Back in October I had the opportunity to interview Israeli filmmaker Udi Aloni about his participation in the protests at the Toronto International Film Festival and his support for the BDS movement. Today Aloni has an important op-ed in YNET bringing the argument for BDS to the Israeli public.
From the article "Why I back Israel sanctions":
I find it appropriate that the Israeli public be notified of the emerging movement for Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions against Israel (BDS), which has been growing at a breathtaking pace.
Following bewildered reports published by Yedioth Ahronoth journalist Sever Plocker, who noticed that BDS has moved from the circles of the radical western Left to the circles of the bourgeois centre, I can add that this is now true for Israel-loving Jews as well.
Obviously, this shift is taking place against the backdrop of Israel’s war on Gaza, waged one year ago, the publication of the Goldstone Report, and the local strain of apartheid policy nurtured by Israel, which differs from the old South African one in some aspects.
This policy has local makings and signature. It is not only an Israeli High Court of Justice ruling to evacuate Palestinian living in the east Jerusalem neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah from their homes, applying a “right of return for Jews only” rule, while Palestinians, on the other hand, are being denied this right.
It is also the denial of Palestinian rights to send Palestinian policemen to carry out a “targeted assassination” of Jewish terrorist Yaakov Teitel (it should be noted that we object to all extrajudicial executions), while the alleged Palestinians murderers of a Jewish rabbi in Samaria can be extrajudicially executed, with the ballistic weapon examination proving their guilt being performed retroactively by the executioners, not by a court of law (the appropriate instance in this case should be an international tribunal, since most Palestinians are sure that at least two of the three had nothing to do with the murder).
I am presenting these cases to illustrate the extreme inequality in our joint life, in this land, and emphasize the reasons behind the emergence of the popular global movement for solidarity with the Palestinian people. And please do not rush to your feet, protesting and chanting: “The whole world is against us, never mind, we shall overcome!”, because we shall not overcome.
The aforementioned violations of human rights are precisely the reason why many Jews all over the world have joined the BDS campaign, a key issue for those of us who are trying to prevent violence against Israel while simultaneously countering its arrogant and aggressive policies against the Palestinians living under its rule.
Aloni continues:
The most provably-effective form of pressure known to us so far is BDS. Thus, BDS action does not amount to negative, counter-productive action, as many propagandists try to portray it. On the contrary, BDS action is a life-saving antidote to violence. It is an action of solidarity, partnership and joint progress. BDS action serves to preempt, in a non-violent manner, justified violent resistance aimed at attaining the same goals of justice, peace and equality.
If a critical mass of privileged Israeli citizens joins the non-violent struggle from the inside, standing shoulder to shoulder with the disenfranchised, perhaps outside pressure will no longer be necessary. The three very basic principles of BDS are:
* An immediate end of the occupation
* Full equality to all Palestinian citizens of the state of Israel
* Legal and moral Recognition of the Palestinian refugees’ right of return
(Obviously, each community’s position will be taken into consideration during the desired negotiations).
No right-wing lobby, not even the messianic-evangelical lobby, and no lawyer from the Alan Dershowitz school can hold back for long the global popular movement which wants to see an end to our local conflict and regional peace, according to the principles of international law, in the benefit of both peoples
Good post, Thanks.
Dick Witty, what do you think about this article?
Well, aparisian, first of all I want to commend you on your sagicity in immediately turning, turning again, to Richard Wittington, Load Mayven of Mondoweiss for advice. So let me make it simple for you:
1. Israel Rocks!
2. Arabs Suck!
3 . You Suck, facist!
4. Feh, The Whole World Sucks!
Thanks for asking.
LOL
Like those slight embellishments on the stock template.
Citizen, you may scoff, but those four axioms have never let me down! Now, Richard Wittington, Lord Mayven of Mondoweiss, dispenses a particularly convoluted and over-concocted word salad, but when you get to the lowest common denominator, those four axioms are the result.
link to jewssansfrontieres.blogspot.com
I’m not scoffing at all, Mooser. I totally agree with your take on Dick’s burnt offerings. Feh, feh.
