{"id":39270,"date":"2014-02-03T14:24:11","date_gmt":"2014-02-03T14:24:11","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=39270"},"modified":"2015-05-05T22:11:09","modified_gmt":"2015-05-05T21:11:09","slug":"why-israel-fears-the-boycott","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2014\/02\/why-israel-fears-the-boycott\/","title":{"rendered":"Why Israel Fears the Boycott"},"content":{"rendered":"

If Secretary of State John Kerry\u2019s attempts to revive talks between Israel and the Palestinian Authority fail because of Israel\u2019s continuing construction of illegal settlements, the Israeli government is likely to face an international boycott \u201con steroids<\/a>,\u201d as Mr. Kerry warned last August.<\/p>\n

These days, Israel seems as terrified by the \u201cexponential<\/a>\u201d growth of the Palestinian-led Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (or B.D.S.<\/a>) movement as it is by Iran\u2019s rising clout in the region. Last June, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu effectively declared B.D.S. a strategic threat. Calling it the \u201cdelegitimization\u201d movement, he assigned the overall responsibility for fighting it to his Strategic Affairs Ministry. But B.D.S. doesn\u2019t pose an existential threat to Israel; it poses a serious challenge to Israel\u2019s system of oppression of the Palestinian people, which is the root cause of its growing worldwide isolation.<\/p>\n

The Israeli government\u2019s view of B.D.S. as a strategic threat reveals its heightened anxiety at the movement\u2019s recent spread into the mainstream. It also reflects the failure of the Foreign Affairs Ministry\u2019s well-endowed \u201cBrand Israel<\/a>\u201d campaign, which reduces B.D.S. to an image problem and employs culture as a propaganda tool, sending well-known Israeli figures around the world to show Israel\u2019s prettier face.<\/p>\n

Begun in 2005 by the largest trade union federations and organizations in Palestinian society, B.D.S. calls for ending Israel\u2019s 1967 occupation, \u201crecognizing the fundamental rights of the Arab-Palestinian citizens of Israel to full equality,\u201d and the right of Palestinian refugees to return to the homes and lands from which they were forcibly displaced and dispossessed in 1948.<\/p>\n

Why should Israel, a nuclear power with a strong economy, feel so vulnerable to a nonviolent human rights movement?<\/p>\n

Israel is deeply apprehensive about the increasing number of American Jews who vocally oppose its policies \u2014 especially those who are joining or leading<\/a> B.D.S. campaigns. It also perceives as a profound threat the rising dissent among prominent Jewish figures who reject<\/a> its tendency to speak on their behalf, challenge<\/a> its claim to be the \u201cnational home\u201d of all Jews, or raise the inherent conflict<\/a> between its ethno-religious self-definition and its claim to democracy. What I. F. Stone prophetically wrote about Israel<\/a> back in 1967, that it was \u201ccreating a kind of moral schizophrenia in world Jewry\u201d because of its \u201cracial and exclusionist\u201d ideal, is no longer beyond the pale.<\/p>\n

Israel is also threatened by the effectiveness of the nonviolent strategies used by the B.D.S. movement, including its Israeli component<\/a>, and by the negative impact they have had on Israel\u2019s standing in world public opinion. As one Israeli military commander said in the context of suppressing Palestinian popular resistance to the occupation, \u201cWe don\u2019t do Gandhi very well.<\/a>\u201d<\/p>\n

The landslide vote<\/a> by the American Studies Association in December to endorse an academic boycott of Israel, coming on the heels of a similar decision<\/a> by the Association for Asian-American Studies, among others, as well as divestment votes<\/a> by several university student councils, proves that B.D.S. is no longer a taboo in the United States.<\/p>\n

The movement\u2019s economic impact is also becoming evident. The recent decision<\/a> by the $200 billion Dutch pension fund PGGM to divest from the five largest Israeli banks because of their involvement in occupied Palestinian territory has sent shock waves through the Israeli establishment.<\/p>\n

To underscore the \u201cexistential\u201d danger that B.D.S. poses, Israel and its lobby groups often invoke the smear of anti-Semitism, despite the unequivocal, consistent position of the movement against all forms of racism, including anti-Semitism<\/a>. This unfounded allegation is intended to intimidate into silence those who criticize Israel and to conflate such criticism with anti-Jewish racism.<\/p>\n

Arguing that boycotting Israel is intrinsically anti-Semitic is not only false, but it also presumes that Israel and \u201cthe Jews\u201d are one and the same. This is as absurd and bigoted as claiming that a boycott of a self-defined Islamic state like Saudi Arabia, say, because of its horrific human rights record, would of necessity be Islamophobic.<\/p>\n

The B.D.S. movement\u2019s call for full equality in law and policies for the Palestinian citizens of Israel is particularly troubling for Israel because it raises questions about its self-definition as an exclusionary Jewish state. Israel considers any challenge to what even the Department of State has criticized<\/a> as its system of \u201cinstitutional, legal and societal discrimination\u201d against its Palestinian citizens as an \u201cexistential threat,\u201d partially because of the apartheid image that this challenge evokes.<\/p>\n

Tellingly, the Supreme Court recently rejected<\/a> an attempt by Israeli liberals to have their nationality or ethnicity listed simply as \u201cIsraeli\u201d in the national population registry (which has categories like Jew, Arab, Druse, etc.). The court found that doing so would be a serious threat to Israel\u2019s founding identity as a Jewish state for the Jewish people.<\/p>\n

Israel remains the only country on earth that does not recognize its own nationality, as that would theoretically avail equal rights to all its citizens, undermining its \u201cethnocratic\u201d identity. The claim that B.D.S., a nonviolent movement anchored in universal principles of human rights, aims to \u201cdestroy\u201d Israel must be understood in this context.<\/p>\n

Would justice and equal rights for all really destroy Israel? Did equality destroy the American South? Or South Africa? Certainly, it destroyed the discriminatory racial order that had prevailed in both places, but it did not destroy the people or the country.<\/p>\n

Likewise, only Israel\u2019s unjust order is threatened by boycotts, divestment and sanctions.<\/p>\n

___________________________<\/p>\n

Omar Barghouti is a Palestinian human rights activist and the author of <\/i>Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions: The Global Struggle for Palestinian Rights.<\/i><\/p>\n

A version of this op-ed appears in print on February 2, 2014, on page SR6 of the New York edition with the headline: Why Israel Fears the Boycott. <\/i><\/p>\n

Go to Original \u2013 nytimes.com<\/a><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Join the BDS-BOYCOTT, DIVESTMENT, SANCTIONS<\/i> <\/b><\/span>campaign to protest the Israeli barbaric siege of Gaza, illegal occupation of the Palestine nation\u2019s territory, the apartheid wall, its inhuman and degrading treatment of the Palestinian people, and the more than 7,000 Palestinian men, women, elderly and children arbitrarily locked up in Israeli prisons.<\/p>\n

DON’T BUY<\/b> PRODUCTS WHOSE<\/b> BARCODE<\/b> STARTS WITH<\/b> 729<\/b>, which indicates that it is produced in Israel.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 DO YOUR PART! MAKE A DIFFERENCE!<\/b><\/span><\/p>\n

7 2 9: BOYCOTT FOR JUSTICE!<\/b><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

These days, Israel seems as terrified by the \u201cexponential\u201d growth of the Palestinian-led Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (or B.D.S.) movement as it is by Iran\u2019s rising clout in the region.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[54],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-39270","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-palestine-israel-gaza-genocide"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39270","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=39270"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39270\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=39270"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=39270"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=39270"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}