Meanwhile,
a campaign to ban Israeli products has been gaining strength in the United
States and Europe. And then there are the many performers who – following the
lead of Brian Eno, Elvis Costello, Vanessa Paradis, Roger Waters, and others –
wonder out loud whether or not to appear in “occupied Palestine.”
None
of these developments is, in itself, of great moment. But, taken together, they
create a climate – and perhaps form a watershed.
And
this is no accident. All of the recent episodes can be traced, more or less
directly, to the global Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement,
established in 2005 by 171 Palestinian nongovernmental organizations. So they
provide a good occasion to remind those who support this campaign of its true
nature.
BDS
is supposedly a worldwide civil-society movement embodying respect for law,
democracy, and human rights. If that is true, why target the only country in
the region that was founded on those values, and that has continued, for better
or worse – and despite a nearly 70-year state of war with its neighbors – to be
broadly faithful to them? How is it that these scrupulous humanists have had
nothing whatsoever to say about the 200,000 victims of Syrian President Bashar
Al-Assad, the crimes of the Islamic State, or the massive deportation of
Christians from the Plain of Nineveh, to name just a few contemporaneous issues?
BDS
is an “anti-apartheid” movement, comes the reply, adopting the methods and
spirit of Nelson Mandela in South Africa. That sounds splendid. But then, once
again, why the focus on Israel? With its multiethnic polity and society – a mix
of Western and Eastern Europeans, Americans and Russians, Ethiopians and Turks,
Kurds, Iranians, and Arabs (17 of whom sit in the Knesset) – Israel is
precisely the opposite of an apartheid state.
By
contrast, in Qatar, whose foundations (together with Saudi think tanks) provide
most of the financing for the BDS movement, 95% of the labor force consists of
Asian non-citizens working in slave-like
conditions under the kafala
system, which is a close cousin to apartheid.
Perhaps
the goal is to pressure Israel to conclude a peace deal with the Palestinians,
which surely is worth a little accommodation with Qatar. In that case, it is a
peculiar peacemaking strategy that puts pressure on only one of the
belligerents, and that, instead of strengthening the hand of the many Israelis
who favor negotiation, imposes collective punishment in the form of exclusion
from the community of nations.
Only
one real formula for peace exists, and everyone knows it. That formula,
enshrined in the Oslo
Accords, is the two-state solution. One has only to read the declarations
of Omar Barghouti, Ali Abunimah, and other
promoters of the BDS movement to see that this solution is precisely what they
do not want. They prefer a “one-state solution” (Abunimah’s term) – under a
Palestinian flag, of course.
Is
this just a detail that can be safely ignored on the grounds that BDS targets
“only” the territories, the Jewish settlements being built there, and the goods
that the settlers produce? This is another sucker trap.
Here,
too, it is enough to read the movement’s founding
declaration of July 9, 2005, which specifies that one of its “three
objectives” is to “protect” the “rights of Palestinian refugees to return to
their homes and properties as stipulated in UN resolution 194.” In fact and in
law, that would amount to establishing on those lands a new Arab country that
could be counted on, in short order, to undergo an ethnic cleansing that would
make it judenfrei.
And,
finally, how can I refrain from reminding those whose memory is as full of
holes as their thinking that the idea of boycotting Israel is not as new as it
appears? In fact, it is older than the Jewish state, having emerged on December
2, 1945, from a decision by the Arab League, which then wasted no time in
relying on that decision to reject the United Nations’ dual resolution to
establish two states. Among the promoters of this brilliant idea were Nazi war
criminals who had settled in Syria and Egypt, where they gave their new masters
lessons in marking Jewish shops and businesses.
A
comparison is not an argument. And the meaning of a slogan does not reside
entirely in its genealogy. But words do have a history. As do debates. And it
is better to know that history, if we wish to avoid repeating its ugliest
scenes.
The
truth is that the BDS movement is nothing more than a sinister caricature of
the anti-totalitarian and anti-apartheid struggles. It is a campaign whose
instigators have no aim other than to discriminate against, delegitimize, and
vilify an Israel that in their mind never stopped wearing its yellow star.
To
activists of good faith who may have been taken in by duplicitous
representations of the movement, I would say only that there are too many noble
causes in need of assistance to allow oneself to be enlisted in a dubious one.
Those worthy causes include fighting the jihadist decapitators, saving the
women and girls enslaved by Boko Haram, defending the Middle East’s imperiled
Christians and Arab democrats, and, of course, striving for a just peace
between Israelis and Palestinians.
Bernard-Henri
Lévy is one of the founders of the “Nouveaux Philosophes” (New Philosophers)
movement. His books include Left
in Dark Times: A Stand Against the New Barbarism.
