But the Issue of Palestinian National Rights Will Not Go Away
by Philip Mendes
The international boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) campaign against Israel was a by-product of the second Palestinian Intifada and the collapse of the Oslo Peace Process. In April and May, 2002, groups of academics in Europe and Australia urged a boycott of all Israeli academics and academic institutions. The timing of these initiatives was instructive: They commenced immediately following the height of the Palestinian suicide bombing attacks in March, 2002, which killed sixty-three Israelis and injured many hundreds. These attacks provoked Israel’s invasion of the leading West Bank cities in an attempt to destroy the terror networks and stop the carnage. Yet the initiators of the academic boycott campaign chose to condemn the invasion rather than the terrorism.
In April, 2004, sixty Palestinian academic and non-government organizations publicly called for an academic and cultural boycott of Israel. The BDS campaign was then formalized on July 9th, 2005 as the Palestinian Campaign for an Academic and Cultural Boycott. The campaign announced three key aims: 1) to end the Israeli occupation of lands occupied in the 1967 war, including East Jerusalem, and dismantle the security barrier; 2) to achieve full equality for the Arab-Palestinian citizens of Israel; 3) to support the rights of Palestinian refugees, including their demand for a right of return to Israel as implied by the 1948 UN Resolution 194, which followed Israel’s success in the 1948 war.
The campaign has not endorsed a two-state solution that respects the national and human rights of both Israeli Jews and Palestinian Arabs. The official statements that emanate from the Palestinian Campaign for an Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel emphasize that the first and foremost priority is to reverse the events of 1948 that led to the Palestinian refugee tragedy, and secondly, to demand the return of the 1948 Palestinian refugees and their millions of descendants to their former homes inside Green Line Israel.
The leading Palestinian BDS advocate, Omar Barghouti, in his 2011 book BDS: the Global Struggle for Palestinian Rights, is completely honest about his real intentions. He explicitly vilifies Palestinian moderates and Israeli leftists (such as Uri Avnery) who support two states, and he even opposes a binational state based on parity between the two national groups. Rather, Barghouti bizarrely returns to the long-obsolete PLO proposal for a secular democratic state that recognizes Jews only as a religious, not national, community.
To me, this amounts to calling for the elimination of the existing State of Israel. Even as harsh a critic of Israel as Noam Chomsky has excoriated the BDS movement for its lack of support for Israel’s right to exist and for misleading the Palestinian people.
In Great Britain, the BDS movement has been openly McCarthyist. The Association of University Teachers, for example — now amalgamated into the University and College Union, UCU — has proposed the exemption from the boycott of “good” Israeli academics who are willing to condemn the policies of Israel and conform to a test of political orthodoxy.
Britain’s UCU has also been implicitly if not explicitly anti-Semitic — as acknowledged in September, 2007, when it withdrew its boycott campaign based on legal advice that it was an infringement of anti-discrimination legislation. The UCU has also distributed racist material that includes conspiracy theories concerning alleged Jewish control of New Labour and international finance. This has provoked accusations of institutionalized anti-Semitism within the UCU, legal threats to sue the UCU on grounds of discrimination, and the mass resignations of Jewish members. One of the few remaining Jewish UCU members, Ronnie Fraser, told the May 2011 Union Congress that they, “as a group of mainly white, non-Jewish trade unionists, do not have the right to tell me, a Jew, what feels like anti-Semitism and what does not.”
The UCU also invited South African trade unionist Bongani Masuku, who had earlier threatened South African Jews who supported Israel with violence or expulsion, to address a union forum in favour of BDS. Masuku’s comments had been formally condemned as hate speech by the South African Human Rights Commission. It is unimaginable that the UCU would have similarly invited a white South African who had incited hatred against Black and Muslim South Africans.
Nevertheless, the UCU has rejected and denounced the European Monitoring Center on Racism and Xenophobia’s widely used definition of anti-Semitism on the grounds that criticism of Israel cannot possibly be anti-Semitic. This is patently absurd.
