A strong sign of how the discourse is changing. Salon is firmly on the left, and the left now has both feet in Palestinian solidarity. (Though it’s easier for the left on the left coast. In New York, The Nation is still a battleground). Steven Salaita, an English prof and grandson of a refugee, explains why the American Studies Association’s national council has supported BDS and in doing so says Israel has never tried to find a viable solution to the conflict and it is the only colonial-settler project to receive an American blessing.
He gives a clear explanation of the issue:
These days, Israel is an extremely difficult state to defend.
It should be so. Israel continues to make a mockery of the “peace process” by constructing new settlements and insulting American leaders. It tolerates politicians who routinely make racist statements. And it continues to be in violation of at least 77 United Nations Resolutions and numerous provisions of the Fourth Geneva Convention.
The latest challenge to these violations comes from the Boycott/Divestment/Sanctions movement, which has attracted the attention of pro-Israel advocacy groups and the Israeli government itself, thus validating the efficacy of the tactic..
Salaita defends the use of academic boycott and makes implicit reference to the lobby.
Academic boycott, quite simply, is a rejection of complicity in the Israeli government’s brutalization of Palestinians, a form of nonviolent resistance at the nexus of the globe’s greatest confluence of geopolitical power….
Of all the world’s settler colonial projects, Israel is uniquely protected from wholesale condemnation in the United States…
What sets Palestine apart is the persistent notion that the colonizers, those with nuclear weapons and land and resources and legislative power and the full support of the United States, are the oppressed party, that they largely suffer the pain and indignity of the conflict, that BDS is furtively anti-Semitic, that Israel is a special case in history. Remove this duplicitous reasoning and most rationalizations for rejecting boycott go away.
Here are the facts: No evidence has ever been presented that the Israeli government is interested in a viable solution to the conflict.
Salaita provides an explanation of the importance of the right of return, as a spiritual necessity.
My maternal grandmother lost her home in Ein Karem, outside of Jerusalem, in 1948. She has never been compensated. Her loss has never been acknowledged by Israel. She refuses to visit an artsy, upper-class, Jewish suburb of Jerusalem that was once a Palestinian village — her ancestral home. She has neither forgotten nor forgiven. I haven’t forgotten, either. I am perfectly willing to forgive, but only in the presence of justice.
Beautiful statement about the potential for forgiveness. To understand the right of return, you must remember that Netanyahu proudly tweeted a foto of his expensive German car some months ago (below). Palestinians see that the Israelis and Germans overcame the legacy of the Holocaust through a truth and reconciliation process a long ago. 65 years and counting and there’s never been an Israeli acknowledgment of the Nakba– an obduracy assisted by the official American Jewish community. 
The BDS on track to be fully adopted by ASA is (only) an “academic boycott” — although this is the type of BDS boycott perhaps most relevant to ASA. I myself do not accept Salaita’s apparent distancing of himself and ASA from an all-out BDS boycott of Israeli goods-and-services-and-institutions, but I can see that ASA is acting within the limited purview of an academic organization.
Salaita points to the seemingly-permanent criminal character of Israel very well. Israel does indeed continue, with USA’s enabling, its oppression and continues to reject any meaningful peacemaking.
Some people may see nothing criminal about the means adopted by Palestinian Jews to create a super-majority-Jewish state in 1945-50. Others may admit that they’d not like their own homes to be taken over by foreigners as the Palestinian homes (and homeland) were taken away, but argue that the creation of Israel was necessary and the criminality of 1945-50 — if such it was — can and must be excused.
But, either way, that was then.
What we all see is that the criminality never stopped. The terrorism, racism, land-theft, water-theft, oppression, exile, murder, torture, house-demolition, imprisonment without charge or trial, and all the horrible rest, has never stopped. In many ways it has increased.
And indeed, all this horror is carried forward by Israel with such enthusiasm that it seems part of the goal, part of the “ends” of the Israeli project, and not merely — as some might have it — part of the “means” chosen in 1945-50 for the limited goal of state-creation. For if criminality were merely “means” chosen to achieve legitimate goals, one would expect those means to be abandoned (and might hope that their use would be apologized for). But none of this has happened.
If the question “do the ends justify the means” be asked about Israel, I believe one will find that the answer is (or has become) “no” because the (criminal) means have become ends (the criminal means have become permanent features of the Israeli state and are, thus, purposes of Israeli policy rather than its tools for some benign purpose), and one can never say that (criminal) means justify the (criminal) means themselves.
