BDS goals, and nature
BDS campaign a prelude to genocide
DEVIN SPER
May 14, 2014 Updated May 14, 2014
As the recent decision by the American Studies Association to boycott Israel shows, academic and other groups are buying into the anti-Israel BDS (boycott, divestment and sanctions) movement in growing numbers. Like most such organizations, the ASA imagines it is taking a moral stand and is almost certainly unaware of the ultimate goal of the movement’s Palestinian organizers, for whom the campaign to delegitimize Israel is not an end unto itself. As Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu wrote: “Slander is the prelude to murder.” Israel’s enemies demonize Israel as a necessary prelude to her annihilation. Stated simply, their goal is genocide.
What, after all, does Hamas intend in calling for the “obliteration” of Israel, in its charter? Aren’t the continual chants of “Death to Israel” by Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah and his supporters a call for genocide? What else does former Iranian President Ahmedinijad’s call for Israel to be “wiped off the map” mean if not genocide against its Jewish inhabitants? Unmasking the Palestinian goal of genocide is the key to preventing its actualization.
We undermine the moral certainty of those who parrot Palestinian demonization of Israel by asking: What is the moral difference between Nazi genocide against 6 million Jews and Arab attempts at genocide against the 6 million Jews of Israel? That the Palestinians have not succeeded in their ultimate goal of exterminating the Jews of Israel does not make their attempts any less heinous. Every time Israel’s enemies call for her destruction, we need to point out that they are in essence calling for genocide.
Nor should we accept the characterization of such calls for genocide against the Jews of Israel as mere hyperbole. Israel’s enemies have gone well beyond advocating genocide against Israel. Palestinian Arabs have murdered 3,000 Israeli civilians and wounded 25,000 in a campaign of terror lasting well over a century. Since 1948, the armies of their Arab supporters have killed 20,000 and wounded 100,000 Israeli soldiers. Is there any doubt that every Jew in Israel would have been murdered had Israel lost the war in 1948, 1956 or 1967, or any of the wars of annihilation launched against her? There is no question but that the Palestinians and their allies would have fulfilled their vows of genocide against the Jews, as they in fact did on overrunning Hebron in 1929 and Gush Etzion in 1948. Every future Palestinian atrocity against Israel hands us an opportunity to point out that mass murder of Jews is not merely their tactic, but their goal.
Not only do the Palestinians practice and preach genocide against the Jews but, in a demonically cleaver twist, they also accuse the Jews of genocide whenever we defend ourselves against them. Many, especially in endemically anti-Semitic Europe, have proven all too ready to accept such transparent Palestinian slander against Israel at face value. European anti-Semites assuage their guilt by imagining that Jews in a position of power behave as wickedly as their forebears did during the Holocaust.
A Palestinian movement identified with its genocidal goal will not be so readily embraced by misguided intellectuals in the media, academia and the arts. In doing so, European elites would no longer assuage their guilt over the Holocaust, but compound it. Their self-righteous hectoring of Israel would be replaced by the extreme discomfort of having to explain their support of a movement bent on genocide and they would soon find themselves a new cause célèbre.
The campaign to delegitimize Israel has succeeded until now because it follows the cardinal rules of propaganda: Boil the essence of your idea down to a simple, powerful, memorable slogan (in this case a single word: “occupation”), stay on message and repeat it at every opportunity.
I once observed Yasser Arafat’s response to an uncharacteristically difficult question in a TV interview. Ignoring the question completely, Arafat turned directly to the camera and simply said, “Occupation, occupation, occupation!” This slogan had nothing to do with the question nor is “occupation” the root cause of the conflict, but the consistent repetition of this slogan by Palestinian spokesmen over decades has been an extremely effective tool in demonizing Israel.
Occupation has become the lens through which most of the world now views the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the root cause of Israel’s pariah status and ever-increasing isolation. Acceptance of the false portrayal of Jews as foreign occupiers in their ancient homeland is the reason that Jewish settlements there are viewed as a violation of international law. Occupation is the original sin justifying every Palestinian atrocity, in the minds of their apologists, as the understandable rage of an occupied people.
Israel’s supporters have been spectacularly unsuccessful in attempting to counter this simple and effective slogan by resorting to necessarily more complex explanations of the historical facts. A far more effective tactic would be to encapsulate the true cause of the conflict into a simple, memorable message of our own: The ultimate goal of the Palestinian movement and its supporters is, and has always been, genocide against the Jews of Israel.
Accepting the enemy’s false definition of Jews as foreign occupiers, we lose the argument going in. We win the public debate by reframing the conflict around its true cause: the Palestinian campaign of genocide against the Jews of Israel. If we continue to allow the Palestinians to frame the conflict as a struggle for freedom from Israeli occupation the delegitimization of Israel will continue apace and ultimately lay the groundwork for their genocidal goals. If we remain apathetic in the face of Israel’s delegitimization, the next step will be genocide.
