Combating BDS movement still critical to Israel’s security

This article first appeared in the Jerusalem Report.

By ROBERT HORENSTEIN

article created on: 2010-10-15T00:00:00

When the Israeli financial daily Globes reported in August that Harvard University had sold all of its holdings in Israeli companies, pro-Israel activists were immediately up in arms. Had Harvard, with the largest higher education endowment in the United States ($26 billion), really divested from Israel?

In actual fact, Harvard had merely made changes in its holdings due to a reclassification of its Israeli investments, shifting them from the endowment’s “emerging markets” to its “developed markets” portfolio. Responding to the Globes report, a Harvard spokesman clarified: “Any suggestion that the university has a policy or plan to divest from Israeli stocks is flatly wrong.” Far from making a political statement, the reclassification reflects Israel’s economic strength and its recent acceptance into the exclusive international club of developed nations known as the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.

Harvard isn’t alone. To date, not a single American university has divested from Israel. In fact, in its decade of existence, the anti-Israel Boycott, Divest and Sanctions movement has had very few successes in the United States. Moreover, despite an ongoing boycott threat (this summer, for example, the Olympia Food Co-op in Washington state decided to boycott all Israeli products), Israel’s economy is running on all cylinders, and tourism in Israel is at record high levels.

All of which raises a question: Should the organized American Jewish community still consider combating the BDS movement an urgent priority? The answer, emphatically, is yes.

Although the BDSers have yet to achieve a significant breakthrough, it would be a huge mistake for the pro-Israel community to become complacent. It’s important to note that the reason universities aren’t divesting from Israel has nothing to do with rejecting the pro-Palestinian (or anti-Israel) narrative. Rather, they don’t divest because their sole concern is to maximize returns within a prudent level of risk.

Likewise, most American retail businesses that have been targeted by the BDSers generally oppose boycotts in principle. Thus, when the Davis Food Co-op in northern California rejected a petition calling for a boycott of Israeli foods earlier this year, its board stressed that “a boycott would conflict with general principles of the international co-op movement which emphasize political (and religious) neutrality.”

But the success of the BDS movement shouldn’t be measured only in terms of actual traction on the ground. More worrisome than the number of organizations that boycott or divest is the extent to which the branding of Israel and Zionism as illegitimate has slowly gained traction on college campuses, in the media and in mainline Protestant churches.

Getting its campaign of delegitimization to take hold within mainstream opinion is what’s at the core of BDS. After all, the goal of the movement isn’t to use the leverage of boycotts and sanctions to force Israel to withdraw to the pre-1967 borders­—it’s to bring about the elimination of the Zionist enterprise altogether. As Omar Barghouti, one of the movement’s founders and, ironically, currently a graduate student at Tel Aviv University, stated recently: “If the [Israeli] occupation ends, would that end [our] call for BDS? No, it wouldn’t.”

And therein lies the ultimate rationale behind the outrageous comparison between the Jewish state and apartheid South Africa, which includes the holding of “Israeli Apartheid Week” on campuses and the false depiction of Israel’s security barrier as the “Apartheid Wall.” To be sure, the BDSers want the world to see Israel as a racist state deserving of international condemnation and punishment (an absurd notion given that Israel, unlike former white-ruled South Africa, is a democracy that extends full civil and political rights to its Arab minority and whose citizenry includes a multitude of ethnicities, including Jews of Ethiopian origin).

The comparison with apartheid, however, runs deeper and is much more insidious. Just as South Africa was colonized by white Europeans who ruled over and oppressed the indigenous black population, Palestine, claim the BDSers, was “colonized” by the Zionists—“foreigners”—who stole the land from the indigenous Arabs. For the delegitimizers, in other words, it’s not simply about Israel’s alleged mistreatment of the Palestinians; they endeavor to convince mainstream Americans that the Jewish historical and religious ties to the land have long been obsolete.

And indeed, there seems to be more and more mainstream questioning of Israel’s right to exist—particularly within academia and certain mainline Protestant circles—not to mention a noticeable increase in the level of anti-Israel activism on college campuses. The long-term danger for Israel and American Jewry is that such delegitimization, if it isn’t effectively countered, could gradually influence policymakers and the electorate.

What to do? Tactical measures such as “buycotts” that urge shoppers to purchase Israeli products at stores targeted by the boycotters and rebranding efforts that stress Israel’s many scientific achievements and humanitarian aid operations abroad (e.g., Haiti, the Philippines) are essential.

On the strategic level, the organized Jewish community should work to expose the hatred, bigotry and historical distortions that fuel the BDS movement’s radical agenda, which not only seeks to deny the right of Jews to national self-determination but seriously undermines the prospects for Israeli-Palestinian collaboration and peace.

Robert Horenstein is the staff director of the Jewish Federation of Greater Portland Community Relations Committee.