After Paris, Whither the BDS Movement?

Showing no empathy and spinning crazy theories, Israels fiercest critics show that
its Jews, not the Jewish state, they despise
By Liel Leibovitz|January 14, 2015 12:00 AM|Comments: 25
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(Gali Tibbon/AFP/Getty Images)

BDS and the Politics of Radical Gestures

Boycotts and divestment can be useful tools for righting wrongs, but they are
apolitical tantrums in cases of right versus right
By Todd Gitlin
Straight Outta Chappaqua
How Westchester-bred lefty prof Corey Robin came to loathe Israel, defend Steven
Salaita, and help cats
By Phoebe Maltz Bovy
Lets say, just for the sake of argument, that you belong to a group committed to
ending the Israeli presence in the West Bank and erecting a Palestinian state. In the

face of repeated criticism, youve insisted that you have no problem with Jews, that
its Israeli policy that you abhor. Maybe you advocate an immediate Israeli return to
the 1967 borders. Maybe youre more hardened and believe that the Jewish state
should give way to a multiethnic one stretching from the river to the sea. Whatever
the case may be, you insist that youre committed to reconciliation, to justice, to
peace.
Now lets assumehypothetically, of coursethat terrorists run rampant in a
European capital far removed from Jerusalem and Ramallah. In one case, they single
out one woman and shoot her for being Jewish. In another, they attack a kosher
supermarket, executing four shoppers. How do you react?
If youre smart, if youre compassionate, if youre truly interested in human rights,
you simply condemn the attacks. You do it not because its the right thing to do
standing up to terrorism is every civilized persons dutybut also because you realize
that your ability to attract allies hinges on convincing them that you harbor no antiJewish sentiments, no matter how fiery your anti-Israeli rhetoric may get. This is
especially true when, in the aftermath of the violence in Paris, kooks of all stripes
rose to decry the massacres as false flag attacks perpetrated by the Mossad in
order to foment anti-Muslim outrage. It would have been good, even essential, to have
heard the pro-Palestinian camp stand up to such nonsense, decry the murder of
innocents, and pledge their commitment to a peaceful resolution.
Weve had no such luck.
Instead of the sort of empathy youd expect any sane person to express at a moment
like this, the most vocal proponents of the BDS movement took radically different
paths. Jewish Voice for Peace, for example, one of the leading radical leftist
organizations focused on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, published a blog post that
indicated precisely where its priorities lay. Entitled The Paris Murders & the
Islamophobic Backlash, it contained many wise observations like the one alerting
readers that Muslims are at greatly heightened risk from the forces of bigotry, but
almost nothing about the fact that other forces, no less bigoted, had just taken the
lives of 17 people, many of them Jewish. Even if you subscribe to the moronic theory
that believes the concrete threat to be not the men with the semiautomatic weapons
but some future affront to somebodys feelings, you can still take more than half a
sentence to express genuine sadness at the thought of so many wasted lives. JVP had
no time for such normal, human sentiments; nor did many others who make assailing
Israel their cause. Writing in Mondoweiss, for example, and never once mentioning
Jewsquite a feat, considering that one of the attacks took place in a kosher
supermarketChloe Patton argued that we westerners needed to embrace the ways
in which the historical traumas of the global south continue to haunt the postcolonial
present. Even without judging the intellectual merit of such an argument, its not too
hard to see that one thing that makes it particularly vile is that it assumes that only
one side has any right to a hearing, while the other, even when slaughtered, ought to
do nothing but listen and empathize.

Such uncaring, coming at this particular moment from anyone professing to be an

activist working on behalf of universal values is deafening. As it happens, however, it
beats the alternative.
That would be the attempt to hurry past the actual killings of actual human beings
and milk the situation for every possible drop of bilious propaganda. Enter Ali
Abunimah, one of the most vocaland noxiousopponents of Israel and the cofounder of a website called The Electronic Intifada, a name that does very little to
distance the sites writers from the memory of the two violent Palestinian uprisings
that claimed the lives of nearly a thousand Israeli civilians.
Observing the situation in France, Abunimah promoted a novel theory: Because the
gravest danger we face is Islamophobia, and because Islamophobia feeds on a false
belief that European Muslims arent trying hard enough to fit in, French Jews rushing
to leave France in the wake of the Paris attacks are the real and unsung villains.
[I]mmigrants and their European-born descendants from Muslim-majority countries
are routinely accused by those who hate and fear them of refusing to integrate in
Europe, Abunimah wrote, and therefore those who say that Jews must leave Europe
for their own safety are saying in effect that it is impossible for Jews to integrate
and ever be safe in their home countries. And that, Abunimah triumphantly
concludes, is a fundamentally anti-Semitic idea.
In other words, when the victims scurry for safety, theyre really only digging their
hole deeper and are therefore to blame for making a bad situation worse. And, of
course, its all Israels fault: The title of Abunimahs piece is Israel Moves Quickly
To Exploit Paris Attacks.
To those among us unfortunate enough to follow the BDS movement closely, such
vitriol is no news. But cataclysmic events have a way of rattling people into sudden
awakenings. And so heres a simple suggestion: before you engage in conversation with
critics of Israel, take a moment and check their digital footprint from the past week.
If theyve taken the time and the trouble to condemn these horrific murders without
equivocation, if they sound genuinely remorseful, proceed. But if all they can muster
are musty cliches or steely dogmas, if they cant take a moment away from their
politics to be ordinary, feeling humans, and if they cant miss an opportunity to see
even this tragedy as yet another proof of the exceptional nefariousness of the
Israeli regime, then theyve proven that the true object of their vitriol is not the
Jewish state but the Jewish people.
***
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Liel Leibovitz is a senior writer for Tablet Magazine.