August 25, 2010 By Roz Rothstein and Roberta Seid

Anti-Israel activists are now putting all their energy into their Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions campaign (BDS). Their goal is to portray Israel and Israelis as pariahs that should be excluded from all international spheres—diplomatic, political, economic, social, and cultural.

Jews have been victims of such policies before. In the millennia of anti-Semitism in Europe and the Middle East, they have been singled out, demonized, and excluded, as they were, for example, in 13th century England and 1930’s Europe. The Jewish State, too, has experienced such policies since its founding when Arab nations implemented strict exclusion and boycotts against Israel, most of which are still in place. The current global BDS campaign began in 2001 and grew after 2005, when Israel effectively defeated the terrorist campaign known as the Second Intifada. Today, hard core anti-Israel activists around the world are feverishly lobbying artists, universities, churches, retailers, unions, municipalities, and other institutions to adopt BDS.

Any public figures, retailers, institutions or organizations that adopt or defer to BDS policies should themselves be boycotted.

They should be boycotted because they advocate destructive rather than constructive, measures. BDS is anti-coexistence, undermines peace efforts, and does nothing to help Palestinians begin state building, improve their lives, or move toward reconciliation.

They should be boycotted because BDS policies are fundamentally anti-Semitic even though some of the movement’s advocates are Jews. The campaign uses the propaganda techniques and imagery of classical anti-Semitism now applied not to individual Jews, but to the world’s largest Jewish community and its only Jewish State. Boycott activists strip away all context for Israel’s actions, such as ongoing terrorism and the virulent ideology that propels it, in order to depict Israel as motivated by sheer malice in what are often simply modern blood libels. They obsessively put a microscope on Israel to detect its flaws, and expect it to live up to standards they do not expect of any other nation. They never call for BDS against nations that do systematically commit war crimes and human rights abuses, such as Ahmadinejad’s Iran, Bashir’s Sudan, Lebanon’s apartheid practices against Palestinians, or Turkey’s occupation of northern Cyprus and violent repression of its Kurdish minority.

They should be boycotted because of their hypocrisy. Where was the outrage of the boycotters, who claim to be champions of social justice and human rights, when the Palestinian suicide bombing campaign targeted innocent Jewish men, women, and children, and Hamas fired thousands of rockets from Gaza into Israeli communities, murdering toddlers and turning daily life into a lethal game of Russian roulette? Where were they when Ahmadinejad denied the Holocaust even as he called for genocide against Jews? Where is their protest against the Judeophobic incitement that dominates the Middle East? Their callous indifference and implicit support of murdering Jews is both morally perverse and anti-Semitic.

Above all, they should be boycotted because they endorse the agendas of the dictatorial regimes and radical Islamist groups who share their hatred of the Jewish State and who are also enemies of human rights, social justice values, tolerance, and modernity. These states and groups like Hamas oppress women, persecute religious and other minorities, and oppress their own citizens. Those who adopt BDS should be exposed and pay the price for supporting and enabling the intransigent enemies of humanitarian and liberal values.

Boycotting those who comply with BDS means that any university that does not unequivocally denounce campus divestment campaigns should not receive another nickel from donors who care about fairness, the survival of Israel, and modern liberal values. Recording artists who refuse to perform in Israel should be labeled as extremists for the regressive, anti-Semitic values they endorse. Fair-minded people should stop buying their records and attending their concerts. Consumers should boycott any retailers who refuse to stock Israeli products, and support the new StandWithUs campaign, “BIG” and “RIG,” acronyms for “Buy Israeli Goods” and “Request Israeli Goods.”

It is time to expose the distorted values that drive the BDS movement, and its alliance with the most repressive and dangerous forces in the world today. It is time to unequivocally say no to this BDS movement and to all who would consider complying with it.

Roz Rothstein is CEO of StandWithUs. Roberta Seid, PhD is Education Director, StandWithUs

The Truth about BDS

By Robert Fulford, National Post

Shahid Alam, writing this week in a Cairo magazine, Al-Ahram, declared that “slowly but steadily, the Western people are throwing their support behind the campaign to divest from, boycott and impose sanctions on Israel.” It certainly seems that way. I’ve read often, over many years, about students demanding that their universities sell whatever stocks they own in Israeli companies and in corporations supporting the defence of Israel. I’ve read, too, about boycotts of Israeli products and attempts to get churches and corporations to sell Israel-connected stocks.