These incidents confirm that BDS campaigns can and almost certainly will lead to the promotion of political anti-Semitism because they fundamentally target not only the occupation policies of Israel but its very right to exist. An arguable exception to this rule is the relatively new, targeted boycott of products and companies doing business with Jewish settlers in the Occupied Territories — a campaign that originated in Israel itself, with the refusal of leading Jewish cultural figures to perform or present in the settlements. This campaign has been endorsed by several rabbis as well as a few American Zionist leaders such as Peter Beinart, and has backing among some liberal Christian church groups. Intentionally or not, however, it gives legitimation to the BDS movement as a whole. To me, a Zionist BDS is a contradiction in terms, for the BDS movement is anti-Zionist — just as the West Bank settlement project is anti-Palestinian.
On the surface, BDS appears to have achieved some success in isolating Israel by attracting support from legal experts, literary figures, musicians, filmmakers, churches, trade unions, and other non-government organizations. In the academic arena, there is some evidence of academics cancelling proposed joint projects with Israeli colleagues, refusing requests for research cooperation, and refusing to attend conferences in Israel. There has also been some specific banning of individual Israeli academics and scholars from international conferences.
However, no major college or university has endorsed the boycott, no American university has voted to divest Israeli shares, and a much greater number of academics internationally have signed anti-boycott rather than pro-boycott petitions. Most importantly, no Western government has endorsed a boycott, which is crucial both for Israel’s international political standing and its ability to maintain normal trade relations.
As a result, the BDS campaign has had little if any effect on key political and trade relations. It has had no impact whatsoever in regards to achieving its key political aims, or more generally in securing Israeli political or territorial concessions. On the contrary, by targeting all Israelis as the political enemy and reinforcing a siege mentality, BDS seems to be one of a number of factors that are strengthening the Israeli right wing. BDS gives no encouragement whatsoever to those Israelis seeking to negotiate a two-state solution based on mutual compromise with the Palestinians. Instead, the zero-sum nature of the BDS agenda guarantees never-ending conflict, for Israeli Jews will never unilaterally surrender and concede their national existence.
By now, most Jewish organizations worldwide have stated their support for a two-state solution based on the continuing existence of the State of Israel and the creation of a neighboring Palestinian State — but many of these organizations damn the plan with silence these days, as the Netanyahu government has shown little intent to pursue the two-state solution, despite its being official Israeli policy. Nevertheless, given that before the 1993 Oslo agreements, neither the Israeli government nor most Jewish groups even recognized Palestinian national rights, this is quite a remarkable turn-around.
The question remains, however, as to whether this major evolution in official Israeli and Jewish opinion is reflected in action. Even Jews outside of Israel should feel challenged, now, to define what we mean by a two-state solution, including the extent of territorial withdrawal from the West Bank we think acceptable, and to outline the concrete strategies we are willing to support to promote this outcome.
In fact, current Israeli policies and actions — or inaction — play into the hands of the BDS campaign. The Israeli government claims that it wants to negotiate a two-state solution and is waiting for a suitable Palestinian partner willing to accommodate Israel’s security requirements. In practice, however, the government has failed to promote progress towards a two-state solution, and has only strengthened the Greater Israel project. Apart from the short-lived freeze on the extension of existing settlements, it has done absolutely nothing to reverse the growing presence of Jewish settlers far beyond the Green Line (that is, pre-1967) borders. The government has even talked about legalizing outposts built on private Palestinian land, and Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman actually lives in such a settlement, Nokdim, south of Bethlehem, well outside Israel’s recognized borders.
Such settlements are a problem precisely because they were built to prevent the creation of a contiguous Palestinian state alongside Israel. This remains the case, irrespective of what the Palestinians say or do. We all know that there are massive barriers to peace on the Palestinian side: the absolutism of their political culture; the continued demands for a literal rather than symbolic return of 1948 refugees to Israel; and the still-growing influence of Hamas, a racist, fundamentalist group that opposes any coexistence with Israel and uses violence as a first resort. Yet just as the Palestinians have choices to make regarding actions that either resolve or prolong the conflict, so do the Israelis.
