The apartheid libel has no place in Pittsburgh’s shops

Pittsburgh is a city that prides itself on being “Stronger than Hate.” In Oakland, home to students, workers, and families from all walks of life, that commitment means everyone is welcome, regardless of race, religion, or other identity. That must include Jews and Israelis.

That commitment is now being tested. Antizionists affiliated with Pittsburgh DSA have launched a campaign pressing Oakland businesses to join “No Appetite for Apartheid,” which asks shops to pledge to stop buying and selling Israeli products and, in doing so, to endorse the apartheid libel. Its timing is chilling: the Nov. 7 canvass falls just before the 88th anniversary of Kristallnacht, when Nazi mobs smashed the windows of thousands of Jewish-owned shops, broke into Jewish homes, sexually assaulted, shot and stabbed Jews, and left hundreds dead.

Pittsburgh is not alone. In Philadelphia, antizionist activists, including organizers of the same campaign, have planned a “boycott ride” targeting Jewish-owned restaurants around Rittenhouse Square on the eve of the anniversary. Pennsylvania Attorney General Dave Sunday called it “deeply unsettling,” warning that it “falls back on some of the oldest antisemitic tropes and tactics in history.” As he put it, this “is not simply a protest directed at the policies of Israel, rather it singles out our fellow Pennsylvanians based on their Jewish identity, targeting them for policies they have nothing to do with and no ability to affect.”

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Why call it a libel? Because it is a lie spread with the intention of excluding Jews and, ultimately, justifying violence against them. Apartheid is a precise legal term, and, no matter how often and loudly the accusation is made, the facts do not fit it. Under the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, apartheid requires “an institutionalized regime of systematic oppression and domination by one racial group over any other racial group,” maintained by design. As NGO Monitor documents, the term is instead “weaponized to frame Israel as an illegitimate, pariah state.”

Israel is a democracy that guarantees full rights to all its citizens, including its Arab citizens. Just last month, Jewish, Muslim, Christian and Druze Israelis of many races voted in the same national election. Palestinians in Gaza are not Israeli citizens and have been governed by Palestinians since Israel’s complete withdrawal in 2005. Palestinians in Judea and Samaria (the West Bank) live under a multi-layered legal system, the product of successive British, Jordanian, Israeli military and Palestinian Authority rule, and of a peace process that has failed to produce a final agreement. These distinctions rest on citizenship, history and an unresolved conflict, not race or peoplehood. As U.S. District Judge Roy K. Altman shows in “Israel on Trial,” the apartheid charge collapses under ordinary legal scrutiny.

Nor did the accusation grow out of South Africa’s struggle. As the Center for Jewish Legal Studies documents in its amicus brief to the U.S. Supreme Court, the apartheid analogy repackages Soviet and jihadist anti-Zionism in terms acceptable to Western audiences, and it is the latest iteration of a long history of Jew-hatred. In 1975, the U.N. General Assembly adopted a Soviet-backed resolution declaring Zionism “a form of racism.” U.S. Ambassador Daniel Patrick Moynihan warned that “the abomination of anti-Semitism … has been given the appearance of international sanction.” The General Assembly revoked the resolution in 1991, but the apartheid charge took center stage at the 2001 UN World Conference Against Racism in Durban, where a conference against racism became a platform for anti-Jewish hatred.

As Dara Horn argues in “The Final Solution to the Jewish Question,” Jew-hatred has long taken the form of an accusation that Jews are “destroying whatever a society values most,” recasting hostility toward Jews as “a righteous act of resistance against evil.” The medieval blood libel accused Jews of murdering Christian children; today’s antizionist libels accuse the Jewish state of the crimes the modern world most abhors. The details change, but the purpose, stigma exclusion and violence does not. The cycle of libel follows every iteration of Jew-hatred, including today’s antizionist version. Antizionists invert the moral language of the anti-apartheid movement to justify Israel’s elimination. But the Jews of Israel are not white colonizers; they are the Jews of Judea, indigenous to the land. Protecting them from violence, in a country where thousands have been killed by antizionist terror and in a region from which more than 850,000 Jews were expelled, is not apartheid.

History shows what happens when economic campaigns single out Jews. In 1933, the Nazi regime’s boycott of Jewish shops posted storm troopers outside with signs reading “Don’t buy from Jews!” In 2019, Germany’s parliament declared that BDS calls not to buy Israeli goods recalled that slogan, and an AMCHA Initiative study of U.S. campuses with the largest Jewish student populations found BDS activity to be the strongest predictor of anti-Jewish hostility.

These antizionist campaigns are spreading abroad, too. This month in Stockholm, after a shoe store displayed an “Apartheid Free Zone” sign, street artist Dan Park attached a “Jude Free Zone” sticker beside it, exposing exactly what such signs mean.

The pattern reaches well beyond storefronts. UK concerts by Jonny Greenwood and Israeli artist Dudu Tassa were canceled after a BDS campaign, and a Jewish artist exposed a group chat in which activists discussed poisoning Israelis at a music festival. Olympic athletes have withdrawn rather than face Israelis or refused to shake their hands, and Iran banned a weightlifter for life for doing so, all echoes of the 1972 Munich Games, where terrorists murdered 11 members of the Israeli Olympic team. In Iraq, a court imposed a life sentence for social-media posts under an anti-normalization law. Even coexistence is a target: antizionists smashed the windows of a Ramallah hotel hosting a peace meeting and assaulted a journalist at a Jerusalem coexistence event.

Nor do boycotts help Palestinians. SodaStream’s West Bank factory paid Palestinian workers about double what Palestinian factories paid. After years of BDS pressure, the company moved the plant to the Negev in 2015, and some 470 Palestinian workers lost their jobs. Journalist Khaled Abu Toameh reports that new Western restrictions on settlement trade endanger still more.

Pittsburgh knows, more painfully than most cities, where anti-Jewish hate leads. If you own a business and canvassers ask you to sign, please say no, and tell them why. If you are a customer, thank the shops that refuse, and spend your money there. Pittsburgh’s commitment to inclusion begins with everyone’s right to walk into a neighborhood shop with dignity. PJC

Rona Kaufman is an associate professor of law at the Thomas R. Kline School of Law of Duquesne University. She is also the co-founder of the independent academic Center for Jewish Legal Studies. Her views are her own and do not represent Duquesne University.