I’ve now read the Waskow piece in full– "Toward an Abrahamic Peace" in Foreign Policy in Focus– nd I find it stunning that Jeffrey Blankfort and so many of your readers can so knee-jerkedly denounce an essay that praises civil disobedience against the blockade of Gaza and endorses the Goldstone report. I am in full agreement with Waskow’s argument against BDS in the abstract: I recognize that there may be militating factors against the principled position, reasonable people can differ on this, and I personally remain ambivalent. But Waskow gives absolutely no indication that he is opposed to a reasoned dialogue on the question.
This is frankly of a piece with gratuitous Palestinian chauvinism. Shlomo Sand is exactly right when he said Zionism invented two peoples, the Jewish and the Palestinian.
Blankfort was right on the money with his criticism. It’s crypto-Zionist gatekeepers who feebly denounce Israel but who fail to support any measures to pressure Israel to be brought to heel who do the most damage.
Jack, a a reasoned dialogue on the question? Everyone is beyond that.
The Rabbi objects to BDS because It points toward demonization of Israeli society as a whole (or even Jews in general) rather than targeting specific, destructive policies of the Israeli government, as if a boycott ever has carved out specific policies. You boycott the entire country, period. Every stinking bit of it and all its people. We did it with South Africa. Everyone knew why South Africa was being boycotted; you didn’t need knit-picking columns of ink delineating this policy and that. After the unforgivable prevarication that Israel has engaged in since the Gaza Massacre, it can go fuck itself as far as I’m concerned. So it and everyone inside it gets demonized, big whoop. Israelis dont like being played for freiers; well, neither do I.
Thanks for the comments, Jack.
Waskow is likely to lead 15,000 with ethical conviction, skillful voice, and determination to do good.
Better that he be helped, than to engage in petty intra-partisan sqaubbling. We’re served and not served by the very angry as vanguard.
Something is very wrong when a fascist like Witty agrees with you Jack.
This isn’t a hypothetical conflict. It’s not some fantasy. It’s REAL.
What the HELL do you expect people to do? People who care. What do you expect the Palestinians to do? BDS is the only tactic people around the world can participate in to combat the occupation.
The occupation is an act of FORCE to use your kind of pathetic apologist language.
This is just more over-socialized intellectualism.
Stop treating the Palestinians like an experiment. Every day, they’re under occupation. Gaza is still under siege. And Israeli Jews live in a fucking country club.
Get over yourself. Blankfort has.
Cliff, I have my own problems with Richard occasionally, but to call him a fascist simply disgusts me, in much the same way it disgusted me when a German politician called Gorbachev the Russian Goebbels. I also think that these kind of insults tend to backfire. At least from the point of view of this reader.
It used to be the standard insult in political discussions over here in Germany, whenever you begged to differ, by pointing out problems in a specific perspective.
Admittedly, I am not sure if Richard with his constant generalizations about “the left” somehow attracts these kind of insults. If this is the source of your anger, it would help if you addressed it directly, when it occurs, when it makes you angry. The most interesting phenomenon in the “crowd’s mind perspective” may be that it ultimately eliminates purely ideological perspectives. In my youth the crowd with its trend to enforce uniformity, conventions had a very different feeling to it. For me the use of the term fascist more easily connects with that aspect of the “crowd”.
LeaNder, you don’t think by the balance of Cliff’s comment after he employs the short-hand term “fascist” he has given some context to why he does so? It’s not hard to see the doctrine of “lebensraum” behind what he says, is it? Your association of the term “crowd” (mob?) POV as being ultimately lacking in any pure idelogy does not seem to address Cliff’s POV. By using the introductory term “fascist” may be seen
to be employing an organized experiment on a collection of individuals for the pleasure and benefit of the experiment’s leaders to move beyond simply one more
example of the Bully (& clique) in the school play yard otherwise filled with the
crowd’s mind perspective therein.
Citizen, I have not only a problem with the first–fascist–sentence, I have a problem with the last too: Get over yourself. Blankfort has.
The last it feels ends a circle movement started in the first. If you do not agree with Blankfort you are a fascist. Get over yourself? Deny whatever you are, your specific outlook, your ethics your, perspective? Your Jewishness?