I would recommend the following. The new Israeli coalition government should take advantage of its flexible political power to issue a statement that it plans to dismantle all Jewish settlements east of the security barrier over the next five years. This would require some seventy thousand settlers to be evacuated. The precise details for the implementation of the plan should be negotiated with the Palestinian Authority and the international community, and time should be allowed for all those settlers to be paid adequate compensation and find suitable housing within Green Line Israel. In addition, the government should state that Israeli troops will remain in place in the West Bank until such time as the Palestinian Authority, preferably with the assistance of an international peace-keeping force (as Mahmoud Abbas himself has suggested), can demonstrate its ability to maintain a peaceful border with Israel.
The vast majority of settlers will remain in the larger settlement blocs — which constitute about 8.6 per cent of the West Bank, including forty-nine settlements and 190,000 settlers — with the long-term aim of exchanging this territory with the Palestinians for appropriate territory inside Israel.
Such a proposal would conclusively demonstrate that the Israeli people are committed to making the significant concessions required for a two-state solution, and would place the onus on the Palestinians to demonstrate their own willing to compromise. It would certainly defang the BDS campaign by reminding everybody that both sides have to give significant ground if there is to be a resolution to the conflict.
Philip Mendes directs the Social Inclusion and Social Policy Research Unit in the Department of Social Work at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia. He is the author or co-author of seven books, including Jews and Australian Politics (Sussex Academic Press, 2004). He is currently preparing Jews and the Left: The Rise and Fall of a Political Alliance for publication in late 2013.
{ 14 comments… read them below or add one }
The Hebrew farmers who were evacuated from the Gaza settlements are still homeless; the luckier ones have small caravans in the middle of nowhere, from whence they have to drive 2 hours to get work. All the promises were broken once they moved even one step down into the Israeli bureacracy. So now, no one in Yesha or Shomron trusts such promises.
Anyway, it’s already all over but the bleating by the blind. The only place left now which could ever become “Palestine” is that part of Eretz Yisrael which lies east of the river. And it only takes the death or exilation of one family from one Palace in one tiny city (Amman) for that to happen overnight. Czarist Russia disappeared forever with the death of one family, as did the Inca Empire.
By what right do you propose the mass expulsion of Jews? (70,000 Jews is a mass expulsion.) Why should Israel accept the concept that land, any land, should be made Judenrein, and by the hands of Jews no less? There is no reason, particularly in the face of Palestinian rejectionism which you admit, for Israel to make any concessions. Also, if Jews can be expelled so simply, why not expel Arabs in a population exchange?
Philip Mendes’ article, “The BDS Campaign is Worse Than Ineffective,” is problematic in so many ways. The BDS campaign grew out of a growing awareness that the Israeli-Palestinian “peace process” was in reality an endless delaying tactic creating facts on the ground that would only obstruct a future peace agreement and that violent resistance had proved unsuccessful and morally and tactically costly and indefensible. This in itself makes it worth examining seriously.
Inspired by the anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa, BDS developed as a grassroots, nonviolent effort against Israeli occupation, the second class status of Palestinians with Israeli citizenship, and the long unresolved Palestinian refugee crisis. The campaign did not endorse a two state solution partly because there is a diversity of opinion amongst its supporters and partly because the details of this two state solution remain deeply controversial. Are we talking about a viable, contiguous Palestinian state or an economically and politically crippled collection of Bantustans or something in between? These details matter and must be explicitly stated. This also does not address the very worrisome, deeply racist and militaristic beliefs and behaviors that are now cornerstones of much of Israeli society and governmental and military policy.
Mendes also raises the bewildering call for Israel’s “right to exist.” Does Poland or New Zealand or Ecuador, or the US for that matter have a “right to exist”? Countries exist because of a complex combination of history, war, politics, resources, passions, power, etc. Contained in this phrase with reference to Israel is the profoundly undemocratic assumption that this presumptive Western- type democracy has a right to exist as a country that privileges Jews over non-Jews and has a right to imprison, dispossess, kill, or throw out much of the native Arab population and then push to expand its (undefined) borders to create the largest Jewish State with the fewest Arabs possible. I suspect that if any other country behaved in this manner, there would be a public outcry, particularly from liberal justice-loving Jews, but Israel seeks a post-Holocaust, we have a right to do whatever we need to do exemption that is increasingly untenable and dangerous for us all.