If Jewish history teaches us anything it is that we ignore at our peril those who advocate genocide against us. To paraphrase Hillel: If we don’t state our case who will? It is time that Israel’s supporters took a page from our Palestinian enemy’s campaign against Israel and boil our message down to a single, but in our case true, and even more emotionally powerful word, and repeat it at every opportunity. The answer to “Occupation, occupation, occupation” is “Genocide, genocide, genocide!”
Lessons for Israel-on-campus from Scarlett Johansson
ByR. S. Boteach
February 3, 2014
[...]
There is no one to talk to at the BDS movement. These are people who hate Israel and employ garish double standards, wanting to punish one of the most humane democracies on earth while they overlook the glaring human rights abuses of nations like China and large swaths of the Arab world. They want to punish Israel even more than they want to stop the slaughter in Syria.
It’s time that we accept that for many campuses, organized, rules-based debate is exactly what is required.
Trying to secure pro-Israel speakers on campuses like UC Irvine or McGill can result in the kind of dangerous riots and chaos that prevented former Israeli Ambassador Michael Oren, Natan Sharansky, and Benjamin Netanyahu, from even being heard. Such hooliganism has been common in Britain for years where, for example, Deputy Ambassador to Britain Alon Roth-Snir was prevented from speaking at the University of Essex, Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon was shouted down at Oxford by shouts of “Itbah Al-Yahud” [Slaughter the Jews] and “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,” and at Edinburgh where Ambassador Daniel Taub, despite bring protected by a small army of British police and Israeli agents, still had his lecture disrupted.
Debates are different, inviting as they...
At Cal Davis, swastikas at Jewish frat house follow BDS resolution
FEBRUARY 1, 2015 7:08 AM
(JTA) — Two swastikas were spray-painted on a Jewish fraternity’s house at the University of California, Davis, two days after the student senate passed a divestment resolution targeting Israel.
The swastikas were painted on the off-campus house of Alpha Epsilon Pi sometime early Saturday morning.
“I don’t think that it’s a coincidence that this happened right after divestment,” AEPi vice president Nathaniel Bernhard told the California Aggie student newspaper.
The nonbinding advisory resolution was passed Jan. 29 by the Associated Students of U.C. Davis by an 8-2 vote with two abstentions. It calls on the University of California system to divest from “corporations that aid in the Israeli occupation of Palestine and illegal settlements in Palestinian territories,” the Aggie reported.
In separate statements, U.C. Davis Chancellor Linda P.B. Katehi said the university opposed divestment and condemned the anti-Semitic graffiti.
“Nothing rivals a swastika as a more potent or offensive symbol of hatred and violence toward our Jewish community members,” Katehi said.
Davis now joins several schools in the University of California system — at Berkeley, Los Angeles, San Diego, Santa Cruz, Irvine and Riverside — in passing resolutions supporting the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement. A similar resolution had failed to pass the student senate at U.C. Davis last May.
The U.C. Board of Regents, which controls the university system’s investment portfolio, has said repeatedly that it does not intend to divest from companies doing business with Israel.
Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement attracting groups with terrorist ties
Jonathan Schanzer
November 2, 2016 | The Hill
This week, George Mason University is hosting a conference promoting the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement, an anti-Israel campaign that has recently swelled its ranks by participating in “solidarity work” with sympathetic organizations. But as the BDS campaign has grown, its “big tent” philosophy may have attracted organizations with ties to terrorism.
In May 2016, for example, the Miami-based organization Dream Defenders flew a group of activists that included a Florida lawmaker to Israel and the Palestinian territories. While in the West Bank, participants were led by a tour guide identified with the terrorist group Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP).
This connection with the PFLP is not new for Dream Defenders. They have expressed support for the PFLP on Facebook, Twitter, andInstagram. The group’s executive director is Ahmad Abuznaid, the son of the PLO’s ambassador to the Netherlands. He has posted pictures of himself embracing Rasmea Odeh, a now infamous PFLP terrorist who was involved in the bombing of an Israeli Supermarket in 1969. Abuznaid also spoke at a fundraiser on Odeh’s behalf.
Odeh is now a cause célèbrefor BDS activists in the United States. Boycott advocates have rallied to her defense, raising funds for her while she faces prosecution in the United States for immigration fraud (for lying about her time in prison). Odeh’s boosters include BDS-supporting groups like Palestine Legal, Jewish Voice for Peace, and American Muslims for Palestine. Her defenders contend she was wrongfully convicted by Israel in the 1969 bombing (Odeh herself appears in a 2004 documentary discussing her involvement).
