Not even a month into the new school year and there are three fabricated BDS scandals. On principle, I will continue to oppose BDS; but it’s a major distraction. After fifty years of Israeli military occupation and settlement construction in the West Bank, the ship may have already sailed. Who’s really opposed to a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict? Who’s opposition is the more effective and counts more? A bunch of relatively powerless activists on the academic left and elsewhere or the government of the State of Israel? While no doubt a problem, BDS is being turned into a convenient stalking horse by the organized Jewish right at the very moment when it is the Israeli right that has turned Israel into a one-state entity. In fact, the hue and cry about BDS is anti-Zionist, a ghetto Jewish phenomenon. I’m reminded of Ben-Gurion’s famous maxim. “Our future does not depend on what the goyim [sic] will say, but rather on what the Jews will do.”
“Who’s opposition is the more effective and counts more? A bunch of relatively powerless activists on the academic left and elsewhere” any chance of this ever dawning on the academics or will the inflated sense of import carry on free of any reality-check?
“In fact, the hue and cry about BDS is anti-Zionist, a ghetto Jewish phenomenon.” You don’t have to be “getto Jewish” to oppose BDS and if you oppose it you don’t have to be Zionist. You can support a Jewish state without supporting the occupation of the West Bank. BDS is radically and dangerously anti-Semitic because it won’t support Israeli or Jewish opposition to occupation, and shouts down ALL Jews and Israeli’s — apolitical musicians and scholars, left-wing anti-occupation USA and British college and university students, as well as left-wing Israeli academics. Those against the occupation should have rallied in support of the IDF second-in-command who warned on a public occasion that Israeli politics was becoming fascist. BDS has lost it focus on the evil of occupation and sharpened its focus on the evil of Jews.