The fact that the BDS movement has not achieved massive political and economic change is also not a reason to condemn it. This is a movement in its infancy, with rapidly growing international support from governments, unions, student groups and more. It has clearly changed the conversation and opened the eyes of many people. If it was such an impotent force, why are millions of dollars pouring into “Brand Israel” campaigns, Birthright, the David Project, CAMERA, and other organizations that seek to demonize the BDS movement and to present only the beautiful face of Israel without the fundamental conflicts that are critical for this vibrant and complicated society to address? The level of opposition speaks to the moral power of the campaign.
I feel that to worry about creating a siege mentality and pushing Israelis to the right is misplaced when one examines the broader sweep of history. While Jewish Israelis clearly deserve to live in a peaceful and secure society, Palestinians have been waiting for some kind of just resolutions to a number of historical catastrophes for over 60 years. We forget that their academics have little access to the international stage, their poets are rarely published in the West, their musicians and artists struggle with roadblocks and permits and rarely have international exposure. University students in Gaza are trapped in a giant prison and denied access to higher education. Patients have difficulty getting cancer therapy and farmers produce often rots at checkpoints. Tens of thousands of young men and activists waste away in administrative detention. Meanwhile the settlements and the civil and military infrastructure that accompany them are gobbling up Palestinian land. Ultra-right Jewish settlers brazenly attack children on the way to school and olive growers in their orchards while IDF soldiers look on. Commemorating the 1948 Nakba has been criminalized within Israel. Why isn’t Mendes worrying about the siege mentality of these people? Unfortunately, Palestinians have been disappointed and misused by their own leadership from Hamas to Fatah, by surrounding Arab governments, by the Quartet, by Israeli politicians from the right to the left. This is far from a conflict between equals where each side just has to make a few more painful compromises and hallelujah.
The BDS campaign offers a welcome nonviolent thoughtful creative grassroots challenge to the status quo. It is based on a long tradition, a form of resistance that has been used by people of conscience going back to the antislavery movement in the US. After all the dialogue groups and peace songs, the calls to congress-people, letters to the editor, agonized conversations in temples, standouts in front of AIPAC, what progress has been made? I think BDS is one of the most promising developments to come out of the region in a long time.
Ultimately, respecting human rights and honestly addressing long simmering conflicts that threaten to explode within Israel and the territories, rather than defending Israeli exceptionalism, can only enhance the security of all Israelis as well as Diaspora Jews. Measures like making the separation wall the new border of Israel or worrying about compensating thousands of Jewish settlers east of the wall who may be asked to move while ignoring the tens of thousands of Palestinians who continue to lose homes and lands and have never been compensated, is more a measure of Mendes’ narrow vision than a plan for the future.
Thanks, Alice Rothchild, for your excellent response to the complaints raised by Philip Mendes. BDS is a response to an intolerable situation that has only worsened in the past 60 years. The question of the viability of a two-state solution has also shifted over the decades and is best resolved by those directly affected.
I heartily endorse much of Alice Rothchild’s critique. I would add that most supporters of BDS do not believe that the boycott will topple the apartheid state or change its policies, but it is a way of educating the public about issues that are almost never raised fairly in the Western press. A few do believe that the boycott of South African apartheid, which they wish to emulate, was the primary reason for the fall of that regime, but they fail to take account of the far more important mass movement that had existed for decades.
But the lesson of South Africa is important for other reasons. Simply the end of egregious race-based civil rights abuses does not end inequality, poverty or racism. In taking power, the ANC did not demand change in the economic basis of society, and the same white capitalist power structure remained in place, with a few new black faces in the boardrooms. That “liberation” government is now shooting down black workers demanding an improvement in their conditions.
