What arguments are being made in the court houses of America to block the anti BDS laws ?
Here are a few brought up by Zionists and their supporters over there to block BDS:
1- “BDS calls for the destruction of Israel”
This is perhaps the most common baseless smear directed against the BDS movement. From the goals of the movement, as well as its call for action, nowhere does it call for destruction. This is a bad faith reading of the movements third goal:
“Respecting, protecting and promoting the rights of Palestinian refugees to return to their homes and properties as stipulated in UN resolution 194.”
Since this calls for the return of Palestinian refugees, this would mean threatening Israel’s Jewish majority. Naturally, the fact that this majority is only artificially maintained through expelling the natives is never brought up. I suppose it is an inconvenient fact to face that Israelis only have their homes because millions of Palestinians don’t have theirs.
Regardless, if Israel were truly an egalitarian and democratic state, as its defenders so often insist, then it wouldn’t matter what the demographic make-up of the country is. A citizen is a citizen. However, Israel is not a democracy, but an ethnocracy built around privileging Jewish Israelis over everyone else.This pushes Israel to instate racist laws that discriminate against Palestinians, even those it begrudgingly calls citizens. This ethnocratic logic animates much of Israel’s demographic obsessions, and gives credence to the utterly dehumanizing view that Palestinian babies are demographic threats, because they endanger an absolute Jewish majority.
Could you imagine any other state saying “we need to maintain a majority of X ethnic group” and instating racist laws to make it happen, and still be considered a liberal first world democracy?
However, the return of refugees does not necessarily imply destruction, but it would damage the Israeli regime which has historically organized itself through discriminatory and colonial policies of ethnic supremacy. It is intellectually dishonest to claim that dismantling this racist system is tantamount for calling for the genocide of all Israelis, as it is often claimed. When the Apartheid regime in South Africa was defeated, this did not mean the physical destruction of South Africa as a state, or the genocide of the Afrikaner. However, critics of the ANC constantly falsely accused them of calling for the genocide of the white population, similar to how Israelis do today against Palestinians.
It should be noted, however, that the BDS movement takes no position on political solutions. It is purely a human rights movement, no matter what intentions are projected onto it. Naturally, its various members do have political positions, but these are not representative of the movement as a whole which has only three goals, which can be found in its call to action:
1. Ending Israeli occupation and colonization of all Arab lands and dismantling the Wall.
2. Recognizing the fundamental rights of the Arab-Palestinian citizens of Israel to full equality.
3. Respecting, protecting and promoting the rights of Palestinian refugees to return to their homes and properties as stipulated in UN resolution 194.
As you can see, the goals of the BDS movement are simply the consistent application of international law. Any other intentions or objectives attributed to the movement are the result of projecting them onto it, and is often by bad faith actors intent on smearing any kind of Palestinian resistance.
2- “BDS singles out Israel for punishment, and applies a double standard towards it”
This is also a prominent argument put forward by critics of BDS. The argument is as follows: There are human rights violators out there much worse than Israel, yet there are no campaigns aimed at isolating them and putting pressure on them. Therefore, the BDS campaign is practicing a double standard as it does not call for the boycott of other human rights violators and singles out Israel specifically.
A more extreme version of this argument posits that since Israel is the only Jewish state, and this movement singles out Israel specifically, then the movement itself is de facto antisemitic in nature and is fueled by hatred for the Jewish people.
This criticism -if we assume good faith- betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of what BDS is. The BDS movement was started by Palestinians specifically regarding their very own issue. It is not a universal scale of justice that metes out punishments on a global scale, rather it is an issue specific movement that focuses on the Palestinian question. People all over the world choose to answer this call for solidarity.
Furthermore, this argument is an implicit admission of guilt. The objection does not even attempt to deny Israel’s wrongdoing, but rather seeks to distract from the fact by pointing fingers at others. This is a laughable attempt at shifting blame, could you imagine this argument in any other context?
Was the Black Civil Rights movement full of hypocrites for boycotting the Montgomery Bus Company while their fellow Africans were being slaughtered in Algeria under French colonial rule?
Of course not, and it is ridiculous to even suggest such a thing.
Notice, however, how these violations in other countries are instrumentalized and wielded as a cudgel with no real interest in their impact. The latest spate of normalization with absolutist Arab monarchies shows that this concern was nothing more than a distraction tactic, as the Gulf countries used to be a favorite example for this maneuver. I’m certain they’ll be shifting to less friendly cases soon enough.
However, if we wish to discuss Israel being singled out, it should be noted that although Israel is one of the world’s leading countries when it comes to violating and ignoring UNSC resolutions, it is still afforded a special place among the nations and considered a democratic civilized first world country and is afforded special privileges, trade offers and partnerships not available to any other serial violator of human rights. If Israel is being singled out for anything, it is for its impunity to any real consequences for its violations.
3- “The BDS movement harms academic freedom”
This argument is as follows:
There are moderate voices within Israeli academia that sympathize with the Palestinians. By expanding the campaign to include academic targets for boycott, these voices are also damaged and silenced to where they cannot help create a just peace. Furthermore, it damages academic freedom which should be above politics.
