David Collier: Boycotting Jews is nothing new. It is as old as antisemitism
Making the moderates and soft Zionists aware It is important to make headway with more moderate elements of the left, just as it was and remains vitally important to educate them on the issue of antisemitism. Make no mistake, without these elements of the left – you will not win the argument, as many will come out to defend the right to boycott even if they do not adhere to the movement themselves.JPost Editorial: The UN has failed Israel with its anti-Israeli resolutions
This is made worse by the deliberate vagueness of the BDS movement. As boycotting settlement goods adheres to one of the three BDS goals, left-wing Zionists become reluctant to call it out for what it is. Part of their politics aligns with some of the goals of BDS and therefore they see aligning with BDS detractors as a defacto support of Israeli settlement policy. These people must be made to realise that standing up against an antisemitic movement that seeks the destruction of the state of Israel is the ethical thing to do.
The problems with BDS Therefore, if the antisemitic discrimination inherent in BDS is to be challenged, some of the problems with BDS must be made clear: - Why does BDS make up stories about Jewish people committing crimes? This is what antisemites have always done. - BDS does nothing to protect Palestinians in Lebanon, where they face severe persecution. So BDS cannot claim to be about human rights or protecting Palestinians. - Why does BDS claim it is a ‘call from within’. Not only do they lie about their formation but they also target Israel – Israelis made no such call. - BDS is deliberately vague. They are not explicit in their goals because they need to hide them. - Why does BDS make demands about Israeli Arabs, when they are by far the freest Arabs in the region? - Why do BDS talk about laws that do not exist and then say the Jews must conform to those laws or be punished. This is what medieval Christianity did to the Jews. - Dozens of despotic nations are serial human rights abusers. Far, far worse that Israel. Why pick on the one Jewish state? - If BDS is about human rights, why do so many supporters wave flags from despotic Islamist nations?
Call ‘boycotting Jews’ out for what it is BDS simply needs to be called out for what it is. This is not about free speech. You are not free to illegally discriminate. BDS is just another in a long line of antisemitic movements that chooses boycotting Jews as an initial way of weakening them. It has no place in unions, on campus or on our streets. The BDS movement should be treated as we would treat any of the antisemitic boycott movements from the last 2000 years. They should be shunned wherever they try to sell their hate.
It is likely that the Palestinians would not have been able to hold out for another four years and would have eventually returned to the negotiating table with Israel, although this time with an understanding that compromises would be necessary.The Declining Credibility of Palestinian Objections to the IHRA Definition of Antisemitism
The question now is what will the Biden administration do if it even finds the time to try and restart the Israeli-Palestinian peace process. What happened at the UN last week should serve as a reminder of what is not needed. Israelis and the Palestinians don’t need plans, resolutions and proposals that look good on paper and at academic conferences, but have nothing to do with reality.
The countries that voted in favor of the five anti-Israel resolutions at the UN showed that they are detached from reality and from what is happening in Israel, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. Moreover, anti-Israel resolutions and meetings of the Security Council are not going to bring the sides together.
What can work? An understanding by the Palestinians that they will not simply get what they want and that they will need to compromise to achieve independence, statehood and peace.
For them to understand that, Biden will need to make it clear that the US is not going back to the days of president Barack Obama and the refusal to veto anti-Israel resolutions like 2334 that passed at the end of his presidency.
Now is the time to make that clear.
A group of Palestinian and Arab intellectuals, 122 in all, endorsed a statement last week published by The Guardian newspaper that attacked the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s definition of antisemitism. These intellectuals were concerned because the definition continues to be adopted by hundreds of governments, local authorities, and civic associations in the United States and across the world as an effective instrument for countering the hatred of Jews.
As is often the case with statements such as these, what wasn’t said was as telling to the critical reader as what did make the text.
It’s not that these Arab intellectuals endorse antisemitism. They declare early on that “no expression of hatred for Jews as Jews should be tolerated anywhere in the world.” They recognize, too, that antisemitism “manifests itself in sweeping generalizations and stereotypes about Jews, regarding power and money in particular, along with conspiracy theories and Holocaust denial.”
Yet despite featuring the names of some of the Arab world’s most respected academics, writers, and filmmakers (arch-foes of Israel all), the statement on the IHRA definition at no point acknowledges that antisemitism as a social and religious phenomenon is deeply embedded within the Arab civilizations that these intellectuals represent. Instead, antisemitism is depicted as someone else’s problem, primarily Europe’s.
It is hard to take seriously the expressed commitment to fighting antisemitism in this statement in the face of such blatant airbrushing of Middle Eastern history. For millennia, Jews occupied a precarious place in Arab and Islamic societies, occasionally experiencing more benign rulers, but frequently serving as the targets of official discrimination and popular violence. That history, importantly, includes the Holocaust, as witnessed through the destruction of Jewish communities in German-occupied North Africa; the anti-Jewish riots in Baghdad, Cairo, and other cities; and the broader ideological affinities between the Nazis and Arab nationalists, many of whom would come to power and expel their Jewish populations in Iraq, Syria, Libya, Egypt, and other countries in the coming decades.


