Another BDS group in America with connections to the PFLP is “The US Coalition to Boycott Israel,” or the “Coalition for Justice in Palestine.” While apparently not officially registered as a business or as a nonprofit, this organization claims to work with several groups in the BDS space. The Coalition is, according to available information, coordinated by Senan Shaqdeh, a figure described on the PLO’s website as a former PFLP “mountain fighter” in Lebanon.
It is unclear whether Shaqdeh is still active with the PFLP. But he has helped to coordinate a number of BDS and anti-Israel protests in Chicago and across the country. Curiously, in 2014, he travelled to Ramallah, where he met with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas and Prime Minister Rami Hamdallah.
The BDS campaign in the United States broadly identifies as a nonviolent social justice movement. But, its connections to the PFLP, a decidedly violent group, are troubling.
Founded in 1967 as a Marxist-Leninist revolutionary organization by George Habash, the PFLP was known for a series of plane hijackings in the late sixties and seventies. They placed bombs in supermarkets, gunned down civilians, and hired assassins to massacre passengers at Israel’s Lod Airport in 1970. The group was designated in 1997 as a Foreign Terrorist Organization by the State Department, and it remains on the list to this day.
While it is still believed to be the second largest faction within the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), the PFLP is no longer as influential as it once was. But the PFLP remains active in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, not to mention Palestinian refugee camps around the Middle East. And its commitment to violence has not changed.
In 2011, two PFLP members carried out the murder of a family in the West Bank settlement of Itamar (including a 3-month-old infant). They were responsible for a 2014 shooting in West Jerusalem that killed five and wounded eight. Open-source reports indicate that the group has recently seen an uptick in funding from Iran.
The PFLP and BDS nexus is not limited to the United States. The group is increasingly active among BDS groups in Europe.
In 2013, Shawn Jabarin, the director of the Palestinian NGO Al-Haq, visited France, where he lectured for several organizations and granted interviews about boycotting Israeli goods. Jabarin was denied travel visas by Israel, and was flagged by Israel as being a PFLP activist in the 1980s and 1990s.
Recently, the PFLP sent its most famous member, the first woman hijacker in history, Leila Khaled, on speaking tours worldwide. In April 2016, she visited the German organization Falestin Beytona, the Offices of the Communist Party of Sweden in Gothenburg, and the Austrian-Arab Cultural Center (OKAZ) in Vienna – all organizations that support BDS. Khaled was also the guest of the BDS movement of South Africa in 2015.
Khaled position on violence has not changed. She sees BDS as a means to an ends. In a 2015 op-ed, she notes that BDS “sustains our resistance and our revolution,” But she also notes that, “refusing to buy products in a store or cancelling a corporate contract will not liberate Palestine. Nothing but the Palestinian struggle and resistance in all of its forms, from refusing the orders of an occupation soldier to marching in protests to armed struggle, will liberate Palestine.”
The BDS campaign has always been controversial. It is, in essence, an effort to wage economic warfare against Israel. Whatever legitimacy it has garnered comes largely from claims that it eschews violence. But the campaign’s growing ties to the PFLP tell another story, seemingly validating the harshest accusations leveled against it.
BDS Myth: Israel Commits Ethnic Cleansing and Genocide
Written by Maccabee Task Force
July 19, 2016
Yes, they actually go there. The BDSers accuse the greatest victims of ethnic cleansing of committing ethnic cleansing. And they accuse the greatest victims of genocide of perpetrating genocide. You sure can’t blame BDS for lacking nerve.
Both accusations are disgusting lies.
Let’s start with ethnic cleansing. The crux of the complaint is that after Israel declared its independence in 1948 it went to work expelling its Arabs residents in order to create an exclusively Jewish state. In the process, 700,000 Arabs were forced from their homes.
The truth is the exact opposite.
In 1947, the United Nations voted to partition Palestine into two states, one Jewish and one Arab. This Jewish state was to have a sizeable Arab minority. Palestine’s Jews enthusiastically accepted this compromise. They actually danced in the streets to celebrate.
The Arabs had a different reaction. The leaders of Palestine’s Arabs and the surrounding Arab states all rejected the partition of Palestine into two states. Instead, they vowed to destroy the Jewish state. The day after the UN vote, Palestinian Arabs launched a sustained series of guerilla attacks against their Jewish neighbors. And when the British officially departed Palestine in May of 1948, five neighboring Arab states invaded Israel.
Before the Arabs launched this war to destroy Israel, there were no Palestinian refugees – not one. The Palestinian refugee crisis was the direct result of this Arab aggression. Wars are terrifying, and the large majority of Palestinian refugees simply fled the fighting as it approached their villages. In the limited cases where Israel expelled Arabs, it did so because of a clear military necessity created by this war.
