BDS and Its Critics

By Stephen Eric Bronner, Middle East Monitor

26 June 20

o civil society group in the United States has undergone as much censorious repression as the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement — better known simply as BDS — and the most radical critic of Israeli policy in Gaza and the West Bank. Twenty-eight states have passed “anti-boycott” legislation condemning BDS. Israel has published a “blacklist” of groups whose members will be denied entry into the country. With an air of paranoia, mainstream Jewish and Zionist organisations have condemned BDS. And why not? It helps justify their existence.

Campus after campus has made BDS unwelcome, although it is true that support for the movement has grown among young student radicals, and it has prompted offshoots and allied groupings in Europe. However, it is also true that BDS has made little headway in American political life. Perhaps 35 out of 435 members of Congress supported a tepid resolution in defence of Palestinian Human Rights, but the House of Representatives also passed a resolution condemning BDS overwhelmingly. What’s more, there was strong bipartisan support for President Donald Trump’s decision to move the US Embassy to Jerusalem and for a “peace plan” that any sane Palestinian would find unacceptable. Meanwhile, punishment for criticising Israel on US campuses occurs so often that the Centre for Constitutional Rights has spoken caustically about a “Palestinian exception” to free speech. Needless to say, Trump has described BDS as a terrorist organisation.

A number of my very close friends are supporters of BDS, and I trust their intelligence and integrity implicitly. The majority of BDS supporters are neither anti-Semites nor self-hating Jews, but rather radicals seeking justice for a colonised people denied the right of national self-determination. Their outraged backing for the Palestinians is, in principle, no different than what rebels of an earlier time extended to the North Vietnamese against the United States or the Algerians against France. Initially, those white critics supporting people of colour against Western imperialism were a minority; ultimately, of course, that changed. BDS is hoping for more of the same.

Existing alongside these radicals of goodwill, almost inevitably there are blatant ant-Semites involved in the BDS movement who speak about driving the Jews into the sea, abolishing Israel and possible deportations. They actually get more press coverage than they deserve and it is true that too many excuses are still being made on their behalf.

Moreover, there are reasons why the Palestinian Authority in Ramallah keeps its distance from BDS; only Hamas offers it ideological support. For better or worse, Israel remains Palestine’s primary economic partner while Egypt as well as Jordan, which have peace treaties with Israel, have little use for BDS.

I am not a member of BDS, nor is my co-director of the International Council for Diplomacy and Dialogue, Eric Gozlan. That decision is rooted in our principles and interests.

BDS calls upon Israel to retreat beyond its 1967 borders; provide equal rights for Israeli Arabs and Palestinians; acknowledge the right of return; knock down the odious border controls; and essentially allow for free intercourse between Arabs and Israelis. On the question of one-state or two, BDS is coy; it has no objection to an Israeli state, but not on Palestinian land. BDS thus draws the distinction between Jews and Zionists as if that helps explain the future treatment of Israeli citizens who might be Jews and Zionists, or neither, or one of the two. It is also not clear whether the right of return is meant as a symbolic demand or a practical one; symbolically, and legitimately, it calls for compensating the Palestinian community, not individuals. As a practical political demand, however, BDS has offered no ideas about how to repatriate millions of individuals into a new state with what will surely prove to be a fragile economy. Given the bureaucratic problems associated with constituting a unified state, the lack of trust or empathy between Israelis and Palestinians, the transformation of Jews from a majority into a minority, and the lack of clarity concerning the government that the Palestinians wish to introduce, there is little serious incentive for either side to support the BDS agenda.

Admittedly, these are mostly long-term strategic considerations, but the short-term tactics of BDS are also problematic. Just as the Zionist right wing ignores Palestinian interests, BDS ignores Israeli security issues and has no constructive ideas about what to do with the hundreds of thousands of mostly reactionary settlers or the orthodox part of the Jewish community that together might well take up arms against the Israeli government in the face of any transformative political project. Without support from Ramallah, moreover, BDS would leave Israel in the position of having to negotiate with two partners thus projecting the self-defeating prospect not of one state, or two states, but three.

Israel has no sympathy for BDS, and even Meretz, a genuinely left-wing party, rejects it. Perhaps this is because there is even a lack of clarity about the meaning of “boycott”, “divestment” and “sanctions”. Depending on who one asks, “boycott” and “divestment” are meant to target companies with direct ties to the Israeli occupation; all companies doing business with Israel, but not universities; all corporations and all universities but not progressive academics and artists; or all of the above. Furthermore, anyone with even a cursory knowledge about sanctions knows that they mostly have an impact on working people, the poor, and the most vulnerable. There is also no reason why Israel – as against a litany of far more repressive and genocidal states – should alone be the subject of boycott, divestment, and sanctions.

BDS has put no meaningful proposals on the table, but its existence has pressured other, sometimes liberal and Zionist organisations like J-Street, to endorse boycotting and divesting from companies that are engaged actively in the occupation of Palestine. That is a genuine contribution. Raising awareness about the conflict among the young is another. And presenting the radical Palestinian standpoint is still another. However, the movement’s critics acknowledge none of this. They know it all, there is nothing to be learned, so shut down BDS, and liberal principles be damned.

