Global, Identity, Israel, Politics, Uncategorized

Whose Birthright? A Conversation with Tufts Students for Justice in Palestine


Recently, Tufts University Students for Justice in Palestine created, published and distributed a Zine called “Birthright? A Primer” for folks contemplating going on a Taglit-Birthright Israel trip. The primer includes testimonies from previous trip participants, as well as resources for exploring Israel/Palestine after the trip. Tufts SJP organizers Matthew Parsons, Anna Furman and D.M.  spoke with Jewschool about the primer, how and why it happened, and what impact they hope it will have.
Jewschool: What was the impetus for creating the primer? What’s the goal?
Anna Furman: The goal of our zine is to equip students who have chosen to go on Birthright with a body of knowledge that they will not find otherwise.  I think the most important section of our zine  may be the section that encourages students to extend their trips and to go with various groups to the West Bank.  If I had a zine like this when I had gone on Birthright 3 years ago, I am pretty certain that my whole understanding of the region and my relation to it would have been very different.

There have been efforts recently within Jewish student groups on campus to engage in discourse that may be more open and more accepting of different viewpoints.  Still, there is a huge lack of conversation about and understanding of what it means to be an American Jew selected to go on a Taglit-Birthright trip.  It seems to me that many students who go on Taglit-Birthright trips are unaware of the position of power that they are occupying, and unaware of how uninformed and misguided they are.  I, for one, was!  I think this can be attributed in large part to a lack of exposure in American Jewish communities to a Palestinian narrative.  The zine attempts to address this!
Matthew Parsons: Taglit-Birthright heavily recruits on our campus and typically is met with a lot of interest from Tufts students.  However, there has never really been a conversation about the problematic implications of the trip.  Most people see this as a free trip to Israel, but very rarely do people recognize how offensive a trip like this can be to our Palestinian peers.  They fail to realize that this trip implies that it is their birthright to travel to a country to which they have never been simply because they are Jewish, whereas a Tufts student who was born or whose parents and/or  grandparents were born on the very same land is not afforded this same right.  There are, of course, students who have been on Birthright before and who definitely took issue with it, but they generally had some previous knowledge of the conflict and are unfortunately in the minority.  As such, we wanted to introduce students who plan on going on Birthright, or are registered for a trip, or who went on a trip in the past, to a counter-narrative to that of Birthright.  Our intention is not to dissuade our peers or anybody else from going on this trip.  We simply want them to approach this trip critically and to understand that they will be provided with an incomplete image of Israel.
D.M.: I was driven to design, write and distribute this zine because I found the information and messages permeated and propagated during these trips to be consciously skewed, calculated and at times misleading to an alarming extent. Ideas, engagement and conversation such as those that we spark in our zine were discouraged, avoided, or ignored. I felt manipulated, but mostly frustrated with the complete lack of safe, open space for critical inquiry or counterpoint once I returned home to Tufts. Birthright’s mission, popularity and presence on campus have, until now, gone unquestioned and unchallenged—and this phenomenon is not unique to our university.  The zine’s creation was strongly motivated by sentiments that resemble mine and Anna’s: a desire to balance the dominant, normative acceptance of Birthright as a neutral, free, apolitical organization by arming students with the resources, information, and support necessary to inspire critical, active contemplation and discussion before, during, and after the trip. Until now, nothing of the sort existed. Like Anna said, I would have been so grateful to receive a zine like our own before my Birthright trip and before my semester in Israel. I am confident it would have changed many of my peers’ and (certainly) my own experience, perspective and future engagement with Israel significantly.
The tactics of the on-campus Birthright promoters during winter trip registration in September served as the immediate impetus that sparked our sense of urgency and drive to produce and distribute the zine this semester in particular. Grand, bright signs lined the lawns advertising “FREE!” “Israel!” “Birthright!” The promoter associated with Hillel stood outside of dining halls, calling to students who looked Jewish as they paid to enter, asking if they wanted to claim their Birthright for FREE, experience the “time of their lives,” etc. Pamphlets were distributed everywhere. Birthright was a dominant, overwhelming presence for a number of weeks. Many students were offended, felt targeted, discriminated against, or excluded, and rightly so. The word “birthright” is inherently problematic, and yet the implications of its broadcast across campus have gone unanalyzed and uncriticized for years. We took it upon ourselves to fill that void. We decided the best line of action was not protest, or the destruction of signs, but rather the promotion of knowledge, the presentation of important facts and realities to which students are typically unexposed on organized Jewish trips. We hope this zine will arm people with the tools to engage critically with their experience, the information, and support necessary to seek out other narratives and perspectives outside of Birthright and Israel proper, and the motivation to analyze and think actively about their trip.

