JVP (& today's membership referendum): why I support it, how I do not

Jewish Voice for Peace has a membership election that ends tomorrow, Sunday, 7/13/25.

Members are asked to vote if we want the organization to become legally a 501(c)(4) non-profit corporation instead of a 501(c)(3).

I find it annoying that JVP is so top-down in its operative organizational structure. Evidenced by the fact that this organizational change is put to the membership for a plebiscitary approval, without debate. The decision was made by the JVP Action Board. It was not debated by the membership. The information sent out by JVP to members asking us to vote does not include arguments pro and con. There is no con position.

Nor am I able so far to find any debate online. At least it would evidently require some searching to find this.

The Jews I have admired were all "democrats" in the sense that we, famously contentious as we are, argue. These Jews do not. This is a corporate non-profit organization. It does some good things, as political non-profits do....

The following is a bit of a digression. It contextualizes personally my experience with JVP and problems with them.

But the current matter at hand is their proposition.

First is the question of JVP's leadership's proposed change in its legal structure as a non-profit corporation under United States law.

Second is the problem of organizations like this as I see it, and whether this problem bears upon that one.

I would love to hear or read before tomorrow's voting deadline any information or thoughts we members (who support JVP's agenda broadly) may find pertinent to the first question, which is on our ballot, a plebescite (the leadership has decided, we are asked to approve).

My personal experiences described below I propose as marginally relevant to the second of these questions.

I am very interested in hearing from anyone else who has given this legal question put to the JVP membership any thought.

I presume support for the Palestinian cause, including as JVP defines it, as a component conditioning any relevant response.
In brief summary as I understand it:

We oppose the Gaza war. Israel should end it. Unconditionally, as far as I am concerned. Yes, they can negotiate for the return of remaining hostages.
It is not ethically proper to kill civilians as a tactic in this negotiation.
Secondly, we oppose Zionism. We believe any future polity on this contested territory must be one in which the Jews, Palestinians, and others who live there live free of the present Apartheid.
This position is starting to become mainstream. The conservative world, part of which is Jewish and claims its conservatism derives from its Judaism and Jewishness (its origins are mostly in other things), hates us, there is no question about that.

Opposing Apartheid means that Israel-Palestine (or whatever the future state that is a residence of citizens from these "nations" will be called) may be a state for some ("the" is an absurdity) Jews. It undoubtedly will continue to be that. It cannot be a state for Jews exclusively. Yes, this means that we oppose the continued existence as such of a Jewish state. This should be understood correctly: This means we are against Apartheid. Also, the political transformation we advocate will, and surely only can, occur politically, not militarily. It is only a fantasy of the militaristic far right that runs the Israel and American governments that Israel's military defeat and the devastation of its people in a war are a possibility that it is defending against. It is not defending against that possibility and arguably never has. So this is not a practical question at all but only emerges in ideological controversies sustained by the billionaire-backed media and belongs there. Israel can only cease to be a police state by becoming a state of Jews and Palestinians both and without preference; it will cease to be a Jewish state in its identity and laws. American Jews can help promote this transition. This is crucial also for the survival of a Judaism that is no longer a reactionary cover for an identity politics inevitably tending towards fascism.

This place must become a land that is home to Palestinians who live there or want to, and home to them in every possible sense. This is the challenge.
To me this is what a free Palestine means.

We don't support Hamas, but that is not our question, nor that facing American Jews. Israel claims to identify the people of Palestine with its present government just as it claims that it represents the world's Jewish people. That claim is being contested, and we anti-Zionists say that it is false. More importantly, only a government engaged in war, and perhaps defining itself and the 'society' or 'people' that it claims, like all governments, to represent, as essentially one engaged in a project of war. Call this War Judaism. Larger than this is contemporary capitalism and its elites (and companies) drive for war. We are against this war, and against a War Judaism.
I am aware of those who think arguments about this questions are still interesting. I do not.
I don't claim to be representing JVP's position, but these are mine and constitute my reason for once affiliating with them and any way I might still work with or alongside them.
(I am a fellow traveler, as people like me used to be called).
These points are important to reiterate.

My personal experiences with JVP are unsatisfactory in at least one respect, which is that I found that internally discussion seems to be unwelcome wherever it might tend towards debate, that is the open manifestation of disagreement and controversy, which by definition involves some expression and/or use of antagonism. I attempted to engage in some discussion in a group within the organization that I briefly joined, and found this impossible. In this instance, what happened was I had stumbled into what is effectively a support group where people virtue-signal their complementary identity themes that form recognizable components of a 'progressive' personal stance motivating, or in a supplementary way also augmenting and intensifying, their commitment to the cause as represented and defined by the organization. Someone wrongly thought I had insulted their social identity (that is doubtful, but people today are very sensitive to such things). JVP's leadership (another Board) then sent me a letter written in officialese citing their policy against offending identities and claiming that some of my blog posts (available here at www.questionsducinema.org, where I have written on Jewish issues and other matters, and try to be controversial, though I have never insulted any person identified by name or implied reference to them as individual). I was not allowed to respond to the accusation; the decision was reported after it had been made; nothing in the contents of the discussion and internal debate that they indicated had taken place over my offensive statement, whatever it was, was made available to me; I was not told which blog post had offended them; and since I knew, and confirmed from another participant in the very discussion group I had supposedly misspoken in, that in fact the offense to which they were responding by sanctioning me, taking me out, in the common corporate American social group compliance to correct opinion way, was not a blog post of mine but something I had said that another member of the social group had found offensive. I then began to wonder how it is that there are today groups of political "activists" whose only allowed speech (and they know this when they enter the room) is posturings of enthusiastic affirmation. Indeed, I once saw the same behavior in a group of "activists" who were hired to work for a private corporation raising funds for causes that all liberals agree with and pretending that they were activists in some social movement with a great cause.

I concluded that there is something broadly wrong with political activism in America today, at least often. And that there is something wrong with JVP. And I resolved to continue my work as writer and translator in support of and as a participant in, this cause, of combatting Zionism and Jewish conservatism and fascism, trying to end this war, and aid the Palestinian people in their struggle, which ultimately is a common one that people like myself also are part of.

Since I have this problem with other activists and progressives in American social spaces today, it is certain a possibility today, which anyone who disagrees with my approach to discussion in political contexts will doubtless readily seize upon to say that I am in the wrong and their mode of operating, being normal, is correct. Suffice it to say for now that I happen to know that what used to be called "the left" historically and internationally is not so closed to discussion. Indeed, many revolutionary and social movement processes (a social movement being, strictly speaking (this is a common place in the sociological study of these things, and I believe is true), something less managed than an organization, even though many movements have involved organizations (which usually claim or appear to direct them, doing much good in the process, though sometimes overdoing their own internal social control or management efforts designed to maximize their strategic and instrumental effectiveness in realizing their defined objectives).

(I have some evidence pointing to these spaces being more open to disagreement in other times and places, including the American left in an earlier generation, including also leftist groups in other countries such as France where I have lived, and including more informal groupings today that are not part of an organization, let alone one organized on a corporate model (albeit nonprofit), or people who get together with the implicit expectation that something like that is going on, which is very common in the United States, and much less so in European and Latin American countries and also wherever traces of the argumentative culture of active democratic spaces such as those that tend to emerge in revolutionary contexts, but not only those,....).