TEL AVIV – Anti-Israel activists have chosen the Passover week to heavily ramp up their activities on U.S. college campuses while Jewish groups are away celebrating the holiday.
Israeli Apartheid Week was scheduled to coincide with Passover at several leading academic institutions, including Harvard University, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) and the University of Minnesota (UMN).
Ron Krudo, executive director of pro-Israel group StandWithUs, said that a plethora of Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions resolutions against Israel were passed during the Passover week, a move he called “undemocratic” since no one was around to defend the Jewish state.
They “wouldn’t be trying to silence us if we didn’t have something compelling to say,” Krudo said according to the Algemeiner.
A BDS resolution opposing the financial support of “corporations that profit off the occupation of Palestine” at Tufts University earlier this week passed a landslide vote on the eve of Passover. A pro-Israel campus leader said voices on the other side were “silenced.”
“There was no real debate taking place about the complicated issues, with our side denied the opportunity to fully respond to the talking points being made by SJP (Students for Justice in Palestine, which organized the vote). It was frustrating,” Keren Hendel said.
David Brog, executive director of the Maccabee Task Force, told the Algemeiner that scheduling BDS activities during a major Jewish holiday was a show of “disrespect to Jews and Judaism.”
He said the decision demonstrates the BDS advocates’ “real face — which is not that of human-rights activists, but of bullies.”
“BDS thrives in darkness,” Brog noted. “The anti-normalization policies of SJP means that they are, by definition, afraid to engage in open and honest dialogue. Their work is driven by ignorance.”
“We shouldn’t be surprised that a movement based in lies tries to avoid free and fair debate,” he added.
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