The Threat of BDS

Abstract

As an israeli born and raised in Jerusalem, when I visit with Jewish communities of the Diaspora—from San Francisco to Melbourne to Rio de Janeiro—I hear a global discussion regarding current realities in Israel and the “question of Palestine” that sounds entirely outdated. It is evident there is a disconnect between the ideological notions of the Diasporic Zionist narrative and present-day circumstances and factors of the realpolitik in Jerusalem.I assume you, the reader, are familiar with the classic historic narrative: The biblical roots tying the Jewish people to the land of Eretz Yisrael, the need for a Jewish safe haven in the aftermath of the Holocaust and World War II, and finally, the return home after 2,000 years of exile and persecution. We are all familiar with the story of hope and promise for the Jewish people facing constant hardship since it sprouted just seventy years ago: The miraculous triumph against seven enemy Arab armies and gaining independence in 1948, followed by the victorious Six-Day War in 1967, tripling the country’s size in six days. Foreigners often reminisce about volunteering on a 1970s kibbutz, hitching rides across the romantic Middle Eastern landscape to eat delicious hummus in Nablus and drink good coffee in Jerusalem.I remember the Peace Camp’s hopes for a two-state solution—the compromise of land for peace during the Oslo Accords in the early 1990s. Growing up in Jerusalem at the time, there is no way I can ever forget the bombs in the buses and cafes, the friends and family we lost. I remember Israel’s generous offer at Camp David, and the disappointment later when it turned out there was “no partner for peace.” And I certainly remember the Second Palestinian Uprising and the concrete slabs that were put in place around the city separating, seemingly forever, economies and communities. There seemed to always be a constant threat of violence, whether it was attacks in South Lebanon, chemical warfare from Iraq, rockets from Gaza, or the threat of nuclear warfare from Iran. The news on the radio was always blaring, announcing something awful. And now, according to comments from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that ran in The Guardian, the second largest existential threat to Israel is the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement (the first is still a nuclear Iran).Growing up an Israeli patriot, a youth counselor and leader in the Israeli Scouts, and later a veteran combat soldier, I’ve recited these narratives most of my life. Around the world they have been shared for decades as historic fact in classrooms, synagogues, Jewish Community Centers, churches, parliaments, and businesses. The stories are woven into an impenetrable truth, one that many around the world sadly still refuse to question.I began to question this narrative during the second Intifada, in 2001. As a soldier, I was ordered to not only protect a community of Jewish settlers in Hebron, but to enable and support their settlement expansion at the expense of the ancient Palestinian market and residents of the city. After eighteen years of growing up in Jerusalem these were the first settlers and the first Palestinians that I had ever met. The facade began to crack, the narrative didn’t add up. Where was the border that I was supposed to guard? These settlers were the people who danced when Rabin was assassinated, why were they calling the shots? But even veteran Israeli combat soldiers raising questions about the militarized control of Palestinian civilians are attacked and labeled as traitors by Israeli politicians and media.In any case, questioning the Israeli narrative is swiftly labeled terrorism if you’re Palestinian, self-hating and treasonous if you’re Israeli like me, or anti-Semitic coming from anyone else. Any kind of criticism is shut down. Even Rubi Rivlin, the Israeli President from the hawkish Likud party, has been accused at high levels of being a leftist extremist. Shouldn’t that raise some questions: Why the hysteria? How have national politics reached such absolute narratives, and what are we so scared of? Sure, Jerusalem streets may feel unsafe, but we’re nowhere near the levels of Second Intifada violence. Why is Netanyahu’s government rewriting school-books and Supreme Court protocol? And why is the Israeli Foreign Ministry spending millions on international messaging against a grassroots movement calling for nonviolent economic action? And what is this latest threat, BDS, really about? Well, let’s clarify:On July 9, 2005, 171 Palestinian non-governmental organizations initiated a campaign calling for a boycott, divestment, and international sanctions to pressure Israel to uphold international law and human rights. The Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) campaign urges various forms of “non-violent punitive measures” against Israel until it “complies with the precepts of international law” by: “Ending its occupation and colonization of all Arab lands and dismantling the Wall; Recognizing the fundamental rights of the Arab-Palestinian citizens of Israel to full equality; and respecting, protecting and promoting the rights of Palestinian refugees to return to their homes and properties as stipulated in UN Resolution 194.”The campaign is organized and coordinated by the Palestinian BDS National Committee. The