Jonathan Calt Harris (born December 27, 1969) a native of Illinois, is an American Christian Zionist, [1] writer, and a foreign policy analyst. From 2008 to 2016, he served as an assistant director of Policy & Government Affairs at AIPAC, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee in Washington, DC.
Harris graduated from the University of Illinois in 1998 in History and attended graduate school at Hebrew University of Jerusalem in Religious Studies, living in Israel for the first half of 1996 as an undergrad, and from October 1998 to July 2000 as a graduate student. Harris does not claim a graduate degree.
Harris worked for Time magazine in Jerusalem from 1998–2000, and as a reporter in New York City for much of 2001. Harris worked as a researcher and occasional contributor for Time magazine’s Jerusalem bureau while in graduate school.
Harris' articles on academia and Middle East studies have appeared in National Review Online , The Washington Times , The New York Post , the Middle East Quarterly and various conservative online sources. [2]
Harris served as the managing editor of Campus Watch, a website which monitors U.S. universities backed by a pro-Israel think tank, [3] from October 2002 through May 2004. Harris continued to write and edit for Campus Watch until registering as a lobbyist in January 2005.
Through Campus Watch, Harris published several highly critical profiles of individual academics including Sarah Lawrence scholar Fawaz Gerges, [4] Columbia University's Rashid Khalidi, whom he called "Arafat's minion", [5] Joseph Massad, whom he compared to a neo-Nazi and of belittling the Holocaust, [6] [7] and the University of Michigan's Juan Cole, whom he has called "anti-Israel to the point of being an anti-Semitic conspiracy theorist." The academic Middle East Studies Association of America, then headed by Cole, was the subject of several pieces, with Calt Harris referring to it as "once respectable group of scholars which has now become a hive of academic opposition of America, Israel, and...rationalism." [8]
Jonathan Calt Harris did not publish under a by-line while serving as an in-house Washington lobbyist for the right-wing Zionist Organization of America. [9] He was registered with the government from 2005–2007 as the ZOA's Assistant Director of Government Relations. [10]
Harris left ZOA in March 2007. He was executive director of the Michigan chapter of StandWithUs, and based in Metro Detroit from April 2007 to April 2008. In September 2007, he was interviewed by the Detroit Jewish News , where he also published several editorials on the Pluto Press controversy at the University of Michigan. [11]
Harris, through StandWithUs, organized a coalition of local community organizations that successfully lobbied for the termination or justification of the unique UM Press contract with the UK's Pluto Press. The University of Michigan announced in June 2008 the cancellation of the distribution contract with Pluto Press. A June 13, 2008 statement released to the coalition members declared, "After careful examination, the UM Press Executive Board determined that the Pluto Press mission and procedures are not reasonably similar to UM Press as specified by the guidelines and therefore do not meet the requirements to continue as a distribution client. As a result the contract was terminated, effective December 31, 2008." [12]
Harris has written on Christian Zionism for the Jewish Policy Center and was profiled in the Decatur Herald & Review in late 2008. [13] [14]
Zionism is an ethno-cultural nationalist movement that emerged in Europe in the late 19th century and aimed for the establishment of a Jewish state through the colonization of a land outside of Europe. It eventually focused on the establishment of a Jewish homeland in Palestine, a region corresponding to the Land of Israel in Judaism, and of central importance in Jewish history. Following the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948, Zionism became the ideology supporting the protection and development of Israel as a Jewish state, in particular, a state with a Jewish demographic majority, and has been described as Israel's national or state ideology.
Israel Shahak was an Israeli professor of organic chemistry at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, a Holocaust survivor, an intellectual of liberal political bent, and a civil-rights advocate and activist on behalf of both Jews and Gentiles (non-Jews). For twenty years, he headed the Israeli League for Human and Civil Rights (1970–90) and was a public critic of the policies of the governments of Israel. As a public intellectual, Shahak's works about Judaism proved controversial, especially the book Jewish History, Jewish Religion: The Weight of Three Thousand Years (1994).
Campus Watch is a web-based project of the Middle East Forum, a think tank with its headquarters in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. According to its website, Campus Watch "reviews and critiques Middle East studies in North America with an aim to improving them." Critics of Campus Watch say that it is a pro-Israel lobbyist organization involved in harassing, blacklisting, or intimidating scholars critical of Israel.
Christian Zionism is a political and religious ideology that, in a Christian context, espouses the return of the Jewish people to the Holy Land. Likewise, it holds that the founding of the State of Israel in 1948 was in accordance with biblical prophecies transmitted through the Old Testament: that the re-establishment of Jewish sovereignty in the Levant—the eschatological "Gathering of Israel"—is a prerequisite for the Second Coming of Jesus Christ. The term began to be used in the mid-20th century, in place of Christian restorationism, as proponents of the ideology rallied behind Zionists in support of a Jewish national homeland.
