- Contends that Israel is an oppressor nation whose "racist" policies are largely to blame for the Arab-Israeli conflict
See also: Deir Yassin Remembered
A
project
of Deir Yassin Remembered, RighteousJews.org (RJO) was founded
in 2003 to honor Jews "who have worked for the human rights of non-Jewish Palestinians."
By RJO's telling, the
Palestinian people “have been, and continue to be, depopulated,
dispossessed, humiliated, tortured, and murdered in the name of
political Zionism and its quest to create a Jewish state in the lands
between the Mediterranean and the Jordan River.” “The root cause
of bloodshed and conflict” in the Middle East, RJO elaborates,
has been the “racist endeavors” of Zionists “to 'pump in' Jews
and 'pump out' Palestinians from this land.”
RJO
says that in order to
qualify for recognition as a “Righteous
Jew,” an individual must “consider himself or herself to be
Jewish” (though “non-practicing Jews and even atheists” are eligible); must have “demonstrated solidarity with
Palestinians as human beings, deserving of being treated equally with
all other people in the lands between the Mediterranean Sea and the
Jordan River, one country with equal citizenship for all”; and must
have “faced disparagement, discrimination, or even death as a
consequence of his or her standing up for the rights of
Palestinians.” Emphasizing actions more than motives,
RJO states
that “it is not important why a 'Righteous Jew' has defended
Palestinian rights or whether his or her actions were based on
friendship, altruism, religious belief, humanitarianism, or simple
human decency.”
Among those whom
RJO has honored as 'Righteous Jews” are such notables as Anna
Baltzer, Joel
Beinin, Phyllis
Bennis, Lenni
Brenner, Marc
Ellis, Richard
Falk, Norman
Finkelstein, Jeff
Halper, Tony
Judt, Joel
Kovel, Naomi
Klein, Jennifer
Loewenstein, Ilan
Pappe, and Howard
Zinn.
The RJO website features the writings
of Gilad
Atzmon, Paul
Eisen, Ilan
Pappe, John
Mearsheimer, Stephen
Walt, Haim Bresheeth (who describes
Israel as a “racist,
illegal and brutal society”); Avraham
Burg (who says
that “Israel, having ceased to care about the children of the
Palestinians, should not be surprised when they come washed in hatred
and blow themselves up in the centers of Israeli escapism”); Peter
Hirschberg (who has praised Hamas
while condemning
Israel for attacking that organization's “shopping
malls, schools, medical centers, charities, orphanages, [and] soup
kitchens”);
Sabine Matthes (who refers
to Israel as a land of “discriminatory laws” and opposes its
existence as a Jewish state); Rich Siegel (who views Israel as “a
society that is racist
to the core”); Cecilie Surasky (who condemns
“ongoing Israeli repression of Palestinians,
and U.S. culpability for that repression”); and Virginia Tilley (who accuses
Israel of having sunk into “the
particular moral abyss of an apartheid state”).
RJO
identifies the following as its “related
organizations”: Americans for Peace Now, the Free
Muslims Coalition, Holocaust Heroes, the Israel
Policy Forum, Jewish
Voice for Peace, Jews for Peace in Palestine, the Movement for
One Democratic Secular State, and Not in My Name.
RJO was
founded
by Daniel
McGowan, a former professor
of economics at Hobart and William Smith Colleges, who refers
to Israel as “a racist, apartheid state” that has established
a host of “concentration camps” and “illegal settlements in occupied
territory.” A contributing columnist for Counterpunch,
McGowan authored
the 1999 book The
Saga of Deir Yassin: Massacre, Revisionism, and Reality,
which promotes the libel that, in April 1948, Jews
engaged in the systematic murder of innocent civilians in Deir
Yassin, a Palestinian-Arab village near Jerusalem. McGowan remains RJO's director to this day.
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