Photo Credit: Peter Haskin for Australian Jewish News
The real BDS.

To those contemplating a BDS vote against Israel:

As far as Israel is concerned, it really doesn’t matter how you vote.

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Jew hatred is the oldest, most enduring, most protean, and most irrational scapegoating hatred in human history. Jews have been hated for being pathetically weak and insignificant, and for being all-powerful and controlling. Jews have been accused of using non-Jewish blood for rituals, of poisoning wells, spreading plagues, killing children, even training animals to kill. Jews have been hated for being rich, for being poor, for being capitalists and for being communists, for being fascists and being socialists. For living apart from others, and for trying to fit in. The history of Jew hatred reads: whatever you hate, that’s what the Jew is.

Although Jew hatred is irrational, Jew-obsession does make a kind of sense. The Jews shouldn’t exist. In every generation, they have tried to kill us. The Egyptians, the Babylonians, the Greeks, the Romans, the Crusaders, the Arabs. Every European country has expelled their Jews at some point in their history, so has every Arab country. By all logic, by every rational analysis of human history, the Jews should not exist.

And now, after two thousand years of exile, after clinging to the faith despite the hatred and the slaughtering, praying hundreds of times a day to return to our land, to rebuild our country, it’s finally happening. And despite every attempt to destroy the Jews in their homeland, bombs, massacres, armies, missiles, suicide bombers, tunnels, every possible way of killing the Jews, by land, sea and air, despite all that, the prophecies are being fulfilled, the ingathering of the exiles is almost complete. The land is reborn, flowering. A language dead for over two thousand years is revived. Gifts of technology, water conservation, solar energy, medicine, agriculture, gifts desperately needed for the planet and for humanity, are flowing freely out of Israel despite the infinite variety of attempts to destroy her.

The latest method is economic boycotts, international kangaroo courts, academic boycotts. They use the language of “human rights” (a concept the Jews introduced to the world by the way), to attack the Jewish state.
Everything the BDSers say about Israel is a lie. But even if it were true, isn’t it odd, that with all the horrific evil and cruelty going on in the world, only the Jewish state is singled out for censure? So much energy, so much time, so much anger, devoted to condemning, exclusively, the Jewish state? Clearly irrational, it makes no sense, yet, it’s nothing new.

Just as Jew hatred will always be with us, so will the Jews. Israel will continue, its mission will be fulfilled.

So it doesn’t matter whether you vote to condemn or boycott or destroy Israel. Whether you send money to Hamas, throw rocks at “settlers,” march around shouting “Palestine will be free,” the material gifts Israel gives the world will continue, and the greatest gifts, the spiritual blessings, are yet to come. But they will, and soon. Regardless of what you do, or what anyone else does, it will happen.

All that really matters is the choice you make. Not for the Jews, not for Israel, for YOU. Will you choose to support death, irrational hatred, tyranny, and evil; or choose life, hope, freedom and goodness? Only your choices really matter, and they really only matter for you. At some point, everyone will be forced to make a choice. This may be why you’re here, to make this choice. Choose wisely, for your soul’s sake. That matters.

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Sheldon Whitten-Vile, trained at UCSF and presently is an inpatient psychiatrist at Kaiser Permanente in Oakland.