committee cites a body of UN resolutions and specifically echoes the anti-apartheid campaigns against white minority rule in South Africa. I doubt most of the people objecting to the BDS movement have actually taken the time to read the strategy or the call itself (if you have not yet, please take the time to read it here: https://bdsmovement.net/call).So why is this nonviolent group of activists such a threat? Perhaps because it calls into question the cornerstone of the Zionist narrative—the idea that, in addition to the Jewish people’s victimhood, Palestine and Palestinians don’t exist, or alternatively, that Palestinians are violent terrorists. The story must be kept within the narrative of heroic Israeli struggle for survival, therefore, there must be a violent enemy (a terrorist) or the story unravels.Within the Israeli narrative, the only thing scarier than violent Palestinians is, in fact, nonviolent Palestinians. The BDS movement cracks the facade of the Israeli narrative. By doing so, the global movement exposes a historic Palestinian experience that has otherwise been denied or delegitimized by Israel for decades. This is a narrative the Zionist world denies and omits from our history books: Over six hundred destroyed or depopulated villages during the Palestinian Nakba (catastrophe) and a number of massacres perpetrated by Israeli militias in 1948.We also don’t learn that the post Independence/Nakba military rule of Palestinian/Arab villages and cities lasted until 1966, or how Israeli education and banking systems were forced upon the occupied cities and villages during the 1970s and 1980s.Under a unity government, Israeli Finance Minister, Ariel Sharon (yup, father of the settlement movement) signed the Israel-U.S. “Free-Trade” agreement with the Reagan Administration. The Israeli government launched the “New Israeli Shekel” (the NIS is the coin still used today in Israel and Palestine). This put an end to the Socialist era of the Zionist experiment on the Israeli side, enforcing Reaganomics-based economies in the Occupied Territories. This was a move to destroy local village-based economies and centuries-old regional economic relationships, further disempowering the local population.By this point two decades had passed since the 1967 occupation and a new generation of Palestinian students were graduating from universities in the West Bank. They were not only graduating into a military occupation but also into an economic one. The first Palestinian Intifada was a well-organized, unarmed protest movement, which after decades of catastrophe and occupation finally got Palestine on the global map in the late 1980s. Israeli media did not report about the sit-ins, hunger strikes, and boycotts. Instead, the organized uprising was promptly labeled “terrorism” when (later to be named a Nobel Peace Prize Laureate) then-Defense Minister Rabin ordered the Israeli military to “break their bones”—sending tens of thousands of Palestinian activists to hospitals and Israeli prisons.The uprising succeeded in raising awareness leading to global pressure on Israel. The first time the two-state solution was introduced was in 1991 in Madrid at the first so-called peace talks. Over the following years, under Prime Minister Rabin’s Labor party, Israel doubled the number of settlers from 200,000 to 400,000, all during the peace talks!The economic implication of the U.S. brokered 1994-Paris-Protocol (the same year Clinton signed the North American Free Trade Agreement into law) was a kosher stamp of approval for the Bank of Israel, using the NIS, to control the income/export taxes and VAT in the Occupied Territories. It took a decade to quell the protest movement and to corner Palestinian leadership into accepting the West’s conditions for legitimacy. The Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO), representing Palestinians in Israel, Jerusalem, the West Bank, Gaza, and around the world, was dismantled by 1995. The Palestinian Authority (PA) was promptly assembled to administer municipal responsibilities in a number of Palestinian cities in the West Bank.It would not be an exaggeration to claim that the PA is an extended branch of the Israeli government. The real implications of the Oslo Accords were the entrapment of the Palestinian workforce and the subjugation of old Palestinian economies to the neoliberal Israeli (American) banking system. The two-state solution was really based on a one-state Israeli economy.Later, Prime Minister Ehud Barak’s media team finally exposed how the 1999 Camp David “generous offer” didn’t include water rights, international borders, territorial continuity, an independent economy or even a capital in the negotiated Palestinian state. But still, all Israelis heard from our politicians and media, repeated time and again, was the mantra: “There is no partner for peace.” Most Israelis will never learn in Israeli civics class that Palestinian residents of Jerusalem have a different legal status and do not have the universal right to vote in any national elections. Nor will we learn that it isn’t BDS causing massive unemployment; that the eight-meter wall was constructed around the largest Palestinian metropolitan areas, separating workforce in the suburbs from their central business district, causing thousands of businesses to fold and leading to massive unemployment, intentionally