Does The Olive Tree Initiative Lack Credibility?
by Jerry Gordon (July 2011)
Apartheid Awareness Week organized by the Muslim Student Union (MSU)at University of California, Irvine (UCI). He encountered Professor Amihai Glazer. Glazer was one of 60 faculty members who had signed a letter expressing the view that antisemitism did indeed exist on the UCI campus – Islamic antisemitism. The conversation became heated when Elcott suddenly hit Glazer with coiled up flyers after Glazer told him he had “a credibility problem.”
Elcott is the brother of Prof. David Elcott of NYU Wagner College. David Elcott is a former US Interreligious Affairs Director of the American Jewish Committee. He left to become executive director of the J Street ally, the Israel Policy Forum (IPF). His successor at the IPF was MJ Rosenberg an active supporter of J Street’s mantra of “pro- Israel and pro-Peace” seeking immediate declaration of a Palestinian State. Rosenberg is now working for Media Matters for America.
Rose Project, was to send Jewish and non-Jewish students to Israel and the West Bank to expose them to a variety of views from Israeli and Palestinian representatives so they might gain an understanding of all sides of the issues.
Jewish student leaders at UCI Hillel, local JFOC officials and Jewish students who have gone on OTI sponsored trips persist in saying that antisemitism doesn’t exist on campus.
Especially troubling is that the OTI model is being spread to other U.C. campuses and to private higher educational institutions in California. The Fourth Spring OTI Symposium was held at UCLA on the weekend of April 9th and 10th. According to the UCLA OTI program announcement, students from “U.C. Irvine, U.C. Berkeley, U.C. Santa Cruz, U.C. Santa Barbara, U.C. San Diego and University of Southern California are expected to attend.”
Some OTI students may have come back from encounters on the West Bank and Israel as converts to the Palestinian cause. Those Palestinian representatives included the Hamas Speaker in the Palestinian legislature, Aziz Duwaik, recently arrested by the IDF for the third time, George Rishmawi, co-founder of the pro-Palestinian International Solidarity Movement (ISM) and Mazin Qumsiyeh, a leading architect of the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions movement. Qumsiyeh was arrested by the IDF during the May 15, 2011 Al Nakbah day protest on the West Bank, and had been involved in an antisemitic email incident at Yale University in 2003. George S. Rishmawi, one of the OTI tour guides and also an ISM co-founder, spoke at a November, 2010 OTI event at UCI.
JFOC vigorously denied that OTI students met with Rishmawi, the ISM co-founder, alleging confusion over two persons with the same name with one having an S and the other an N as middle initials. OTI students met with both Rishmawis. JFOC President Elcott said they would “never meet with the despicable George N Rishmawi, however, they did. The facts are that OTI materials containing the 2008 and 2009 itineraries expressly identify George Rishmawi as an ISM co-founder. Who is kidding whom?
Islamic Antisemitism at UCI
For the past decade, the MSU chapter at UCI has been engaged in the annual anti-Israel Apartheid Awareness Weeks (AAW) each May just before IFest, Israel Week on campus, the later celebrating Israel’s Independence, or as the MSU would call it Al Nakba (“the disaster” in Arabic). In February, 2010, an emboldened MSU orchestrated the premeditated disruption of a speaking engagement by Israeli’s Ambassador to the US Michael B. Oren; a speech underwritten by JFOC’s Rose Project. That disturbance of a public gathering and denial of Oren's and our free speech rights resulted in the arrest of MSU protesters and suspension of the MSU chapter from the UCI student activities program for a short academic quarter. It was simply a slap on the wrist.
Eleven members of the U.C. Riverside Muslim Students Association (MSA) and UCI MSU chapters were charged following a grand jury investigation by Orange County District Attorney Rackauckas with conspiring to disrupt Ambassador Oren’s speech. Ironically, “Jewish Studies” faculty members at a number of U.C. System institutions signed a petition in support of the 11 Muslim students indicted by the Orange County DA.
Virulently antisemitic Muslim Brotherhood speakers such as Mohammad al -Asi, Malik Ali and Siraj Wahhaj have spoken at UCI under MSU sponsorship. The usual venue is the plaza or “flagpoles” on campus where each day at noon during AAW, MSU chapter members, UCI students, JFOC officials and community activists gather to hear the vitriol of hate. Hillel has a food stand about 40 feet from this UCI speakers’ corner. The program for AAW 2011 was “Palestine an invisible Nation.”