Jewschool: What’s been the response to the primer, both on campus and in the larger Jewish community?
DM: Students on campus—including those with Birthright trip prospects and/or previous experience, and those who’ve had minimal exposure to the trip and its mission—have been extremely receptive so far, both in response to the hard copies and especially the online version, which circulated with impressive speed! We distributed a number of hard copies to students attending the trip this winter, and thousands of people viewed the online version in the first few days of publication. Because we distributed the zine so late in the semester, it is difficult to garner how the Jewish community, Hillel, or Tufts Birthright leaders felt about it. I spoke to many Jewish students and past Birthright attendees who were grateful to read the Zine, and supported our distribution to future Birthrighters. Some Jewish students were less supportive. However we are proud that so many students—zine supporters and criticizers alike—have taken the time to read through the pamphlet and discuss it in depth. This level of dialogue and critical thought surrounding Birthright was previously (and problematically) absent on campus.
MP: Until Tufts Students for Justice in Palestine was started in the fall of 2010, discussions surrounding Israel were largely kept within the confines of Tufts Hillel and its significance to Judaism.  However, there was little interaction with the occupation or the Palestinian narrative.  Over the past two years, Tufts SJP has worked tirelessly to bring a more nuanced conversation about the occupation and the Palestinian-Israeli occupation to our campus.  The spring of last year was really when we saw the most success in terms of sparking debate about the topic.  We held our first Israeli Apartheid Week and brought speakers such as Diana Buttu, Judith Butler, and Max Blumenthal to aid us in our endeavors.  We wrote op-eds all semester about various aspects of the conflict, held movie screenings, and staged direct actions.  By the end of the semester, almost everybody on campus had heard about the conflict and many had begun developing opinions.  Our goal was to at least get people talking and introduce campus to the Palestinian perspective.  We definitely achieved that goal.
(In regard to the zine) The response, so far, has been varied.  We’ve mostly heard and seen positive responses, especially from the activist community.  We have tried our best to give every Tufts student who is going on the Birthright trip this winter a copy of the primer, and many seem excited to read it.  Most of the negative response has been directed towards bits and pieces of the primer, and not towards the publication as a whole, which is great.  Through word of mouth, we have heard that there are some people who are quite upset about it, but nobody has confronted us directly.
Jewschool: Is there anything you would have liked to include in the primer that didn’t make it in? Is there anything you’d add?
MP: I think the primer is comprehensive; we tried to make it as simple and direct as possible so that people would actually read it.  We also tried to include as many testimonies from past Birthrighters as possible so that people understand that there is actually a necessity behind a primer such as this one, and this necessity has been identified BY people who have gone on the trip before.  Of course I would have liked to include a brief history of the conflict, because that oftentimes seems inaccessible to somebody who hasn’t studied the region before.  However, we did not have space, so we opted for a reading list in the end of articles that don’t exactly give a good history of the conflict but do touch on a variety of issues.  People tend to think that this conflict comes with a lot of baggage and don’t want to spend the time learning about it.  I’ll admit, it is an incredibly complex issue and it has taken me three years of study to feel like I have a fairly good handle on the main points.  That being said, I think there are some very black and white issues off which people can start to form some opinions, and these are the issues that we tried our best to weave into the zine.
DM: We would have liked to include a more in depth discussion about the terms “birthright” and “taglit” and their implications. We were also hoping to include a few more quotes (and their counterpoints) that I remembered hearing frequently on my own Birthright trip in the “What You’ll Hear on Birthright” section. We would also have liked to include longer list of alternative West Bank tour options at the end, and more detailed descriptions of those tours.
Jewschool: What do you want people to know about the group of folks who made the primer?
AF: In terms of the group of us working on the zine, it actually came about pretty organically.  D.M. and I are close friends and were in Israel this summer together and so shared some formative experiences, like traveling to the West Bank (for me, for the first time) and discussing the conflict with Jewish students in Tel Aviv.  At SJP meetings we discussed how Birthright trips are advertised to students on campus, and how the mission of the organization is not questioned or really looked at critically.  D.M. came up with the concept of a dis-orientation zine, to educate students about the issues with the organization and the trip’s mission.  Tamara and Matt have been active in SJP for some time and both worked hard on this zine, writing and compiling entries for it.
As students, we realize that the production of knowledge is an incredibly powerful thing.  Who produces this knowledge?  What knowledge is being produced?  When I went on Birthright, I was hardly given any information about the political situation in Israel or the historical context for its creation from the organization itself.  Before the trip and throughout the trip, I was under the impression that I was going on an apolitical, experience-of-your-life trip.  I think this is very common.  The experience-of-my-life was realizing that this trip’s mission is very political and is presenting me with only one side of a narrative.
DM: Many of us went on Birthright, many of us have long histories of engagement with Israel. I have cousins in Israel, I’ve lived there for months at a time. We are your peers, and our intentions are not accusatory. Rather, we hope to illuminate the harsh, silenced realities from which many of us have been unfairly sheltered for so long. We are a RESOURCE to everyone and anyone considering a Birthright trip, or who wants to analyze the implications of their experience, or who cannot decide whether a Birthright trip is right for them. We are a SUPPORT SYSTEM for those ready to engage with the truths of Israel/Palestine and seek out information independently through conversation and travel to the West Bank and other areas not covered by Birthright trips. We hope to INSPIRE students to explore the realities of Israel/Palestine, not just those strategically presented to them.
MP: I suppose what’s most important to keep in mind is that our target audience is students who are (thinking about) going/have gone on Birthright.  These are our peers and we tried to approach them as respectfully as possible.  We also recognize that some of the information in the zine is over-simplified.  Unfortunately we were limited to eight pages and could only do so much. I’m very happy with how it turned out, and I truly hope that it makes people think about the implications of Birthright.
 