It is high time for both sides to show a little humility. Engage in symbolic protests if you like, turn your backs on speakers, or even walk out of an assembly; but protest against their ideas (and tackle them seriously) not their right to speak.

Kant knew that freedom of speech is the foundation for all other political freedoms. And there is that famous line attributed (falsely) to Voltaire: “I disapprove of what you say but I will defend to the death your right to say it.” The hysteria surrounding BDS in the US and now in Europe is deplorable. The far-right can do what it wishes, but when liberals, socialists and people of the left start mimicking its calls for censorship and the denial of free assembly, things never turn out well. Israel has not divulged which groups supporting BDS have been banned, and this, my friends, is a dangerous precedent.

Censoring the far left has traditionally been the first step on the road to censoring others. The self-righteous critics of BDS generally surrender to the paranoia, intolerance, and extremism that they otherwise denounce. Of course, similar criticisms apply to those in BDS who ignore the enlightenment values upon which their project should be based. Such attitudes lead only to political practices that increase the visibility, publicity, and martyr-like status of their target. When Jews proclaim support for Trump or France’s Marine Le Pen, because such leaders are “good for the Jews” or because of the venom they spout against Arabs and people of colour generally, these opportunists are not being “realistic” or “pragmatic”. They are just being short-sighted in swallowing ideological nonsense, abandoning their principles, isolating Israel still further, and fomenting anti-Semitic resentment, while forgetting that their new right-wing allies can (and probably will) change policies in the blink of an eye.

No less than the folks in BDS, the movement’s reactionary critics also lack a positive vision for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Palestinian concerns simply don’t matter to them. By implicitly or explicitly endorsing Israeli settlement expansion, balkanising the West Bank, and boycotting Gaza, their stubborn arrogance contributes to a politics of stasis that has become ever more odious and frustrating.

It’s almost as if BDS and its right-wing critics have become mirror images of one another: les extremes se touchent. Supporters of BDS seem congenitally incapable of admitting that Palestinian leaders ever made a mistake. Palestinians are victims pure and simple; memories of the brutal Palestinian expulsion from their lands, pride and honour prevented their leaders from adapting tactics and demands to an ever-greater imbalance of power, and all this while their future state began to shrink and turn from a viable into a non-contiguous entity.

As for the right-wing critics of BDS, the situation is no different: lack of peace is always the fault of the Palestinians; atrocities committed against them during the expulsion from the new state of Israel were not really that bad, not compared to what the Jews suffered in the Holocaust; and Biblical claims to Judea and Samaria justify any Israeli use of excessive force and any of its imperialist ambitions. Like Israel, for whom it claims to speak, the extremist right is also a victim, actually a greater victim, though very few are still alive who ever experienced a concentration camp; only necessity has forced these victims into the role of conquerors.

Intransigence and self-righteousness have led both BDS and its reactionary critics to consider anything except uncritical support as what communists used to call an “objective apology” for the enemy. Dialogue has broken down and political positions have hardened on both sides. Hope and humanist sentiments are about all that remain for the reasonable. But there are also intelligent activists with goodwill on both sides of the barricades, and perhaps there is something simmering beneath the verbiage: ideas to rekindle negotiations, reformulate demands, change tactics and actually contribute to the prospects for peace that are growing dimmer by the day.

The Trump Campaign's Gross Political Malpractice

By Frank Rich, New York Magazine

26 June 20

Most weeks, New York Magazine writer-at-large Frank Rich speaks with contributor Alex Carp about the biggest stories in politics and culture. Today, Trump’s campaign after Tulsa, the nationwide coronavirus surge, and Bill Barr’s attempt at a Friday Night Massacre.

resident Trump’s Tulsa rally failed to be the campaign launchpad that he and his staff had envisioned. Where does his campaign go from here?

Perhaps the most important thing we learned from Trump’s Tulsa fiasco is that there is no Trump campaign. No real political campaign, even for City Council, would let the candidate and his minions repeatedly promise a million attendees at a rally that missed that mark by some 993,800. No real campaign would demolish its unused outdoor stage for that rally’s “overflow” in broad daylight, on camera, as cable news scrounged for images while waiting for the rally to start, rather than wait until after dark to whisk away the humiliating ruins of defeat. No real campaign would let its candidate be seen returning to the White House that night, all alone, his tie undone, his MAGA cap crushed in his hand, a dinner-theater Willy Loman in visible disarray on a walk of shame.

Wasn’t bravura showmanship, especially when appearing on television, supposed to be Trump’s one unassailable gift as a politician? Coming after the ramp embarrassment at West Point — further evidence of the failure of a political advance team to manage the most basic performative elements of election-year stagecraft — Tulsa suggests the wheels are coming off the Trump show.

Someone will get fired, presumably, but as we all know, it doesn’t matter. Now, as in 2016, Trump sees himself as the bearer of the golden gut who always knows best and will override the “experts” who think they know better. But physically and mentally, he’s not the guy he was four years ago, he’s not facing the same opponent he did four years ago, and only the truest of believers can ignore what’s happened in America on his watch.