and permanently crippling Palestinian economies.Palestinian political leadership made a strategic political decision to call off violent resistance in 2004. Since then, the ongoing status quo has allowed Israeli business to grow and for us Israelis to continue our lives oblivious to the ongoing oppression of Palestinians. While it may seem as if the only thing Israel responds to is violence, the nonviolent global BDS call has been one of the strongest campaigns to keep the Occupation on the global map without the use of violence!With the recent appointment of rabid Israeli settlement supporter, David Friedman by President Trump, as the next U.S. Ambassador to Israel, the U.S. has finally come out of the closet clearly on the Israeli side of the Palestinian/Israeli negotiations. Freedman honestly and openly voices the implicit message those of us who have been following closely have known for quite some time: there isn’t going to be a two-state solution! Perhaps now, a movement for justice and equality can focus on more practical campaigns.With a clear set of demands designed to guarantee equality in Israel/Palestine, the global BDS movement is anchored in progressive standards of justice—and the world is listening. The Israeli settlement economy is considered a pariah and has been singled out by European institutions that now demand that settlement goods touting that they are “made in Israel” be labeled as such. Major Christian churches such as the Presbyterians have voted to divest from corporations turning a profit off the Occupation. Companies such as the French cell phone carrier Orange pulled out. The largest private security company in the world, G4S, recently announced its intention to abandon its contracts in Israel. Even Israeli companies Soda Stream and Ahava (owned today by China) have recently declared they will relocate across the Green Line.Critics of BDS sometimes ask why there is a disproportionate focus on Israel as opposed to other countries with records of human rights violations. The first part of the answer is we’re not, there are many other campaigns for justice we are focusing on and you must not be paying attention. The second part is that we focus on Israel/Palestine because together we receive more financial aid than almost anyone! And finally, the answer is that Israel claims to be a progressive, democratic society, so shouldn’t we expect and demand that it lives up to the standard it has set for itself?The BDS call in no way makes Israelis or Jews in the Diaspora less safe. But the grassroots movement for justice demands we face the racist nature of our Israeli democracy. BDS invites us to discuss the unequal nature of the one-state economic reality. For many of us in Jewish communities around the world this is a devastating truth to come to terms with. Israel isn’t really the Jewish democracy we thought it was, let’s be honest, friends, Israel is a democracy for Jews, not for anyone else—Palestinians just happen to be there.Anyone following Israeli politics is aware that Israeli society is not taking the news well, and has gone down a very scary and dark road. Jewish supremacist lynch mobs dominate the streets of downtown Jerusalem without fear of prosecution. More than ever, government/military policy is designed to violently pressure Palestinian communities to leave. Some young Palestinians, in turn, crack under the pressure and violently react, lashing out with random acts of violence, stabbing Israeli civilians. I cannot remember a time when tensions were so high as they are at the time of penning this article.But the heightened levels of rhetoric, violence, and racism in Jerusalem are not caused by those Palestinians or the BDS movement. This grim political reality is led by Israeli politicians, but mostly enabled by the silence and compliance of Jews and Christians around the world. Blindly supporting the Israeli narrative has caused a national psychosis no current Israeli leader can lead us out of. As an Ashkenazi Israeli man, I am learning just how much privilege I’ve had all my life and I hope to leverage it toward equality and justice. This is why I place my hope in the principled Palestinian call for BDS and in grassroots organizers in Palestine.As an Israeli, I now work in solidarity with my Palestinian neighbors because I was raised in Jerusalem, a city we share, and because I was taught “never again” and to not stand idle in complacency while we ethnically cleanse our neighbors. I work with a growing network of Jews around the world, in the Diaspora, who, awake to the injustices of my country, are joining the BDS call and organizing their communities. Using the core of Jewish ethics, these groups are asking mainstream Jewish institutions to stand behind Jewish values and speak out against the ongoing violence and the Occupation.But most of all, I support BDS because it is only the beginning. BDS provides the principled, justice-based foundation for the truly democratic society I would like to live in, it implicitly asks; what does the day after the occupation look like? BDS provides a list of tactics. The broader strategy is to support a vibrant Palestinian society, side by side with the Israeli, so that neither has to leave. BDS calls for making separation, inequality, racism, and blind nationalism things of the past.Otherwise, you tell me, what’s the alternative?