Israel and ‘white privilege’
May 11, 2015, 4:24 PM | Updated: 4:26 pm
In college campuses across the country, student activists for the “BDS” campaign demand that universities “boycott, divest, and sanction” to punish Israel.
When defenders of the Jewish state resist this pressure, leftists often respond with the slogan “Check Your Privilege!” — insisting that Israel’s existence relies on discrimination by wealthy white people against the downtrodden with darker skin.
In fact, when the UN finally recognized Israel in 1948, the Jewish people had just experienced the “privilege” of seeing a third of their world population murdered, and another third displaced and homeless. Even in the United States, Jews were disproportionately impoverished and subject to intense discrimination. Moreover, before the Russian influx of the 1990’s, the majority of Israel’s Jewish population wasn’t “white” — consisting largely of darker-skinned, destitute Jewish refugees from Islamic and African countries.
Most recently, Israel alone enjoyed the “privilege” of being targeted by 10,000 Palestinian rockets, with the world expecting the nation would never respond.