For decades, Israel advocates complained that their opponents were unwilling to fight for their cause through peaceful means. Now we have the growing success of the BDS movement, and the arguments are shifting.
Jonathan Tobin writes for Commentary magazine:
his past week, on both ends of the country, the BDS (boycott, divest, sanction) movement against Israel received a stern rebuke. Several states around the country are passing laws that would bar their governments from doing business with companies that comply with boycotts of Israel. But in New York and California, the current debate is not about implementation of this economic war against the Jewish state but rather the way college campuses — including state-run universities like the University of California or the City University of New York or CUNY — have allowed the debate about Israel to turn into acquiescence for open expressions of anti-Semitism. In New York, the legislature has cut funding for CUNY, though BDS was not the sole motivation. But in California, the regents of the state university system voted last Thursday to take a stand against what they termed “anti-Semitism, anti-Semitic forms of anti-Zionism, and other forms of discrimination.”
The measure was long overdue but pro-Palestinian and other leftist groups are blasting it as an attempt to stifle freedom of expression. They claim this simple sentence will make it impossible to criticize Israel and its policies. They are wrong about that. Israel is a democracy and, just like Israelis, those on campus can opine all they want about its government and all it does. But what is at stake here is whether those whose purpose is to destroy the one Jewish state on the planet can pose as advocates for human rights while in engaging in hate speech against Jews.
In an era where the preservation of “safe space” for students against anything they might find objectionable, including subtle slights labeled “micro-aggressions,” political advocacy, or actual hate speech, there is one group that hasn’t gotten much protection: Jews. The reason for this isn’t much of a mystery. In the context of academia, Jews are treated as the 21st century moral equivalent of WASPS and are therefore too secure and/or powerful to merit any concern for their rights, let alone their sensibilities. To some extent, such complacency is justified. Unlike in Europe or most other parts of the world, the rising global tide of anti-Semitism hasn’t made much of an impact in the United States. American exceptionalism and the lack of a history of state-sanctioned anti-Semitism in this country has left Jews free to rise on their own merits finding acceptance in virtually every sphere of American society. Jew hatred has largely been confined to the fever swamps of the far right and left. But there is one glaring exception to this rule: college campuses.
Anti-Semitism in academia has become an issue because the BDS movement against Israel has made it one. The efforts of pro-Palestinian students to delegitimize Israel have effortlessly slipped into a campaign to stigmatize and intimidate Jewish students and organizations. As the numbers of incidents of hate speech and intimidation grow, some Jewish groups and other fair-minded people are pushing back.
Groups like the AMCHA initiative and the Zionist Organization of America have documented many of the anti-Semitic incidents and cases of incitement against Jews associated with anti-Israel agitation. Jews have subjected to every kind of insult and threat by those whose goal it is to wipe out Israel, often by promoting egregious lies about atrocity stories.
But we don’t really have to dig too deep into the files of incidents because we already know why it is so easy for BDS and pro-Palestinian advocates to slip into overt anti-Semitism. That is because, contrary to the University of California statement that was hoping to mollify some of the Israel-haters, there is no such thing as an anti-Semitic form of anti-Zionism. All forms of anti-Zionism are anti-Semitic, no matter the identity of the speaker because to single out the one Jewish state and to deny its people the right to self-determination and self-defense in their ancient homeland is, in principle, anti-Semitic. Put simply, denying Jews these rights that no one would think of challenging for any other people, is an act of bias. Acts of bias against Jews are called anti-Semitic.
That’s why the line that supposedly separates traditional Jew-hatred from the cause of destroying Israel is so frequently breached by its advocates. They can’t help speaking this way because their goal is to deny Jews their human rights. In order to justify this indefensible cause, they don’t merely resort to lies about Israel or ignore the fact that the Palestinians have been waging a century-long war to destroy the Jewish presence in the country and not merely to force it back to the 1967 lines. Like the Palestinian Authority and Hamas, which broadcast hate about Jews and praise for anyone that tries to murder a Jew, BDS supporters need to demonize the object of their criticism. And to do that, they inevitably use hate speech designed to marginalize and silence Jews…
Anti-Zionism is a form of discrimination because of the unique nature of its advocacy that serves a cause designed to ensure that the Jewish people remain not merely stateless but homeless.
As for the welcome mat laid out for Jewish anti-Zionists in the BDS camp, that is meaningless. The fact that some Jews are ready to join forces with those urging the destruction of the Jewish state is not evidence that its attitude toward Jews is benign. Part of the psychosis of the Jewish existence in the Diaspora has always been a willingness to believe that all other peoples and faiths have rights to particularity that Jews should not have or exercise. Cynthia Ozick’s quip that “universalism is the parochialism of the Jews,” tells us a lot about the tension between the two differing yet ultimately compatible strains of thought in Judaism. But when applied to the battle for the existence of the state of Israel, the desire of some Jews to treat Israel as the one illegitimate ethnoreligious state on a planet that has so many other similarly constituted nations is a testament to dysfunction on the part of this small minority of Jews. It tells us nothing about the toxic nature of the vile cause for which they serve as useful idiots.
As for Beinart’s South African analogy, it is so specious that he even disassociates himself from it even as he urges us to consider it. Democratic Israel is not, as Beinart correctly states, remotely analogous to apartheid-era South Africa.
