One of the most common
challenges to the Divest-nista crowd is why they don’t call and march for
divestment against Sudan, China, Syria or any of the totalitarian dictatorships
whose daily human rights abuses dwarf anything Israel could have possibly done
over the course of 60 years.
Generally, their first
response is to ignore the question and move onto their next accusations (real
or imagined) against Israel, hoping that no one will peek behind the curtain.
While such stonewalling can work for a while, those trying to sell BDS to the
general public must eventually explain the apparent double standard whereby
Israel must be punished while its dictatorial critics are left alone. Some of
the more easily dismissed excuses I’ve seen from US-based divestniks include:
·
Israel is a democracy and
thus our protests can have an impact there (ignoring the obvious corollary that
the best way to avoid the wrath of these alleged “human rights” champions is to
be a dictatorship)
·
Israel is an ally of the
US, and thus as Americans we are obliged to criticize our friends more than our
foes (ignoring the obvious question as to why their limitless hostility does
not extend to other US allies like Saudi Arabia and Egypt)
·
“Israel receives [pick
your sum, ranging from three-billion to eleventy-jillion dollars] in US aid so
as a US citizen it’s the use of my tax dollars I’m protesting” (never
specifying why a country like Egypt, which receives 2/3 as much US aid as
Israel - a formula calculated at Camp David decades ago - receives <1 66="" against="" boycotters="" direct="" hostility="" israel="" o:p="" of="" rather="" than="" the="">
Clearly, these are just
excuses or rationalizations for people who have a political agenda (hostility
towards the Jewish state) who feel a need to dress up their attitudes in the
ill-fitting garments of legitimate principle. Yet even if such hypocrisy is the
compliment vice pays to virtue, the excuses BDSers use to explain their obvious
double standards only stretches so thin, often with embarrassing results.
My favorite example of
over-reach in an effort to explain away the double standard was the UK academic
boycotters who claimed their effort to sanction Israeli universities would be
particularly effective because of the Jews unique love and respect for
learning. Needless to say, this implied dissing of the scholarly passions of
non-Jewish societies did not go over well with the boycotters' third-worlder
constituency.
Within this rickety pile
of excuses, the only one that is backed by enough fact to not be immediately
dismissed as a smoke screen is the claim that the call for boycotting Israel
welled up from the Palestinians themselves in the form of a 2002 boycott call
from the Palestinian Campaign for Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (or PACBI).
Because the PACBI BDS call (unlike so many divestment hoaxes) actually exists,
poking holes in this argument takes a little more effort. But not much…
To be continued…