Calling me anti-Semitic for defending Palestine is a personal tragedy

Last week, I spoke at a conference on anti-Semitism and anti-Arab racism hosted by the University of Southern California Annenberg School of Communications, which was co-sponsored by the Arab American Institute (AAI), as well as a number of national American Jewish organisations. Because both communities have been victimised by negative stereotyping and hate crimes, I believed that the conversation was both timely and necessary.

For me, this topic is deeply personal.

I grew up learning about anti-Semitism. When I was quite young, my mother read me excerpts from The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank. She also read me Letters from my Godfather, a Second World War infantryman, describing his experiences entering concentration camps liberated by Allied forces at the war's end. And one of my most striking memories about my mother was of her crying at the news reports of Ethel Rosenberg’s execution. When I asked why she was executed, my mother said that while the government said Rosenberg had spied for the Soviet Union, she felt in her heart that it was because she was Jewish. Mum also told me part of what prompted her tears was that the Rosenbergs left two children, who were the same age as me and my brother.

Being sensitised at an early age to the vulnerability of the Jewish people as I grew to adulthood, I was angered by the use of anti-Semitic tropes such as "the Jews own the banks, control the media, or run the country", or accusations made against individuals based on them being Jewish, as if there was something inherently evil or untrustworthy or dishonest about that community.

Anti-Semitism was a problem then and continues to be one now, with Jewish people and institutions subjected to defamation, negative stereotyping, threats of violence and actual violence.

When it came to addressing anti-Arab bigotry, I noted the problems of defamation of Arabs in the media and popular culture, and the pain it has brought to my community – especially to our children. The hate and violence Arab-Americans have experienced over the decades and the traumatic backlash we faced when terrorists struck at home or abroad, whether they were Arab or not, the latter being the case during the Iranian hostage crisis and the Oklahoma City bombing.

I also chose to use this opportunity to address what I believe is the way anti-Arab bigotry was combined with a false definition of anti-Semitism to be used against Arab-Americans.

Growing up in a diverse immigrant community, I did not experience anti-Arab sentiment per se until my graduate school days at Temple University in the late 1960s and early '70s. Ironically, the source of this discrimination came largely from members of the Jewish community. My life was threatened by the Jewish Defence League. I was dismissed from a teaching job because some Jewish parents were concerned that their children were being taught by an Arab. Interviewing for my first full-time college teaching position, I was told that I would be limited to courses in religion, because it would be ‘too controversial’ for someone of my ethnicity to teach about the Middle East. And on too many occasions I was forced to defend my right to work in political coalitions, or even attend certain meetings because some Jewish organisations objected to my presence.

What was especially troubling about each of these instances (and I could cite many more) was that I was called anti-Semitic – simply because I had called out the injustices done to Palestinians by Israel.

Over the next several decades, I founded and ran several organisations: the Palestine Human Rights Campaign, which, like Amnesty International, took on the cases of Palestinian victims of torture, detention without charges, expulsion and home demolitions; the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, which documented and combatted defamation and disinformation in the media and popular culture against Arab Americans; and the AAI, which supports Arab Americans in politics and advocates for their concerns.

In every one of these efforts we faced the problem of exclusion or defamation, pushed in large part by some major American Jewish groups who routinely conflated being pro-Palestinian or opposed to Israeli policies with being anti-Semitic. This had serious consequences that have been hurtful to my community and damaging to our ability to fully participate in the political process. Coalitions were pressured to reject our involvement. Candidates were pressured to return or reject our contributions or endorsements. Members of our community were denied employment or political appointments. And, in too many instances, Arab-Americans were accused of being anti-Semitic, even supporters of terrorism, something that fuelled hate crimes against us, often as serious as death threats or violence.

The good news is that we have become sufficiently empowered to protect ourselves against these damaging charges, and we are now being defended by law enforcement, civil rights groups and a host of progressive Jewish organisations. But with a number of major Jewish groups pressing legislators to equate criticism of Israel with anti-Semitism and who are intensifying attacks on public figures who speak out against Israeli behaviour, we realise that more must be done.

That is why I welcomed the opportunity to speak at the conference at the University of Southern California and to make the point that anti-Semitism must be condemned and opposed, but also clearly defined and never weaponised to silence legitimate criticism of Israel, or to defame individuals who do so.