Israeli academia, like virtually every sector of Israeli society, has a long history of not only complicity with Israeli colonialism, but active support for it. For example, part of Tel Aviv university lies on the ethnically cleansed ruins of the Palestinian village of Sheikh Muwannis. Israeli medical schools store Palestinian bodies which are then used as bargaining chips against their families. Israeli universities help develop the weapons which are then tested on Palestinians, and the tech which control Palestinian lives. But this is hardly the only ways in which Israeli universities aid in the dispossession of Palestinians; as institutions of ideological production and reproduction, they contribute to the maintenance of colonial thought in Israeli society, creating moral justifications for the colonization of Palestine and repression of Palestinians.
Anti-Apartheid South African activist Archbishop Desmond Tutu, asserts that:
“Israeli Universities are an intimate part of the Israeli regime, by active choice…. Israeli universities produce the research, technology, arguments and leaders for maintaining the occupation. BGU is no exception. By maintaining links to both the Israeli defence forces and the arms industry, BGU structurally supports and facilitates the Israeli occupation. For example, BGU offers a fast-tracked programme of training to Israeli Air Force pilots.”
Despite all of this, the BDS movement does not target individual Israeli persons, whether academic or otherwise, but targets mainly Israeli institutions and those representing them in an official capacity. An Israeli professor would not be boycotted purely for being Israeli.
However, there is good reason to suspect that these champions of academic freedom are not sincere in their assertions. For instance, never once during both Intifadas which saw the closure, bombing and raiding of Palestinian universities, did the:
“..senate of any Israeli university pass a resolution protesting the frequent closure of Palestinian universities [by Israel], let alone voice protest the devastation sowed there during the last uprising.”
This silence on the violation of Palestinian academic freedom was hardly a one-time occurrence. Israeli professor Menachem Fisch et al. designed a social experiment in the aftermath of the bombing of the Islamic University in Gaza during the war in 2008, where he circulated a petition among Israeli academics to denounce this attack against academic freedom and Palestinians right to education. Out of the 9000 academics contacted (5000 of which were senior faculty academics), a mere 4% of them agreed to sign the petition.
This sudden interest in academic freedom should only be understood as an insincere and cynical pretext to demonize the BDS movement, and nothing more.
4- “The BDS movement harms sympathetic Israelis”
As mentioned earlier, the BDS movement does not target random Israeli individuals. BDS targets the Israeli government, as well as institutions, organizations and their representatives which are complicit in the repression and dispossession of Palestinians.
5- “The BDS movement is one sided and assigns all blame to Israel”
Settler colonialism is by definition asymmetric and one sided.
It is disingenuous to appeal to a false equivalence or a “both sides” approach when it comes to the Palestinian question. It is the Israelis who are colonizing the Palestinians, and it is the Israelis who are building settlements and annexing Palestinian land. Israelis hold the power between the river and the sea, while Palestinians have noreal means of imposing their wishes. We are not speaking of a conflict between two countries, but an expansionist settler colony versus a native population.
6- “The target of the BDS campaign should be restricted to the illegal Israeli settlements”
Some argue that the scope of BDS is too indiscriminate, and that we should focus our attention instead on the illegal Israeli settlements themselves, rather than Israel. There are multiple issues with this line of thought; most glaring of which is that settlements and other illegal policies are not self-perpetrating, and neither are they occurring in a vacuum. Settlements need to be built, maintained, protected, developed, and all this is performed gleefully by Israel, which has always sought to maximize its land-grabs.
Israel actively incentivises the transfer of its population into the settlements by declaring them “National Priority areas”, meaning that they are the recipients of generous state subsidies in multiple areas, such as housing and education. Furthermore, Israel’s violations of international law are not related only to the areas it occupied in the 1967 war, but to the entirety of the land it controls, including inside the green line.
However, even if you were to remain unconvinced by all of the above, this type of targeted boycott is unfeasible for practical reasons as well. From a distance, looking at static maps it might appear that the green line neatly dissects Palestine into 1948 and 1967 territories, on the ground the green line simply does not exist for Israelis. Hundreds of thousands of settlers commute to work every day over the green line, and it is not a factor in everyday Israeli life. For all intents and purposes the settlements are part of Israel, and not a neat separate entity that can be easily singled out for boycotts.
7- “BDS should not include a boycott against Israeli culture”
BDS does not target individual Israeli artists, but institutions or those complicit in the oppression of Palestinians and the whitewashing of Israeli crimes.
Israel has always been very public about usingcultural means to improve its image abroad, and to divert attention away from its oppression of the Palestinians. A recent example is Israel hosting Eurovision in Tel Aviv in an attempt to put a pluralistic and “pretty face” on the state, and whitewash its human rights violations. It should be noted that Israel is not unique in this regard, as Apartheid South Africa also hosted music festivals and cultural events in an effort to change perceptions of the racist state.
In this context, cultural activities gain a new role, one that is complicit in oppression. Even things that seem inconsequential in the grand scheme of things all contribute to whitewashing Israel’s image. For example, Maxim magazine’s infamous “Women of Israel Defence Forces” article was deemed so benefecial to Israel’s international reputation that the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs threw a party celebrating its publication.
All the arguments behind Anti-BDS laws are null and void.
Au Revoir