The bottom line? While I believe there are undoubtedly those out there who will support BDS out of hatred pure and simple, I think it is just too easy to dismiss this movement as ipso facto anti-Semitism. Beyond the fears articulated by Friedman, Dershowitz and so many others like them, I think there’s an even deeper fear for many of us in the Jewish community: the prospect of facing the honest truth of Israel’s oppression of Palestinians.
For so many painful reasons, it is just so hard for us to see Israel as an oppressor – to admit that despite all of the vulnerability we feel as Jews, the power dynamic is dramatically, overwhelmingly weighted in Israel’s favor. Though a movement like BDS might feel on a visceral level like just one more example of the world piling on the Jews and Israel, we need to be open to the possibility that it might more accurately be described as the product of a weaker, dispossessed, disempowered people doing what it must to resist oppression.
Related posts:
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- Rabbi Rosen refuses to use his Jewishness to criticize persecution everywhere except in Palestine
- another prayer about Jewish censoriousness, from Rabbi Rosen
- Abba Eban Said Chomsky Was ‘Guilty’ Over Jews’ Refusal to Disappear
- Seinfeld’s Rabbi Friend Says Jews, Notwithstanding Success, Are ‘Endangered,’ Must Always Be On Guard
{ 21 comments }
Problems with Mondoweiss web layout:
For some reason tonight, on two different browsers, on the main Mondoweiss page, the right-hand column ("Donate" button and below) is encroaching on the text of main posts, cutting off the right-hand part of the text, so it cannot be read. Way, way down the main page, this is not a problem, because the column listing archives, etc. stops at some point.
BTW, why not talk about the new graphic, etc?
Oh I thought he was on a donation drive — so I donated 25 bucks…
;-)
yes, william, but this is just typepad being cranky, it will clear soon, I'm sure
Happened to me, too, but when I click on the actual articles, it fixes up, difficult for browsing, though. Hope it fixes up. BDS is a humanitarian issue, or the reasons for it coming into being.
hope you are right, it's screwing up on my machine too. hope it's typepad…
Phil,
I have to begin as always when you are reading posts that you are doing an incredible job on this site.
Just to comment on the topic at hand (the problems with the layout): I noticed that your site was down for about 5 or 10 minutes earlier today. When it came back up, the layout was messed up like it is now.
Phil, it's okay now. On another issue, you are often talking about the progressive Jewish movement (not up with the terminology, sorry) combining with other movements who are looking for justice in the I/P travesty. The American human rights groups who recently wrote an open letter urging Obama's administration to attend the Durban conference surely qualify. I think it would be a good story to run, but it is your blog.
This is the link from Ha'aretz, and opinion from Ha'aretz. Sorry to be off topic.
Great posts tonight. The Rabbi is very insightful. The examination of Polish history provides a learned and informed perspective. This blog is a unique resource.
Well the layout's fine from here. Regarding dismissal of BDS, the good Rabbi is on target. Those who refuse to recognize who is the dispossessed, disempowered in the I-P conflict–what would it take to get them to acknowledge they are the oppressor, not those who resist? In the HBO documentary I just watched, To Die In Jerusalem, the mother of an Israeli high school girl, beautiful and smart, who is killed by a suicide bomber while grocery shopping eventually, meets the mother of a Palestinian high school girl, equally beautiful and smart, who was the suicide bomber–she also died in the bombing. The Israeli mother never gets it, that while she is free to come and go, etc.,
the occupation is a very different daily reality of the home-dispossessed Pals–the two families live four miles apart, but it's like night and day–the Israeli mother ventures into the Pal Camp but is so afraid to physically be in the occupied area where Pal cops are in control that she flees without meeting
the Pal mother. In the the end they confront each other face to face–via satellite TV.
Sounds like a powerful documentary but I wonder why HBO didn't do the mirror image: the mother of a Palestinian teenage boy, bright, hard-working, his whole life ahead of him, meeting the mother of the Israeli boy who was inducted into the IDF straight from high school,and who participated in the shelling of Palestinian homes, thereby killing the Palestinian boy. There must be a lot more of these around.
Hey technoids: how do you add a picture to the comments? I have a terrific proposal for Phil's header graphic.
BDS in the manner that it is presented now, is NOT an effort at healing, but an effort at resistance and punishment.
As I don't care that someone that calls themselves a "rabbi" asserts that the land is all Jewish permanently, title and sovereignty; I also do not take stock in a "rabbi" stating that an action guided by some revenge as a means is a valid spiritual approach.
