While your attention was diverted to America’s elections, a fierce debate was underway among Israel-bashers. The debate is over the precise parameters of the obviously essential boycott of Israel. And it took place, quite properly, in the pages of The New York Review of Books, where just how much to bash and boycott Israel is the only debate worth having.

First came a group of about 300 intellectuals, professors, and others that includes people who want to be known as Israel lovers, such as Peter Beinart, Daniel Ellsberg, Todd Gitlin, and Michael Kazin. Their full text follows:

We, the undersigned, oppose an economic, political, or cultural boycott of Israel itself as defined by its June 4, 1967, borders. We believe that this so-called Green Line, as defined by the 1949 armistice, should be the starting point for negotiations between the Israeli and Palestinian parties on future boundaries between two states. To promote such negotiations, we call for a targeted boycott of all goods and services from all Israeli settlements in the Occupied Territories, and any investments that promote the Occupation, until such time as a peace settlement is negotiated between the Israeli government and the Palestinian Authority.

We further call upon the US government to exclude settlements from trade benefits accorded to Israeli enterprises, and to strip all such Israeli entities in the West Bank from the tax exemptions that the Internal Revenue Service currently grants to American nonprofit tax-exempt organizations. The objects of our call are all commercial and residential Israeli-sponsored entities located outside the 1949 Green Line. It is our hope that targeted boycotts and changes in American policy, limited to the Israeli settlements in the Occupied Territories, will encourage all parties to negotiate a two-state solution to this long-standing conflict.

The first thing to say about this plea is perhaps “lots of luck, fellas” after the smashing Trump victory on November 9. But there’s a lot more to say.

Note the tricky language in this letter, from people who no doubt think they are about the most honorable and principled folks in the land. At one point they refer to “entities in the West Bank.” But everywhere else in this letter they refer to Israel “as defined by its June 4, 1967 borders,” to the “Occupied Territories,” and to places “outside the 1949 Green Line.” The difference between those latter formulations and “the West Bank” is huge: it is Jerusalem. Fairly read this letter calls for boycotts of goods and services from East Jerusalem, including the old Jewish Quarter. It calls for removing tax exemptions from any charity that, for example, spends money on the Western Wall, a synagogue in the Old City, or on archeology in the City of David digs—or any other place in what used to be Jordanian-occupied Jerusalem.

But of course they are all pro-Israel, you see; they “oppose an economic, political, or cultural boycott of Israel itself.” Small problem: their version of “Israel itself” does not include its historical and political capital, Jerusalem.

There is one other key point to make about this letter. In it, and the view of the world apparently held by its signers, there are no Palestinians—or at least no Palestinians who are grown-ups, who can act, who are able to make decisions. Their boycott is meant to continue only until such time as “a peace settlement is negotiated between the Israeli government and the Palestinian Authority” and there is “a two-state solution to this long-standing conflict.” What if there is no solution, no peace settlement, because the Palestinians won’t negotiate? What if they won’t come to the table? What if they demand that five million Palestinians have a “right of return” to move to Israel? Such details do not trouble the signers. If there is no peace, Israel must be to blame, and it must be punished. Period.

The letter suggests that a boycott may “help persuade the Israeli electorate to reject the costly and wrongheaded settlement enterprise and get serious about a two-state solution.” What’s to make the Palestinians “get serious about a two-state solution?” That thought never seems to strike the authors of this letter. At least they do spare us any reference to the “Palestinian electorate,” which is wise since the last Palestinian election was in 2006.

But this whole position is, for many other intellectuals, shockingly weak; it borders on, well, Zionism! So a bunch of them sent a reply to the NYRB. This one is signed by Angela Davis, Richard Falk, Rashid Khalidi, Alice Walker, and about 120 others, and this letter has one great virtue. There’s no “more in sorrow than in anger” nonsense, no pretense that we have to destroy or at least damage Israel to save it. They don’t really want to save it. “By omitting Israel’s other serious violations of international law,” they say, “the statement fails the moral consistency test.” Right on! as Angela used to say in the old days. “Palestinian civil society has called for Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) against all entities, Israeli or international, that are complicit in denying Palestinians everywhere their rights.” All entities, everywhere; that’s the spirit.

Watching Angela Davis and Richard Falk debate Daniel Ellsberg and Todd Gitlin just as the United States elects Donald Trump has its amusing side; the New Left of the 1960s, which is now a pretty Old Left itself, is falling apart just like the Democratic Party. Presumably some of these Lefties thought they could soon use these arguments—their letter was dated October 13—with their friends and colleagues in the Clinton administration. But like the Israeli electorate, which keeps voting for Benjamin Netanyahu, the American electorate has disappointed them; it voted for a president and a Congress that want much tighter relations with Israel. How about boycotting the states that went for Trump? Maybe Angela and Todd can debate that one next.