Last week New Bedford mayor Jon Mitchell spent 4 days in Israel on a junket funded by the American Jewish Committee’s “Project Interchange,” a program “dedicated to connecting global leaders to Israel.” As such, it had nothing to do with Jewish life in the U.S. It was all about cultivating pro-Israel support from foreign leaders for Israel’s benefit.
The “delegation” of the US Conference of Mayors which Mitchell headed was in fact the AJC’s fourth all-expenses paid tour of Israel for mayors. The group toured Sderot, one of the towns raided by Hamas, and participants spoke with families of hostages. There were no meetings with victims of Israel’s ongoing ethnic cleansing in either Gaza or the West Bank.
Yet according to Mitchell, “The current conflict is widening the political fault lines in our country, and I believe that it is important for mayors, as the leaders of their cities, to take opportunities like this to deepen their understanding of a situation that, as everyone can agree, is complicated and difficult.”
If only that were true. If only an understanding of a complex issue could be obtained by allowing a highly biased party in the conflict to completely shape your views. What’s next for the mayor? Trips to Riyadh and Kiev to obtain insights into what? School funding? Improving municipal services? For most of these mayors their participation in an AJC-funded junket had nothing to do with their day jobs and everything to do with performances meant to burnish their political resumes and broaden contacts with potential donors.
Aside from the fact that the junket took the better part of a week out of Mitchell’s schedule, the AJC is hardly an even-handed educational outfit. It is one of a constellation of Zionist lobbying organizations that exist solely to build support and sympathy for Israel, even as that nation 5,500 miles away conducts a genocide of Palestinians in Gaza and ongoing ethnic cleansing in the West Bank.
One of the AJC’s chiefly pro-Israel propaganda efforts is the criminalization of any criticism of Israel. The AJC astroturf group Mayors Against Antisemitism promotes the IHRA definition of antisemitism, which includes roughly 15 features, of which 11 relate to criticism of Israel and Zionism. This is the basis on which the AJC also opposes the non-violent Palestinian BDS movement. In opposition to official US policy but completely in line with Israeli policy, the AJC also opposes a Palestinian state.
The AJC also follows the Israeli Foreign Ministry’s lead in labelling South Africa’s genocide case against Israel at The Hague “meritless” and “a travesty.” The AJC’s antisemitism glossary regards as antisemitic the recognition of Zionism as settler colonialism. It takes some extreme mental and moral gymnastics to willfully deny a historical reality like colonialism.
Partly because of DEI’s critiques of settler colonialism, The AJC has joined other Zionist and Christian Nationalist groups in opposing diversity, equity, and inclusion programs. Last December former ADL national director Abe Foxman and former AJC CEO David Harris both called for an end of DEI programs. The ongoing McCarthyite Congressional hearings on supposed “antisemitism” in the Ivy Leagues headed by MAGA Republican Virginia Foxx serves both Christian and Jewish ethno-nationalist interests at the expense of American First Amendment rights.
But academics, progressives, and intellectuals have long been a thorn in the side of Zionist groups like the AJC and the ADL. The AJC’s own history reflects this. In the Fifties the AJC was involved (again) in McCarthyite witch-hunts of supposed Communists, in the Seventies it actively opposed affirmative action (in fact celebrating the Baake decision), and in a 2007 pamphlet authored by Alvin H. Rosenfeld with a forward by AJC President David Harris, attacked a number of liberal and anti-Zionist Jews, naming names in a now-familar pattern of smearing critics of Israel.
The AJC is a far-right defender of ethno-nationalist supremacy, occupation and war crimes. Mitchell and other politicians who participate in its programs ought to be called to account. What could they have possibly learned from a tour guide like the AJC? What were their actual reasons for attending? And did any of this have even the remotest thing to do with running their cities?
Jon Mitchell owes his constituents an explanation.
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