An immoral boycott [View all]

As the Middle East devours itself, leaving behind the worst human devastation since World War II, an international movement seeks to delegitimize Israel, the region's only intact society.

Israel alone in the Mideast has an independent judiciary, a free press and religious freedom. Yet the anti-Israel boycott, divestment and sanctions movement, or BDS, has singled out the Jewish state as the world's most pressing problem in the early 21st century.

BDS is at once immoral and a threat to peace. Immoral, because it perpetuates the lie that Israel is solely or even primarily to blame for the absence of a Palestinian state — rather than the repeated rejection by Palestinian leaders of peace plans presented over the decades. Immoral, too, because it ignores the anti-Israel and anti-Jewish hate education on which generations of Palestinians have been raised, an education that denies any place for a Jewish state in any borders.

Like a majority of Israelis, I recognize that the ongoing occupation of the Palestinian people is a long-term threat to my country's well-being. But that same majority of moderate Israelis is deeply wary of the ultimate goal of the Palestinian leadership — both the nationalist Fatah party and the Islamist militant group Hamas. As the Palestinian media broadcast on a daily basis, the goal isn't two states living in peace but a single Arab-majority state in which Jews would be at best a tolerated minority.

http://triblive.com/opinion/featuredcommentary/10718076-74/israel-state-bds