“Today I’m coming out,” writes David Harris Gershon, endorsing BDS at Daily Kos (a piece originally at Tikkun). The title reflects the huge psychic cost involved in Jews seeming to betray their community by calling for BDS. Gershon is a liberal Zionist two-stater, whose wife was hurt in a suicide attack in 2002. He has worked with Americans for Peace Now.
The best thing about this piece is its honesty about the desperate situation that Israel and the U.S. have created in the occupation. Gershon speaks openly of ethnic cleansing, is outraged by the Levy report saying there is no occupation, and describes the apartheid status of Jews and Palestinians on the West Bank. Note that there is no tapdancing in this piece about just boycotting settlement products– no, all of Israeli political culture is off the rails.
From his conclusion:
And I think about Israel’s inability to stop the occupation on its own, about how the only way to stop it may be for outside pressures to bear down upon the country I love.
Sanctions. Boycotts. Divestments. (BDS)
These are the tools Israel and Israeli propagandists fear greatly, for they are tools with potentially sharp teeth.
And so we come to the confession, to the coming out: as an American Jew invested deeply in Israel’s success and survival — which in turn drives my investment in stopping one of the greatest moral challenges of my generation: the occupation — I have no choice but to formally endorse and embrace BDS.
That’s a difficult statement to make, for in both my personal and professional worlds, making such a statement could bring ostracization, condemnation or censure.
To some Jews, I will now (wrongly) be viewed as an enemy, as anti-Semitic, as anti-Israel. Some in my community may, upon reading this, choose to withdraw. It’s happened to others.
As it is, I have long been uncertain about supporting such measures, afraid of the long-term damage a sustained BDS movement might do to Israel, and concerned about the anti-Israel motivations of segments who push to sanction Israel.
However, I know this for a fact: those who claim in Israel that there is no occupation have only one goal in mind: a single-state solution, a Jewishly-controlled Israel stretching from the Mediterranean Sea to the Jordan River.
And here is a postscript from the author:
12:23 pm EST: I’m stunned and humbled by the response this has received. When I have time, I promise to go through and read all of the comments, and hopefully respond to some.
Thank you for the civility and for your support. I’m deeply moved.
How times change.
Wasn’t it just very recently that this site was branded as some sort of Nazi hate-site by an outraged Jewish ‘liberal’ Zionist who moonlights as the ‘poor man’s Alan Dershowitz’ on that site?
Will Daily Kos now be given the ThinkProgress treatment?
Is Josh Block (‘former AIPAC staffer’) coming out of the woodwork with a fiery email to sympathetic journalists like Ben Smith at Buzzfeed, Eli Lake at Newsweek or Dylan Byers at Politico with a damning attack on the moral miasma that is now the Daily Kos?
Interesting how fast things change from Nazi to moral englightenment.
Protip: it was never us. It was you.
David,
As someone who has gone through a similar process, I understand the difficulty in deciding to express public support for BDS, and applaud your “coming out”. You did the right thing.
There’s one thing I don’t understand, however. You refer to “the country I love”. What is it about Israel that you love? You obviously don’t love the occupation, which has become part of the fabric of Israeli society. Since you seem to be committed to justice and equality, I also presume that you do not love the systematic inequality between Jews and non-Jews within the green line, inherent to the very concept of a “Jewish state”. You say that (Jewish) Israeli society will not transform itself and will not end the occupation without external pressure. What is there to love about such a country, such a society?
There are many people I love in Israel and I love the physical land, as well as some aspects of Israeli culture (e.g. the Hebrew language), but the inherent inequality and dispossession seem to turn just about everything else to ashes in my mouth.
Note to liberal zionists (and i dont mean to be a jerk, i give this guy credit):
maybe tone it down with the “the country i love” stuff – those of us who have no manufactured sympathetic feelings toward israel have a hard time with statements like that; because to us, israel is the country that bombs civilian populations, ethnically cleanses land, arbitrarily imprisons thousands and attacks and occupies its neighbors. Nothing much to love. So, enough with the nationalism. Lets judge societies on their actions and their sentiments, without mention as to their demographics – the horror of israeli crimes is not mitigated because they are undertaken by Jews.
One last thing: How is it that anyone can say, “as a Jew” I dont support the occupation etc. and then (probably for the same reason) say they “love” Israel? In other words, Gershon, because he is jewish, “loves” Israel ( I assume he knows its history) but opposes the occupation and the current political discourse on the same grounds. Am I the only one who is really confused by this? I can’t be. I think its high time we all put our political identities down and hit the restart button, Gershon doesnt object “as a Jew” – he objects as a human being, and should have the stones to say so.
Excellent diary . Bravo for Gershon.
And what a change for Dkos in the comments made.
I see that the aggressive zio bots have been reduced to a very few. I noticed the bots losing ground there some time ago but I visit Dkos so seldom that seeing the change today it looks monumental.
Two other interesting things in the comments 1) more Jewish commenters agreeing Israel has gone very very wrong 2) more non Jewish commenters saying exactly what they think and not being intimidated by the anti semite hurlers.
Yes things are changing.
This guy Gerhson is an interesting case of a man who ponders things and only let’s out a very selective portion of what he must know. For example, on his website he writes a piece about how, when he and his wife were having a baby, he dreaded the notion it might be a boy because he had mixed feelings about circumcision, especially since he knew he’d get his boy circumcised for sure since he was a Jew. He discussed a recent German court case of a muslim baby boy who had been mutilated, and a local German decision banning routine baby boy circumcision. He said that was very courageous of the German official responsible, considering Germany’s public history (meaning the miniscule 12 years of it under Hiter). I fail to decipher his intent on this blog article on this subject because he did not tackle the whole subject, but only the religious aspect of it, utterly failing to even mention to his readers that he might have mentioned that the USA is the only Westernized country that still does routine baby boy circumcisions, although it is a country who’s population is mostly Christian and only a tiny segment of the whole population is Jewish or Muslim. And that the US medical community has only recently confirmed that routine circumcision of baby boys has no medical health value, something the European medical community figured out many decades ago with no harm to German males (and some hot benefits) who are mostly uncut. Nor did he mention the economic aspects of the subject, that is, that in many US states, governmental funds still pay for such a painful and stupid practice performed on boy babies; only recently do hospitals even ask the parents if they want it done. Further, the barbaric practice is very lucrative, both for the hospitals, and for the cosmetic industry, which buys the foreskins to make things like skin cream for females.
Given this approach, what does his call for BDS mean? How specific, how factually based is his public change of heart, and will he tell us more about that? And, should we be happy the country he says he loves is not the USA, but Israel, any more than we should be happy he now thinks not engaging in BDS will, eventually, harm the Jews? What about harming America? What about the useless pain of all All American baby boys still subject to routine circumcision?
Just asking.