Mondoweiss recently posted several pieces on J-Street and the BDS debate. The organization’s executive director, Jeremy Ben-Ami, expressed his need to keep the debate intra-Jewish. Palestinian BDS activist Omar Barghouti called this strategy racist, while Ben-Ami sees it as a legitimate form of a “communal conversation.”
In relation to the powerful forces attempting to stifle any discussion of BDS, Ben-Ami’s willingness to create any space at all for such a discussion is truly praiseworthy. Nevertheless, the attempt to keep it as a “communal conversation” is very counterproductive. From my Jewish Israeli perspective, I want to explain why.
We need to remember there is a power dynamic here. American Jews enjoy privileges over Palestinians, just as Israelis do. They are encouraged to visit Israel at almost no cost on Birthright trips, while Palestinians born in the country are barred from entering it. They can donate money to the most extreme settler organization with little fear of FBI investigations, while any donation to Palestinian charities is inherently suspect. They can heckle an Israeli prime minister while pro-Palestine Arab activists who heckled the ambassador face criminal charges. If popular journalists like Glenn Beck make anti-Jewish comments, they lose their jobs – while ignorant anti-Palestinian or islamophobic statements are widely tolerated. Given all these privileges, this isn’t just a communal conversation – it’s a conversation within the privileged community about what to do with the less powerful: how should “we” promote “their” rights?
Keeping this separation of “us” and “them” may seem more palatable, but it places huge barriers in the way of a truly effective conversation. For one thing, it overly amplifies voices of Jewish victimhood in relation to those of Palestinian suffering, because Palestinians are excluded from the conversation. In the UC Berkeley divestment debate last year we heard many times how the discussion made Jewish students uncomfortable, or damaged their existing relationships with Muslim students. What helped put these descriptions of suffering into proportion was hearing Palestinian students talk about how their relatives in Palestine had been tortured, or were prevented from receiving medical aid by checkpoints, leading to their deaths. A conversation that doesn’t take these voices into account will ignore the very issues that need to be resolved.
But perhaps some Jews could represent Palestinians in this internal conversation, and bring these issues up? However, this is also problematic. Aside from never having the depth of experience to do so, this attempt to be more Palestinian than the Palestinians prevents American Jews and Israelis from coming to terms with our own racism and with our own privileges. One of the biggest barriers to effective Jewish-Palestinian peace work is a widespread sense of Jewish moral and intellectual superiority, which often makes it impossible for Palestinians to work with us. This is why so much of the discussion of BDS is in the form of Jews giving Palestinians advice about how they should resist. We can’t honestly face this sense of superiority while we are busy representing others, but an internal Jewish conversation will inevitably push us in that direction.
Preserving the “us/them” distinction also leaves “us” more vulnerable to fear-mongering. One of the easiest ways of preserving the current system is portraying any of its opponents as extreme, hateful and dangerous – just as Mubarak and Qaddhafi have presented themselves as the only alternative to al-Qaida. This stigmatization is ongoing. Without hearing genuinely progressive Palestinian voices, the fear-mongering can never be overcome.
An internal Jewish discussion of BDS can only go so far. We need to open it up.