One cannot heal until the injustice is over
@ Anna
The young woman responsible for the documentary, a Jewish American, read about the real
incident (the suicide bombing) in an article in Time magazine. The Israeli government helped the production as did Israeli cable company. The reason the Israeli took her short trip into the enemy camp was that she could, the earlier request of the Pal mother to visit the Israeli mothers home was not permitted. The mirror scenario is impossible–due to the occupation & lack of support
from the USA.
@ Witty
BDS resisting the apartheid S African regime was much more an effort at resistance and punishment, a much more blanket or broad brush attack on that regime. It worked, and that was a precondition to any healing.
You say you know the Rabbi is motivated by "some revenge"–how so? Where's your support
for this slur?
@ Shafiq
That was the opinion of the Palestinian mother in the documentary To Die In Jerusalem. The Israeli mother just didn't get it. The Pal's daughter was a suicide bomber; she died along with the Israeli
mother's daughter in the bombing. The Israeli mother took the position that both girls died for nothing. The Pal mother said, although if she had known, she would have tried to talk her daughter out of it, she also knows her daughter's suicide bombing was a form of resistance
to the occupation and dispossession.
"One cannot heal until the injustice is over"
Then healing will never occur, and certainly not unless the left and solidarity acknowledge the elements of injustice that they've done and proposed and rationalized for in the name of justice.
Citizen,
BDS is motivated by an effort to harm, to get one's way from outside, rather than by persuading and negotiating.
And, it appeals to those that are primarily angry.
The anti-apartheid effort worked because Nelson Mandela said the same thing to De Klerk and to the public as Gandhi did to the English. "We VALUE what you have contributed to us, and wish to remain good friends after we achieve liberty and justice."
That is NOT what is said to Israel by the dissenters promoting the BDS activity.
persuade my ass. there's no one to persuade, You know that, Witty, you lying SOB. You seem to think we just fell out the trees yesterday, here.
Witty, you've managed to put two relatively unrelated issues and fudged them together.
Nelson Mandela advocated violent resistance and was a 'terrorist' in the eyes of the US State Department until two years ago. HE, was not the one that called for a boycott of South Africa.The BDS movement against both apartheid South Africa and Israel were/are organised and carried out by outsiders, to economically and culturally bankrupt the countries after it is established that they have lost any sense of morality they ever had.
I'd also like to know what exactly these 'injustices' that have been carried out by the left, are?
@ Richard Witty | April 02, 2009 at 05:26 AM
BDS in the manner that it is presented now, is NOT an effort at healing, but an effort at resistance and punishment.
I agree, and I wholeheartedly endorse it. It SHOULD be punishment. Punishment is the objective. How did nonsense like 'healing' come into the BDS issue? This conflict, with its catastrophic consequences for my country, is long past the time where it could have been resolved by sitting around a roundtable and discussing our 'feelings' and how we might 'heal' them. It is time for punishment, as harsh as we can make and stay inside the law, until we are free. Welcoming arms for non-Zionists and moderate, i.e. anti-colonial, Zionists and firm hostility to those colonial Zionists who betray our country to help foreigners carry out wicked campaigns of ethnic cleansing and colonization.
There is a Jewish state within the 1967 borders. If it's not good enough for you colonial Zionists after all that America and Americans have sacrificed for YOU, then you don't deserve a damn thing. I'll save my wishing of luck for your victims.
Witty, I am glad you know that the BDS effort against Israeli occupation (alone) is motivated by an effort to harm Israel, as distinguished from the BDS effort against the total regime of apartheid S Africa.
What's your IQ? 90? If not, you must think that's the IQ of the critics of Israeli policies on this blog.
How did you ever learn to read people's inner minds? You know their inner motivations so well anything they say rolls off you as mere rationalizations of their, what? Anti-semitism virus?
Do you think gentile Americans have any standing to discuss the questions raised by Phil on this blog? If not, why not? If so, how so? I won't hold my breath for a direct, honest answer. You are no Phil.
Again, Israelis who know the history of the British seizure of British Jewish assets, of the French arms cut-off, of the EU resupply refusal in '73, are likely to regard BDS as another episode of "the whole world against us." The US is actually much more flexible with its allies, and the pressures on Israel are actually more diffuse, befitting a relationship with a democratic power with multiple centers of power, a developed civil society, and a free press.
Any Palestinian government that can recognize Israel AND keep the militants from turning a withdrawal into a Trojan Horse will get 99%+ of the West Bank overnight.
That this has never been on offer, and that the Oslo, Lebanon, and Gaza withdrawals have been followed by more war reminds Israel that Hamas and BDS are just different sides of the Jihad.
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