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Jewish Voice for Peace slams Israeli Memorial and Independence days, Yom Hashoah

ADL and NGO Monitor, among others, condemned the radical anti-Zionist group for its distortion of history.

By Batya Jerenberg, World Israel News

A virulently anti-Zionist group claimed Thursday that Israel’s three “secular holidays” were all created as “harmful narratives” to create a myth of Jewish victimization and justify ethnic cleansing.

While Israel was still celebrating its 74th birthday on Thursday, Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP) came out with a series of social media posts that condemn Israel’s Independence Day as well as Memorial Day for Israel’s fallen IDF soldiers and victims of terror and Israel’s Remembrance Day for victims of the Holocaust.

The radical, American-based organization claimed that these three days were intentionally and falsely established right after Passover, which celebrates Jewish freedom from Egyptian slavery, “to establish a mythical pattern of Jewish history as recurring cycles of oppression and freedom.”

Holocaust Remembrance Day was set on the Hebrew date that the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising erupted, the most famous Jewish revolt against the Nazis during World War II. Israeli Independence Day is celebrated on its Hebrew date rather than on the secular date of May 14 because Israel officially follows the Jewish calendar. Memorial Day is commemorated immediately prior to Independence Day in order to clearly link the ultimate sacrifice that individual Jews have made so that the Jewish state could come into being and continue to exist.

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JVP says these days are “promoting false Zionist narratives that the Holocaust justifies the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians [and that] Jews need a militarized, colonial, apartheid state to keep us safe.”

As a result, the group wrote, “We reject the Israeli state’s distortion of our religion’s liberation story into an ahistorical myth of endless Jewish persecution. We refuse the idea that we are doomed to victimhood unless we accept militarism and nationalism. We don’t want the memories of ancestors murdered in the Holocaust to be instrumentalized to justify the murder and expulsion of Palestinians.”

“Attempts like those by JVP to distort history and reality don’t stay just within their followers online. It legitimizes all actors of hate,” The Jerusalem Post reported Saskia Pantell of the Sweden Israel Alliance & Zionist Federation of Sweden as saying in reaction. “I’ve witnessed firsthand how this kind of propaganda harms the daily lives of Jews globally resulting in death threats and attacks against Jews myself included.”

According to NGO Monitor, JVP was founded in 1996 as the “Jewish wing” of the Palestinian solidarity movement. As such, it advocates for a Palestinian state on all of Judea, Samaria and Gaza, with eastern Jerusalem as its capital, and is a prime leader of the BDS movement. It also works to eliminate all U.S. economic, military, and political aid to Israel.

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Regularly calling Israel a racist, apartheid state, JVP continually justifies Palestinian terrorism against Israelis and engages in antisemitic rhetoric, the watchdog group reports.

The Anti-Defamation League believes that the purported human rights group promotes antisemitism and harms any chance for dialogue or peace.

“JVP’s dissemination of the view that Israel and its U.S. supporters are fundamentally racist oppressors of non-Jews has the effect of perpetuating the classic anti-Jewish stereotype of Jews as self-centered elitists, disdainful of non-Jews, who are focused on their own interests,” the group states in its report on antisemitism.

“JVP leaders believe that expressing support for Israel…must also be viewed as an implicit attack on people of color and all marginalized groups in the United States. JVP’s energetic proselytizing of this view – especially among other social justice groups – has created a hostile environment for many progressive Jews.”

“Their fixation on what they consider Israel’s uniquely evil role in the contemporary world…their ideologically inflexible view of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, leaves them unable to recognize the legitimate concerns of both parties, which can only make peace harder to attain,” the veteran watchdog group added.