Anti-semitism in Oakland....

As the author says, this is all very depressing...

After 20 years at the Anti-Defamation League, I shouldn’t be surprised anymore, right? Wrong. Case in point is the latest anti-Israel and anti-Semitic slur percolating through parts of the Bay Area: that there are direct parallels between the conflict in Gaza and oppression in Oakland.

In early January we first noticed this phenomenon at protests over the New Year’s Day shooting death of Oscar Grant, an unarmed black man, by a BART police officer. We saw signs there making the strange parallels about how “our taxes kill” in both Gaza and Oakland. Though the notion was absurd, my colleagues and I had a queasy feeling that it could catch on. And, unfortunately, we were right.

First, we noticed posters and speeches at anti-Israel rallies making the same link throughout January. Then late last month, I heard about a public event for Oakland youth sponsored by the Gaza Action Committee and the Eastside Arts Alliance, which describes itself a group of “artists, cultural workers and community organizers of color … that improves the quality of life for our communities and advocates for progressive, systemic social change.” The promotional flyer declared that participants would “learn and discuss the connections between state-sponsored violence in Palestine and Oakland.” I decided to attend and observe.

Once there, it didn’t take long for me to understand how seriously the Jewish community needed to take this latest development.

The first thing I noticed were multiple posters of the wounded in Gaza taped on the exterior windows of the Eastside Arts Alliance building. Every one of these pictures was emblazoned with a large Jewish star with the U.S. presidential seal inside the middle of the star. The unequivocal message to me: Jews control the U.S. government, and both are responsible for the deaths in Gaza.

I listened with dismay to the presentations. After a brief, distorted history lesson about Israel in which Jews were portrayed as colonizing European interlopers with no prior connection to the land, speakers took turns convincing the audience that the experiences of a person of color in Oakland mirrored those of a Palestinian in Gaza.

To do this, they repeated one false claim after another: Palestinians have curfews just like youth in Oakland; Oakland police are trained by Israeli law enforcement to oppress minorities; during Hurricane Katrina, the Israeli Mossad shot black Americans trying to survive the devastation; the gentrification of Oakland is the same as “the Occupation”; the same company which built the security barrier in Israel is building the barrier between the U.S. and Mexico; and so on.

In sum, the young people attending this event learned that Jews and the Jewish state are responsible for Palestinian oppression, and that this is the same sort of oppression they feel in their own Oakland communities. Furthermore, they learned that to combat this oppression, the two communities needed to band together against their common foes.

To say the event was depressing for me is an understatement.

Yet I also knew that the Jewish community could not afford to simply dismiss this event as just a fringe phenomenon. We can all remember when only extreme activists made Nazi analogies at anti-Israel demonstrations — now the swastikas are routine.