Media Analysis

BDS supporters should stop the one-state talk and help J Street, ‘New York’ magazine advises

Ross Barkan, a writer with progressive credentials, has advice for the BDS campaign in New York Magazine. Throw in with J Street and two-state “moderates” who focus on the occupation. Help out Rep. Andy Levin’s embattled campaign in Michigan and Donna Edwards’s in Maryland. Give up on the one-state talk. You will only set the movement for freedom in Palestine back because it is unrealistic, and Washington will never go there. The right of return and talk of “genocide” put moderates off. Israel is a “more complex” case than South Africa. There is broad “global support” for a Jewish state.

The indie band Big Thief’s cancellation of Tel Aviv under pressure from the left was just Brooklyn hipsters in an echo chamber. BDS cant win against the rightwing forces in Israel and their supporters in the U.S. But J Street can.

My quick response begins with areas of agreement with Barkan. He says the greatest victory of the Israel-critical movement was the Iran deal in 2015 under Obama, and that was the work of moderates. I agree, and I regularly praise J Street for its work on that deal. Barkan says we must support people who favor conditioning aid to Israel not to go to the occupation. I think the left should work with such people, yes. And while I have friends who can’t forgive Andy Levin’s strongly pro-Israel comments during Israel’s regular slaughter of Gazans, Levin is way better than AIPAC’s candidate in Michigan, Haley Stevens.

I have long cheered J Street for breaking up the old Israel lobby and presenting an alternative Jewish voice. They said they don’t want Israel to be a political football, but they have helped make it one. Good for them. That opens the door to others further left. A Levin victory empowers the Squad. There is a lot of overlap of agendas in D.C.

The reason I won’t join up  with J Street –speaking as a journalist — is that it cannot face two fundamental truths: There will never be a two state solution. There is apartheid in the occupied territories and that extends to Israel. J Street is dishonest about these realities because it is sworn to the idea of a Jewish state, and acknowledging the truth would obliterate that fantasy. It is interesting to me that Barkan, while acknowledging Israeli human rights atrocities, can’t bring himself to say apartheid. But countless human rights organizations and people of conscience have said just that. The former Chancellor of Brown called it “apartheid on steroids” ten years ago. Barkan repeats the leftwing charge, “genocide,” and says that won’t win over the moderates–well, I don’t use that word. But I say what I’ve seen: apartheid, segregation, persecution, the ghettoization of 2 million in Gaza– the humiliation and brutalization of a people based on ethnicity.

J Street’s leadership is D.C. establishment, but its rank and file know this. They’re generally on the left, and the young say it’s apartheid. I can’t wait to watch the J Street conference this October. I predict that IfNotNow will have an honored place there, because J Street knows that all the energy on this issue is on the young left, and IfNotNow will use the word apartheid and talk about a future without Zionism. Peter Beinart will probably also be represented there, and he crossed the street out of Zionism and called for one state.

Ross Barkan seems to believe that giving up the one state talk and working with liberal Zionists against the occupation is ultimately the best way to avoid violence. Many have said so. Norman Finkelstein used to say similar things. The problem with that advice is that the situation is way more dire than that. Israel destroyed the two state solution and Zionism presses on to extend the “Jewish state” to far corners of Palestine, oppressing the occupied people at every turn. This is an inherently revolutionary situation. The two state solution was supposed to accommodate Palestinian nationalism and Palestinian rights, but the Jewish government is incapable of renouncing that territory. Even a good moderate like Yair Lapid is just another racist when it comes to the West Bank.

J Street calls this a robust democracy. For me it is reminiscent of Algeria, South Africa, and the segregationist south. It demands action.

Palestinians have shown incredible restraint, and also shown us that they will never accept subordinated status in their land. Anyone who has met Palestinians over there comes away with a very strong feeling: These people should have the right to dream of a better life for their children; and nothing liberal Zionists are doing has advanced that prospect. Barkan admits that the nonviolent BDS campaign has made incredible progress in the last few years but says Big Thief’s change of heart does nothing for Palestinians. (Jeremy Ben-Ami of J Street has made a similar argument.) But if Palestinians truly don’t care about bands boycotting, then why did so many organizations with Palestinians support it? As Michael Arria frequently points out here, BDS comes from a call from Palestinian civil society. And we should be listening to the persecuted.

Barkan is right, BDS is not winning, now. The turnaround by Unilever on Ben & Jerry’s ice cream, pleasing the Israel lobby, is a blow to BDS campaign. But it is even a bigger blow to J Street. While J Street never endorsed the Ben & Jerry’s move, they certainly cheered it on, and Israel’s defeat of the Ben & Jerry’s gesture shows that there is just one state. Yair Lapid is the great white hope of liberal Zionists, and he called those who want to boycott the West Bank settlements “antisemites.”

