[dropcap]When[/dropcap] is anti-Semitism not anti-Semitism? When it is propounded by the BDS (Boycott, Divest, Sanctions) movement against Israel. This perverted hatred, dressed up as social justice, is not necessarily seen as such or simple to establish. Last week’s IJN report of a recent debate between a BDS proponent and opponent offered just such an opportunity.
The proponent in the debate offered a touching, naive — and dangerous — insight into the mentality of a Jewish BDS proponent.
She is a public health professional in Boston, the daughter of a Conservative rabbi and a member of Jewish Voice for Peace’s Boston chapter steering committee. She was born and raised in Baltimore, attended Jewish day school through high school and a Labor Zionist youth camp from ages 8-22. She said:
“I grew up in a strong Jewish household. It was a kosher home. We went to Shabbat services regularly and for all Jewish holidays.”
Observation: Jewish education and Jewish observance do not automatically transmit fundamental Jewish values.
She said she traveled to Israel many times, spent a semester on a kibbutz in high school and a college semester at the University of Haifa.
Observation: Israel is not an automatic inoculation against anti-Semitism, especially if one’s exposure to Israel is through the rose-colored glasses that shield visitors from Israel’s problems. It is not a perfect society reflective of Jewish values in all ways, at all times.
She said:
“At age 27, having never visited the West Bank or met any Palestinians, I went on the Norwegian NGO’s House of Human Rights delegation to Israel. I went into it with an open mind and heart, realizing I would witness some difficult situations and harsh realities.
“But I had no idea that my life would be fundamentally changed forever. I had no idea that everything I knew to be real and true, safe, comfortable and familiar, would be challenged and that I would leave feeling betrayed and shattered.”
Observation: The same rose-colored glasses that shielded her from the real Israel also shielded her from the anti-Semitic agenda of a human rights organization, from Norway no less. People who see the real Israel, in all its complexities, and who see the real life of Palestinians, in all its complexities — including self-caused hardship intermixed with sheer hatred of Jewish Israelis — will not feel betrayed.
She said she witnessed and heard countless experiences from Palestinians who “were forcibly displaced from their land to maintain a Jewish majority in Israel.”
Observation: Here we reach the heart of the matter.
• Most of the Land of Israel — from the Mediterranean Sea to the Jordan River — is empty. For the most part, neither Jew nor Palestinian displaced the other.
• “Forcibly displaced”? When? How? In the 1948 War of Israel Independence, when Israel fought for her life after having been invaded by six Arab armies? The Arabs lost that war. That is not “forcible displacement.” All the Arabs of Palestine needed to do to avoid that self-caused suffering was to accept the UN partition plan of 1947 — the original two-state solution. Israel accepted it. The Arabs rejected it.
• “Forcibly displaced”? After the 1967 Six Day War? This too was initiated by Arab countries for the express purpose of destroying Israel. This war had the unintended effect (unintended by the Arab aggressors) of opening up empty lands on the West Bank to Jewish settlement. Say what you like for or against settlements, virtually every dunam on which they sit was empty before 1967. There was virtually no displacement, forcible or otherwise.
• There are two reasons for a Jewish majority in the Land of Israel today. First, Jews returned to their historic homeland, a status the land enjoyed before Islam or Christianity was even founded. Second, Arabs moved out — Christian Arabs moved out because the ruling Muslim Arabs persecuted them; and Muslim Arabs moved out to work around the Palestinian leadership’s anti-Israel obsession, which prevented many Palestinians from getting an education, a profession and commensurate employment.
She said:
“I realized we would all be safer if the Israelis valued the liberation and self-determination of Palestinians and all peoples as highly as our own.”
Observation: Restated, her words say: The onus for Palestinian self-determination is on Israel — as if the Palestinian rejection of a two-state solution by the UNin 1947; as if the Palestinian (and greater Arab) attempt to destroy Israel in 1967; as if the Egyptian and Syrian attempt to destroy Israel in the Yom Kippur War of 1973; as if the rejection by the PLO of an Israel offer of a two state-solution in 2000 and 2008 — as if all this never happened. The basic reason why there is no Palestinian self-determination rests with the Palestinians themselves.
She said:
The 2005 BDS document states three goals: Israel must end the occupation and colonization of Arab lands and dismantle the wall; recognize the fundamental rights of Arab-Palestinian citizens in Israel; and respect, protect and promote the Palestinian right of return. The onus is on Israel to behave humanely.