In Canada, a union proposed that Israeli professors not be allowed to lecture here. And of course, everyone knows that Elvis Costello recently deprived Israelis of the two performances he was scheduled to give in Israel, on grounds of “conscience.”

This is all part of a plan coordinated by Palestinian leaders and activists to pressure Israel with boycotts, divestment and sanctions (routinely abbreviated on websites and placards as “BDS”). The more mild-mannered supporters of BDS say they want to encourage Israel to improve its treatment of Palestinians and seek peace. It seems clear to me that their main goal is to destroy Israel.

Given the publicity BDS has received, the program should be on the way to success. And probably it has helped discourage some Israelis and their supporters. But is it working on a more practical level? Surprisingly, the clear answer seems to be No.

Jon Haber, a Boston writer who runs the website Divest This! (divest-this. com), recently reported in The Jerusalem Post that — despite the passage of nearly a decade of BDS activism — not one college or university has sold even one share of a company the divesters identify as an immoral supporter of Israel. The divesters are good at attracting crowds, writing manifestos, passing motions and getting their opinions onto TV. But they get few results: Boards of universities, corporations and churches all reject divestment proposals.

In May, the divesters were greatly cheered by news that Deutsche Bank had sold its shares in Elbit, the Israeli arms company. Wiltrud Rosch-Metzler, a campaigner with Pax Christi Germany, called that “a huge success.” A representative of various Palestinian organizations said: “Palestinian civil society warmly welcomes the principled decision taken by Deutsche Bank.”

This news was closely followed by Deutsche Bank’s announcement that it was untrue. The bank pointed out that it had no Elbit shares to sell. Evan Jones of the University of Sydney, trying to argue last week that the BDS movement “has acquired fresh impetus after each Israeli outrage,” had to acknowledge that, “Alas, the heralded divestment of Deutsche Bank from Israel’s largest defense firm appears to have been a false alarm.”

Last year, a group called Students for Justice in Palestine celebrated its triumph at Hampshire College in Amherst, Mass. They claimed Hampshire had become the first college or university in the United States to divest from companies involved with Israel. But the board claimed its decision said nothing at all about Israel. True, the idea of ethical investment had been raised by Students for Justice in Palestine, but the board’s decision to sell the college’s shares in an investment fund was based on a study of 200 companies said to have violated the college’s standards for social responsibility in labour practices, environmental abuse, unsafe workplaces, etc. The students had named six companies it accused of supporting Israel’s occupation of Palestinian land. Three of the six failed a screen for socially responsible investing based on their sales of military equipment, employee safety record and other violations. Two of the companies named by the students passed the screen. A sixth company turned out not to be on the list of the college’s investments. Less than a stirring victory.

Curiously, during the period when enemies of Israel were doing their best to cut its economic lifelines, Israel’s economy remained in much better shape than equivalent economies elsewhere. As David Rosenberg wrote recently in a paper published by the Gloria Center, “Israel experienced no more than a mild recession as a result of the global financial crisis that began in 2007.” Of all the OECD nations, Israel was the last to show signs of recession (in the fourth quarter of 2008) and among the first to begin recovering (in the second quarter of 2009). While under verbal attack from gangs of ranters in every corner of Europe and North America, it had by far the shortest downturn in the OECD.

Ben Cohen

It was an expose in the best traditions of investigative journalism: Commerce Department documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act that detailed how, between 1965 and 1977, more than one thousand American corporations colluded in the economic boycott of a small, embattled country, in a bid to please a group of powerful, oil-producing states. Though the boycott was prohibited under U.S. law, the government consciously looked the other way as these corporations went the extra mile in complying with the boycott. Like when they discriminated against employees deemed to have compromising ethnic ties to the targeted country.

The article in question appeared in 1981. The object of the boycott, organized by the League of Arab States, was Israel. And the magazine that published these revelations was The Nation.

How times have changed. Three decades after it named and shamed those American corporations who cozied up to some of the most repressive and reactionary countries on earth, The Nation has become the house journal of the American branch of the movement to subject Israel — and only Israel — to a campaign of Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS for short.)