Barkan’s response is likely to be, Israel is a special case because the world accepted the Jewish state in Palestine as an answer to the historical suffering of the Jewish people in Europe. I agree with him, and for me this is the key part of the struggle, convincing Zionists or Zionist sympathizers that far from being an answer to persecution Zionism is an “anachronism,” (as Tony Judt put it in calling for one state 20 years ago). Convincing Democrats of that (including the Jewish community) is the best answer I know of to the Violence question. That is what could change the pressure from Washington. Ultimately even J Street will agree.

P.S. I didn’t even deal with Barkan’s claim that we are singling Israel out, and what about Saudi Arabia and China? My country has singled Israel out for the “special relationship,” and so has my community, the Jewish community.

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“Something in Israel’s daily reality exudes evil. Just hit the streets, fly abroad or read the interview with Ram Cohen in Haaretz’s Hebrew edition a week ago on the future of teaching. Get into your car & try to reach your destination in a reasonable amount of time. Try to find parking, book an appointment with a neurologist, get a cable TV technician to come over, speak with El Al, cross the street, catch a cab, board a bus.
“Everything is filled with gas fumes & could explode at any moment. Aggressiveness & violence lurk beneath the surface. Everything is liable to give way. Everything screams existential despair.
“The situation of the occupation & the roads is similar. No one has any hope about them. They’re deteriorating. We don’t believe in peace anymore or believe we’ll ever see a Tel Aviv subway. Nor does anybody suggest an alternative.
“All this is accompanied by denial, repression & the lies we tell ourselves. We tell ourselves that we’re one people & there’s no occupation, that we’re not living in an apartheid state & under ethnic discrimination; polarization between Ashkenazim & Mizrahim – something still deep in our blood. Likewise, the struggle over the state’s character, between religion & modernity & between the Levant & the West, has yet to be decided.
“Some people put the toilet lid down on all this sewer water. There’s nothing like the Israeli media, which excels in denial & concealment – but there’s an eruption from time to time. The most explosive vision is that the strong will leave & the weak will stay. It has yet to happen, maybe thanks to Yedioth Ahronoth’s grotesque headlines like the one on Wednesday celebrating the ‘historic victory’ by the under-19 national soccer team.
“Does all this mean that the situation is one of bitter sobbing & a dead end? Definitely not. But on the day that Yesh Atid Chairman Yair Lapid became prime minister, the strongest feeling was that, no, there is no future. Certainly not a good future.”

 

“There is broad “global support” for a Jewish state.” Well, there was support — maybe not global, but from the US and other rich countries — for South Africa. Remember Ronald Reagan, that great president [sic]? Very supportive of apartheid South Africa.
Genocide… A woman from the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions said she didn’t use that word, she was waiting for when it actually starts. Meaning, I think, wholesale genocide, as opposed to the retail version that is ongoing.

I can think of two reasons for demanding what is, at present, politically impossible. For activists abroad, to expand the Overton window of what is possible to talk about, and to make the people who are demanding what is possible look reasonable by comparison. For Palestinians, well, they aren’t getting anywhere by demanding what is “possible,” so why not demand what they actually want?

the occupation is the state, and the state is the occupation. one can’t protest the occupation of the west bank without questioning the foundation of the state.

It is always interesting, for me, to read  Philip’s essays/articles, to have him clarify his thinking on particular issues and events in the news, so that I may compare his thinking with the views of other intellectuals in the U.S., Palestine, the Jewish State, and around the world. I am using the term intellectual, here, to mean anyone who is interested in examining the social, political and moral issues of the time in which he or she lives.

Americans’ attitudes toward the Jewish State and its ethnocractic social and political system — its policy of segregating and discriminating against non-Jews; its chauvinistic military and educational institutions; its elite military unit of assassins who are dispatched to murder civilians identified as its enemies; its relationship with a vast network of pro-Zionist think tanks and lobbyists in the U.S. and Europe; its links with the many pro-Zionist academics, journalists, diplomats, politicians and political pundits working in influential positions around the world; its highly convoluted and morally dubious justifications for committing war crimes and crimes against humanity — necessarily evolve over time.

Americans’ attitudes toward European settler colonialism and imperialism — religious doctrine and ritual, racial and ethnic identity, gender and sexual identity — also evolve over time. Mondoweiss encourages its readers to chew over, and thus expand their understanding of, our rapidly changing world and some of the critical issues of our time.

It’s not that no one is giving a chance to J Street. James Zoghby and the Arab American Institute (AAI) are. Let’s see where that leads to. The October conference of J is only 3 months away.