8 thoughts on “Whose Birthright? A Conversation with Tufts Students for Justice in Palestine

  1. 1/ Here is Tufts University’s own website:
    http://www.tufts.edu
    You’ll notice how:
    1/ All the material is pro-Tufts.
    2/ All anti-Tufts material is deliberately excluded.
    3/ Reasons for a student not to go to Tufts, however valid, is never provided.
    4/ Material for other Universities is not shown.
    I think that Tufts student’s understand this and have no problem with it. Even Tufts SJP members seem to be all right with such a one-sided approach.
    Just as people understand that Birthright is pro-Israel if for no other reason than the fact that Birthright is sponsored by Israel as Birthright’s website shows.
    2/ As for all the Tufts Gentiles who feel excluded from going on a free trip to Israel (is there one?), well they can pay their own way (few I imagine do).
    With the knowledge that if any Jew were to go on a trip to Mecca and be found out they (like any kuffar) could have their head cut off. Muslims, including Palestinian Muslims stay intact.

  2. The Jewish roots in Palestine go much farther back than most Muslims would be willing to admit.
    Before 1948, Palestine was ruled by a series of empires. Before that Palestine was Judaea—a Jewish country. Jews have lived in Palestine continuously for more than 3,300 years. “Palestine” was the name given to the Jewish homeland in the second century by the Romans, in an attempt to break the Jewish adherence to the land. This was a century after the Jewish temple was destroyed and more than a million Jews were massacred.
    The Jews stopped fighting the Romans only after they had no more fighting men standing. As Evangelist William Eugene Blackstone put it in 1891, “The Jews never gave up their title to Palestine… They never abandoned the land. They made no treaty, they did not even surrender. They simply succumbed, after the most desperate conflict, to the overwhelming power of the Romans.”
    The Jews persisted through the centuries under the various empires, after the Arab invasion of 635AD (which they fought alongside the Byzantines), and after the Crusade massacres of the 11th Century, which decimated much of their population.
    Few Muslims realize that Jewish customs, religion, prayers, poetry, holidays, and virtually every walk of life, documented for thousands of years—all revolve around Judaea/Palestine/Israel. For thousands of years Jews have been praying for Jerusalem in every prayer, after every meal, in every holiday, at every wedding, in every celebration. The whole Jewish religion is about Jerusalem and the Land of Israel. Western expressions such as “The Promised Land,” and “The Holy Land,” didn’t pop out of void. They have been part of Western knowledge and tradition dating back to the beginning of Christianity and earlier.
    After the Crusades, the Jews—including many who have returned over the centuries—lived peacefully with Arabs, often in the very same villages, as in Pki’in, in the Galilee, until the Zionist immigration of the 19th and 20th Centuries. Article 6 of the PLO Charter specifically calls for the acceptance of all Jews present in Palestine prior to the Zionist immigration. These Jews were simply another ethnic group in a region composed of Sunnis, Shiites, Jews, Druz, Greek Orthodox, Catholics, Circassians, Samarians, and more. Some of these groups, like the Druz, Circassians, Samarians, and an increasing number of Christians, are actually loyal to the Jewish State.
    Incidentally, genetic studies consistently show that Zionist immigrants (a.k.a., Ashkenazi Jews) are closely related to groups that predate the Arab conquest, like the Samarians, who have lived in Palestine for thousands of year.
    Arab and Muslim denial may lead to events such as the ones brilliantly depicted in Jonathan Bloomfield’s award-winning book, “Palestine,” in which actual history and predicted events are thinly veiled as fiction.
    War and bloodshed will continue until the Arabs and Muslims stop lying to themselves, and acknowledge that the Jewish roots in Palestine go back thousands of years, long before the Arab invasion of Palestine.

