In my first week at the University of Washington, the SUPER club (Students United for Palestinian Equal Rights) tabled at the university club fair. They handed out pamphlets encouraging students to support the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions campaign. These flyers question Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state and spread falsehoods about the Arab-Israeli conflict.
SUPER defines itself as “working to educate students and the broader community about the struggle for Palestinian equal rights.” But it’s apparent that the club misconstrues the reasons for the current conflict and solely blames Israel.
In its pamphlet, SUPER mentions three prominent BDS activists — Roger Waters, Alice Walker, and Desmond Tutu. These names should be alarming to college students as these figures have a history of spreading antisemitic tropes from their platforms.
For starters, Roger Waters consistently describes himself as a human rights activist but purposely goes out of his way to depict the Jewish people as Nazis. At his concerts, he displayed “a huge inflatable pig descending from the rafters and emblazoned with the Star of David, and dollar signs with the images of Nazi swastikas projected on background screens.” While Waters has the right to criticize the Israeli government and its policies, demonizing Jews and antagonizing the world’s only Jewish state is intellectually dishonest and libelous.
Alice Walker is an American novelist and social activist.. In 2018, Walker was questioned over her endorsement of And the Truth Shall Set You Free, a book by author David Icke. In the book, Icke repetitively cites the antisemitic playbook, Protocols of the Elders of Zion.
The late South African Archbishop Desmond Tutu endorsed the BDS campaign (Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions). BDS is a bigoted campaign that targets Jews and Israelis with discriminatory policies. Omar Barghouti, a co-founder of BDS, has said, “we oppose a Jewish state in any part of Palestine. No Palestinian, rational Palestinian, not a sell-out Palestinian, would ever accept a Jewish state in Palestine.”
Tutu also made shocking remarks about the Holocaust, suggesting that it was engineered by the Europeans to “implement plans that were in the making for at least 50 years, under the rubric of exceptional Jewish security.”
In SUPER’s pamphlet, they list that one of the goals of BDS is for “the right of Palestinian refugees to return to their homes and properties as stipulated in UN Resolution 194”.
Historians estimate that 700,000-750,000 Palestinian refugees and 850,000 Jewish refugees resulted from the War of 1948, where five Arab armies attacked the State of Israel. A majority of the countries that formally house Palestinian refugees do not grant citizenship or integrate Palestinians into society, choosing instead to prolong the resettlement.
Furthermore, CAMERA’s Alex Safian notes in his comprehensive analysis of claims for a Right to Return that “many analysts have pointed out that because an Arab and Palestinian-initiated war against Israel created a similar number of Jewish and Palestinian refugees, and because Israel settled the Jewish refugees, the Arab side should settle the Palestinian refugees.”
Jewish refugees from the war resettled in Israel, and most did not receive any assistance from the international community. Comparatively, UNRWA, a UN Agency that remains active to this day, categorizes all descendants of the Palestinian refugees created by the Arab offensive of the War of 1948 as “refugees.”
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Samantha Wampold is an undergraduate student at University of Washington. She attended Mercer Island High School and was one of the two students who formed the Holocaust Education Committee. Send comments to editor@mi-reporter.com.
