“Nation” Writers Use a Fallacious Historical Analogy to Support their BDS Campaign

Ron Radosh
pajamasmedia.com
22 June '10

Writing in the June 28th issue of The Nation, Philip Weiss and Adam Horowitz, present a lengthy article investigating the debate within the American Jewish community over supporting the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions Movement against Israel. (BDS) While most Jewish groups, including liberal ones, recoil from the movement’s effect of delegitimizing Israel, the authors seem to gleam hope for its inroads on college campuses, where there is pressure, especially on Jewish students, to support BDS resolutions.

At Berkeley, where such a resolution was ultimately defeated, Jewish students spoke out against it. Speaking for many of them, one said “We feel marginalized, we feel scared, we feel intimidated, we feel alienated” by the legislation. But not to worry, claim Weiss and Horowitz, such worries surely “accompany any transformative social movement.” To address their anxieties, Palestinian leader Mustafa Barghouthi told the Berkeley students that they should not “stand in the way like those angry Alabama students 50 years ago blocking integration.”

In their article, Weiss and Horowitz make another specious historical claim about Arab Palestinian boycotts in the past:

Boycotts are not a new tactic for Palestinians. As far back as the 1936–39 revolt against the British Mandate, Palestinians incorporated general strikes and boycotts into their struggle.

Anyone who knows about the 1936-1939 “Arab revolt” knows that its main thrust was against British support of Jewish immigration to Palestine. In his classic book A History of Israel from the Rise of Zionism to Our Time, Howard Sachar writes that The Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin el-Husseini, demanded that “the British terminate Jewish immigration immediately.” The Mufti’s strong-arm men then saw to it that an Arab general strike was enforced — a step that primarily hurt Arab business and agriculture, and that ironically stimulated the Jewish economy. The cost of the strike, Sachar points out, “to the Arabs themselves became increasingly punitive.”

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Tutu’s Crusade Against Israel

John Perazzo
frontpagemag.com
19 May '10

At first blush, the suggestion that a Nobel Peace Prize winner would have anything in common with a pack of unabashed, poison-tongued Jew-haters seems preposterous. But Desmond Tutu, the former archbishop of Cape Town, South Africa, who in 1984 won the coveted Nobel award for his campaign against apartheid in that country, is today one of the most celebrated supporters of the “Divest from Israel” movement. Particularly widespread on university campuses across America, this movement routinely offers a high-visibility propaganda forum for some of the most rabid, combative anti-Semites of our time.

At its heart, the campus divestment movement aims to cripple Israel’s economy by compelling universities to withdraw whatever funds they may have invested in Israeli-based or -affiliated corporations. These efforts are founded on the premise that Israel is guilty of practicing apartheid and ethnic cleansing against the Palestinian people. According to the divestment movement’s leaders, the human rights violations perpetrated by Israel are on par with those of the former apartheid regime in Desmond Tutu’s South Africa; many critics go so far as to liken modern Israel to Nazi Germany. When the Associated Students of UC Berkeley recently expressed their wish to have the university divest its money from Israel, Tutu praised their “principled stand” against the “injustice of the Israeli occupation of Palestinian land and violation of Palestinian human rights.” “[I]t is always an inspiration when young people lead the way and speak truth to power,” said Tutu.

The philosophy underlying the divestment movement has been displayed in stark relief recently at a number of University of California campuses, where Muslim student groups sponsored events under the banner of “Israeli Apartheid Week: A Call to Boycott, Divest, and Sanction Israel.” At a Muslim Students Association (MSA) event at UC San Diego, for instance, one MSA member explicitly affirmed that she supported Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah’s assertion that “if Jews all gather in Israel, it will save us [jihadists] the trouble of going after them worldwide.”

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Israel Divestiture Movement at UC Berkeley Loses Battle, but Advances Their War

The campus Hillel has become an unfriendly environment to pro-Zionist students, catching up to the rest of the campus.