  3. Except for the trolling that is required in pretty much any Boxthorn comment, he’s fairly accurate here. None of this additional information is hidden. Birthright is pretty upfront about what it is and isn’t.
    My issue here is the arrogance of the statement, “The goal of our zine is to equip students who have chosen to go on Birthright with a body of knowledge that they will not find otherwise.” We’re talking about students from a top university planning to make an international trip. If they’re interested in learning about the conflict, they are more than capable of doing it. The implication here is that ignorant students will be force fed a political perspective and become (improperly) pro-Israel. If anything the reality is the opposite. There are hints that people who go on Birthright trips without much Judaic background or preceding study are least likely to have an increase in their positive opinions about Israel (see comments at: http://jewschool.com/2011/08/10/26658/kosher-stats-201-taglit-birthright-israel-might-not-change-interest-in-in-marriage-for-program-participants-who-were-raised-secular-or-%E2%80%9Cjust-jewish%E2%80%9D/ ) Anna Furman’s description of her own experiences fits this.
    It seems that the problem here is not that SJP can’t get it’s message out or that students are ignorant. Many places, including Jewschool, seem to be willing to help them with publicity. It’s that many people read what they do write, have studied the issues, and still disagree with SJP in fundamental ways.

  4. @ chaneld1621 – I hope you read comments.
    Did you read this ‘zine before posting on this topic? What are your own opinions on Zionism and how it fits into Judaism and Jewish identity?
    It is very clear from the opening few pages in the ‘Zine that the writers of it are not interested in the State of Israel, in its current form, remaining a part of Jewish identity. While open discussion and debate of Israel and her behavior is essential to Israel’s success there is a difference between such open discussion and debate and what is presented in the Zine.
    The piece is a great example of propaganda – say you are doing one, very palatable thing (criticism of Birthright Israel, which it deserves BTW) and then really turn it into another – criticism of Israel and the ideology upon which it was founded. If I were writing about Birthright in a critical piece I would first focus on why the trip was started in the first place – fear of the disappearance of non-Orthodox diaspora Jewry – and then go from there.
    Finally, the Zine presents itself as being full of information but then fails to cita ANY sources for its statements, even in the version offered online. In my experience of “hot topuc” discussions I have learned to find suspect any groups that do not give sources for factual statements; the “further reading” section, instead of pointing the reader to well sourced and relatively unbiased sources like Wikipedia instead points mainly to the BBC.

  5. Not related to the publication, but there is a real disconnect between this statement from Parsons:
    “our intentions are not accusatory” and the fact that his organization sponsored an event (mentioned in this post) called Israeli Apartheid Week.
    Is it valuable for us to discuss whether or not the situation in the West Bank is now or will eventually become something like Apartheid? Yes, yes it is.
    Is it incredibly accusatory to use the term “Israeli Apartheid” in the title of a program. Yes, yes it is.
    Whether you are of the opinion that Israel has or has not become an apartheid state the use of the word to refer to ANY group in the world is inflammatory and accusatory because there is no way to argue that Apartheid was good in any way.
    What can we say, then, about the practices of Tufts SJP? Are they well intentioned bur naive about how their rhetoric will turn off potential partners, or is their real goal to delegitimize the entire concept of a Jewish state? Reading the zine and interview I suppose it could go either way but I am leaning towards the latter.

  6. Greeks have lived in Egypt for at least 3000 years. So. Fucking. What. I’ll never understand why Z’s think ancient history matters in certain ways but not others.
    Hebrews have lived in Babylon and Persia continuously for thousands of yeas. Again – so. Fucking. What.

  7. Dave-
    We seem to see eye to eye on many things. Would you be willing to post your e-mail address so we could communicate privately?

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