Rabbi Arthur Waskow, who just had this long piece put up on the Foreign Policy in Focus website, is typical of those "progressive" Jewish activists who long for a solution to the Israel-Palestine conflict that does not require Israel to pay any political or economic price for what it has done (and continues to do to the Palestinians) for the past 60 years and whose own "solution" for change remains the same despite its obvious failure to this point. Here he is stating that the BDS movement, the first in the diaspora that actually holds some promise of bringing pressure on Israel–to the point where it has been denounced editorially by the Forward–is unethical, as well as being strategically and tactically flawed.
Had Waskow been able to show even a modicum of success after all his years of toiling in the touchy-feely peace field, one might pay some attention to his comments but in the end they amount to little more than an exercise in damage control on Israel’s behalf. When I saw that that he mentioned Obama and Clinton’s efforts to curtail Israeli settlements–now abandoned–as being a positive step I had to go back and look at the date of his article. [Oct. 9, 2009, today]
"A second avenue for efforts to change U.S. policy might be the "boycott/divest/sanctions" movement being pursued by some pro-Palestinian groups. This effort carries with it three serious problems — one ethical, one strategic, and one tactical. Ethically, the present it embodies and the future it seems to proclaim would be hostile to Israel, rather than affirming peace between Israel and Palestine. It appeals far more to anger and disgust than to hope and compassion. 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 — a stance not only ethically suspect but likely to create a backlash against itself."
