The Disappearing BDS Movement: From Anti-Zionism to Anti-Semitism

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Step by misstep, the faltering BDS (Boycotts, Divestments, Sanctions) movement is stumbling into an abyss of hatred that will soon lead to its rejection by reasonable people everywhere. In fact, at this rate, critics of the campaign to unfairly stigmatize Israel for its supposed lack of “academic freedom” (news to Freedom House, the respected organization giving the Jewish State a laudable rating of 1.5 on a seven point scale, 1 being the freest) will have little more to do than quote BDSers themselves–in order to discredit an extremist ideology that rejects a two-state compromise solution to the Israeli/Palestinian dispute in favor of denying Israel’s right to exist. First, one of its otherwise more intelligent spokespersons, the distinguished political theorist, Corey Robin, of Brooklyn College, is reported by Jonathan Marks, in The Chronicle of Higher Education, as having surprisingly confessed to an undeniable overlap between anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism in the BDS movement:

You say you’re a left-wing critic of Israel, so I presume you’ve supported some actions against the state. Well, guess what: I bet among those who also support those actions there are people who want the Jews to disappear.

Next, to make matters worse, the prominent Italian philosopher (and member of the European Parliament), Gianni Vattimo, comes out with the following statement of his own, in a recent book called Deconstructing Zionism–in which, if nothing else, the emeritus professor candidly names names, identifying unabashedly who at least some of Robin’s (and his own) allies and would-be Jew-disappearers, as a matter of fact, happen to include:

For good reasons of international stability, one never dares—or almost never, except in the case of Islamic heads of state like Ahmadinejad—to question the very legitimacy of Israel’s existence…. When Ahmadinejad invokes the end of the State of Israel, he merely expresses a demand that should be more explicitly shared by the democratic countries that instead consider him an enemy.

Yes, the philosophy of BDS embraces the “philosophy” of Iran’s former President, and Holocaust denier, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad–the one who, like Professor Robin, dares to speak the truth. Israel is illegitimate. Its end should therefore be sought.

So! With that bracing reminder. Knowing for sure who at least a couple of BDS’s more recognizable fellow travelers include–a terrorist-sympathizing dictator/puppet who famously threatened to wipe Israel off the map, and a Heideggerian postmodernist who thinks that “democratic countries” above all should give credence to the essential thought behind the Iranian nuclear bomb project–do the opponents of BDS really need to mount arguments in favor of peace and reconciliation instead?

As the preeminent man-of-letters, Edward Alexander, helpfully reminds in a brilliant editorial of just a day ago, Jews Against Themselves: The BDS Movement and Modern Apostasy, it was the courageous German historian Matthias Küntzel who accurately discerned that,”Every denial of the Holocaust contains an appeal to repeat it.” Well, Küntzel’s point is to the point, indeed. And furthermore–the point I myself would stress here and now–today the additional link that needs to be made above all is to the analogous denial inherent in the BDS campaign for the delegitimation of Israel as a Jewish and democratic state. For what BDS, Ahmadinejad, Corey Robin, and other leaders of the not-so-stealthy “stealth campaign” to seek to infiltrate the norm of a one-state “bi-nationalism” from-the-river-to-the-sea all seem to forget (including the influential Queer Theorist, Judith Butler, and the anti-Israel activist, Omar Barghouti, who openly proposes to “euthanize” Israel) is that the real tragedy, the truenakba even, of modern Israel’s rebirth is that it came a decade or more too late.

Is rolling the clock back now supposed to help? BDS and its allies–”well, guess what”–want to do just that. Only it’s far too late for that, and the only people they are really hurting with their fantasy of time-travel are the Palestinians themselves. Which is why I join with Abu Mazen in rejecting BDS for the ideological arm of a new kind of terror campaign that it is. For, as Marc H. Ellis also frankly avers in his grotesquely phantastical contribution to Vattimo’s same edited volume,

At least in the present the very announcement of a process of ending a Jewish State of Israel would probably precipitate a mass exodus of Jewish Israelis to Europe and the United States—if, that is, the borders of the various states would accept millions of Jewish Israelis.

And “if not”? The ideologists of BDS don’t really care to comment. After all, why should they? Disappearing Jews is what BDS is all about.

 

The Disappearing BDS Movement: From Anti-Zionism to Anti-Semitism

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AUTHOR

Gabriel Noah Brahm

Gabriel Noah Brahm is Senior Research Fellow at University of Haifa’s Herzl Institute for the Study of Zionism. In 2016 he founded Michigan’s Center for Academic and Intellectual Freedom (named an "Oasis of Excellence" by ACTA), at Northern Michigan University, where he also teaches English and world literature. His forthcoming book is Israel in Theory: The Jewish State and the Cultural Left. Follow him on Twitter @Brahmski.


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