Eric Alterman has published an anti-BDS argument in a Nation forum on the question. Addressing BDS proponent Omar Barghouti, Alterman calls for incremental political progress that will engage Israelis and American Jews– and likens Barghouti’s call for the right of return to Ahmadinejad’s threats to Israel:
For this [domestic Israeli] pro-peace majority to become politically empowered, Israel’s citizens must be able to trust that the Palestinians with whom they negotiate are able to enforce the agreements they reach. This is, literally, the only path to genuine Palestinian self-determination. No American president, much less Congress, will ever attempt to force Israel into a peace agreement against its will. Neither would the Europeans, who are actually irrelevant since they lack both the power and the means to do so. Terrorism aside, Palestinians have no credible military option vis-à-vis Israel. Their only hope can come by convincing Jewish Israelis that the risks and benefits of peace outweigh the risks and benefits of continued conflict.
…Barghouti’s conditions demand that Israelis voluntarily forfeit their commitment to their history, their national identity and their understanding of Jewish history.
Were Barghouti to ask American Jews to join him in pressuring Israel to come to its senses and negotiate a secure settlement based on the 1967 lines, with necessary adjustments on both sides and some sort symbolic (and perhaps financial) redress for Palestinians without the “right of return,” he might stand a chance of attracting significant support even among American Jews and within the Israeli peace camp. As his plan now stands, it is of a piece with the programs of Hamas and Hezbollah and with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s recent call for “the destruction of the Zionist regime” by peaceful means.
What I find most remarkable about Alterman’s argument is how inherently conservative it is in the claim that the BDS strategy defies Israelis’ “history, their national identity and their understanding of Jewish history.” A liberal would not accept such rationalizations in any other situation in which we encountered such a gross imbalance of power. Imagine ceding to the white southerners of the 1960s “their understanding of southern history” as a reason to tolerate Jim Crow. Alterman is referring to fears of another Holocaust, but this dialogue is billed as a conversation among progressives; and I should think it is the progressive’s duty to reimagine social relations and overcome traditional understandings. Also, notice how Alterman seems to honor the constellation of existing powers, American empire and the Israel lobby, which have served to preserve the occupation.
The piece is also surprising for Alterman’s argument that the “democracy deficit” between Israel and its Arab neighbors, including Egypt, somehow justifies the status quo. I keep waiting for a sincere statement from Alterman about why he feels a need for a Jewish national homeland when we are doing so well here. That is the heart of his own understanding of Jewish history.
In the same forum, Lizzy Ratner argues for BDS and offers a far more fluid understanding of Jewish history. She cites a Jewish tradition of supporting boycott when there is injustice, and disputes the claim by Bernard Avishai, who preceded Alterman, that boycott will only put Israelis on the defensive and curb the progressive force of international capital. Again there is the issue, of a progressive adopting a conservative program:
Avishai makes the perplexing claim that in cutting off the salutary spigot of corporate capital, BDS risks alienating the very Jewish Israelis who are most primed to be sympathetic to Palestinians’ plight—namely, its “most educated and cosmopolitan people.” This is an odd formulation for several reasons, the most notable being the most obvious: Since when was morality the privilege of elites? And at what point did corporations become the avant-garde of enlightened behavior?
But there is another problem, which is that the available evidence doesn’t seem to support the theory. During the years that capital has poured into Tel Aviv, nightlife may have boomed but anti-occupation protest has not. More to the point, one of the prime, historic examples of boycott and divestment—the international campaign to end apartheid in South Africa, which inspired BDS—was enormously effective, as both Nelson Mandela and Desmond Tutu have argued. (And they should know, to quote Omar Barghouti.)
Read Ratner’s piece for the emphatic description of the facts on the ground today. That is the real argument for BDS, intolerable conditions. If not now, when?
In the American South, the Jim Crow system of racial segregation had endured since the end of Reconstruction in the 1870’s, and didn’t end until the 1960’s. In the absence of pressure, it would still exist today. The overthrow of Jim Crow required a revolt by the oppressed African-Americans, and the realization by the US ruling class that racism was an embarrassment and handicap that helped the Soviets in the Cold War. The Jim Crow system had popular support among southern whites, because they benefited (or thought they benefited), because it flattered their sense of racial superiority.
Compare with the plight of the Palestinians. Even those Palestinians who are Israeli citizens do not have the same rights as Israeli Jews, and it’s a lot worse in the Occupied Palestinian Territories. Israel’s systematic racism has popular support amond Israeli Jews, because they benefit. It flatters their sense of racial superiority.
Eric Alterman calls himself a liberal, but evidently he has no problem squaring his liberalism with the systematic exclusion of Palestinians from Palestine. He’s against equal rights for Palestinians.
One final point: Palestinians were deprived of their property: their lands and houses, by Israel. The property was just taken by force, and the Palestinians didn’t receive a penny in compensation. The nakba continues on the West Bank and in East Jerusalem today.
In contrast, the Jewish owners of property in Europe, who had their property taken by Germany, have received compensation, in the billions.
“Alterman calls for incremental political progress that will engage Israelis and American Jews…”
[Sigh] Right. As if that hasn’t been tried, along with dialogue groups, staged withdrawals, back channel communications and thousands of other meetings, conferences, proposals and whatever for 45 YEARS!!!
In the meantime, there’s a serious risk that many Israelis will die from laughing too much while they steal more land, kill more Palestinians and recieve more American financial and military aid.
An incremental (i.e stationary) political process is exactly what Israel wants.
/ and I should think it is the progressive’s duty to reimagine social relations and overcome traditional understandings./
Living in a world of fantasy where 6 million Israeli Jews just give up on their
country without a fight and welcome RoR is not something that even a “progressive”
as you say should see as his duty to imagine.
People get it into your thick “liberal” heads RoR may come some day but it will
only come over a LOT of dead bodies, our’s and theirs.
Now some of you probably find that idea appealing and some of you are just deluding
themselves, but that’s the way it is.
Like Alterman said,
Good luck with that.
Alterman, like Finkelstein, misreads the BDS movement’s political goals. Here is Barghouti in Huffpo:
Maybe this is what Phil means by “conservative”, but it’s not just that Alterman approaches the entire issue from the perspective of power; he expects Barghouti and Palestinians in general, to do the same. While demanding greater Palestinian sensitivity to Israeli and Jewish identity and history, Alterman shows complete (and necessarily wilful) ignorance of Palestinian history and experience. Lots of nerve, no sense of irony.
The “Israeli peace camp” already supports that agenda. As for American Jews, or at least their institutions and leaders, even Beinart flesh-of-their-flesh, speaker-of-hard-truths-wrapped-in-soothing-reassurances is fighting an uphill battle to get that very message across. What chance could Barghouti (who does not love Israel, and is not a member of any known Zionist organisation) possibly have – and to what end, if such a campaign fails to address core Palestinian concerns in any meaningful way? I have little doubt that Alterman could successfully negotiate a peace deal with Jeremy Ben-Ami, but what would be the point?