We posted some initial comments on Jacob Weisberg’s anti-bds Newsweek/Slate article below, and I have a few thoughts I’d like to add as well.
There are important factual corrections to make to Weisberg’s article – such as his misrepresentation of the cultural boycott as a blacklist, it’s not – but my response will concentrate on the main focus on his article – the argument that Israel shouldn’t be boycotted because it’s a Jewish state.
Funny enough, for the first half of his piece Weisburg does a pretty good job of defending the BDS movement. Although he takes a very caustic approach to some boycott defenders, such as Meg Ryan who he implies is not a "thoughtful person whose views are worthy of respect," he dispatches with some of the common attacks against the boycott such as it isolates the most progressive segment of society, it will never work and it’s wrong to boycott a "democracy." Weisberg doesn’t even fully embrace the common attack that the boycotters only focus on Israel, and thus are anti-Semitic. Where it really comes down to for him is that the boycotters aren’t focusing on the correct issue. Weisberg seems to imply that if the BDS movement was focused on settlements that he’d be behind them 100%, but instead in his longer piece for Slate he says:
Boycotters are not trying to send a specific message, such as "We object to your settlement policy in the West Bank" or "We think you need to be willing to give up more for peace." What they’re saying instead is: "We consider your country so intrinsically reprehensible that we are gong to treat all of your citizens as pariahs." Instead of warning that Israel risks becoming an apartheid society if it fails to make peace, boycotters have concluded that Israel already is an irredeemable apartheid society.
This shows a fundamental misunderstanding of the conflict. One of the strange arguments in this piece is that Weisberg seems to think that the end goal of any movement protesting Israel is to oppose the current Netanyahu government. Like many liberals in the US (and Israel) Weisberg can only imagine that this conflict began in 1967 with the creation of the settlement enterprise. He sees these settlements as a "deviation from [Israel’s] own principles." The exception to the rule. And thus the answer is to get Israeli to "give up more for peace." This gets to the crux of the issue. For Weisberg, and many other liberals like him, to talk about the Nakba, or to talk critically about what a Jewish state means to its non-Jewish subjects, is to go beyond the pale. It seems it is the right that seems most willing these days to talk about the root causes of the conflict while liberals seem content to believe that peace is just a few evacuated settlements away.
With this thinking Weisburg is correct to oppose the BDS movement because it takes a much more holistic view of the conflict. It sees the settlements not as a cause of the conflict, but as a symptom of it. The broader conflict is about a system where Jews are given special and exclusive rights over non-Jews living on the same land. These rights extend to everything from national symbols, to immigration, to land ownership, to natural resources and state services. This system extends to both sides of the green line, and to Palestinian refugees who are prevented from returning to their homes simply because they are the "wrong" religion. This system was put in place in 1948 with the creation of the state of Israel and has been operating pretty efficiently since then. This is the system that has to change if this conflict is going to end. BDS is a nonviolent attempt to do this by applying moral and economic pressure on the decision makers to promote equal civil, human and national rights. And while Weisburg seems to have supported this idea in South Africa, in Israel he finds it "repellent" in large part because Israel is a "a refuge for persecuted Jews."
Weisberg’s blind spot has important implications for his argument. He says this frontal attack on the idea of Israel itself is why Israel’s own internal opposition won’t support a boycott. It’s not entirely clear who he’s referring to here, but earlier he refers to Amos Oz and David Grossman as Israel’s "national consciences." He’s right that they don’t support the boycott. But what Weisburg ignores is that 20% of Israel’s citizens are Palestinians, and they do support the boycott. As do the 3.5 million Palestinians living under Israel rule but who are not allowed citizenship in the occupied territories, and as do the 5 million more Palestinians living in the diaspora who Israel won’t even allow to live inside the area that was historic Palestine. The 2005 call for boycott, divestment and sanctions was supported by all of these communities. When you take non-Jewish opinions into account, suddenly there is a lot of internal opposition. Should it be a surprise that the very people who benefit the most from the current Israeli system would oppose punitive attempts to end that system?
As long as Weisberg is only concerned for the Jews in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict it stands to reason that strategies like BDS won’t make sense to him. And I guess that’s his prerogative. But before he dismisses people he disagrees with as not being "worthy of respect" I hope he’s clear what he’s defending.
