There Is No Victory Without Anguish

On the logic and illogic of Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions

By Todd Gitlin

United States
THERE IS NO VICTORY WITHOUT ANGUISH
On the logic and illogic of Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions
By Todd Gitlin
January 20, 2016
In a recent essay titled The Logic of the Beneficiary, my Columbia colleague
English professor Bruce Robbins, wreathes the boycott, divestment, and
sanctions (BDS) movement with laurel leaves, but while making a spotty argument
he does succeed in clarifying some of whats at stake.
Robbins notes that a few American academic associationssmall left-wing ones,
as he doesnt notehave passed academic boycott resolutions. (More accurately,
as Jeff Weintraub has noted, what they call for are blacklists.) Robbins
observes that some Israeli companies that manufacture on the West Bank have
either relocated inside the Green Line or announced their intention to do so. He
rejoices that some entertainers consider Israel the only nation in the world so
vile as to warrant refusing to cross its border to bestow their in-person gifts.
(Whether they turn down royalty checks for Israeli purchases of movies and
music I do not know.)
Robbins shrewdly refrains from a straight-out defense of BDSs evasive and
purposively disingenuous core principles. He is committed to a version of BDS
that he can support, so he overlooks the purposive slipperiness of the
groups founding principles, which operate on a false syllogism that goes
something like this: a) Israel oppresses Palestinians (true); b) many Palestinians
oppose a two-state solution (true); therefore c) everyone should join BDS in its
equivocation about whether the Israeli state of 1948 is legitimate.
As I wrote in Tablet magazine, in 2014, BDS mobilizes legitimate anger at Israel
toward a very particular idea about how to settle relations between two peoples
by enfolding one under the dominance of another. BDS is not a practical
proposition to raise the price Israel must pay for the Occupation: by demanding,
say, that the United States cut aid to Israel that goes to sustain and enlarge
the Occupation. It is categorical, absolute. It knows only one set of wrongs,
not another.
For Robbins, BDS is not a utilitarian enterprise but a straightforward campaign
for justice. He claims that the movement explicitly restricts the demand to

lands colonized since 1967, in other words to the West Bank. To a hasty reader,
that explicitly has a resounding ring, but its more than a bit of a stretch. In
fact, BDS specializes in strategic equivocation. The proposition Robbins cites
does appear on a web page called Introducing the BDS Movement. When it
first arrived on the BDS site, I do not know. (I find no references to it online
predating 2013.) What I do know is that on its home page, BDS continues to link
to its earlier Call, which demands that Israel end its occupation and
colonization of all Arab landsthe boundary of such lands left unspecified. So
far as I can see, the qualification since 1967 does not appear on a single other
page attached to the site. The new language is jammed into a single location, like
a pro forma denial of what the rest of the site proclaimsthat Israel is
an apartheid state. If it in fact were that, why should any BDS supporter think
it has a right to exist even within 1967 borders? Moreover, if the Introduction
supersedes the Call, why feature the Call at all?
On and on with simplistic disingenuousness. Although BDS speakers claim that
BDS as a whole is agnostic as to the political solution they recommend, somehow
it turns out that the speakers themselves support a one-state solutionthat
is, the abolition of the State of Israel. BDS continues to endorse a Palestinian
right of return, the authority for which, they say, lies with UN Resolution 194 of
Dec. 11, 1948. The Resolution is a wartime grab-bag and its meaning is heatedly
disputed for good reasonits suffused with vagueness. Clause 11the only part
that addresses refugees at alldeclares that the refugees wishing to return to
their homes and live at peace with their neighbours should be permitted to do so
at the earliest practicable date, and that compensation should be paid for the
property of those choosing not to return and for loss of or damage to property
which, under principles of international law or in equity, should be made good by
the Governments or authorities responsible. Needless to say, BDS does not
comment on the live at peace with their neighbours part. Brandishing
Resolution 194 is a rhetorical gesture. For making a just peace, its well-nigh
useless.
Curiously, Robbins thinks that I consider the right of Palestinian refugees to
return to their homes a dealbreaker. Not so. He falsely attributes to me the
view that a Palestinian right of return is an all-or-nothing, love-it-or-leave-it
proposition. Itsfor BDS that 194 is conclusive. For me, its no more than a
(not the) starting point for sorely needed negotiations toward an acceptable
deal. I have no idea how Robbins gets the idea that I refuse to acknowledge the
possibility of pragmatic compromises. Its only pragmatic compromises (a
redundancy, come to think of it) that have any political use. For the thousandth
time, the problem in the Middle East is not right-vs.-wrong but right-vs.-right.

