Search

Sarsour attempts to clarify remark that Israel is built on idea of Jewish supremacy

“I asked a question to those in the room, how can some be against white supremacy in America but support the state of Israel,” says Sarsour.

By World Israel News Staff 

American political activist and former Women’s March leader Linda Sarsour stated during an American Muslims for Palestine (AMP) conference on November 28 that Israel “is built on the idea that Jews are supreme to everyone else.”

Following a widespread uproar when her comments became public, Sarsour issued a clarification:

“Over the weekend, I made comments about Israel that require context to understand. I was specifically referring to the racist argument at the heart of the nation-state law recently passed by the Israeli government – not the Jewish people. I apologize for the confusion,” she tweeted on Tuesday.

“I was part of a plenary session discussing the interconnectedness of racism in America and in Israel. Zionism was a topic of discussion. For Palestinians, Zionism is the dispossession, displacement, and dehumanization of our people,” Sarsour wrote in the social media thread.

“I asked a question to those in the room, how can some be against white supremacy in America but support the state of Israel that operates on a supremacist system? Palestinians & other minorities treated as second class citizens,” she added.

The Nation-State Law was passed by Israel’s parliament, the Knesset, in July 2018.

“The Nation-State Bill is a Basic Law that, for the first time, anchors in law Israel’s status as the ‘national home of the Jewish people,'” explains the Israel Democracy Institute (IDI).

“Among its 11 clauses, the bill defines such things as state symbols like the flag and national anthem, the official language, national holidays, the Sabbath, the capital Jerusalem, relations with the Diaspora, and of Jewish settlement,” the IDI continues

It has evoked controversy within Israel, as well, relating to such issues as democracy, equality, and majority-minority relations, the institute acknowledges.

It cites, however, the statement by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that even as “we enshrined in law the basic principle of our existence, [that] Israel is the nation-state of the Jewish people,” Israel is also “a nation state that respects the individual rights of all its citizens; and in the Middle East, only Israel respects these rights.”

In response to Sarsour’s follow-up tweets, Reservists on Duty, an Israeli NGO of reservists working to expose anti-Israel and anti-Semitic sentiment, posted:  “That wasn’t a ‘confusion,’ that was a deliberate hateful speech you didn’t think will get out.”

“The amount of hate in Linda Sarsour’s latest diatribe is shocking. She slanders the founders of Israel as supremacists, invoking a centuries-old anti-Semitic trope when she describes them as having believed that Jews are ‘supreme to everybody else,'” tweeted Jonathan Greenblatt, CEO of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) on Tuesday.