A clear line between advocating peace and inciting hatred

On March 28, 2021, three student organizations from the University of Miami Law School — the South/West Asian and North African Law Students Association, the Black Law Students Associations, and Miami Law National Lawyers Guild — welcomed Ahmad Abuznaid and Philip Agnew to speak about the Black social justice movement in the U.S. and Palestinians’ activism against “apartheid.”

Abuznaid and Agnew are co-founders of the Dream Defenders, an organization founded after the killing of Trayvon Martin to promote “transformative justice,” socialist ideas, and defunding the police. Abuznaid and Agnew have a history of using their platform to spread conspiracy theories about Zionism, Jews, and distortions of the Arab-Israeli conflict to demonize the state of Israel.

At the start of the hour and a half-long event, Abuznaid, who calls himself “Zaddy the Zionist Zlayer” on his Instagram bio, claimed the founding of the state of Israel was an act of imperialism. However, this is ahistorical thinking. The Levant is the homeland of the Jewish people, and the site of important religious and historical sites, with some archaeological evidence dating back to the 12th century B.C.E. Furthermore, Jews have maintained a continual presence in the land. 

In fact, Israel’s founding was an act of decolonization. For the first time in thousands of years, Jews achieved self-determination, putting an end to thousands of years of foreign rule. Arabs too had an opportunity to have their own state under the 1947 partition plan. However, while Jews accepted the plan, the Arabs rejected the offer, instead, responding to Israel’s founding with a military invasion. 

During his one-sided monologue, Abuznaid claimed that Zionism has created an apartheid state, founded on Jewish supremacy where “there is a set of laws for Jews and a completely different set of laws of those that are not [Jews]”. If Israel is an apartheid state, how do we explain the two million Arabs (20 percent of Israel’s population) who live in Israel with full citizenship — who can vote in elections, serve on the supreme court, run their own political party, and as we have seen in the last weeks, serve in the majority coalition in the government?  

The second speaker, Agnew, also used his time to proliferate falsehoods and libels against the Jewish state. One of the main themes of Agnew’s talk centered on the idea that America and Israel are part of a “bigger imperialist project” that “oppresses minority groups through police brutality and the prison system.” Agnew claimed that police departments in Miami, New York, and Los Angeles had received training in Israel to learn oppressive tactics. He went so far as to say that the prison system corporations that operate in America were also flourishing in Israel in order to profit from the so-called apartheid Israel regime. Claims such as these are part of a long history of conspiracy theories that blame Jews for specific problems societies face. This latest conspiracy theory gained steam after a series of incidents involving police brutality against the Black community.

The truth is that training programs between American police and Israeli police are egregiously misrepresented. Steven Pomerantz, former assistant director of the FBI and an architect of one of the joint programs, stated “trip participants have discussed efforts to build trust with minority communities, visited hospital trauma units and crime scenes, and spoken with terrorists serving life sentences for murder.” The idea, as presented by Agnew, that American police officers are sent to Israel to learn the ways of police brutality and imperialistic tactics are unfounded and misrepresent the nature of these joint training exercises. These trips began in the 1990s, and increased after 9/11 to give American police an opportunity to “learn from a country and police force with many decades of experience protecting civilian populations from attack.” 

Pomerantz further explained that there is “no shooting, there’s no wrestling, there’s no chokeholds. That’s just not what this is about. It’s about the constituent parts of successful law enforcement [and] counterterrorism responsibilities in local policing.” 

Allowing people like Abuznaid and Agnew a platform for their false narratives and conspiracy theories is not in the service of the Palestinian cause. There is a clear line between advancing peace and inciting hatred. It’s clear that the true goals of speakers like Abuznaid and Agnew are more aligned with the demonization of the State of Israel and the growing antisemitic climate that is resurging across the world than it is with securing the well-being of the minority groups they claim to represent.

Shannan Berzack is a recent graduate from the University of Miami.