JVP protesters are they living in an alternate world?

By PHYLLIS CHESLER

On Columbus Day, Jewish Voice for Peace held a demonstration outside of the New York Stock Exchange. The group was mainly led by women cheerleaders there to scream their usual chants: “Free, Free Palestine,” “Stop arming Israel,” “Jews say stop arming Israel.”

Many of these protesters were not masked, unlike at other such rallies. One can only surmise their reasoning. Perhaps they are so proud of what they’re doing that they want photographs of themselves or maybe they want to be arrested to become martyrs for the Gaza cause.

This begs the question: Are JVP members out of touch with reality?

Ignoring Facts!

During the last year, at least 26,000 rockets, missiles and drones have been launched at civilians in Israel from the Gaza Strip, Lebanon, Syria, Yemen and Iran. In the last year, more than 1,700 Israelis have been murdered by Islamists, among them 888 civilians, 740 soldiers and 75 police officers. More than 100 of the 251 people—many of them civilians—taken on Oct. 7 are still being held hostage in Gaza.

In the past few days, Hezbollah and Iran have launched thousands of projectiles into north and central Israel, wounding some 70 civilians and murdering at least four soldiers. Hundreds of thousands of Israeli civilians have been displaced from both the south and the north of the country since last October.

Controlling The Narrative

JVP, one of many anti-Zionist hate groups, doesn’t care about any of these facts. They join Hamas, Hezbollah, Iran and other anti-Zionist elites in celebrating the murder of Jews who, in their view, are guilty of having oppressed and colonized the Palestinians, and who have refused to allow the Arabs in the region to have a Palestinian state.

They ignore the reality that Israel withdrew completely from Gaza in 2005 and that the Arabs have rejected statehood time and again.

However, truth is not JVP’s objective. Controlling the narrative is, destroying both Israel and America as a goal. They rely upon the mainstream media to help them garner support by airing photos of Palestinians mourning and burying their dead, and “Pallywood”—doctored footage of children being burned alive in Gaza. At the same time, Israelis are shown mainly as combat-ready soldiers.

Funding?

JVP was founded by three Jewish women at the University of California, Berkeley, in the mid-1990s. Wearing professionally printed red “Not in our name” and “Stop arming Israel” T-shirts, the mainly white, young and even a bit athletic JVP members raced to their designated spots outside the stock exchange on Monday morning, Oct. 14.

So, who is paying for this continuous display of anti-Israel and anti-American hatred?

According to Gerald Steinberg at NGO Monitor, in recent years, these young women have received funds from the Kaphan Foundation ($441,510); the Rockefeller Brothers Fund ($340,000); Quitiplas Foundation ($200,000); Matthew G. Krane Foundation ($198,000); Open Society Policy Center ($150,000); Vivian and Paul Olum Charitable Foundation ($117,500). But let’s not forget the anonymous donor-advised funds provided between 2019-2021 through Schwab Charitable Fund ($654,233); Fidelity Investments Charitable Gift Fund ($260,705); Morgan Stanley Global Impact ($175,600); Vanguard Charitable Endowment Program ($98,650); Tides Foundation ($75,000). On and on, it goes with too many foundations to list.

Jew-hatred is big business, and some Jews are actually profiting from this blood lust.

But why are so many Jewish women involved? Have they been so amorously taken with terrorists that they identify with them? Is this a gesture of appeasement? A death wish? A weird way of rejecting patriarchal Judaism by identifying with an even more patriarchal Islam?

Or, perhaps, it is a way of opting out of the freedoms of Western society or embracing the barbarian lies as a way of “going native,” and finally becoming accepted tribally.

Has Western feminism passed these young women by completely? Are they mindless not only about Jewish survival, including their own, but also about the plight of women under Sharia law? Have they learned nothing about the virtues and importance of Western post-Enlightenment thoughts and values?

I ponder these questions, looking for a way out— a way to understand such traitorous, dangerous and suicidal/homicidal behavior.

Phyllis Chesler is an emerita professor of psychology and women’s studies at the City University of New York (CUNY).