Council for the National Interest (CNI), who has accused Israel of harvesting Palestinian Prisoner organs.
To paraphrase his comments:
President Clark Kerr, our job is to make students safe for speech, but not make speech safe for students because we cannot control all speech.
Watch this video of the Rabbi Weiss exchange with Jewish activists at the 2011 AWW at UCI:
JFOC loses its Credibility- the smoking gun letter.
The JFOC’s credibility problem surfaced from a response to a California Public Records Act (PRA) request by local activists from Ha’Emet. That information surfaced a “smoking gun” letter sent by JFOC President Elcott to UCI Chancellor Drake in October, 2009 revealing a meeting between OTI students and Hamas representative Duwaik. The JFOC leaders seized upon this letter as evidence that they had brought this to the attention of UCI administrators seeking an investigation. The JFOC leaders never informed the community.
Aziz Duwaik, on September 16th. The students were told by an unidentified person, presumably, the field co-coordinator for the OTI program, to say nothing while passing through Israel or upon arrival back in California, as it might look as if under our laws they were giving material assistance to a designated foreign terrorist organization.
On Sunday, September 20, 2009, the second class of the Olive tree Initiative (OTI) returned from their travels in Israel and the west Bank. As its largest funder, Jewish Federation has strongly supported the concept and development of OTI from its inception.
Elcott goes on to wring his hands about the untoward consequences of this OTI Hamas meeting:
“Coming to a Mosque Near You: “Pimping for terrorists”.
The ZOA has reason to believe that this fundraiser may have provided material support to Hamas in July, 2009. While this is an entirely separate issue from the OTI concerns, you should take into account the possibility that both issues involving Hamas could be linked in any media story.
“The Patrons of Anti-Israelism”, U.Cal Chancellor Yudoff also provided funds to OTI:
Dee Sterling of the Ha’Emet, The Truth, website, for “disrupting Jewish life on campus.” Sterling had organized two pro-Israel rallies by community members, including non-Jewish Zionists, opposing the MSU AAWs in both 2010 and 2011.
Joe Wolf, a PhD candidate at UCI, reported the Hillel student petition signature fraud in Pajamas media. He commented “Sterling’s reputation was slandered in a letter that mischaracterized her intentions.” These PRA disclosures began the unraveling of a conspiracy by JFOC and the Rose project to cover up the truth about the OTI.
A Balanced OTI Itinerary?
The Jerusalem Post published a recent article, “A Very Balanced Itinerary” that reflected the views of JFOC leader Elcott, Rose project funder Margolis and OTI co-founder, Yerushalmi, who may be contemplating making aliyah to Israel after graduating from UCI. The article noted:
Elcott answered community criticism of OTI this way:
There are people who do support BDS or calling Israel an apartheid state giving students the ability to understand how they construct these messages is important for the development of their leadership abilities and their ability to hold a dialogue.
UCI profile published in 2002, just after 9/11 she noted:
. . . the lessons learned from the Georgia-Abkhazia conflict and similar wars are meaningful as Americans try to come to terms with terrorist and Middle East violence.
We live in an interdependent world and we understand that more than ever before. That requires that we work on all possible fronts to prevent further violence. I hope more ordinary Americans make themselves visible to people in the Islamic world so they have a better chance to understand who we really are, and we get to know them better, too. This sort of citizen diplomacy can make a difference.
Garb was on the first OTI trip to Israel and the West bank in 2008, she noted at the time:
Los Angeles Jewish Journal article on the roiling OTI controversy in March 2011 noted:
OTI faculty adviser Paula Garb said that none of the three OTI trips to Israel have included ISM speakers.
Garb must not have read the itineraries that clearly indicated discussions in 2009 with George Rishmawi, listed as a co-founder of the ISM. The same Rishmawi who spoke at an OTI-sponsored event at UCI in November, 2010.