A recent issue of the magazine included a piece by Adam Horowitz and Philip Weiss endorsing BDS with zealot-like enthusiasm. Rich in distortions and half-truths, the article was at its most preposterous in depicting BDS as a grassroots movement assembling Palestinians, anti-Zionist Jews, human rights advocates and labor unionists in a moral crusade against Zionism.

Scratch beneath this complacent self-image and you quickly understand that the origins of the BDS movement have more in common with a black shirt than a rainbow flag. Horowitz and Weiss point out that there is an established boycott tradition among the Palestinians, citing their embargo against the Jewish community in Palestine during the upheavals of 1936. What they don’t mention is that the 1936 boycott was accompanied by a paroxysm of violence against Jews and their property. Nor do they mention that the Palestinian leadership, under Haj Amin al Husseini, the Mufti of Jerusalem, was unashamedly pro-Nazi. Indeed, the policy of simultaneously boycotting and beating the Jews had been introduced by Hitler when he assumed power three years earlier.

In 1945, al Husseini’s Nazi-derived policy was formalized by the Arab League Council, which declared a boycott of “Jewish” and “Zionist” goods. In 1948, the Arab League launched a separate office to enforce an economic boycott of the State of Israel that functioned upon three levels, by targeting Israeli companies, foreign companies working in Israel, and foreign companies conducting business with other companies with an operational base in Israel.

Given these parameters, it was inevitable that the application of the boycott would blur the line between Israel as a state and Jews as a people. That point was cogently grasped by Mark Green and Steven Solow, the authors of the 1981 Nation piece. “There is nothing necessarily objectionable in economic boycotts of one country or community by another,” they wrote. Yet, they added, “the Arab embargo of Israel can be distinguished from other boycotts by the way it discriminated not only against a country but against an entire religious group. Thus American Jews were sometimes penalized by their employers simply because they were Jews.”

However much BDS advocates insist otherwise, that observation remains true today. Unlike, say, the African-American boycott of segregated buses, which aimed to change a racist policy and did not apply to whites in general, the boycott of Israel reaches much wider. Any Israeli who does not explicitly disavow his or her country is fair game — and those who declare their solidarity with Israelis are, as a consequence, equally suspect.

Crucially, the “United Call for BDS,” which Horowitz and Weiss approvingly link to, dates the Israeli occupation as beginning not in 1967, following the Six Day War, but in 1948, when Israel was created. This is no accident, for the aim of the BDS movement is not to effect a change in Israeli policy, but to dismantle the state which makes those policies.

Diehard anti-Zionists won’t be bothered by that, of course. Still, there is a much larger group of people within the orbit of the BDS movement — like the U.S. Presbyterian Church, which gathers in a few days time to discuss a report which includes a comparison of Israel with Nazi Germany — who may wish to consider where the demonizing rhetoric and toxic origins of the boycott campaign might lead them.

In addition, as the Presbyterians deliberate on a resolution to divest from Caterpillar Inc., the bete noire of BDS advocates, they might ponder the following. In their Nation article from 1981, Caterpillar was named by Green and Solow as one of those corporations complying with the Arab boycott. They quoted a Caterpillar spokesman confirming that the company would cooperate with Arab requests for information about such vital operational matters as whether there were any Jews on the payroll (”If somebody wanted to do business with us and wanted to confirm a fact, we did it,” the spokesman said.)

Isn’t it ironic? Caterpillar abandoned those racist practices. Now, the BDS movement wants Caterpillar to readopt them — and is telling the public to scorn the company until it does so. No doubt, the Mufti of Jerusalem would approve.

Follow Ben S. Cohen on Twitter: www.twitter.com/ZWord

The primary aim of the Gaza flotilla was not to provide humanitarian relief; it was to cause a provocation with Israel.

Its top organizers and some of its participants are radicals with ties to terrorist groups that sought a violent confrontation. In contrast, the Israeli navy had worked hard to plan a peaceful interception of the six ships and its personnel only used force when their lives were at risk. Israel has legitimate self-defense reasons to inspect the cargo going into the Hamas-controlled area, where the U.S.-designated terrorist group has smuggled in thousands of munitions and rockets for use in attacks against Israeli civilians.

The flotilla’s organizers willfully ignored repeated warnings that they would be denied entry—including messages from the European Union—and rejected offers by Israel to transfer humanitarian goods through the Israeli port of Ashdod.

