In light of recent events, the USA Network sees a need to articulate our position on anti-Semitism— a position we have expressed previously within various statements and publications:

  • We oppose all forms of anti-Semitism—a prejudice in speech or in action against Jewish persons—just as we oppose all forms of discrimination on the basis of religion, race, ethnicity, nation, beliefs, or gender.

 

  • We are appalled by all acts of harassment and assault directed at persons because of their Jewish identity and the vandalism of property associated with them; all such acts are immoral and their perpetrators should be brought to justice.

 

  • We recognize that the Jewish people have long suffered from discrimination, hatred, and violence in many places around the world—most catastrophically in the European Holocaust of the twentieth century.

 

  • We believe it is crucial to distinguish expressions of anti-Semitism from expressions that criticize the state of Israel.

 

  • We observe that the government of Israel—in an effort to silence debate about its occupation of Palestine, its violation of International Law, and its violation of the human rights of the Palestinian people—claims that any criticism of such conduct is anti-Semitic.

 

  • The state of Israel falsely claims that it represents all Jewish people, that it speaks for all Jewish people, and that all Jewish people support the state of Israel. The state of Israel has adopted a particular political agenda vis-à-vis its Palestinian citizens, the Palestinians under occupation in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, and the Palestinians under siege in Gaza—an agenda which does not represent and is not supported by all Jewish people.

 

  • Zionism is a political ideology laying claim to the Palestinian land between the Jordan river and the Mediterranean Sea as a nation for exclusively Jewish settlement and governance. Many Jewish people had opposed the political agenda of Zionism from its earliest beginnings in the nineteenth century and have opposed Zionism throughout its history.

 

  • At this time, a large number of Jewish people worldwide (including many Jewish Israelis) are opposed to the Israeli violation of Palestinians’ human rights, the demolition of their homes, the military occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, the discrimination towards Palestinian citizens of Israel, and the indefinite military detention and torture of Palestinian civilians—including the torture of children.

 

  • We hold the state of Israel responsible, therefore, for damage to Judaism itself and for putting the lives of Jewish people in danger all over the world. Israel’s intentional conflation of anti-Semitism with criticism of Israeli state policy has resulted in the Jewish people being unjustly held collectively accountable for the human rights abuses perpetrated by the state of Israel. Innocent persons who are Jewish are thus made into human shields, to absorb the outrage caused by reprehensible Israeli state policies. Moreover, resistance to seventy years of Israeli governmental and settler violence is cynically exploited to inflate a self-serving myth of eternal victimhood and to justify the apartheid Israeli political agenda.

 

  • We hold the state of Israel guilty of exploiting crimes and acts of anti-Semitism to justify the ethnic cleansing of the homeland of the Palestinian people.  We stand against anti-Semitism and we stand for Palestinian human rights.

 

May 29, 2021

The Steering Committee