Daniel Wehrenfennig was a co-founder and is current director of the OTI at UCI. According to his biography on Changemakers, he is Director of the Program in Conflict Analysis and Resolution, School of Social Sciences, a colleague of Dr. Garb at the Center for Citizen Peace Building. A native of Germany he received his undergraduate education at the Heinrich-Heine University in Dusseldorf before coming to UCI to earn a PhD in Political Science in 2009. Wehrenfennig had become interested in citizen involvements in the Balkan conflicts of the 1990’s, participated in the Abkhazia – Georgia research project with Dr. Garb, did a film documentary about issues in Malawi and the Northern-Ireland sectarian conflict and peace brokered by former US Senator George Mitchell who was also President Obama's Special Envoy to the Middle East. He did his PhD thesis on the ‘relevance’ of the Northern Ireland peace paradigm to the Israeli-Palestinian peace process.
“Sowing the Seeds of Peace”:
OC Task Force on Antisemitism. Ms. Rossman-Benjamin had criticized the predominance of anti-Israel, alleged antisemitic Palestinian speakers, who were engaged in development of BDS initiatives: Mazin Qumsiyeh, George Rishmawi and Sam Bahour. She noted among other criticisms the core problems of OTI, furthering the doctrine of moral equivalence of Israeli versus Palestinian “narratives” and exploiting Jewish community funding for this purpose.
Do you honestly believe that the argument in favor of BDS is equal and opposite to the argument against it, or that advocating for the elimination of the Jewish state and against the elimination of the Jewish state are equally legitimate positions??
In fact, the campus climate for Jewish students at UCI has not improved since the establishment of the OTI, and in some ways it has significantly deteriorated.
It is alleged that Wehrenfennig might have arranged the encounter with Hamas Representative Duwaik. No doubt that inadvertent meeting with Duwaik was an effort to maintain equivalence in presenting contrasting views from a group, Hamas, whose charter seeks the obliteration of the Jewish State of Israel.
Nahian: True dialogue is difficult with Israelis and Palestinians. As an example when we met with Avi Zimmerman, a representative of the Ariel settlement in the West Bank and Khaled Zighari opposed to the existence of a separate Israeli State in Palestine. These two men resisted dialogue not because of their sharply opposed political positions on the Israel-Palestine conflict, but because they took every fact they heard and tried to put it into their own narrative.
For nearly my whole life I have only addressed the Jewish perspective, but traveling to Israel and the territories exposed me to another experience, one that was not necessarily in line with what I believed my whole life. Although these two narratives contradict one another together they create the truth.
The Risks of Continuing the OTI Program
The 2011 OTI program is set to roll out this summer in the midst of roiling Palestinian protests raising concerns about possible threats to OTI students from kidnapping or worse. In Mid-April AP and The Jerusalem Post reported the abduction and execution by Al Qaeda Salafist extremists of 36 year old ISM Italian activist Vittorio Arrigoni.
, “Headless in Gaza” the consequences of Arrigoni’s death vis a vis the OTI at UCI and other UCAL system colleges and universities.
trip by UC Irvine students on which they were told to lie about their meeting with a Hamas leader. The politically unconscious souls who arranged that tour should be thankful one of the UCI students wasn’t kidnapped.
“It’s Security Stupid: Stop the Olive Tree Initiative Programs in the U.Cal System, Now!”
Deborah Glazer, Esq. pointed out in a Pajamas media article the risk of the OTI program exposing students to possible harm should something untoward occur during an OTI trip.
What the Jewish Community of Orange County could do to bring the JFOC to Account
JFOC leaders persist in white washing a malformed and dangerous OTI program. At the least they could do something constructive. They could sign the Fogel Pledge about denying funds to BDS and student programs like OTI. The Fogel pledge is based on one adopted by the San Francisco Federation after the ruckus caused by the showing of the film Rachel, about ISM martyr Rachel Corrie at the Jewish Film festival in 2009. The Jewish Federation of Sarasota-Manatee County in Florida has signed the Fogel Pledge. Other JFeds are reviewing it as well.
Jewish communities across the US are telling Jewish Federations like JFOC to stop programs like OTI.
the JCCWatch. JCCWatch has reproached the Manhattan JCC about its sponsorship of The Other Israel Film Festival, which included a showing of films by a prominent Palestinian director who came to the Festival to discuss his anti-Israel films.
local affiliate) with its genocidal Antisemitic and anti-Zionist agenda were non-starters. In fact, on numerous occasions the JCRC enthusiastically promoted its participation in interfaith events that included stealth jihadist organizations with well documented Antisemitic track records, such as the Islamic Society of North America.
Dr. Kenneth Levin called The Oslo Syndrome: delusions of a People under Siege. The saga continues.
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