Of course you are not scoffing, but I needed an opening to give the link, and that seemed good at the time.
great article. this is driving them nuts in israel, the comment section of the original article is very telling. they are totally not getting the growth of the movement. i urge everyone to go put in your 2 cents worth.
reminds me of something else i read today @
coteret:
The shock and indignation expressed in the article indicates just how difficult it is for the Israeli elite to come to terms with this new reality………”In the meeting with the British attorney general, Israel will also protest the boycott phenomenon against it.”
phenomenon!
a line from the link: The Israeli officials intend to make it clear to Baroness Scotland that Israel expects a change in British legislation that would ensure that officers and Israeli personages cannot be arrested in Britain because of lawsuits against them for their part in IDF operations.
I just can’t get over the supreme arrogance of the Israeli political establishment. It’s genuinely amusing.
Perhaps Britain could follow the Israeli example and simply resort to targeted assassinations instead. Israelis should be glad that their methods are not the template for how to treat the “others”
They’re arrogant, but I expect they’ll get their way. The last thing either US or British government officials want is a world where Western officials have to worry as much about international war crimes tribunals as some third world dictator. I suspect that if a high ranking Israeli official is ever arrested, it won’t just be Israeli pressure being applied to have him (or her) released.
not so sure about that. i read a few weeks ago there was an immediate backlash from british society when the suggestion was made centuries of precedent be set aside or changed to suit israeli politicians.
No question here that the USA and England (or China) won’t honor “universal jurisdiction.”
If they did, that might the 1945 Nuremberg principles actually applicable to them.
Perish the thought. Watch the US Supreme Court decision set for next March regarding the civil suit against former Somalia tryants now residing in the USA–the ZOA and other Jewish groups don’t want such Lawfare-they are worried about its possible use against Israeli war criminals–that stuff’s for old decrepid Nazis and any Muslim (American or not) suspected of aiding or abetting Palestinians.
I did read the comments under the original article. Very depressing, most of them.
i agree i stopped reading because it makes me so angry, i loved the one who was using anti-semi label.
They are quite mild for comments on ynet. Most comments there are usually very extreme.
I myself am pro semi(tractor/trailer). It is the life blood of America.
yonira you are a traitor, you are more Israeli than American
yonira made a pun and you respond by telling him he’s a traitor.
that was ironic WJ take it easy my friend
wow, what is going on here? What was ironic aparisian.
English Lesson: In America(predominately in the midwest) we call tractor/trailers, semis. I was trying to lighten up the mood a little bit. I hope you didn’t think I was belittling you.
Obviously you guys didn’t get the joke. I’m not surprised. I’d be liable to say you’re getting all huffy just to make an argument, but that would be giving you and WJ too much credit.
Thus far, the Zionist sense of humor has consistently proven to be the verbal equivalent of kicking people in the shins and laughing at their pain.
what are you talking about Chaos? seriously do you even know anymore?
yonira, haven’t you learned by now that you can’t do irony?
yes, i know potsherd. That is why I was wondering where the irony was. maybe you can help me?
Well, I certainly can’t, yonira. I’m not a licensed psychiatrist.
Look, I can’t ice skate. I know this. I’ll never be able to ice skate. I look ridiculous if I try to ice skate, flopping around on my collapsed ankles. Solution – I don’t try to ice skate anymore.
Potsherd, not with the irony, but with understanding WTF aparisian is trying to say to me.
Oh, that. I’m not sure, but I t hink aparisian may have thought you were mocking him with the “semi” joke, or making light of a situation he considers too serious for levity.
Sigh. “tractor/trailer” -> -tor/trai- -> Switch the order.
It’s a jumbled syllabic cypher. I suppose it might have been more apparent to other people who have experience with multiple language families. I suspect there was also something embedded in the “pro semi” relation as well (playing off the idea of only being semi-American in loyalty).
For my part, it only merited a snicker. Considering you go around calling people names like “whiner,” yonira, I’d have expected you to be a bit more thick-skinned. But apparently, you take it even more poorly than you dish it out.
ahhh yes, very nice indeed. If I knew that is what aparisian meant I would have commended them. Its very clever.