Analogously, in Israel/Palestine, there can be no equality or justice in a race-based or religion-based state. Not only would two states guarantee permanent huge disparities between the Arab and Jewish populations, but one state could do the same. The same opportunist and relatively wealthy Palestinians who control Fatah would cooperate with the economic elite of Israel to oppress the workers of both nationalities, albeit with super oppression of Palestinians. Racism and nationalism would be used to divide and confuse ordinary citizens, just as in the US. Thus the more difficult demand we must raise is not only for a single secular state, but one based on economic and civil equality.
Thanks, Alice,
Very cogent analysis!
I am struck by the vast misinformation supplied as early as this article’s first paragraph. Is Mr. Mendes practicing journalism or propaganda? Firstly, BDS organizations state clearly in their mission statements and supplementary materials that they are not calling for a boycott of “Israeli academics.” A boycott is a kind of buyers strike. Like a labor strike, the academic boycott aspect of BDS focuses on organizations and institutions, not individuals. Secondly, “suicide bombings” did not provoke “Israel’s invasion of the leading West Bank cities”; instead, Israel’s increased oppression and violence toward Palestinians since the Oslo Accords, including massive settlement expansion into both the West Bank and Gaza, led some Palestinians to turn once again to the armed struggle, to which a colonized people such as the Palestinians is permitted under international law. Thirdly, Israel’s invasion of the West Bank was not “to destroy the terror networks and stop the carnage,” but to inflict collective punishment upon Palestinian civilians and civil society for the resistant acts of a small number of that population. Unlike armed resistance to colonial rule, collective punishment is absolutely illegal under international law. Finally, the initiators of the academic boycott campaign in fact chose to condemn terrorism as well as the invasion: BDS arose as a form of positive non-violence resistance to the terror enacted upon the Palestinian population by the Israel Defense Forces’ invasion of the Occupied Palestinian Territories. Such an invasion is itself illegal under international law, insofar as Israel is bound by that law to protect–not to alter or destroy–territories it has occupied militarily. In short, the BDS is an entirely respectable, legal, and noteworthy effort to call international public and political attention to the plethora illegal acts being committed by a U.N. member nation–the Jewish state of Israel–upon its minority indigenous population, which it has colonized, ethnically cleansed, and positioned into conditions of apartheid–all of which have been proven and are themselves illegal under international law. Mr. Mendes needs to get his facts straight if his writing is to be taken seriously by the informed, intelligent readers of Jewish Currents!
Thank you Alice Rothchild for a well written and cohesive response.
Your observation that this conflict… “is far from a conflict between equals where each side just has to make a few more painful compromises and hallelujah.”, says it all.
Collective punishment meted out uncompromisingly is a bane to any future solution. Indeed, this is a matter better understood by those directly affected by the living conditions in Palestine and those who stand up to vocalize the magnitude of its effects.
Alice Rothchild makes valuable points that convey the thrust of why American Jews should support rather than oppose BDS. There is simply too much injustice in the current approach to “peace” and treatment of the Palestineans for us to not want to take active visible steps to oppose and dissociate ourselves
Alice Rothchild eloquently challenges statements made by author, Philip Mendes.
Mr. Mendes claims that BDS is an outgrowth of Palestinian acts of violence toward Israel. Many of us see BDS as a direct non-violent response to the Israeli government’s violent and terrorist actions toward Palestinians.
I believe it would be helpful for Mr. Mendes to reflect on and research some of the points raised by Ms. Rothchild.
I fully agree with Alice Rothchild’s response. She put her finger on the extreme reactionary measures various Israeli groups have taken as indications of the raw nerve struck by the BDS movement. My hope is that this nerve rests in the conscience of Israelis, who need to face the abhorent facts of the Occupation and egregious confiscations of Palestinian lands and resources. May it move them to bring their nation into line with international law.
BDS is a joke in terms of being a solution to or component of eventually Palestinian nationhood. Simply because it’s TERRORIST, EXTERMINATIONIST and completely BOGUS. By demonizing all Jews and Israelis and demanding that they “self destruct” without making any concessions whatsoever, these savages deserve nothing more than the back of one’s hand.
