Don’t Be Fooled By BDS Campaign’s Failures
Latest update: August 23rd, 2012
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For more than a decade, anti-Israel activists have sought to shoehorn Israel into the nomenclature of apartheid-era South Africa through the use of a tactic named BDS (boycott, divestment, sanctions). Apartheid was a universally decried racist system. BDS activists argue that Israel is the second coming of apartheid South Africa and must be treated the same.
BDS activists may claim success, but they are certainly aware that their efforts have failed. No American university has divested from Israel. When a British academic union voted on a boycott of Israeli academics in 2007, more than 400 American university presidents jointly declared that if these Brits insisted on dividing the academic community into two groups – Israelis who should be shunned and everyone else – their U.S. institutions should be counted as Israeli, too.
As University of Miami President Donna Shalala has said, “I know of no American university that would support such a boycott.”
BDS proponents at best can point to isolated, near-meaningless “victories,” such as the recent decision of a socially responsible investment index to remove the Caterpillar Corp. from its list. The BDSers, of course, generally ignore that the decision was based on a variety of factors (including the company’s treatment of its workers), or that many other companies doing business in or with Israel are still listed on the index.
Perhaps their one “victory” was to get a single food co-op in Olympia, Wash., to remove Israeli ice cream cones, crackers, chocolate bars, baby wipes and hand sanitizers from its shelves.
Antics aside, the point of BDS is to change the way Israel is viewed, to focus the debate on whether it is a “pariah” state.
Lately, however, the BDSers seem to be a bit more candid about their motives. While still asserting that Israel is in effect wrong all the time, now they are increasingly comfortable suggesting that Israel should not have been born and this “mistake” should be undone.
Judith Butler, a philosopher and a leading scholar in feminist theory who teaches at the University of California, Berkeley, makes this point in her new book Parting Ways: Jewishness and the Critique of Zionism, published by the prestigious Columbia University Press. Butler underscores why BDS proponents do not limit their campaign to products made in the territories.
To do so would “forget the claims of 1948, bury the right of return, [and] also accept forms of unjust majority discrimination within the present borders of Israel,” she says.
In essence, the point of BDS – articulated by Butler and others – is to revert to a world without Israel, irrespective of its policies. That was the theme of the One-State Solution conference last spring at Harvard. That is why many of the pro-BDS materials circulated during the recently failed efforts to pass divestment resolutions at three major conferences of church groups – Presbyterians, Methodists and Episcopalians – distorted Jewish history by ignoring the religious, cultural and physical connection of Jews and Judaism to the land of Israel in order to paint Jews as interlopers in a region where they have no right to be (let alone a right, like other peoples, to national self-determination in their historic homeland).
Anti-Israel Christians recently circulated a document titled “Call to Action: U.S. Response to the Kairos Palestine Document.” The Palestinian document was a one-sided political and theological denunciation of Israel; the U.S. version goes a step further, promoting a belief that Jews as a people do not have “an exclusive or preeminent right to the Holy Land,” but rather a right only “to create a vibrant Jewish culture in historic Palestine.”
So while BDS has yet to have any tangible economic impact on the state of Israel, it continues to be a vehicle through which the questioning of Israel’s basic right to exist is, for some, a “legitimate” issue to be raised without embarrassment. This is much more worrisome than a vote about Caterpillar stock or a co-op refusing to sell Israeli ice cream cones. BDS can change the perception of Israel by creating space for respectable people to have calm debates about the “merits” of a world without a Jewish state.
Fighting BDS, then, is not just about preventing or defeating motions and referenda. It requires paying attention to and challenging the distortions of history and language used by BDS advocates. And it requires reiteration that the two-state solution, in which Jews and Palestinians have a right to national self-expression, is the only path to sustainable peace.
Tellingly, Rebecca Vilkomerson, the executive director of Jewish Voice for Peace – a strong proponent of BDS that is, at most, agnostic on Israel’s right to exist – recently appeared on an American Free Press podcast and told the host she “appreciate[d] your support.” AFP is a neo-Nazi, white supremacist, Holocaust-denying group. That JVP appreciates AFP’s support says it all.
EDITOR’S NOTE: In a statement on JVP’s website and in emails to JTA, Vilkomerson says the podcast interview on AFP was obtained under false pretenses and that she was not aware she was being interviewed for AFP. Vilkomerson has asked AFP to remove the podcast and JVP has issued a statement condemning AFP as racist and anti-Semitic.
Kenneth Stern is the American Jewish Committee’s director on anti-Semitism and extremism.
tell a friendAbout the Author: Kenneth Stern is the American Jewish Committee’s director on anti-Semitism and extremism.
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All these so called philosophers should address the issue of why does the USA exists? after all all of these lands were take away from their true and original owners, the Native American Tribes. For an american intellectual to even question the existence of the state of Israel is not only preposterous but hypocritical. Israel is here to stay.
JTA News Desk <newsdesk@jta.org> has issued a correction to this piece, which should have been included with the piece itself. Here it goes:
EDITORS: The following Op-Ed, which went out Thursday, contains a.
disclaimer at the end by Jewish Voice for Peace in an Editor's Note.
It is now the last paragraph. This disclaimer should run with the.
piece.
EDITOR’S NOTE: In a statement on JVP’s website and in emails to JTA,
Vilkomerson says the podcast interview on AFP was obtained under false.
pretenses and that she was not aware she was being interviewed for.
AFP. Vilkomerson has asked AFP to remove the podcast and JVP has.
issued a statement condemning AFP as racist and anti-Semitic.
"the two-state solution, in which Jews and Palestinians have a right to national self-expression, is the only path to sustainable peace."
Many, perhaps a majority, of this newspaper's readers might disagree with this statement. They should address how a one-state solution can work. The BDSers certainly have not done so!
No, a 2-state solution is NOT acceptable. At least not if it involves establishment of another Arab state besides Jordan. Jordan is the 2-state solution. Surrendering Gaza, under threat of blackmail by the Bush administration did not bring peace. It brought rockets from Hamas into neighboring Jewish settlements. Surrendering control of the west bank will not bring peace, either. That is part of the PLO's & PA's stated aim: destruction of Israel in Phases. The final phase would be allowing the so-called "right of return" which would be the demographic death of the Jewish State. Unless Jews wake up and accept the fact that the Arabs & the Muslim world DO NOT WANT PEACE. They want to destroy Israel. J-Street Jews and their ilk are either delusional or they are simply self-hating Jews. But as the holocaust has taught us, the objection against Jews by the haters is insuperable. In the end, no willingness to accommodate and propitiate would spare us that last ride in a cattle car to oblivion because, in the end, our "crime" is that we are Jews.