Well, yes, that was obvious. But it came across as mean-spirited when yonira’s remark was clearly in a spirit of levity.
That’s wonderful, potsherd. Nice of you to be there when OhioJoes was calling me a “faggot” and yonira was saying, “Oh, don’t bother with that! You’ll just feed his victim’s complex.” But yeah, go ahead and keep going after people like me and aparisian instead because clearly, we’re the significant threat to intelligent discussion here, huh.
I reported OJ for abuse and he has been banned.
But that’s OK, make it all about you and your personal quarrels.
Except Chaos, I said don’t call him a faggot. but I understand.
I fucking stuck up for you Chaos, and you can’t even get that straight. Well, fuck you man!
I’ll take that as pun intended.
Sorry i didnt reply earlier as i was sleeping.
Yonira,
My joke was related to what you said “i m (tractor/trailer)” which for me sounds like traitor and when you said its the life blood of America, i wanted to tell you as if you really care about America and that you are more Israeli than American.
I know my English is limited enough to make jokes that’s why i made it clear to WJ. Yonira, can you tell me how many times you mocked me on here? how many times you mocked my English? Yonira, you have a bad faith ‘mauvaise foi in french’, you come to this site to diffuse some Hasbara propaganda, and attack the commentators, and once they reply your provocations you play the victim. You were being very dishonest here, using my Irony to do so and attack Chaos.
don’t cry yonira, take it easy!
Yoni, in order to make a joke, you need a sense of humor, and Zionism sucks that right out of you. You couldn’t make a joke if your life depended upon it.
But you’re a ziocaine addict, which means you make a murderous joke out of your life.
Now, whine and kvetch for us, Zionist.
So will I. I’m not even remotely interested in yonira. ;)
i know, but what surprised me the most was allegations such as (paraphrasing) ‘this guy is an extremist and no one will listen to him’ or the general feeling the bds campaign would go no where in israeli society..as if it wasn’t an international campaign. and the endless screeches implying this was a result of those primarily seeking to end the jewish state altogether as opposed to the more obvious reason of human and equal rights for palestinians. ..the hubris in assuming it’s all about them and our hatred for them AS IF the recipients of the failure of their zionist enterprise mattered not at all.
They are all about, “We learned all we ever need to know about you goys thanks to Hitler.”
To them, it is all about them. The impact of their whims and calculations enacted
on anybody but them matters not a twit. “Never Again!” applies only to them. They are totally resistant to applying universal moral principles. Tribal morality rules. Stone age morality backed by the only superpower in the world with both guns and butter.
I expect that when the dust settles at the end of the horrendous reaming that Zionists and other anti-American interests, I include corporate interests who will locate a factory overseas to increase their profit margin by a dollar (anyone read Spy Trade: How Israel’s Lobby Undermines America’s Economy ? I’m considering it), we Americans will start to take far more seriously George Washington’s warning about foreign entanglements. It would be ironic if Zionism came to be seen as a foreign political cult and “Never again!” became in American political parlance to mean never again permitting a Zionist to hold a public position more powerful than county animal control.
Right now, and for over fifty years, it’s been the other way around, so that when Ron Paul supports Washington’s foreign policy, Ben Stein calls Paul an
anti-semite–recently on Larry King show. Can you say, Chaz Freeman?
Israeli Arab Jews Nazi saluting (I kid you not!) the Ashkenazi Israelis protesting against evictions of Palestinian families in Jerusalem:
link to youtube.com
Really disgusting; as America sits down to do its annual IRS tax return I wish every American had to watch that clip and ponder what their government is enabling.
From the Coteret link:
Aha! This is undoubtedly where the implementation of UN Res 242 will be discussed, no?
Probably not. Israel is a law unto itself…
Show them the peace, they’ll show you the land.
Really? Is that what happened when Hamas maintained their end of the cease fire?
BDS? How about it’s running mate, Lawfare?
Watch that US Supreme Ct case coming up in March:
link to somaliaonline.com
Looks like going after decrepit minor Nazis and Muslim terrorists or their financial backers or sympathetic charitable NGOs is one thing, but this humanitarian movement is quite another to Organizations like ZOA.
