Participants in the propaganda

LATER THIS month, 15 members of the New York City Council are scheduled to take an all-expenses-paid trip to Israel, sponsored by the Jewish Community Relations Council (JCRC) of New York and United Jewish Appeal (UJA).

The delegation will be led by Speaker Melissa Mark-Viverito--her second JCRC sponsored trip to Israel--and will include nine members of the council's Progressive Caucus as well as members of the LGBT and Black Caucuses.

In response, a broad coalition of organizations initiated a campaign urging the City Council members to decline this invitation to tour apartheid. The campaign has so far included an open letter, a press conference on January 12, as well as a January 22 demonstration at City Hall.

The coalition includes Jewish Voice for Peace-New York, Direct Action Front for Palestine, Adalah-NY, New York City Queers Against Israeli Apartheid (NYC QAIA), CodePink/NY, Boricuas for Palestine and other activist groups. Condemning the trip as a mode of Israeli propaganda and a legitimation of Israel's apartheid policies, the coalition's open letter states:

In light of the 2014 massacre in Gaza that killed over 2,300 people, including over 500 children, injured over 10,000, and left countless others displaced and psychologically scarred, this trip would be an exercise in misinformation. You will not see Israel's Apartheid Wall, four times longer and twice as high as the Berlin Wall. Nor will you traverse the labyrinth of military checkpoints that West Bank Palestinians encounter daily. You will not walk Gaza's decimated streets to speak to residents about their murdered families, or the poverty imposed upon 1.8 million people, mostly refugees, in an open-air prison one-third the size of New York City.

The council members' tour of apartheid Israel is scheduled to take place on February 15, a mere six months after Israel's most recent attack on Gaza. During what the Israeli Occupation forces dubbed Operation Protective Edge, Israel managed to drop an atomic bomb's equivalent in explosives on Gaza, killing and injuring thousands, and destroying countless homes, schools, mosques, and United Nations shelters.

IN LAUNCHING this campaign, the coalition is challenging the long-standing relationship between Israel and New York City politicians, partially cultivated through trips such as the one scheduled this month.

The usefulness of that relationship to Israel was clearly demonstrated over the summer in the stark disparity between the supportive reaction of New York politicians to Israel's assault on Gaza and the outrage of the New Yorkers they supposedly represent.

While thousands marched through the streets of New York City demanding that the mass murder of Palestinians cease, the city's politicians were professing their support for Israel's so-called "right to defend itself" by committing mass murder.

During the bombardment of Gaza, JCRC and UJA both supported the attacks and actively lobbied against a cease-fire. In late July, at a time when at least 1,000 Palestinians had already been killed, the two groups organized and led a rally in which their own speakers and local politicians called for the continuation of the assault.

Democratic U.S. Rep. Eliot Engel promised a cheering crowd that he would push through legislation adding $176 million in funding to bolster Israeli military defense systems, while Sen. Charles Schumer urged against a cease-fire.

Building and amplifying a claim of affinity between New York City government and Israel, while maintaining unapologetic support of Israeli apartheid and militarism, no matter how gruesome the consequences, is the very mission of JCRC and UJA. Sponsoring trips to Israel is one of the mechanisms of propagating such a narrative, and in agreeing to be part of the trip this month City Council members are publically reaffirming that narrative.

JCRC-sponsored trips to Israel involve tours on which the occupation and Israeli violations of international law are whitewashed and even celebrated. On its website, JCRC has a schedule of activities taking place during what is referred to as "intense fact-finding trips for New York public officials." The schedule includes multiple meetings with Israeli politicians and officials.

The schedule also includes a visit to Ma'aleh Adumim, Israel's second-largest settlement. The settlement, which is illegal under international law, was established by the destruction of the five Palestinian villages of Abu Dis, Al Izriyyeh, Al Issawiyyeh, Al Tur and Anata, as well as the forcible displacement of Palestinians living in and near those villages.

In keeping with its mission to brandish a false Israeli brand of democracy and inclusion, the schedule also includes a visit to the Gay Center in Tel Aviv, through which the JCRC can pinkwash apartheid.

By presenting itself as a modern and secular LGBT-friendly state, Israel attempts to distract from the human rights abuses carried out regularly in order to maintain its apartheid system, thereby using LGBT struggle in order to justify the oppression of Palestinians.

Israel's record on LGBT rights is not as perfect as pinkwashing campaigns claim, and Israeli apartheid oppresses and dehumanizes all Palestinians, including those in the LGBT community. The council members' trip is designed to make that reality somehow irrelevant.

The JCRC doesn't stop at supporting racism and state repression in Israel. The organization also actively supports racial profiling and surveillance of Muslim New Yorkers by the city's police department.

In an article titled "The Case for Ray Kelly," JCRC's president, executive vice president and CEO, and associate executive director together defended the NYPD's targeted surveillance of Muslim communities in New York and New Jersey, and specifically endorsed the NYPD counterterrorism and Intelligence Divisions responsible for this surveillance.

The same article praised then-police chief Kelly's supposed record on reducing crime--but unsurprisingly failed to mention the racial profiling and stop-and-frisk practices that target New Yorkers of color, especially Black New Yorkers.

THE COALITION demanding that the City Council members decline a tour of apartheid Israel has regularly asserted the connections between the struggles for social justice and against racism in New York City and the struggle in Palestine. The Coalition's letter to council members states:

As New Yorkers, we recognize that the struggle for social and racial justice in our own city is deeply connected to that of the Palestinian people. Israel's callous disregard for international human rights norms and the impunity enjoyed by Israeli police and occupation forces cannot be viewed apart from the near-total lack of accountability mirrored by the NYPD and other police forces as they target communities of color in the United States.

The NYPD is one of many U.S. police agencies that has traveled to Israel for lessons in law enforcement and social control. Over decades of colonization, Israel has used captive Palestinian populations to test and develop sophisticated mechanisms of surveillance and control, which have subsequently been exported to be applied on people of color and oppressed communities in the US. As the coalition letter cites:

The trip is especially worrisome given the NYPD's long history of cooperation with Israeli forces, including its 2012 establishment of an office in Kfar Saba, just outside of Tel Aviv, funded with our taxes. NYPD officers, including former Commissioner Ray Kelly, have joined at least 9,000 U.S. law enforcement officials on trips to Israel.

City Council Speaker Viverito and City Council Black Caucus member Darlene Mealy both protested the killings of Mike Brown in Ferguson and Eric Garner in New York City, as well as the non-indictment of their police killers. Yet both council members, like others in the Progressive Caucus who have paid lip service to the struggle against police brutality, are nonetheless eager to participate in a trip that legitimizes racist state violence against Palestinians.

The willful participation of 15 New York City Council members in a trip to Israel sponsored and organized by two established Zionist propagandist organizations is part of a well-established pattern of allegiance between New York politicians--and U.S. politicians in general--and the Israeli government.

While the U.S. political elite has a vested interest in sustaining Israel's colonial project in Palestine, which ultimately serves as a means for maintaining American dominance in the Middle East, Israel and its NGO collaborators in New York work to promote that allegiance by disseminating a political narrative to justify it.

The activist campaign against the JCRC trip challenges that narrative--and lays bare the hypocrisy of New York City politicians who are willing to be part of it.