I understand the urgency and pain in everything he writes between this start and end. But strictly the “fasicist” connects with the “totalitarian” demand in the last. There is only one way to see matters, the way Blankfort does.
the negative aspect of “crowd”, the manipulated, the vigilantilee crowd, looking for revenge without checking if the suspect is the guilty, the crowd enforcing conventions, negating other views or perspectives on life.
the positive aspect of “crowd”, the creative crowd, many know more than each single member, the people creating the net, people sharing their wisdom
BDS worked with South Africa, it can work with Israel too. Besides, South Africa never attacked blacks with helicopter gunships, cruise missiles, and white phosphorous.
BDS is the last great hope of saving the Palestinians from ethnic cleansing. The people of Gaza are squatting in the rubble that was once their homes as we squabble about how to kickstart the peace process.
Squatting in the rubble, denied fuel and food. Not allowing their children to go to school with real textbooks, or scholarship students to attend university, refusing cement to rebuild their houses, withholding their money so that they can rebuild, terrorizing families with soldier break-ins in the middle of the night. In short the IDF has become the SS.
With the exception of BDS, which is a tactic that can be ignored or implemented depending on circumstance, nothing else Waskow raises sounds wrong to me. There are other people whom I respect that also have come out against BDS, including Stephen Walt and Uri Avnery, but to make BDS the cornerstone of some ideological split or litmus test is silly. We agree on everything else.
Somebody please refresh my memory, what again is the main rational given for why BDS won’t work on the Israeli regime as it did on the S African regime? Didn’t the latter regime dig in their heels too, and unite to stay on top in the face of ever-growing world pressure; didn’t that regime also feel it was an existential posture
for its own survival? Why would work in the one place, but not the other? Why again would the BDS tactic be not worth it on a cost-benefit strategic analysis?
I read the article and agree with Jack. I don’t think opposition to BDS should be some sort of litmus test. Waskow was in favor of nonviolent actions intended to break the blockade on Gaza and that made perfect sense to me. Maybe he’s wrong about BDS, but he is obviously a serious person who wants peace and doesn’t, for instance, support blockades on Palestinians while opposing them for Israelis.
And as Ehrens said, BDS is a tactic and should be debated on whether it would be effective or not. I don’t know. Some people I respect oppose it (Waskow is on that list, having read his article). The fact that some others oppose it who have hypocritical double standards on the subject is a reason to criticize people like that (one of whom we all know), but I don’t let the hypocritical arguments get in the way of considering the real ones a sincere opponent could make.
If Jack Ross had been following Waskow’s career of doing damage control for Israel , that is, advocating for a “two-state solution” while bringing no economic pressure to bear on Israel, he would understand what kind of a game he has been playing and continues to play with this essay.
Is the notion that targeting all of Israeli society and less ethical than it was to target South Africa whose crimes against its indigenous black population, as horrible as those were, have been exceeded in their ferocity and matched in their sadism by Israel in what it’s democratically elected government and citizen army have done to the Palestinians?
If there is any question as to the culpability of the majority of the Israeli population in this, it should have been put to rest by the reports that 94% of Israeli Jews supported the onslaught on Gaza while only a relative handful demonstrated against it.
Does Jack really share with Waskow the belief that “anger and disgust ” against Israel are unwarranted? Does he believe that “affirming peace between Israel and Palestine” is a substitute for justice, a word that doesn’t seem to appear in the lexicon of the Waskows of this world?
Does Jack really share with Waskow that there is ANY possibility of “bringing power to bear on changing U.S. governmental policy,” given the power of the Zionist Lobby over both the White House and Congress?
What needs to be recognized is that, having waited for years for the US solidarity movement (a world class joke to this point) to do something positive besides fruitlessly waving signs and shouting “End the occupation!” or “Two states for two peoples!,” the Palestinians themselves have taken the lead in the BDS campaign and it is where one stands onthis issue that has become the dividing line between those who are seeking justice for the Palestinians as opposed to those who are willing to see them pacified. Waskow is clearly among the latter.
David Samel reminded me last week of a great phrase written in a March 1919 petition to President Wilson by 38 powerful and wealthy American Jews who objected to Zionism. ‘The rights of other creeds and races will be respected under Jewish dominance’ is the assurance of Zionism, but the keynotes of democracy are neither condescension nor tolerance, but justice and equality.