A Jew with a Conscience Calls for a Boycott of Israel

It can help brig peace in the region. The boycott of South Africa helped end apartheid there and it can help do so with Israel. It is a current issue in NYC because the supporters of Israel right or wrong are going out to pressure the Political Science Dept at Broolyn college from having pro-boycott/divestment speakers at a student forum.
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I am for boycott because I have many times observed conditions under military occupation in the West Bank and East Jerusalem and Gaza that reflect apartheid policies effected by Israel. I have seen ethnic cleansing, village demolitions, collective punishment, suppression of demonstrations, confiscation of land, hateful checkpoint systems fit for livestock, and violent targeting of civilians, and all these policies carried out on an ethnic basis. If you were Jewish, it wouldn't be happening to you.

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The conditions I've observed are revolutionary conditions: they are the tinder of violent uprising and annihilationist dreams. Any people subject to these conditions would take up arms. I know that New Yorkers would. And Palestinians have taken up arms many times, and violence has never served them. And that is why I am for boycott. Boycott is painful but it is nonviolent. And we need a nonviolent solution to the tyranny that exists in Palestine. A nonviolent solution is highly unlikely, but it is the best hope; and boycott has the potential to isolate and punish the Israeli regime in such a way that it might begin to transform itself, and that international human-rights norms will at last apply.

But I am American, and I am for boycott because of the American paralysis over the issue, best demonstrated by the Chuck Hagel hearing last week. Our political parties have an inability to talk about Palestinian conditions frankly. Hagel's words about Palestinians being treated like caged animals were stuffed down his throat, and no Democrat could speak up for those views

. Our politics are broken on this issue. Four years ago I was in Cairo and sat in the audience as Obama spoke of Palestinian humiliations and declared, The settlements must end. The young people in the audience cheered him, their faces were lit with smiles. Four years on that policy is a shambles; Obama has walked away from his words, the settlements go on unabated. When liberal Zionists say that Obama must pressure Israel, they ignore this political wreckage. Why is he going to change now and pressure Israel when the lobby has handed his head to him (and Netanyahu) over the last four years?

When governments fail to act on crying injustices, the people must act, people of conscience, like us. When the United States government was controlled by the slave power in the 1840s and 50s, abolitionists pushed the country forward, they changed the American discourse. I do not seek the violence that ended slavery, but I am a fellow traveler today to the abolitionists of the Israel/Palestine conflict.

I think BDS is a popular movement, and it can force governments to act. I don't believe that Israel can continue to be a Jewish state when 20 percent of its citizens are non-Jews. I don't believe that the two-state solution is still viable; I want to see a peaceful transition to a democracy, perhaps involving binationalism, or federation as initial steps.

I have avoided all discussion here of cultural and academic boycott, anti-normalization measures, and the desire some have expressed to transform Israel with a flood of returning refugees, to revolutionize 1948.

I am sometimes troubled by the rhetoric of the camp I follow, but I am a fellow traveler, and I know as Tony Judt knew 10 years ago (and as Charles Dickens knew in 1842, when he republished abolitionist tracts) these people are on the right side of history; and as to the right of return, it is very difficult to visit an ethnically-cleansed land, Israel, and see it market itself as a European high tech country and also a fantasy of Jewish power, and know that it does so on the ruined villages of people who live a few miles away, even as it invites Jews from around the world to "return" there. That is the return that most disturbs me as a Jew, the injustice I see before my eyes.

Omar Barghouti once said to me, If you want to boycott an egg, we want you to boycott that egg. That is now my slogan. I welcome all who would seek to punish Israel's behavior in the occupied territories by doing something. Governments have failed to do anything. Boycott is my way of taking action about a human-rights calamity that is perpetrated in my name, as an American and a Jew.
http://mondoweiss.net/2013/02/why-im-for-boycott.html

 

Typical. This is alll the defenders of current Israeli policies toward the Palestinaians have.

I am unhappy with Israel probably for the same reaon you are so happy with it. It is currently an Apartheid society that is very racist/ethocentric toward other humans--in this case Muslims.


I believe Israel will eventually be fine, like South Africa and Northern Ireland, once Apartheid breaks down.

Apartheid is not healthy for the rulers either.

Too bad you have learned noting from the mistakes of your grand parent's generation in Nazi Germany. Thankfully this does not seem to be the case with many younger Germans.

 

deji

While I support the one state solution, as I think it supports the essential rights of all the people who live there, I don't think that the boycott-divestment movement can only be used to pressure Israel into a one state solution, but to behave in general wrt to human rights.

If true it is sort of sad that only 5% of Israelis who claim to be in line with the values that are esteemed in the United States and Western Europe.

As to whether it would only be 5% I tend to doubt this statistic. First there are more than 5% of even pre 1967 Israel who are Palestinians and I doubt they want to continue in second class status. As for 5%. At one time you probably could have gotten that polling figure among Afrikaners or southerners in Mississippi, but things can change. I am not so sure whether only 5% of the occupied would be against a modern secular democracy. Some of them are Christians and in general the groups got along prior to colonization by European Jews.

 

That is not what I hear, but it doesn't make Jews or Muslims in the land bad people. Just like not all whites who more or less supported segregation in the South were bad people who mistreated or disliked individual African Americans or viceversa. I had a neighbor here in Houston who could not go more than 5 minutes without using the N word, to the point that we told him very directly to stop it, we did not want our kid to be hearing that *hit Funny thing. He would go out fishing with a coworker who was AA, to quote the neighbor "old Charlie, he is a N**** but a good one."

I hear that many Americans who visit Israel beyond a few tourist sites are shocked at the way Israelis talk about Muslims.

 

Hey, one of my grandparents was from Germany. It is sad to have ATW be a representative of Germans with his behavior on this bbs.

 

Wow, take it out of context why don't you. As an aside I was not saying that it is that rare for a Jew to have a conscience-- just the type of conscience toward the suffering of Palestinians the author shows.

PS perhaps you are used to this type of statement closing off discussion of the treatment of Palestinians and the Jewish-Palestinian issue. It doesn't work here and is increasingly ineffective for supporters of the Israeli status quo. In the long run only pressuring israel to be more just will be supportive.