Abraham H. Miller
pajamasmedia.com
09 May '10

Both sides of the anti-Israel divestiture movement were focused on UC Berkeley on April 29. Proponents of divestiture were making their third attempt to get a resolution passed, this time by trying to override Student Senate President Will Smelko’s veto of an earlier successful effort. Sometime near five in the morning — after a heated, all-night discussion — the veto was sustained. For now, the divestiture movement had lost.

Even so, the divestiture movement showed both tactical and strategic ingenuity, and increasingly, its narrative of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is taking hold on campuses and in liberal churches:

Israel’s settlements are the obstacles to peace. Palestinian violence is a reaction, if not a justified reaction, to Israeli settlements. If the settlements were removed, peace would break out tomorrow and two states would live in peace and harmony.

Of course this is unhistorical nonsense, promulgated by people who have interest not in a two-state solution but in finding an excuse to gain access to the public agenda and to oversimplify one of the most difficult conflicts on the planet.

In reality, divestiture is meaningless, and everyone knows it. Divestiture, boycotts, and sanctions against Israel are illegal. Even the Arab League, which makes a lot of noise about its boycott, neither enforces nor practices it: the PA openly trades with Israel.

The Associated Students of the University of California at Berkeley hold no stock in General Electric, for example, or any of the other American companies that do business in Israel. More than 80 million shares of GE trade daily. If all the proponents of divestiture coordinated their sale of GE stock, they probably could affect the price of the stock for a few hours to a few days, suffer losses, and yield the upside to those on the other side of the trade. More than likely, Saudi Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, known for his acumen in spotting bargains, would be there on the buying side — GE and Saudi Arabia just announced a major partnership for sustainable economic growth.

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Berkeley BDS and Democracy

Jon
Divest This!
18 April '10

Most of the “by losing, we really won” arguments from the BDSers defeated in last week’s Berkeley divestment battle are like this piece by Jewish Voice for Peace/Muzzlewatch Queen Cecilie Surasky, who substitutes the excitement of getting hundreds of people in a room to bash Israel for ten hours for actual political success. If such arguments rang a hollow ten years ago when groups like JVP begun providing a Jewish face to every BDS initiative on the planet, claiming unstoppable momentum seem positively bizarre after a decade of watching divestment fall flat on its face time and time again.

Now there is one argument the boycotters are making that’s worth dissecting: their claim that they actually won a majority of votes in the Senate (16/20 in the original vote, and 12/20 in the veto override) and should thus be considered the winner of the democratic process (implying that their win was undone by undemocratic political maneuvering by their foes). Not that this argument holds any more water than the other ones they trot out, but it does open up some interesting discussions vis-à-vis BDS and democracy.

For Berkeley’s student government (like the US government) is not an Athenian democracy (where all citizens/students vote on every issue), but is rather, like the US, is a constitutional representative system. Because the word “democracy” is used to describe these very two different kinds of systems, it can get confusing why simple majorities do not always get their way.

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Blast from the Past: Power

Jon
Divest This!
12 April '10

As we await what comes next at UC Berkeley, I thought I'd dredge out some real old stuff, things I wrote years ago when divestment came-a-calling at Somerville, Massachusetts. It's interesting to note that now that BDS is attempting to use the paddles of life to resurrect itself, how little their arguments (or required rebuttals) have actually changed...

Does anyone ever wonder why the Palestinians, alone among peoples without a state, have their own seat at the UN (an organization that spends almost a quarter of its time fighting on their behalf)?

Why does the Palestinian refugee problem have its own international organization (UNWRA) with annual budget of $350 million, while every other refugee in the world (almost twenty million at last count) are lumped together in the "other" category, supported by the United Nationals High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR)?

Why is Palestinian statehood one of the planet's top foreign policy goals, yet independence of for Kurds, Tibetans and Basques has been permanently removed from the international agenda? Why is Palestinian suffering on the West Bank being debated in universities, cities, towns and churches unendingly as Sudanese bury two million people unlamented?

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