Observation: The reference to the occupation and colonization of “Arab lands” denies the Jewish historical link to the Land of Israel, something that her Jewish education and Jewish camp never taught her, or, if they did, she didn’t absorb the point.
The unelaborated reference to the security “wall” dividing Israeli civilians from Palestinian areas blithely ignores the reason for the wall: the second intifada (2000-2005), during which Palestinian terrorists attacked unarmed Israelis in cafes, night clubs, on public streets and elsewhere (so much for BDS’ concern for behaving humanely). The wall has stopped hundreds of attempted terrorist attempts. Its effect is extraordinarily humane — the reduction of the deaths of innocent Israelis. Apparently, this does not count for BDS.
Rights of Arab-Palestinian citizens in Israel? They vote, and not just in the voting booth. They vote with their feet — not to leave Israel. They have it better in Israel than they would in many other Arab countries. Arab-Palestinian citizens hold public offices. They hold a seat on Israel’s supreme court.
“Palestinian right of return.” Is this Jewish proponent of BDS so naive, so beholden to her rose-colored glasses, so as not to know that a so-called Palestinian right of return spells the destruction of Israel? Not to mention, people who launch wars and lose them also lose their right to return. Let them think about that before they launch the wars to begin with. Not to mention, the actual refugees of 1948 have mostly died, and nowhere else in the world are descendants of refugees regarded as refugees themselves.
The advocacy of a Palestinian right of return is what makes BDS purely anti-Semitic, not “just” anti-Zionist. The influx of millions of Palestinians into Israel, each claiming the right to a home in which an Israeli lives (no matter that most of these homes did not exist in 1948), would, if it ever happened, lead to a bloodbath of either Israelis or Arabs or both; and in any case the end of Israel as a Jewish state.
That’s BDS: the destruction of Israel. That’s what it’s all about. That is why it is so tragic that Jews get caught up in it.
A double standard underlies it all. The BDS movement does not target any other people or country perceived to be engaged in human rights violations. BDS targets only Israel.
She said:
“With regard to the idea of BDS being anti-Semitic, I just want to reiterate that it’s a rights-based movement to achieve justice and equality. It opposes all forms of oppression, including anti-Semitism.”
Sounds good. It’s just that according to this BDS proponent, “criticizing Jews for being Jewish or practicing Judaism is anti-Semitic,” but doing the same against Israel is not anti-Semitic — as if living in Israel, forming a just Jewish society in Israel, studying Torah in Israel, observing those commandments that can only be performed in Israel, were not being Jewish.
Again, her Jewish education and Jewish camp were either woefully off base or woefully misunderstood.
She said:
“This is what the Zionist movement essentially has worked on for the past 100 years, to really marry this religion, this culture, these people with a rich, complex history, to a political ideology that prioritizes Jewish lives over non-Jewish lives. We try to disentangle that conflation.”
Observation: That “conflation” is the essence of Judaism: the union of ethics, nationalism, ritual and morality, all under the kingship of the one G-d. This is Judaism 101.
This BDS proponent really aligns herself with the old Bundism, classical Reform Judaism, the current American Council for Judaism and Satmar chasidism, all of whom idealize the Jewish exile. If, says this BDS proponent, you don’t buy a stateless, exilic existence for the Jews, because you celebrate and try to perfect a Jewish nation-state, well, then, you’re anti-Semitic.
She said:
“Part of what we do in JVP [Jewish Voice for Peace] is to work within Jewish communities to educate ourselves and others about the distinction between anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism.”
Observation: BDS is a perversion not only politically but theologically.
One last thing, her reference to a “political ideology that prioritizes Jewish lives over non-Jewish lives.” Right. As in the Israeli doctors who go to Haiti, Nepal, Turkey and elsewhere to save non-Jewish lives, as in the Israeli doctors who treat non-Israeli, Palestinian children from the West Bank and Gaza, as in the Israeli scientists who invent medical devices that save non-Jewish lives around the world.
Did the Palestinians she visited and the Norwegian “human rights” NGO who sponsored her visit — those who left her feeling “betrayed” and “shattered” — tell her about these instances of a Jewish, Israeli political ideology that prioritizes both Jewish and non-Jewish lives?
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