The Supremes do tend to value consistency to precedent.
In some legal circles, legal precedent and consistency are the same–so I am not sure what you mean, postsherd.
Perhaps you thinking about US Supreme Ct decision that reversed an earlier decision–the original one that said a Mexican American could not be a dual citizen, the one that overuled it because it involved a Jewish American? The latter decision is current law. As you likely know, the US Supreme Court avoids a lot of really important decisions under the (vague) legal principal/theory of the issue being a “political question”…. Perhaps you are right in your implication; the subject is not really developed in USA law schools. At least it was not when I was there.
If Udi Alon thinks that a BDS campaign will be enough to get Israel to sign unto * Legal and moral Recognition of the Palestinian refugees’ right of return, then he isn’t thinking right. Any peace treaty that Israel would sign would have to define specific number of refugees that Israel would accept their return. (It would require a true revolution in thought that would change Israel’s mind about that.)
I would be interested in hearing predictions from Udi Alon how future Israeli governments will interact with the reality that Udi hopes to see developing in the BDS movement.
To ensure Jewish tyranny of the majority, huh? Keep telling us that Zionism isn’t racism.
Chaos- Clearly my point is attempting to frame the political discussion rather than the ideology.
Regarding ideology: there are many Israelis who feel that Israel will be voted out of existence when the Palestinian Arabs become the majority. Many of them are ideological: we must hand over a Jewish state to our children and grandchildren. Others have fears: what will a Palestinian majority do (besides changing the name and the flag and the immigration policy and enacting justice oriented legislation to force the Jewish Israelis to pay damages for the nakba and other injustices?) What kind of violence can be expected?
It would be useful if you or others on this site would help paint what that Palestinian majority new Israel would look like. The venom of the attitude of the commenters here may seep into my doubts about proposals that come from people with so much venom.
Do you believe Palestinians are entitled to civil rights and restitution like Jews have received from Germany? What is your opinion about that?
Gee, should white Americans start considering seriously their rejection from
discrimination-proof identity politics available to all other Americans? Should they assess Obama’s
continued attempts at wealth transfer, and the illegal immigration de facto policy both representative parties ignore, and should they push for reform of our legal immigration policies in terms of
keeping and attaining more educated and business savvy foreigners?
I’m sorry. His last name is Aloni. my mistake.
I believe he’s the son of Shulamit Aloni.
WJ:
Oh, at first they will try and call it antisemitic. Then they will try and ignore it and claim it has no effects, ostrich style. Then they will probably harden their stance some more, in a ‘up yours too’ and ‘never again’ kind of way. Meanwhile more valuable time will be lost in which Israel could simply do the right thing. Then they will probably find themselves very isolated and cave in?
That seems the most likely scenario. A rational response from The Bunker isn’t to be expected though…
gmeyers:
What kind of caving in do you foresee? Does it include acceptance of the right of return in principle rather than a specific number of refugees? I don’t see how that is going to change as a result of pressure. A withdrawal from occupied territory, more or less is more conceivable to me than the signing onto a right of return without it being limited to a specific number.
The thief refuses to return the stolen goods unless the prosecutors limit the amount to a specific number of items.
I’ve heard that analogy before and I don’t mean to dismiss it, potsherd. I am trying to assess the political realities. (The serenity prayer has a function for me regarding politics as in: God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can and the wisdom to know the difference.)
I do think you are sincere in this instance, WJ. I don’t know how to square the circle logically when it comes to applying any right of return to all Jews in the world, no matter when or where born, as distinguished from the Palestinians still holding family keys to their homes taken within living memory on the actual land
involved in who gets to have it. There’s no question in my mind that the larger non-Jewish world has allowed the Jews to take Palestinian land; indeed has awarded them Palestinian land–as a way of bringing rough Justice to the Jews
–at the expense of the Palestinians who simply had the historical position of
having no real power and actually living on the land gifted by powers who had no right to do so. NY will never be given back to the native Americans, along with the beads used to purchase it. It’s hard for me to see how the Jewish need for a haven from the world set against it, as epitomized by the Shoah, can be
reconciled with the Palestinian need to have their post-1945 civil rights recognized. We in the USA are still working on justice for native Americans and imported black slaves. Look how many whites died in the USA Civil War. But I can’t help but argue “Never Again!” is applicable post Nuremberg Trials to ALL peoples–perhaps we should ask the Roma what they think about this state of human affairs? Anyone know a Roma who has discussed this with the world?
