The Great BDS Debate (Uri Avnery)

[shira]

The Great BDS Debate

...Buying or not buying, whatever the motive, is a private affair. Therefore, it is very difficult to know how many Israelis followed our call. Our impression is that quite a considerable number of Israelis did and do. We did not ask people to boycott Israel as such. We considered this counter-productive. Faced with a threat against the state, Israelis unite. This would mean pushing decent, well-meaning citizens into the arms of the settlers. Our aim was the very opposite: to separate the general public from the settlers.

THE BDS movement has quite a different point of view. It was initiated by Palestinian nationalists, directed at a world audience and totally indifferent to Israeli sentiments. A boycott movement does not need a precise program. The general aim of ending the occupation and enabling the Palestinians to found their own state in the occupied territories would have been enough. But BDS published right from its beginning a clear political program. And there the problem starts. The proclaimed aims of BDS are three: ending the occupation and the settlements, assuring equality for Arabs inside Israel, furthering the return of the refugees. This sound innocuous, but is not. It does not mention peace with Israel. It does not mention the two-state solution. But the main point is the third. The exodus of half the Palestinian people from their homes in the 1948 war – partly fleeing the fighting in a long and cruel war, partly deliberately evicted by the Israeli forces – is a complicated story. I was an eye-witness and have extensively written about it in my books. (The second part of my memoirs has just appeared in Hebrew.) The salient fact is that they were not allowed to return after the end of the war, and that their homes and lands were given to Jewish immigrants, many of whom were refugees from the Holocaust. Reversing that process now is as realistic as demanding that white Americans go back to where their ancestors came from, and returning the land to its original native owners. It would mean the abolition of the State of Israel and the creation of a State of Palestine from the Mediterranean to the Jordan River, a state with an Arab majority and a Jewish minority. How can this be achieved without a war with a nuclear-armed Israel? How does this relate to peace?

....However, and this must be said, there are some BDS adherents who utter statements with an unmistakable anti-Semitic smell. For an honest-to-goodness anti-Semite of the old school, BDS is nowadays a safe pulpit from which they can preach their odious gospel, under the guise of anti-Zionism and anti-Israelism. I would like (again) to warn the Palestinians and their true friends that the anti-Semites are in practice their dangerous enemies. It is they who are pushing Jews from all over the world to settle in Israel. These anti-Semites don't give a damn for the Palestinians, they exploit their plight in order to indulge in their own age-old anti-Jewish perversion.

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