On Saturday evening, November 8, 2003, the eve of Kristallnacht, I addressed a woman’s “networking” conference of mainly African-American and Hispanic-American womanists and feminists at Barnard College. The conference was described as a grassroots, multi-cultural, multi-generational, and multi-disciplinary organization for women in the arts. Indeed, the women seemed to range in age from 20 to 65 and were dressed in corporate business suits, ever-colorful African/ethnic attire, and youthful jeans. The conference was closed to men — but one of the organizers made a split-second decision to allow my adult son in and seated him by himself at the very back of the room on a chair set apart.

In retrospect, I realized that I should have known what was coming. A few days before the conference, I had the following conversation with one of the organizers. She asked me what my most recent book was, and I told her it was The New Anti-Semitism. I explained that Jew-hatred was a form of racism — only it was not being treated as such by anti-racist “politically correct” people. The organizer did not say: “I don’t agree with you,” or “This won’t play well to our constituency.” She only said: “We need you to explain the ways in which women sabotage each other and remain divided. We need you to talk about your book Woman’s Inhumanity to Woman. Your speech will precede our big Unity panel.”

When I arrived, performers were rapping and singing and dancing, and the energy was fabulous. I whispered to my son, “Perhaps I have become too obsessed with ‘The Jewish Cause,’ with Israel. Maybe I need to remember that I am also connected to more than one issue.” I had been asked to talk about what women can do, psychologically and ethically, in order to enact sisterhood and to work in productive, even radical ways. As I spoke, the women in the audience sighed, cheered, applauded, nodded in agreement, laughed, groaned. It was a half hour of good vibes.

And then my first questioner blew it all to hell. All it took was “The Question,” and it only required one questioner. I could not see who was speaking. A disembodied voice demanded to know where I stood on the question of the women of Palestine. Her tone was forceful, hostile, relentless, and prepared. I could have said: “The organizers have specifically asked me not to address such questions.” I could also have said: “I am concerned with the women of Palestine, but I am also concerned with the women of Rwanda, Bosnia, Guatemala, who have all been gang-raped by soldiers who used rape as a weapon of war; I am concerned with the poverty and homelessness of women right here in America; I am concerned with the women of Israel who are being blown up in buses, at cafes, in their own bedrooms.” I did not say this. Instead, I took a deep breath and said that I did not respect people who hijacked airplanes, or hijacked conferences, or who, at this very moment, were trying to hijack this lecture. She grew even more hostile and demanding. “Tell this audience what you said on WBAI. I heard you on that program.” Clearly, she wanted to “unmask” me before this audience as a Jew-lover and an Israel-defender.

I took the question head-on. “If you’re really asking about apartheid, let me talk about it. Contrary to myth and propaganda, Israel is not an apartheid state. The largest practitioner of apartheid in the world is Islam, which practices both gender and religious apartheid. In terms of gender apartheid, Palestinian women — and all women who live under Islam — are oppressed by “honor” killings, in which girls and women who are raped are then killed by family members for the sake of restoring the family “honor”; by forced veiling, segregation, stonings to death for alleged adultery, seclusion/sequestration, female geni-tal mutilation, polygamy, outright slavery, and sexual slavery.” I continued, “Islam also specializes in religious apar-theid as well. All non-Muslims have historically been viewed and treated as sub-humans who must either convert to Islam or be mercilessly taxed, beaten, jailed, murdered, or exiled. The latest Al-Qaeda attack in Saudi Arabia was primarily directed against Lebanese Christians and Americans.”

I further continued, “Today, the entire Middle East is judenrein — there are no Jews left in 22 Arab countries. And, the Arab leadership has backed the PLO strategy in which the 23rd state remains under constant and perilous siege. Historically, in general, but specifically since 1948-1956, Arab Jews were forced to flee Arab Islamic lands. Jews cannot become citizens of Jordan, Egypt, or Saudi Arabia, for example, and yet no one accuses those nations of apartheid.”

I told the truth. Clearly, they had not heard it before. The audience gasped collectively. Then, people went a little crazy. Someone muttered darkly, coarsely, in a near-growl: “What about the checkpoints? What about the fence?” I asked the audience if they thought that being detained at a checkpoint was really the same as having your clitoris sliced off, the same as being stoned to death for alleged adultery. The only response I got was from the first questioner who demanded that I denounce Ariel Sharon — but not Yasir Arafat — as a murderer. I absolutely refused to do so.

As I left the podium, a young African-American woman stopped me to say that I’d “hurt” her by how I had “disrespected” a “brown” woman. “What brown woman?” I asked. “Your first questioner was a brown woman,” she said, “and so are Palestinian women.” I said: “Jewish women, especially in Israel, also come in many colors, including brown and black.” She stopped me. “But you’re a white Jew.” As if this was proof of a crime.

The three young African-American women who had invited me were very supportive of me. They hugged me and thanked me for coming and looked rather embarrassed about what had happened. What’s important is this — not one of them tried to stop what was happening, not one stood up and said: “Something good has just turned ugly, and we must not permit this to happen.” Thus, the “good” people did nothing to disperse the hostility or to address the issues. Perhaps they were simply unprepared on the issues. Perhaps they agreed with the view that Israel is an apartheid state and that anyone who would dare defend it was supposed to be treated as a traitor and an enemy. Perhaps they simply lacked the courage to stand up to the fundamentalists in their midst.

I couldn’t help reflecting on my life’s work against racism. For example, in 1963, I joined The Northern Student Movement and tutored Harlem students. In the late 1960s, I was involved with both the Young Lords and the Black Panthers. I marched outside the Women’s House of Detention when they jailed Angela Davis. I was involved in the Inez Garcia case and have written extensively about the cases of both Joanne Little and Yvonne Wanrow, two women of color who, like Garcia, had killed (white) men in self-defense. In the mid-’70s, I interviewed Jews from India, Iran, Afghanistan, and North Africa, and Jews who had fled Arab lands about “cultural” or “ethnic” racism in Israel. By the early 1970s, I also began organizing against Jew-hatred on the left and among feminists in America. For nearly 30 years, I taught working-class people and students of color at a public university. I admired and loved them and was sometimes able to help them in ways that changed their views and their lives.

Here’s what’s sad. Clearly, my speech touched hearts and minds; there was room for common ground and for civilized discourse. But not once was the word “Palestine” uttered — not when “Palestine” is seen as a symbol for every downtrodden group of color who are “resisting” the racist-imperialist American and Zionist empires. Once the “Palestine” litmus test of political respectability was raised, everyone responded on cue, as if programmed and brainwashed. It immediately became a “white” versus “brown” thing, an “oppressed” versus an “oppressor” thing.

These are the Brownshirts of our time. The fact that they are women of color, womanists/feminists, is all the more chilling and tragic. And unbelievable. And to me — practically unbearable. Afterwards, my son, ever wise, said, “Well, mom, you have your answer. The Jew-haters will never allow you into their wider, wonderful world. You can’t go back.”•

About the author
Phyllis Chesler, a prominent feminist intellectual, is the author of 12 books. Her most recent book, The New Anti-Semitism: The Current Crisis and What We Must Do About It, is reviewed in this issue of Midstream on p. 40. The above pieces first appeared online in FrontPageMagazine.com on November 19, 2003 and December 4, 2003, and are reprinted by permission.