The radical environmentalist group Sierra Club has announced that it will be canceling a planned trip to Israel after facing pressure from far-left anti-Semitic activists.
According to the Washington Free Beacon, the group’s announcement was made in an email statement that was first obtained by Jewish News of Northern California. In the statement, Sierra Club leadership declared that the trip was canceled after backlash from the far-left, who claimed that the trip would be “greenwashing the conflict” between Israel and the terrorist state of Palestine.
Hosting such a trip, the anti-Semites said, would be “providing legitimacy to the Israeli state, which is engaged in apartheid against the Palestinian people.”
Sierra Club said in the statement that the criticism of the planned trip first came from a “Jewish-American activist,” whose demands for cancellation were rejected. The unnamed individual then began recruiting multiple far-left organizations known for their anti-Israel stance, including the Movement for Black Lives, the Sunrise Movement, and Jewish Voice for Peace.
Sierra Club leadership eventually agreed to a meeting with the leaders of the anti-Israel coalition, where the radicals “insisted that there was no room for compromise.” The anti-Semites additionally threatened to “go public that the organization was violating the organizational values it recently rolled out” if the trip was not canceled.
The acting executive director of Sierra Club, Dan Chu, eventually caved to the pressure and agreed to abandon the planned trip. As such, the trip is no longer listed on the group’s website.
At least one Jewish member of the Sierra Club, David Neumann, spoke out against the group’s decision to bow to pressure from the far-left.
“Obviously, people who care about the environment aren’t necessarily progressives. You can care about the environment and have different political views,” Neumann said in a statement to Jewish News of Northern California. “We have Republicans among us. … These groups that call Israel an apartheid state, that’s so far out there. That’s so not mainstream. That’s crazy.”