Having to flee one’s home is a terrible tragedy. No one should deny the human suffering experienced by these hundreds of thousands of Palestinian refugees. But recognizing their suffering does not require us to blindly blame Israel for it. The ultimate responsibility for the Palestinian refugee crisis rests with those Arab leaders who rejected Israel’s creation and launched a war to destroy it.
The claim of genocide is just as easily disproven.
Simply out, Israel has never had a policy of intentionally harming Palestinian civilians. Quite to the contrary, even during wartime Israel goes to extraordinary measures to protect Palestinian civilians. These efforts to safeguard Palestinian lives – efforts that expose Israeli soldiers to far greater risk – are the exact opposite of genocide. These are the policies of a government that values all human life.
The math could not be clearer. Genocides – the intentional mass murder of certain groups of people – shrink the population of the targeted group. Hitler’s Holocaust, for example, reduced Europe’s Jewish population from 9.5 million in 1933 to 3.5 million in 1950.
How much has the Palestinian population shrunk as the result of Israeli policies? It hasn’t shrunk at all. Quite to the contrary, since the birth of Israel there has been a sustained Palestinian population boom.
In 1947, there were approximately 1.2 million Arabs living in the British Mandate for Palestine. Today — despite the fact that many hundreds of thousands have left this territory — that original number has grown to approximately 6 million (4.4 million Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza plus 1.8 million Arab citizens of the Israel). There are actually more Arabs living in Israel today than were living in all of Palestine when the state of Israel was created.
Simply put, if Israel is trying to commit genocide against the Palestinians, it’s doing a terrible job of it.
Incitement Against Jews Within BDS And Pro-Palestinian Facebook Groups – Part II - Anti-Israelism, Anti-Semitism, BDS News, Pro BDS
Oct 29, 2019 · Introduction The Facebook groups examined in this report are focused on promoting the Palestinian cause and Boycott Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) against Israel. In this report we present posts that appeared in eight BDS groups between January 2016 and July 2019, with explicit and blatant antisemitic incitement against Jews and Judaism without any context linking them to Israel or its policies..
Neo-Nazi parties are supporting Palestinian and Hezbollah terrorism, as well as BDS.
By United with Israel Staff
The German neo-Nazi parties The Third Way and the Green Party are celebrating the European Union’s (EU) decision to not allow Israeli products made in Judea, Samaria, parts of Jerusalem and the Golan Heights to bear a “Made in Israel” label.
The ruling ignores the more-than-200 countries involved with territorial disputes worldwide. The only country discriminated against by enforcement of “political” labels is Israel.
German neo-Nazis unmask BDS
MAY 31, 2019, 5:23 AM
The old Nazi slogan “The Jews are our misfortune” adorned the pages of the antisemitic propaganda magazine “Der Stürmer;” the new Nazi slogan “Israel is our misfortune” has been on display in recent weeks wherever the German far-right party “Die Rechte” campaigned for the European Parliament elections.
While the tiny neo-Nazi party seems to have only a few hundred members and has been unable to garner more than a few thousand votes in elections since it was established in May 2012, the determined campaigning for this weekend’s European Parliament elections paid off with 24.430 votes. Thankfully, this amounted only to an irrelevant 0,1% of the votes cast in Germany. Shortly after the results were announced, a fairly downbeat assessment on the party’s website vowed continued efforts to organize a “broad resistance front” and emphasized the importance of attracting media attention, crediting the “anti-Israel agitation” with some success....
Sixth BDS national conference sheds light on movement’s intentions and terrorist affiliates
Raising eyebrows within the Jewish and international community, the conference was supported and promoted by the terror-affiliated Palestinian National and Islamic Forces, and attended by leaders of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine and the Palestinian Liberation Front. By Eliana Rudee. JNS, April 25, 2019
https://www.jns.org/sixth-bds-national-conference-sheds-light-on-movements-intentions-and-terrorist-affiliates/
Sixth BDS National Conference and its Terror Ties - Brandeis Center
The BDS National Committee hosted its sixth annual BDS National Conference, which was heavily attended by individuals associated with
On March 16, the BDS National Committee hosted its sixth annual BDS National Conference in Ramallah. The conference, which received a statement of support from internationally recognized terrorist organizations such as Hamas, the Palestinian National and Islamic Forces (PNIF), and the People’s Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP),..
BDS activists disrupt Holocaust event with Hitler imagery
During an online memorial in honor of the Holocaust Remembrance Day in Berlin, pro-Palestinian protesters interrupted a Zoom chat with survivors by posting pornography, Nazi images and shouting anti-Semitic slogans
Itamar Eichner|
Published: 04.21.20 , 13:48
A group of pro-Palestinian activists in Germany disrupted an online Holocaust memorial by posting Nazi imagery and pornographic content during a conversation with the survivors of the genocide...
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