The Middle East Forum (MEF) is an American conservative 501(c)(3) think tank founded in 1990 by Daniel Pipes, who serves as its president. MEF became an independent non-profit organization in 1994. It publishes a journal, the Middle East Quarterly.
New antisemitism is a new form of antisemitism developed in the late 20th and early 21st centuries, typically manifesting itself as anti-Zionism. The concept is included in some definitions of antisemitism, such as the working definition of antisemitism and the 3D test of antisemitism. The concept dates to the early 1970s.
The Zionist Organization of America (ZOA) is an American nonprofit pro-Israel organization. Founded in 1897, as the Federation of American Zionists, it was the first official Zionist organization in the United States. Early in the 20th century, it was the primary representative of American Jews to the World Zionist Organization, espousing primarily Political Zionism.
Pluto Press is a British independent book publisher based in London, founded in 1969.
Rashid Ismail Khalidi is a Palestinian-American historian of the Middle East and the Edward Said Professor of Modern Arab Studies at Columbia University. He served as editor of the Journal of Palestine Studies from 2002 until 2020, when he became co-editor with Sherene Seikaly.
The Israel lobby are individuals and groups seeking to influence the United States government to better serve Israel's interests. The largest pro-Israel lobbying group is Christians United for Israel with over seven million members. The American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) is a leading organization within the lobby, speaking on behalf of a coalition of pro-Israel American Jewish groups.
The Jewish lobby are individuals and groups predominantly in the Jewish diaspora that advocate for the interests of Jews and Jewish values. The lobby references the involvement and influence of Jews in politics and the political process, and includes organized groups such as the American Jewish Committee, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, B'nai B'rith, and the Anti-Defamation League.
The University of Michigan Press is a new university press (NUP) that is a part of Michigan Publishing at the University of Michigan Library. It publishes 170 new titles each year in the humanities and social sciences. Titles from the press have earned numerous awards, including Lambda Literary Awards, the PEN/Faulkner Award, the Joe A. Callaway Award, and the Nautilus Book Award. The press has published works by authors who have been awarded the Pulitzer Prize, the National Humanities Medal and the Nobel Prize in Economics.
The Union of Progressive Zionists (UPZ) was a North American network of Jewish student activists who have organized around principles of social justice and peace in Israel and Palestine. The UPZ provides guidance, education, and resources to students who seek to contribute a progressive voice into the campus debate concerning Israel and Palestine.
The Israel lobby in the United Kingdom are individuals and groups seeking to influence the foreign policy of the United Kingdom in favour of bilateral ties with Israel, Zionism, Israel, or the policies of the Israeli government. As any lobby, such individuals and groups may seek to influence politicians and political parties, the media, the general public or specific groups or sectors.
Anti-Zionism is opposition to Zionism. Although anti-Zionism is a heterogeneous phenomenon, all its proponents agree that the creation of the modern State of Israel, and the movement to create a sovereign Jewish state in the region of Palestine—a region partly coinciding with the biblical Land of Israel—was flawed or unjust in some way.
The American Palestine Committee was a political lobby group in the United States founded in 1932 to influence American policy towards the establishment of a Jewish national home in Palestine, an aim achieved in 1948 with U.S. support for the Partition of Palestine and subsequent recognition of the new state of Israel.
The Muslim Student Union of the University of California, Irvine is a student organization at the University of California, Irvine (UCI) in Irvine, United States, and an affiliated chapter of the national Muslim Students' Association. Its self-declared mission is to create an open environment, to promote social awareness, to strengthen Islamic foundations, and to cater to the Muslim student community at UCI.
Jonathan Cook, born circa 1965, is a British writer and a freelance journalist formerly based in Nazareth, Israel, who writes about the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. He writes a regular column for The National of Abu Dhabi and Middle East Eye.
The following is a list of works by Israel Shahak.
Zionist antisemitism or antisemitic Zionism refers to a phenomenon in which antisemites express support for Zionism and the State of Israel. In some cases, this support may be promoted for explicitly antisemitic reasons. Historically, this type of antisemitism has been most notable among Christian Zionists, who may perpetrate religious antisemitism while being outspoken in their support for Jewish sovereignty in Israel due to their interpretation of Christian eschatology. Similarly, people who identify with the political far-right, particularly in Europe and the United States, may support the Zionist movement because they seek to expel Jews from their country and see Zionism as the least complicated method of achieving this goal and satisfying their racial antisemitism.