What Philip Mendes has forgotten to mention in his criticism of the BDS campaign is that there is no call to end the conflict, The BDS campaign calls for “the return of refugees, dismantling of the barrier, the end of occupation”, etc – but it does not state that it expects the Palestinians to end the conflict when these grievances are rectified. A campaign for peace should be clear about its goals. It must be absolutely obvious that the issue at hand is the very end of hostilities – i.e. no more grievances, no more animosity, no more conflict. It should be clear that the Palestinians will have to accept the legitimacy of the Jewish state, and that’s absolutely final. Of course, the reason that the BDS campaign does not insist that the rectification of its stated grievances would mean “the end of conflict” is that most of the activists – surely all of the anti-Zionists – would not stay in the movement. There is no intention of recognizing Israel’s legitimacy and of ending the conflict. It’s obvious to the anti-Zionists (but not necessarily to the general public) that the struggle against the legitimacy of Israel will continue even after complying to the demands of the BDS campaign.
Alice Rotshild’s statement is ridiculous.
First of all, Israel does have a right to exist. This right is inscribed in Resolution 242 and every UN member state has the right to exist and to protect its national sovereignty.
Second, the borders of a two-state solution are known.
Resolution 242 and the Clinton parameters refers to minor border changes only.
It means that the border must be pretty close the pre-1967 Green line.
Also, let me remind you that 80% of the settlers live in the main settlement blocs which represent no more 5% of the West Bank only.
It would be very easy to swap these territories with land located on the Israeli side of the border so that the Palestinians can recover a territory tantamount to 100% of the West Bank with ”minor border changes” only, as stated in Resolution 242.
So calling for the destruction of Israel because of the large number of settlers is just an excuse for refusing a two-state solution. Saying that the establishment of a viable Palestinian state (not a bantustan), is not feasible because of the settlements, is simply a lie.
Furthermore, let me also remind you that Resolution 194 has no legal value. UN General Assembly resolutions are not binding for any state. Moreover, the Conciliation Commission for Palestine, set up by the UN in 1948 to serve as a mediator between Israel and the Arab belligerents of the 1948 war, excludes an unrestricted return of Palestinian refugees because of the changes on the ground imposed by the Arab agression against Israel in 1948.
But still, let’s assume that UN General Assembly resolutions have a legal value.
Resolution 181 recognizes Israel’s right to exist as a ”Jewish state”. So even the UN General Assembly resolutions (which have no juridic value) make no room for an unrestricted return of Palestinian refugees. In law, when two different types of rights contradict each other, a principle called proportionality must be applied. Thus, a balance between the rights of the Palestinians and the rights of Israel must be found. But the rights of Palestinian refugees do not supersede the rights of the state of Israel to exist as a Jewish state.
As for racism in Israel, it has nothing to do with ”whiteness” or ”Eurocentrism”.
50% of Israeli Jews are ethnically Arabs, and even today, most elderly Oriental Jews in Israel, use Arabic as their first language (like in my family for example).
And please, don’t tell me about discrimination against Sephardi Jews.
It’s been over for nearly 40 years. Even the Labour party (identified with the Ashkenazi community) has already had two ”Arab Jewish” leaders, a Moroccan and an Iraqi.
Israel also had two Oriental Jews as presidents and the proportion of mixed marriages between Ashenazi and Sephardi Jews is above 30%. Hence, the two ethnic groups are more than mingled and cultivating an anachrotistic antagonism between Oriental and Western Jews is something that can be believed only by people who have never set foot in Israel.
As for Anti-Arab racism in Israel, it stems mostly from the conflict with the Palestinians.
Without the conflict, there is every little racism. Look at the Druze for example. They serve in the IDF and support Israel. Of course, their situation is far from perfect but the number of Israelis who have a bad opinion of the Druze is very small.
By the way, even though the proportion of Israeli Jews who are openly anti-Arab is quite high (between 40% to 60% according to the polls), don’t forget that in Arab countries, the proportion of people who despise the Jews is over 90%.
