My great-grandfather was a Palestinian Jew whose family lived in Jerusalem for hundreds of years. I’ve advocated for an end to the occupation for decades, and lost jobs because of it. I’ve planted olive trees in the West Bank.
But to the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement against Israel (BDS), people like me don’t exist, for two reasons. First, they don’t believe Jews can have an indigenous connection to Israel/Palestine, and second, they believe you need to support a full (including academic) boycott of Israel to be a true opponent of the occupation.
I realized this after this month’s rally on “Criminalizing Dissent,” put on by Sut Jhally’s Media Education Foundation at UMass Amhert. Like last May’s rally (“Not Backing Down”), it was billed as a forum on free speech, but both were forums for free polemic, without chance for meaningful critique.
There’s a place for that, of course. As Palestinian-American activist Linda Sarsour, who moderated the recent forum and was a speaker last May, said, BDS advocates will never catch up with the vast number of events presenting Israel’s side. The problem is not both-sides-ism, but a lack of diversity. Couldn’t these panels have included someone anti-occupation, but not anti-Israel?
Diverse perspectives matter because amid inspirational calls to stand with Palestinians, one hears condemnations portraying Israel supporters as inherently evil or inhuman. The worst example, in May, was when Roger Waters of Pink Floyd claimed that a concert crowd of 60,000 Israelis stopped cheering and fell silent the moment he mentioned making peace.
Waters called it “one of the most chilling sights” he’s ever seen — but it never happened. In recordings of the concert, you can hear the outpouring of cheers and support. (Watch this Al-Jazeera clip, starting at 18:33, or listen to the audio, starting at 2:01:30.)
Waters’ message — that Israelis are monolithic and don’t care what happens to Palestinians — can only breed hatred, not just of Israel, but of all Israeli Jews. It doesn’t matter whether we call it anti-Semitism. An anti-occupation Israeli would have called out Waters’ lie on the spot. When no challenge is heard, some students will inevitably see Israel as nothing more than a monstrosity.
That was evident when the Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) president called Israel a “racist, white supremacist, settler colonial apartheid regime” at the end of the “Criminalizing Dissent” event. There’s an extraordinary disconnect between that rhetoric, which has little room to accept any Israeli state as legitimate, and the official BDS position.
The recent rally included subtler, but still dangerous, distortions. It’s hard not to love Cornel West when he says, “If the kingdom is inside you, then everywhere you go you want to leave a little heaven behind.”
But what about when he says this: “If you are a Jewish right-wing racist, you choose to be a racist, you choose to lose sight of the humanity of Palestinian people. And so it is on the other side: We got Palestinian brothers and sisters who are hating Jewish brothers and sisters, we call it into question, they’re choosing that, but they’re hating the domination, they’re hating the occupation. Absolutely. And rightly so.”
Do we oppose all dehumanization or not? Do “we” oppose hatred toward “Jews” or not? And why “Jews” instead of “Israelis?” There was no one, and no room, to ask such questions.
BDS seems to think the problem is fixed by distinguishing “good” Jews from “bad” Jews, and touting those token Jews who are part of BDS. West played this game when he said, “We got Noam Chomsky.” Chomsky the Jew is a brilliant linguist and anti-colonialist critic, but he doesn’t claim to speak for the Jewish people or Judaism. On top of that, Chomsky opposes academic boycotts.
I would never imagine Cornel West means to condone anti-Semitism. But BDS is wrong to think Jewish tokenism will nip anti-Semitism in the bud.
But that doesn’t work if BDS’s Jews are not taking advantage of the platform they are given to criticize the problems within BDS.
As long as that’s the case, BDS can’t use them to paper over hate-inducing rhetoric. For that matter, West and Sarsour, if they want to be allies the Jewish people as they claim, also have a responsibility to call out Waters’ lies.
Like Chomsky, UMass Chancellor Kumble Subbaswamy also opposes academic boycotts — this was his first reason for discomfort with BDS events. But he also raised the spectre of anti-Semitism, and the idea that Jewish students and supporters of Israel would feel unsafe. At the rally, SJP’s president countered that the chancellor’s charge of anti-Semitism jeopardized Palestinian and pro-BDS students’ safety.
Could that be literally true? I don’t know, but I do know if SJP students feel that way, they should empathize with the Jewish or pro-Israel students — including those who are anti-occupation — who don’t feel safe when BDS holds an event. And it’s a fact that some Jewish students feel threatened, including people I know and people that Hillel Rabbi Aaron Fine has counseled.
It’s almost impossible for empathy like that to grow when BDS shuns people who disagree with it. Perhaps BDS isn’t inherently anti-Semitic, but it is creating an environment ripe for anti-Semitism. Without engaging more diverse perspectives, BDS events effectively criminalize dissent about Palestine, even as they challenge criminalization of dissent about Israel. And that is to everyone’s harm, Palestinian and Israeli, student and teacher, human being and human being.
Rabbi David Mevorach Seidenberg, creator of neohasid.org and author of Kabbalah and Ecology, teaches at and attends all three Hampshire County synagogues and runs the Prayground Minyan.