(Jewish group) Is the Boycott Movement Anti-Semitic?

As campus efforts to support boycotts of Israel universities intensify this year — and everyone expects them to in the wake of events in Gaza, the most challenging and controversial question about the movement that sponsors the boycott agenda looms over all of us: Are there anti-Semitic dimensions to the Boycott, Sanctions, and Divestment (BDS) movement?

BDS advocates have long countered the anti-Semitic label by protesting that critics of Israeli government policy do not deserve accusations that they are anti-Semitic. In fact BDS opponents themselves often reject the claim that every critic of Israel, or even every supporter of BDS, is anti-Semitic. Israelis themselves are relentless critics of the government in power, and many of the Jewish state’s strong supporters there and abroad condemn the occupation of the West Bank and urge curtailment of settlement construction or withdrawal from most existing settlements. BDS assertions that they are condemned simply because they are policy critics distract us from the more complex and troubling ways that the movement enhances anti-Semitic aims.

Ever since Lawrence Summers asserted that the divestment movement proposals were “anti-Semitic in their effect, if not in their intent,” we have had a model to use in examining the prejudicial implications of BDS in a more thoughtful way. That does not mean that every divestment proposal is anti-Semitic, but it does help us see why people who advocate the elimination of Israel as a Jewish state are promoting a goal that has anti-Semitic effects.

Arguments that Jews have no ancient connection to the land, that Israelites and Hebrews never existed — positions that some academic BDS advocates promote — also have an anti-Semitic component. The demand that the citizens of Israel give up their right to political self-determination and the unsupportable assertion that the Israeli government is an exceptionally egregious human rights violator are also consciously or unconsciously underwritten by the long-term history of anti-Semitism and the history of efforts to isolate and “other” the Jewish people.

I realize that people will dispute these conclusions, but they nonetheless offer examples of a more serious basis for debating the issue I am urging all of us to address. Doing so also requires that we confront the policies vigorously promoted by virtually all of the BDS movement’s major spokespeople, whether or not the movement officially endorses them. These include advocacy by Omar Barghouti and others of a one-state “solution” encompassing Israel, Gaza, and the West Bank in which Jews would become a minority. That demand is typically accompanied by the call for the Palestinian diaspora’s “right of return” to this new state, a plan that would further marginalize the Jewish population. Both positions are put forward in Barghouti’s Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions, Judith Butler’s Parting Ways, and other books.

The confidence with which some BDS advocates assure us Jews could live peacefully and safely and have full religious freedom in an Arab-dominated state is so contradicted by regional history, culture, and politics that one has to consider the possibility that they really do not care about the fate of Israeli Jews. Naivety alone does not seem to account for so thorough a denial of reality. The real perils Jews could face in an Arab-dominated state undercut the rather pious claims about the movement’s dedication to nonviolence that are part of its founding principles. Once again, highly likely violent effects call into question the status of nonviolent intent. Equally worrisome are those BDS supporters who ally themselves with Hamas, despite the organization’s ferociously anti-Semitic and genocidal charter. One might well wonder why those in the West who would ordinarily oppose a group that vilifies gays — and has an appalling view of women — would overlook these facts because of Hamas’s stance toward Israeli Jews.

more: https://www.insidehighered.com/views/2014/09/02/essay-considers-how-issue-anti-semitism-plays-out-boycott-movement