I think it’s important because it seems to me Goering’s POV is pervasive, once you see behind the veil of humanitarian verbiage and look at the actual physical and financial application of such verbiage.
BDS is potentially a movement for “justice, peace and equality” if the framing of any action is concise, focused, disciplined, framed in an attitude of “do unto others”.
BDS that is punitive, ideological, demonizing, vague, is not a movement for justice, peace and equality.
So far this one is framed as punitive, ideological, demonizing and vague.
Our resident propagandist and pathological liar, Witty is at it again w/ the equivocations.
Witty:
Punitive
merriam-webster.com/dictionary/Punitive
1 : inflicting, involving, or aiming at punishment
Ideological
merriam-webster.com/dictionary/Ideological
1 : relating to or concerned with ideas
2 : of, relating to, or based on ideology
Demonizing
yourdictionary.com/demonizing
1 : [...]b. to characterize or conceive of as evil, cruel, inhuman, etc. to demonize a political opponent
Vague
merriam-webster.com/dictionary/VAGUE
1 : a. not clearly expressed : stated in indefinite terms
–
Just thought we should read the definitions of the words (slurs in this context, used by Witty) he’s using to describe BDS. Seeing the definitions before us, should have an effect of it’s own. We need to see these words and then think of what’s going on, on the ground in Palestine. We need to reconcile Witty’s propaganda with the reality.
There is a sense of urgency we should adopt – this should inform our sensibilities about Palestine and the conflict. This urgency sets the parameters more or less for what is an efficient course of action.
The liar keeps stalling. He doesn’t want any kind of pressure on his country club. In spite of the human rights abuses, the colonization, the occupation, the lies and defiance of international law. Etc. etc.
We need to keep in mind that all societies can change, with enough time. That you can’t go out and kill 1300 people in 22 days (mostly civilians), destroy their society (after you de-developed it; see Sara Roy’s book on Gaza), steal from them, and then expect to be treated with kid gloves.
I urge people to watch this video by Illan Pappe. He’s truly an asset to the Palestinian camp. He speaks eloquently and honestly. He’s sincere and practical as well.
link to youtube.com
He summarizes my thoughts on BDS and on this framing of Palestinian activism, via the the sense of ‘urgency’.
BTW – Witty isn’t being hypothetical, he’s just being his usual passive-aggressive self.
So he says, ‘BDS that is‘ – then let’s loose.
Anyways, this is the same song and dance BS this guy has done over and over.
Witty, do yourself a favor, go through each definition and provide a substantiated argument to connect your rhetoric to reality. (I know you can’t, because you’re full of shit.)
Let’s not ever loose focus. The Richard Witty’s of the world are unfortunately the kind of people Israel uses as ambassadors/etc. to mystify the conflict for people who aren’t paying attention. We all know the daily abuses committed by the Israeli government against the Palestinian people. We know it’s not just an Occupation, but a Colonization of Palestinian land.
Israel does what it wants to do, it has virtual diplomatic immunity.
This is not about arbitrary punishment. It is about ordinary people being able to pressure this rogue, criminal State to follow the law and to end the theft of Palestine and the oppression of the Palestinian people.
Apply Witty’s abstract rhetoric against the POV of the civil rights pioneers in the Jim Crow era in the USA. What do you get? All comments most welcome.
All you have to do is remove the framework of identity politics. Adopt that sense of urgency and remember that in spite of all the BS distracting rhetoric, this is not simply occupation – it’s colonization. It all comes back to 1948. It’s not just about the Palestinians in the OT, but the Israeli Arabs who are treated like second-class citizens.
The Palestinians didn’t land on Plymouth Rock, ‘Plymouth Rock landed on them’.