This past weekend, Palestinian Arabs in Jerusalem marked the conclusion of Ramadan with vast gatherings at the Temple Mount (the world’s holiest site for Jews and third-holiest site for Muslims), where incendiary video footage showed the crowds enthusiastically chanting hateful slogans preaching violence against Jews. Naturally, the so-called “Jewish” anti-Zionist organization IfNotNow publicly endorsed the incitement—and claimed to do so on behalf of American Jews.
Founded in 2014, ostensibly in response to Operation Protective Edge (the third Hamas-Israel war), IfNotNow (INN) identifies itself as a “movement” of “young Jews” who were “moved to act by moral anguish” in response to the fighting in Gaza. Of course, as we’ve illustrated before, “young Jews” can mean anything from “actual Jews, however gullible and ignorant of their own history” to “Islamist activists”; “moved to act” generally means “moved to blame Israelis and Jews for nearly everything that has ever gone wrong for any Palestinian Arab ever”; and “by moral anguish” usually translates to “by an overwhelming and narcissistic impulse to find favor—whatever the cost—with adversarial forces that ultimately seek to reduce all Jews to a subjugated minority anyway.”
Regular readers might remember INN from our earlier coverage, including:
Much like Jewish Voice for Peace—another oft-covered anti-Zionist group of fringe Jews and their allies—INN provides a useful cover for non-Jewish anti-Zionists; by gleefully trumpeting their own Jewishness as justification and even motivation behind their obsessive castigation of Israel, INN members enable anti-Semites masquerading as “pro-Palestinian” “human rights activists” to maintain a façade of fair-minded moral superiority.
But during this past weekend’s Ramadan protests, INN’s characteristic ignorance of the facts on the ground (yet again) revealed its hypocrisy and disregard for the Jewish communities it claims to champion and represent.
In its latest public faux pas, INN promoted a May 8th, 2021 video clip of Palestinian Arabs chanting in unison at the Temple Mount in celebration at the end of Ramadan. The clip, shared previously by a reporter at the Qatari-owned and virulently anti-Israel network Al Jazeera, showed hundreds of Palestinian men raising their illuminated cell-phones in the air and chanting responsively in Arabic, “Strike, strike Tel Aviv!” and “With blood and spirit, we’ll liberate you, Al Aqsa!” (You can see the reporter’s original tweet and video here or below.)
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INN, inadvertently revealing that none of its staff have even a rudimentary grasp of Arabic (this would not be surprising, given that they don’t seem to speak or read a lick of Hebrew, either) retweeted the reporter’s post, calling the Palestinians’ incitement to violence “incredible, inspiring images of Palestinian resistance”.
As if to further emphasize its own detachment from reality, INN also purported to speak for American Jewry at large, declaring to the hateful crowd, “American Jews are with you”.
The response to INN’s tweet was overwhelmingly negative, with many Jews weighing in to clarify that, no, we most certainly do not stand with those who’d like to murder and otherwise ethnically cleanse us from Jerusalem (where the Al Aqsa mosque is located). Many also offered English translations that INN evidently did not bother to obtain beforehand.
Finally, in an attempt to save face, INN deleted the tweet completely. But instead of then offering a contrite apology, INN followed its usual M.O.: exploiting Jewishness by insincerely performing familial Jewish attachment to Israel while undermining the safety of Israeli Jews; deflecting blame by accusing the rightly outraged of spreading “propagand[a]” with malicious intent; and doubling-down on its own propaganda, meant to infantilize and exonerate Palestinian Arabs of all behaviors that retard peace or their own success.
So much for being #JewsAgainstFascism, INN.
Samantha Mandeles is Senior Researcher and Outreach Director at the Legal Insurrection Foundation. You can contact her on Twitter at @SRMandeles.
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