One of the flotilla’s leaders, Greta Berlin, stated that “this mission is not about delivering humanitarian supplies, it’s about breaking Israel’s siege on 1.5 million Palestinians,” the AFP reported on May 27.

The head of the group that organized the flotilla, Bulent Yildirim (left), is closely linked with Ismail Haniyeh’s U.S.-designated terrorist group Hamas.

 The main organizer of the flotilla—whose members led the assault on the IDF—was the Turkish Humanitarian Relief Foundation (IHH), which has publicly affirmed its links to Hamas, maintains an office in Gaza and has ties to other terrorist organizations.

IHH has also been linked to al-Qaeda and played a role in al-Qaeda’s failed Millennium bombing of Los Angeles International Airport, according to French counter-terrorism magistrate Jean-Louis Bruguière, who testified during the trial of failed bomber Ahmed Ressam.

The Israeli navy had worked hard to plan a peaceful interception of the six ships and the soldiers only used force when their lives were at risk.

 Individuals aboard the vessels had clearly prepared for violence, chanting an Islamic battle cry recalling the killing of Jews and calling for martyrdom, according to an Al-Jazeera report.

 While intercepting six ships attempting to break the naval blockade of Gaza after frequent warnings not to proceed, Israeli soldiers were attacked immediately upon boarding one of them.

The outnumbered soldiers were immediately and brutally attacked with crowbars, clubs and knives and shot at with guns stolen from soldiers, seven of whom were injured. One soldier was thrown to a lower deck 30 feet below and sustained a severe head injury.

 Israeli soldiers reacted with the utmost restraint. Only when their lives were in danger did they seek and receive permission to open fire.

Regrettably, nine flotilla participants were killed and others injured. Seven Israeli soldiers were injured.

Israel has a legitimate right to self-defense and reason to be concerned about cargo going unchecked into Hamas-controlled Gaza.

The charter of Hamas, the U.S.-designated terrorist group that seized Gaza in an armed coup from the Palestinian Authority in 2007, calls for the destruction of Israel.

Israel’s actions are aimed at blocking arms and explosives shipments to Hamas, which is at war with the Jewish state. Hamas has fired more than 7,000 rockets and mortar shells into Israel since Israel withdrew from Gaza in 2005.

Hamas continues to operate a vast network of tunnels under Gaza, which it uses to smuggle in weapons from Iran and Syria for attacks against Israeli civilians. It also has repeatedly sought to smuggle weapons through the sea.

 According to international legal experts, it is legitimate for a state to impose an embargo on international waters during wartime. Israel’s detention of the flotilla ships—and its use of force to defend its soldiers when attacked by some of the radicals—is acceptable under international law.

 Egypt also has imposed a blockade on Gaza to protect its own internal security by constructing an underground steel wall along the Sinai-Gaza border to help stymie the flow of illicit goods.

Israel continues to facilitate a vast operation to provide humanitarian goods and medical services to the people of Gaza.

Since the end of the Gaza war in 2009, Israel has facilitated the transfer of more than a million tons of humanitarian supplies to Gaza and 133 million liters of fuel. Israel is now in the process of unloading the items from the flotilla and is transferring legitimate humanitarian items into Gaza via established mechanisms.

 To handle the delivery of humanitarian aid and other civilian issues related to Palestinian life in Gaza and the West Bank, Israel has a special unit in the Ministry of Defense—the Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories (COGAT).

The U.N. issued a presidential statement condemning the events leading up to the incident, which some have interpreted as a criticism of Israel.

It would have been preferable if the U.N. and Obama administration had blocked any action implying criticism of Israel for defending itself.

Nonetheless, intervention by the United States prevented passage of a Security Council resolution condemning Israel.

The administration continues to express its confidence in Israel’s ability to conduct its own investigation of the incident despite calls for an international inquiry.

During the Security Council deliberations, Alejandro Wolff, deputy U.S. representative to the U.N., said the “direct delivery by sea [of humanitarian supplies] is neither appropriate nor responsible” and criticized Hamas’ “continued arms smuggling and commitment to terrorism.”

The United States must now maintain its longstanding position not to allow the Security Council and other U.N. organs such as the U.N. Human Rights Council to exploit unfortunate incidents by passing biased, anti-Israel resolutions that obscure the truth and accomplish nothing.