Anti-Zionists usually excuse that by pointing out to the crimes perpetrated by Israel. Well, anti-Arab racism in Israel is prevalent mostly among ”Arab Jews” who were persecuted in the Arab world during the 1950′s.
So please, don’t look for excuses.
Antisemitism in the Arab world, is much worse than anti-Arab racism in Israel.
Finally, if Hamas decides to become a genuine national liberation movement, changes its charter (which still call for a genocide against the Jews and the destruction of Israel), and if it decides to fight the Israeli occupation of the West Bank instead, there would be a good reason to lift the blockade.
But as long as their aim is to destroy Israel, there is no reason for Israel to lift this blockade which would allow Hamas to import all the weapons it needs to attack Israeli civilians.
It may surprise some of you, but Israelis are not suicidal!
Last remark, every single poll conducted over the last twelve years has shown that a consistent majority of Israelis support the Clinton’s peace plan (1967 border with minor landswaps).
So if instead of making foolish comparisons with apartheid, if you really are interested in knowing why Israelis vote Netanyahu, the answer lies in the existence of Hamas and other Islamist armed factions.
Israelis fear that if the IDF pulls out of the West bank, this territory will be used by these genocidal groups to fire rockets and missiles on Israel.
And guess what? They are right.
So far, no one has proven that the void that would be caused by an Israeli withdrawal of the West Bank would not be filled by Hamas (the same way as Hezbollah has taken over Southern Lebanon and Hamas has conquered Gaza after the Israeli army evacuated these territories).
P.S.
I remember that ten years ago, being pro-Palestinian meant opposing the Israeli occupation, whereas being pro-Israel meant supporting Ariel Sharon and opposing a settlement of the conflict based upon the 1967 border.
Now, it’s totally the opposite. Most pro-Palestinians reject a two-state solution, whereas most Zionists support the Clinton parameters and the Geneva initiative.
Furthermore, pro-Palestinians don’t hesitate to call Hamas and Hezbollah ”freedom fighters”. You guys would have never dared to say something to despicable 10 years ago.
Back then, pro-Palestinians accused Israel of strenghting Hamas with the occupation, but no one praised this genocidal group.
However, most people who identify as pro-Israel now, are embarrassed by Netanyahu and Lieberman. People who identify as pro-Israel today, and who still defend the occupation, the settlements, Netanyahu and Lieberman are more and more marginal in Jewish communities worldwide (including in France where Sephardi Jews who tend to be much more radical, are predominant).
Finally, can someone tell me where the legitimacy of the BDS movement comes from?
They pretend to speak on behalf of the Palestinian ”civil society”.
Usually, people who speak in the name of the ”civil society” are those that are too weak to be represented in the Parliament, since they have no real support in the population.
And even if they have no state, the Palestinians do have democratic political institutions. So if BDS wants to appear as a legitimate actor, it must at least try to garner some support in the Palestinian parliament first.
So far, I haven’t seen many BDS ”one-staters” being elected in the Palestinian parliament except maybe for the PFLP which is quite marginal.
Of course, there is still Hamas, these ”freedom fighters” whose aims are close to the BDS movement. It just shows how extreme and deceitful BDS is!
It’s quite strange, because ten years ago, pro-Palestinians had respect for self-identified ”Zionist pro-Palestinians” like myself. This expression was coined by Patrick Klugman, the former head of the French Jewish student Union. We felt pretty much respected back then by pro-Palestinians. Now, it’s all over. Pro-Palestinians despise us more than they hate right-wing Zionists, because they know that it’s much more difficult to caricature Yossi Sarid, Yossi Beilin, Zeev Sternhell or Shulamit Aloni than Avigdor Lieberman or Ovadia Yossef.
Stalinists also used to attack the Liberal left much more than the fascists during the 1920′s and the 1930′s.
I think its a pretty good comparison. There is a lot in common between Stalinism and the BDS movement.
They are both extremist movements, using deceitful methods to achieve their aims.