Hi, I've been wondering about BDS. A number of people have blogged about "BDS-safe" makeup, avoiding companies that deal with Israel, even though the official website says that boycotting every company that does so isn't worth it, only some. And I know your criticisms of BDS, such as the boycott of Israelis themselves, who could often only be safe in Israel. What about comparisons to apartheid South Africa, re: boycotts? Or the idea that Israel now= other settler states in say the 19th century?
My big problem with the comparisons with South Africa as far as BDS is concerned is that while there are similarities in effect, the causes are very different.
There was no pressing reason for Europeans to be in South Africa. For the most part, they went to the country to exploit it for profit and for empire. Israel is largely a refugee state. Most of its population is Jews who fled from anti-semitism in some form (the Holocaust, MENA expulsions, state anti-semitism in the Soviet Union and Ethiopia, etc.) They didn’t come to improve a privileged standing. They came to live with their own people where no government would enact such atrocities against them.
Now, you can point out that the Palestinians weren’t responsible for the Holocaust or the MENA expulsions or anything that happened outside of the region and you’d be correct. But at the same time, the BDS movement for South Africa was protesting a former British Colony with colonists who had a home nation to return to. That’s really not the case with the Jews in Israel who aren’t there because it was the most profitable option for them and their ancestors, but because they were unsafe living elsewhere, frequently the countries where people are now engaging in BDS practices.
This is where I get very frustrated with the popular colonial point of view. Because we have people marching, right now in favor of better treatment and admission for refugees. I agree with those sentiments. At the same time, the doors of those very same countries were closed to Jews. Israel is guaranteed to always be open for Jews. As a diaspora people who’ve experienced numerous expulsions throughout our history, this is an important point that can’t be overlooked. The British effectively closed Palestine to Jewish refugees in 1939 in response to Palestinian anti-British and anti-Jewish immigrant riots, the year World War II started in an about face from the Balfour Declaration that there would be a safe Jewish home there. Yes, that’s British colonialism, but it was also the place where hundreds of thousands of central European Jews were able to escape from Nazism from 1933-1939. The question you have to ask yourself is “with no real alternative, would I have let those Jews die in Europe rather than escape and survive in Palestine?”
When around a million Jews were expelled from countries in Africa and the Middle East, Israel took them in. I’m not going to pretend that they didn’t face racism and Ashkenazi supremacy issues in Israel or that they still don’t today, but it’s a lot better than staying in countries where Jews were being executed for Zionism regardless of whether or not they were Zionists, having their rights and property stolen, faced pogroms and worse and had to pick up and go.
The thing people fail to understand is that, unlike the English, Jews have been vilified by our own countrymen for thousands of years. We’re used to it. We expect it. Using dehumanizing tactics like Academic or Cultural BDS just feeds into that notion. The mindset here is “we’re unsurprised that you hate us, but we have our own country and we don’t need to live under your judgment anymore. You taught us that we only have each other to count on and you’re proving it right now.”
Because the Israeli mindset is so fundamentally different than the White South African mindset, different tactics would be more effective. For many Jews Israel’s existence isn’t merely a matter of “I was born and raised here and my family came here in 1887 and it’s been good to us,” it’s a matter of “they didn’t let me exist anywhere else and my parents and grandparents faced death for being Jews in another country.”
I think it’s easy for a lot of non-Palestinian gentiles to look at Jews they know in countries that have been better to Jews like the USA and think “well, they seem to be doing alright.” But it’s a different question to bring that up to an Israeli Jew whose family had to flee under desperate circumstances that they’re no different than Cecil Rhodes.
As I’ve stated before, I don’t know that it’s effective, but I can see and respect the point of economic BDS. It’s when you get into the cultural and especially the academic BDS that encourages not just economic but interpersonal disengagement, that I think the plot is really lost. Economic boycott can start a conversation, cultural and academic boycott insists on stopping one. When that happens, your voice disappears while the hardliners keep talking and the people who can be swayed only hear the people whose voices can be heard.
Again, Israelis don’t care if the world loves or hates them. They care that they can live. When your mind is trapped in existential queries, questions of protecting the rights of other people becomes a secondary concern. The message “they hate us, they want to kill us, we have to protect ourselves, we have nowhere else to go” is incredibly powerful. BDS doesn’t take away that mindset. It reinforces it.
