Rabbi Andy Bachman is a leading liberal Zionist. He’s spoken at J Street, he hosted Rashid Khalidi at his shul, Beth Elohim in Brooklyn. Well the Park Slope food coop is considering boycotting Israeli goods, and Bachman is opposed to boycott. Here he is interviewed by Julie Wiener in the NY Jewish Week.
Bachman: if you look over the last six months at the ongoing Chinese repression of people in Tibet and the continual documented human rights abuses in China and in Syria all summer long, I sincerely doubt those people are going through the co-op shelves and writing up a referendum to boycott any products from Syria or China. … This isn’t a rational effort here; that isn’t BDS’s goal. And that is to my mind what’s so reprehensible about it. You don’t have to go very far inside the BDS movement to understand what they’re really advocating is the end of Israel as a Jewish state. They don’t believe in a two-state solution.
What are you hearing from your congregants and from others in the community?
Most people’s perception of it is that it’s a nuisance. They don’t think it’s going to pass, and they’re exhausted from all these efforts to delegitimize Israel. … The idea that someone is singling out Israel in public, you have to oppose it and deal with it, but it ends up becoming a distraction from the real efforts people ought to put their energy into. … The moderates among Israelis and Palestinians need to get their acts together and make peace, because there’s more dangerous things happening out there: bloodshed in Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria. It’s crazy to think all the instability is Israel’s fault, and I say this as someone committed to two states for two people, not as some kind of all-of-a-sudden right-wing activist.
You’ve served on J Street’s rabbinic cabinet and been a fairly vocal critic of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and many of Israel’s policies. How do you feel about targeted boycotts of West Bank settlements?
I don’t think what might come out of a successful boycott would have any appreciable impact. I just don’t think boycotts are the way to go; it doesn’t seem like a good strategy to get Israelis and Palestinians to peace.
If not through BDS, what is a legitimate way for people to express concerns about Israel and advocate a better life for Palestinians?
Strengthening all the civil society work people are doing there, the organizations that are strengthening the hands of moderates so a moderate Palestine can be built and Israel’s civil society can thrive.
When I prepared this post last night, I thought to let the rabbi just hold forth without comment. But this morning I’m reminded of what a tinderbox the Middle East is, and how Palestinian oppression has been a CONSTANT for 64 years, and then you hear a leading American liberal rabbi telling everyone to moderate themselves– a rabbi living in one of the most affluent neighborhoods in the world as millions of Palestinians live without any political rights (as Sheizaf and Siegman have attested, let alone countless Palestinian sources) and it’s just crushing. The indifference of American Jewish leadership, during this crisis of the human spirit! This idea of “moderate” Palestinians–who are they? Does “moderate” mean accepting checkpoints and dispossession? What would Thomas Paine have said to that? I think moderates are the people who have foresworn violence and are using protest and boycott to end occupation. And as to the end of Israel as a Jewish state, yes, I recognize that this is a desideratum in the minds of many in the movement I’m joined with. Myself I am agnostic on the point. But I challenge my fellow American Jews, living in this multiethnic democracy: If we were to save one life by giving up our mental attachment to the idea of a Jewish state, is that maybe just worth it? Would you give up your life for the preservation of that idea, when you don’t even have to live there?
Update: original version of this post said that Bachman’s on the J Street board. An assumption; I can’t find his name there. Apologies.