Palestinians see that the Israelis and Germans overcame the legacy of the Holocaust through a truth and reconciliation process a long [time] ago.
That’s strange phrasing. Israelis didn’t even exist when the Holocaust happened. Your choice of words equates Israelis with Holocaust survivors. So, you make the same mistake as German politicians. They view Israel as the representative of Holocaust survivors. Therefore, giving submarines to Israel counts as reparation to Holocaust survivors. That’s a very Zionist way of thinking. Please don’t adopt it.
Besides, most (Jewish) Israelis only have nothing against (non-Jewish) Germans because they assume that most of us support Zionism. If we spoke out against Zionist crimes, they would immediately hold the Holocaust against us. As long as we do everything they want, they tolerate us. As soon as we dare to disagree with them, they hate us.
Zionism makes it impossible to leave the Holocaust behind because Zionists keep (mis)using the Holocaust as a tool for their purposes.
BDS is still a drop in the bucket of what needs to be done to Israel.
I remember the wiki leak cables that came out in which Isr officials talked about their plan to reduce Gaza to collapse and that is just what they have done.
Earlier this week I noticed Amnesty, Red Cross and UN press releases saying Gaza was once again on the brink and this time it was ‘going over the cliff.’
Gaza had like 3 days worth of emergency fuel left to power their generators at hospitals and etc since their one power plant was out of commission, and then even that had be rationed. Which also means no way to pump out sewage or water facilities either so it just overflows and floods in the streets while they have no clean water to drink. Egypt aligning itself with Israel and closing down Gaza was the final death knell for Gaza.
United Nations Radio
http://www.unmultimedia.org/radio/english/2013/11/gaza-on-brink-of-a-humanitarian-catastrophe-because-of-fuel-crisis-warns-un-expert/
Gaza becoming uninhabitable as blockade tightens, says UN
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/nov/22/gaza-uninhabitable-blockade-united-nations
Gaza is facing a power crisis as a result of a shortage of fuel, with blackouts lasting 12-16 hours a day, according to Oxfam. Raw sewage has flooded streets in some areas of Gaza City following the closure of Gaza’s only power plant on 1 November, which made pump stations inoperative. ‘
And the zionist filth is lapping up this horror by putting out hasbara on how it’s all the result of internecine warfare.
Another Twist in the Palestinian Tragedy: Gaza on the Brink of Fitna …
http://www.ajc.org/site/apps/nlnet/content2.aspx?c=7oJILSPwFfJSG&b…
Another Twist in the Palestinian Tragedy: Gaza on the Brink of Fitna (Internecine Warfare) — and of Large-Scale Preventive Action by Israel
Is this where Netanyahu’s money for his fancy car came from?
Palestinian Authority loses $300m in trade taxes a year to Israel
3 Sep 2013:
UN report defines as ‘fiscal leakages’ the customs, purchase and value-added taxes destined to the PA but retained by Israel….
Shall we apply the means justifies the end? Fine, then turn these zionist nazis to dust.
The Germans certainly produce high performance cars popular with leaders.
Max Blumenthal was also interviewed in Salon yesterday:
http://www.salon.com/2013/12/04/max_blumenthal_i_knew_alterman_would_freak_out/
The title is an inside joke. Because, lo’ and behold, who is it that is frantically emailing Lennard to demand she and her editors “update” the article with his long-winded rant?
Ah yes, that guy. Again. The tenth attack against Blumenthal. I think we can officially call Alterman a stalker now.
But, aside from a nutter like Alterman, it’s also a reminder how the book is slowly gaining currency. The New Inquiry, a neo-Marxist/socialist magazine which was formed a few years ago, did a very positive review. They’re aspiring to be high-brow(and they’re New York-based! With a Jewish editor-in-chief, too).
The Apartheid-apologists at TNR will be the last holdout. Hughes will inevitably make a decision at some point: either fire most of the bigots like Chortiner et al, or pay an increasingly heavy price to support, so unflinchingly, a state which so much of the rest of the left no longer does.
Finally, given this new consciousness of the left, which we already saw at the DNC convention in 2012, I wonder how the next DNC convention will be? Most likely the party apparatchiks will not even allow a vote; they know they’ll lose it next time. But will the grassroots force onto the party a different agenda?