In brief, BDS has not ceased to equivocate. Robbins evocation of a two-state

BDS does not dispel the conclusion that its a bait-and-switch operation. The S
in BDS might as well stand for Slippery.
***
Robbins writes accurately: The growing appeal of BDS relies on a growing sense
that the founding claims of Zionism are less and less relevant to the facts on
the ground. On the existence of a growing appeal, hes right. Hes right, too, if
he means that, outside Israel, belief in the nations right to exist has been
undermined by Israels dreadful national policies and flagrantly illiberal
direction. Its a fact, as Robbins writes, that on the most fundamental recent
issues, like the 2014 invasion of Gaza and the ongoing theft of West Bank land
for settlements, Israels conduct is increasingly held to be indefensible.
But then we are back into the tedious and disheartening domain of the pointcounterpoint duel, and Robbins real contribution lies elsewhere. He proposes to
clarify the deeper logic that undergirds the BDS debate. He wants to dig down
to the substratum of unarticulated, but not necessarily unprincipled, intuition
and thereby try to understand the deeper logic that undergirds the BDS
debate. Here is the nub of his point: Time eats away at the rights of even the
most violently victimized of victims. Since he challenges me to address the
question of whether even the Holocaust is of diminishing salience, I will say that
I think that too.
Robbins is pointing to an unnerving truth about history, not only about the
Israel-Palestinian conflict, and especially about quarrels between right and
right: Peace and justice require term limits on attempts to replay the past. Even
the intellectual merit of what-if thinking can wreck the future if retains a tight
grip on the mind. When you do geometry, you can blithely roll back time, for
geometric shapes are eternal. When you do politics, the past has already
deposited a whole lot of facts on the ground. Justice and injustice are not all of
a piece. Then what?
Robbins condemns Israeli journalist Avi Shavit for writing that if it wasnt for
atrocities, the State of Israel would not have been born. If it wasnt for them,
I would not have been born. They did the dirty, filthy work that enables my
people, myself, my daughter, and my sons to live. Indeed, Shavits claim of a
logical chain is full of broken links. As an autonomous moral agent, one can
support a cause overallone can acknowledge ones debt to a history that
included uglinesswithout embracing all actions undertaken in its name. The very
concept of war crimes would not be tenable without this distinction, which is why
I can unequivocally relish the victory of the Allies in World War II while
condemning the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, or Stalins

1940 Katyn Forest massacre of 22,000 Poles. In a bleeding world, there is no

victory without anguish.
Robbins writes: Gitlin, whether he realizes it or not, seeks to reconcile himself
to past atrocities in order to defend the state of Israel as it exists, to suggest
that what it achieved must not and cannot be given away. But not so! Again, he
has recourse to either-or logic with a vengeance. I do not reconcile myself to
past atrocitiesI deplore themand I do not defend the state of Israel as it
exists, if by that Robbins means that I defend Israeli policies toward the West
Bank or Gaza Palestinians, or toward the Arab minority within the Green Line. I
do indeed defend the existence of a state that was created in 1948, recognized
in 1948, and justifiably defended in 1948, because in an ugly world that is the
residue of injustice as well as justice, history cannot be repealed. I do think
that what the nascent Israel achieved in 1948must not and cannot be given away
even though Israeli forces committed atrocities in the process. I also know that
the land Israel conquered in 1967, however the Six Day War began, it holds
today illegally and must renounce.
***
The beneficiary who is the target of Robbins broadside is the guilty but wellintentioned person who knowingly profits from a system she believes to be
unjust, who knows that atrocities were committed by her side but is reconciled
to benefits which she refuses to renounce. The beneficiary inherits the spoils of
injustice. But things are worse still, for truly, as he writes, we are all the
beneficiaries of unspeakable actsall of us without exception.
The founding and defense of the State of Israel delivered justice to Jews, a
people hitherto driven into exile and deprived of statehood. In the process of
establishing that State, Israeli Jews committed crimes against Palestinians.
Some of those unspeakable acts took place in living memory of at least some of
the victims. But then what? The past cannot be fixed because attempts at fixing
take place in history, which did not cease at the moment when the wrong was
done. Realities, stakes, interests, and claims evolve. Bad consequences can be
modified but not cancelled. Trying to perfect the past is a fantasists errand.
But pull away from the dread immediacies of the Israel-Palestine situation and
ask why so much controversy revolves nowadays around the question of what can
and cant be done about the past. This is the subject of a
revelatory book, Making Whole What Has Been Smashed: On Reparations
Politics, by the sociologist John Torpey,who argues that on the whole,
reparations politics stems from a lack of faith in a collective future.
The pursuit of the future, the homeland of progressives throughout the modern
era, has been overwhelmed by a tidal wave of attention to memory,

reparations, and coming to terms with the past. Perhaps never has so much
firepower been trained on history as a battleground of political and intellectual
struggle.
Visions of a collective good have crumbled. In the rubble of the future,
reparations demands can be seen as
a pursuit of the past that can only be understood as a response, at once
compensatory and escapist, to the collapse of the future. The implied hope is
that the excavation of memory will salve the yearning for prospects of real,
sustainable improvement. When the future collapses, the past rushes in. In
the absence of a plausible vision of a more humane future society, the presence
of the past becomes magnified; righting past wrongs supplants and replaces the
search for a vision of a better tomorrow, or even of today. The reckoning with
abominable pasts becomes, in fact, the idiom in which the future is sought.
For millennia, the appeal of upending the past endures. Every valley shall be
exalted, says Isaiah (40:4-5), and every mountain and hill shall be made low:
and the crooked shall be made straight, and the rough places plain. And the glory
of the Lord shall be revealed, and all flesh shall see it
together. Every mountain; all flesh;all glory revealed. So does Isaiah wield the
license of the prophet. But short of a cosmic mountaintop mutilation that, with
todays earth-mindful sensibility, we cannot behold without horror, the crooked
cannot be made straight. Hamas embraces one idiom of river-to-sea all-ornothingness; Israels irredentists, another. Give up the logic of extremity, which
is the call of conquest.
***
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Todd Gitlin, professor of journalism and sociology and chair of the Ph.D.
program in Communications at Columbia University, is the author of The Sixties:
Years of Hope, Days of Rage; Occupy Nation: The Roots, the Spirit, and the
Promise of Occupy Wall Street; and, with Liel Leibovitz, The Chosen Peoples:
America, Israel, and the Ordeals of Divine Election .