gaza\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9238"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/haimbresheeth.com\/gaza\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9238"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/haimbresheeth.com\/gaza\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9238"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}