Wednesday, May 11, 2022
From Ian:
Einat Wilf: The BDS Pound of Flesh
Einat Wilf: The BDS Pound of Flesh
Fresh from my experience as an Israeli, I was able to recognize the same dynamic starting to play out on American campuses. When I attended college in the United States in the mid-1990s, liberal, left-wing Jews could comfortably be pro-Israel and even active in AIPAC without any fear of repercussions or social pressure to hand over a pound of flesh. That changed with the emergence of J Street, IfNotNow, and Jewish Voices for Peace, until we arrived at the present condition, in which a Jewish student who does not show herself to be an ally of Students for Justice in Palestine, or does not agree that “Zionism equals racism,” or that Zionism is a form of apartheid, and Nazism, and white supremacy, and whatever other supreme evil will be identified next, cannot be considered a good Jew. This escalation in anti-Israel activism among some young Jews no longer seemed like a natural and excusable choice shaped by different generational circumstances, but the result of a relentless campaign of bullying.Harvard, BDS and the Nazis
Over the last several months, as a visiting professor at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., I taught a course called “Zionism and Anti-Zionism.” In the many hours I spent discussing student life with students and faculty alike, it became apparent that the anti-Zionist activism on campus—the college version of the pound of flesh dynamic—was not primarily a form of social protest or political expression, but a form of bullying. The anti-Zionist activists, like classic bullies, deliberately targeted the real and perceived frailties of their Jewish peers—fear or shame in the expression of one’s Jewish identity, with its calls to Jewish solidarity and deep connection to a faraway foreign country.
The Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement has been one of the most effective expressions of the pound of flesh bullying tactic, inviting young Jews to participate in the cause of “social justice” only to ultimately demand the mutilation of their Jewish identity. BDS has demanded that diaspora Jews not only criticize Israeli government actions, but sever their connections with Israel completely.
The issue is not limited to campus or student life. Last fall, the D.C. chapter of the Sunrise Movement, an organization “mobilizing young people to make climate change an urgent priority across America,” pulled out of a rally to support voting rights because the Jewish organizations also participating supported Israel. The groups that Sunrise mentioned—National Council of Jewish Women, the Reform movement’s Religious Action Center, and the Jewish Council for Public Affairs—are some of the most progressive organizations in American Jewry, devoted to numerous left-wing causes. No matter. These organizations, by their mere presence at an environmental rally, were sullying a noble cause. Unless, that is, they were willing to give up a pound of flesh: their Zionism.
In January, Big Duck, a Brooklyn-based marketing firm with several nonprofit clients, declined to work with the Shalom Hartman Institute over its connection to Israel. This led Shalom Hartman to issue a statement identifying Big Duck’s decision as “a moving of the goalposts on BDS from Israel to North American Jewish organizations,” the never-ending pound of flesh demand in practice. The institute correctly noted that this “applies a standard on North American Jewish commitments that would exclude the vast majority of the members of our community.” In other words, the ancient goal of making it harder and harder for Jews to be fully Jewish, until it eventually becomes impossible.
My choice to step back from the pound of flesh dynamic was a personal one. But I have since met many Jews, older and younger, who shared with me their confrontation with the same challenge and sense that they need to make a similar decision. Extracting oneself from this toxic dynamic is not only the right thing to do, but also a key to mental health. Anti-Zionist bullying takes an emotional toll, and it cuts to the deepest levels of our Jewish identities. Rather than try to find out how many pounds of flesh it would take to make the bullies go away, the only effective response is to resist them with confidence. It’s hard to bully a proud people; it’s impossible to bully a people who know they have nothing to be ashamed of, and who don’t need or seek anyone else’s approval in the first place. The only response to anti-Zionism, in other words, is Zionism.
The editors of Harvard's student newspaper have just urged a boycott of the Jewish state and praised a campus group that has celebrated a murderer of Jewish college students. In the 1930s, the editors of the same newspaper asserted that Harvard should grant an award to a Nazi official who promoted anti-Jewish boycotts and celebrated murderers of Jews.Jonathan S. Tobin: Can the UN's antisemitism problem be solved?
Is there a basis for comparing today's editors of The Harvard Crimson to their pre-World War II predecessors?
The Crimson's editors last week accused Israel of committing "crimes against humanity" and endorsed the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement. One presumes the editors are aware of the fact that BDS founder Omar Barghouti has said his goal is not to oppose "settlements" or "occupation," but rather to "oppose a Jewish state in any part of Palestine."
The editorial heaped praise on the "colorful" and "spirited" anti-Israel activities organized on campus by the Harvard College Palestine Solidarity Committee. For some reason, it did not refer to the Committee's 2015 post of a video that justified knife attacks against random Israeli Jews, or its 2016 event in support of Rasmea Odeh, the convicted murderer of two Hebrew University students in Jerusalem.
It would not be a stretch to imagine that if Ernst "Putzi" Hanfstaengl were alive today, he would be an enthusiastic supporter of the BDS campaign, the Palestine Solidarity Committee and Rasmea Odeh.
The shameful story of Hanfstaengl and Harvard was documented in the landmark 2005 book The Third Reich in the Ivory Tower by Prof. Stephen Norwood.
For decades, supporters of Israel have debated what to do about the United Nations. Should they ignore it as a talking shop that makes a lot of noise but can't impact events on the ground in the Middle East? Or should they treat its growing efforts to smear Israel as an "apartheid state" a genuine threat to the Jewish state?
Many Israelis, including those in the government, have trouble taking the United Nations seriously. Israel's first prime minister and founding father, David Ben-Gurion, famously dismissed the concerns of Moshe Sharrett, who served as his foreign minister and initial successor, about the importance of the world body. Using the Hebrew acronym for the UN (UM), Ben-Gurion disputed the idea that without UN backing in the 1947 Partition Resolution, the Jewish state wouldn't have been founded.
"Not at all," Ben-Gurion responded. "Only the daring of the Jews founded this country and not some 'Um-shmum' resolution."
That sentiment expressed his admirable philosophy that the actions of the Jews were far more important than the opinions of the non-Jewish world. Several decades later, it still accurately sums up the way many Israelis feel about the United Nations, which is even more hostile to their nation than it was in Ben-Gurion's time.
The world body's bias against the Jewish state is baked into the cake due to the dominance of Islamist, Marxist and Third World nations that buy into the lie that Zionism is racism. That bias has been expressed in many ways over the years—from the General Assembly's passage in 1975 of the infamous "Zionism is racism" resolution to its role in convening the 2001 Durban Conference on Racism, which became an anti-Semitic hatefest.
The United Nations and its various agencies are a ticker tape of reports, programs and resolutions aimed at undermining the Jewish state's security and bolstering the Palestinians' century-old war on Zionism. The UN Relief Works Agency (UNRWA) is solely focused on ensuring that the descendants of Palestinian Arabs who fled the country during Israel's 1948 War of Independence remain stateless refugees to be used as propaganda to delegitimize the existence of a Jewish state.