Those true believers will never betray him. “Give me liberty or give me corona,” one middle-age MAGA fan in Tulsa told the Times. These people are literally willing to die for their dear leader. They were happy to camp out much of a week in punishing heat and torrential rain, to expose themselves to a deadly disease, to be sure to get good seats Saturday night. But this loyal hard core represents roughly a third of the country — the same percentage of seats they filled in the 19,000-seat BOK Center.

What now? Trump can’t risk his favored outdoor rallies in large arenas lest this debacle repeat itself. He has only one message: a brew of virulent white supremacism and nativism that veers between attacking American racial and ethnic minorities at home and blaming every administration failure on China and its “kung flu.” It’s not working. Most Americans abhorred the spectacle of Trump’s troops firing tear gas at peaceful demonstrators to make way for his biblical photo op. The antifa villains that Trump and Bill Barr have identified as the ringleaders of a national assault on “law and order” have evaporated much like those Latin American caravans that once were supposedly preparing to assault America’s southern border. Meanwhile, evidence of how much Trump and his party are in hock to China seems to be surfacing continuously. In this week’s installment, The Wall Street Journal reported that wealthy Chinese people with ties to the Chinese national-security apparatus and military and looking to buy influence in the White House have been pouring hundreds of thousands of dollars into Trump’s reelection. You can bet that the Lincoln Project will knit the photographic evidence into spots far more persuasive than Trump’s evidence-free eruptions about #BeijingBiden.

Biden is also proving a much more formidable candidate against the 2020 iteration of Trump than most (including me) had figured. The Tulsa audience wasn’t whipped into a frenzy by their hero’s Biden insults; it’s further evidence of how essential misogyny was to the bloodthirsty cries of “Lock her up!” four years ago. “Lock him up” just doesn’t have the same ring. And Biden’s calibrated rollout to public settings has flustered Trump too. The president looks impotent when he swings and misses at “invisible” enemies.

No one can rely on polls showing a Biden romp more than four months before Election Day. Anything can happen. But one thing that won’t happen: Trump won’t change. He won’t stop showboating his racism. He won’t stop believing that “opening up” the economy will lead to a skyrocketing economic recovery in the midst of a skyrocketing pandemic. Even the little lessons are never learned. Only a couple of weeks after he turned John Bolton’s memoir into a No. 1 best-seller, he is doing the same for his niece Mary Trump’s memoir, Too Much and Never Enough, No. 4 on the Amazon list a month ahead of its publication thanks to the latest doomed Trump legal action to suppress it.

New coronavirus surges in states that have reopened have left some experts in other countries thinking that “the U.S. has given up” attempts to rein in the pandemic. Are they right?

Speaking of Trump as never changing: As the American death count passes 120,000, he is more persuaded than ever that COVID-19 will just go away miraculously because he wills it to happen. Having surrendered to the “invisible” enemy of the coronavirus, he is going after visible enemies — testing, masks, and anything else that might help thwart it. Now that the spread is spiking exponentially in red states, some of those mini-Trump governors who did the bare minimum to protect their constituents at the outset — Ron DeSantis in Florida, Greg Abbott in Texas, Doug Ducey in Arizona, Asa Hutchinson in Arkansas — are starting to panic and about-face. But not Trump. He may or may not have slowed down testing in the past, but he certainly is now: The federal support of testing is going to be scaled back even further at the end of the month, including in states like Texas. My guess is that Trump would, however, be glad to have taxpayers foot the bill to ramp up production of that air-purification system (it “kills 99.9 percent of COVID within 10 minutes”) hawked by the Phoenix megachurch where he appeared yesterday. It shows even more promise than hydroxychloroquine.

After Bill Barr’s botched attempt at a Saturday Night Massacre in the Manhattan federal prosecutors’ office, Jerrold Nadler has said he is preparing to subpoena Barr to testify in Congress and threatened to limit Barr’s budget if he does not comply. Will increased pressure change Barr’s behavior?

“Botched” doesn’t begin to describe Barr’s sub-Machiavellian move at the SDNY. It takes a certain amount of idiocy to stage a Saturday Night Massacre on Friday night. Richard Nixon knew that by staging a coup on Saturday night, you catch the Sunday television talk shows and newspapers off-guard, whereas, if you do it Friday night, you tee up the media for a full weekend of frenzy.

Not for the first time — or the thousandth, perhaps — America has been rescued from complete authoritarian rule by the sheer incompetence of Trump and his lieutenants, who are rarely better at executing their extralegal maneuvers than they are at their rare forays into legal governance. But Nadler’s threats will go nowhere. Barr will continue to serve his master in any way he can, assuring get-out-of-jail-free cards for the likes of Michael Flynn, Roger Stone, and Rudy Giuliani while continuing to hollow out civil-rights enforcement at Justice even as law-enforcement criminality is given a pass. America has an attorney general who seems far more at home in a bunker with a lawless leader than in any Washington edifice that stands for our Constitution.