The bankruptcy of BDS's new narrative on Israel and Ukraine
The anti-Israel mob claims that the refusal to sanction Israel while sanctioning Russia is hypocrisy. It isn't.
I’ve watched the massive sanctions regime against Russia take shape over the past two weeks with approval, but also a certain discomfort. This is not because of any sympathy for the Russian invasion of Ukraine, which I believe is an abomination, or opposition to the sanctions themselves. Indeed, I’ve been struck by how unexpected and heartening the united response of the West and its allies to the invasion has been. The discomfort came instead from the knowledge that this massive campaign of sanctions and isolation is exactly what Israel’s enemies want to see applied to the Jewish state, and that advocates of the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement were sure to seize on it to advance their own agenda.
It took a little time for this new anti-Israel narrative to take shape, as the BDSers were, by and large, as surprised by the invasion as the rest of the world. But the anti-Israel mob is not stupid, and they know an opportunity when they see one. Their campaign is now underway.
A brief article in the UK newspaper the Guardian — which is fairly reliable in its distaste for Israel — highlighted the coordinated message that is now being formulated. It is a fairly simple, indeed simplistic one: The Ukrainians are the Palestinians, Israel is the Russians, and the world must treat the Palestinians and Israel as it is currently treating Ukraine and Russia.
Among the usual suspects advocating this narrative is Sarah Leah Whitson of Human Rights Watch — an organization that, while it may do good work on other issues, is essentially an extremist faction of the Palestinian nationalist movement when it comes to Israel.
“We see that not just the US government but US companies are falling over themselves to sanction and boycott anything that has an association with the Russian government,” Whitson said. “Contrast that with the exact opposite when it comes to sanctioning Israel for its violations of international law to the point where American states are passing laws to punish Americans unless they promise never to boycott Israel. It’s very clear that the grounds for resisting sanctions on Israel, or even compliance with international law, is purely political.”
The Guardian also cites Lara Friedman, the president of the Foundation for Middle East Peace, whose Twitter feed displays a fanatical obsession with all things anti-Israel. She echoed Whitson’s claim that America is hypocritical in advocating sanctions on Russia while supposedly trying to render BDS illegal.
The most usual of the usual suspects, however, was James Zogby, the erstwhile president of the Arab American Institute and a lifelong apologist for antisemitism and Palestinian terrorism. On Twitter, Zogby reassured us that “I’ve always advocated non-violent mass resistance,” but asks “why are Ukrainians wielding Molotov Cocktails seen as heroes while this week Israeli forces shot dead a 14 yr old boy (they called him a terrorist) for throwing one at settlers who have illegally taken Palestinian land? Why?”
There are several answers to this new narrative. The first is that its analogy is simply inaccurate. As my friend, journalist Michael Totten, who has reported extensively on the Middle East, told me, “These people fail to understand that Israel is analogous to Ukraine, not Russia. Israel has never attacked an Arab state or territory without being attacked first; but Egypt, Syria, the PLO, Hamas, and Hezbollah sure have attacked Israel. The conflict will end when they stop. Sure, it’s a lot more complicated than that, but it also isn’t.”
The obvious factual inaccuracy Totten points out also leads us to a question that reveals the essential difference between Ukraine and the Palestinians: that is, what does Ukraine want and what do the Palestinians want? The Ukrainians are resisting a completely unprovoked and morally bankrupt invasion aimed at ending their existence as a state. They want that invasion to be beaten back and for their state to be secure. The Palestinians, by contrast, are “resisting” ordinary civilians — men, women, children, the elderly, everybody — as part of an openly genocidal war. They want to either force the Jews to “go back to Poland” or wipe them out. The Ukrainians want to preserve a state and a people; the Palestinians want to destroy a state and a people. Sure, it’s a lot more complicated than that, but it also isn’t.
Equally important is the contrast between Israel’s conduct versus Russia’s conduct. The Ukrainians, beginning with Russia’s conquest of Crimea up to today, have been offered less than nothing by the Russians. Indeed, Russia has made it quite clear that, at best, it is willing to accept a castrated, rump Ukraine, with “separatist” territories amputated, Russian military dominance secured, and the Ukrainians firmly in the Russian “sphere of influence” in perpetuity. In other words, the Russians are willing to accept nothing but Ukrainian national suicide.
By contrast, despite claims otherwise by the Palestinians and their supporters, Israel has repeatedly proven itself willing to agree to the creation of an independent Palestinian state via massive and indeed dangerous territorial concessions. Israel, in other words, has offered on multiple occasions to risk severely compromising its security in order to give the Palestinians everything they claim to want. That the Palestinians have consistently, for the better part of century, turned down such offers and responded with horrific violence speaks for itself.
Equally important is the question of Ukrainian versus Palestinian nationalism. While all nationalisms have their ugly side, Ukrainian nationalism is by and large concerned with preserving Ukraine’s freedom and right to self-determination, particularly against Russian imperialism. The ugliness of Palestinian nationalism, in contrast, is essential, not tangential, to their movement. Ironically, given Russian President Vladimir Putin’s false claims that Ukraine’s leaders are a “Nazi” regime, the Palestinian national movement collaborated with actual Nazis while the Third Reich was in power, regularly engages in Holocaust denial — including, in the past, by Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas — and often openly admires Hitler and echoes his antisemitic rhetoric, not to mention his genocidal ambitions. Ukrainian nationalism, in other words, has morality on its side; Palestinian nationalism, at least at the moment, does not.
The anti-Israel mob’s self-pitying assertion that the US is ratcheting up sanctions on Russia while trying to outlaw BDS is also simply untrue. The US government and various state governments are not trying to make BDS “illegal.” Instead, they have taken the fairly principled stance that federal and state governments reject BDS and will not collaborate with or enable it. This has been expressed through laws that outlaw such collaboration, not BDS itself. In other words, these laws express a policy that these governments will not work with or financially enable BDS. It is perfectly legitimate for any democratically-elected government to adopt such a policy. Nor has it “outlawed” BDS in other areas. Indeed, it is clear that, in the non-governmental sphere, BDS is, in many ways, flourishing. In particular, as borne out by the comments above, BDS is ubiquitous in the NGO world, which is not even to mention its wild popularity in institutions of higher education, which has resulted in very real persecution of Jewish students and their organizations.
The US government, in other words, has decided on firm moral grounds that it will support sanctions on Russia, because they are justified, and oppose sanctions on Israel, because they are not justified. This is a moral choice, and those who make it have the right to do so. It is a choice, moreover, made by the anti-Israel mob as well. They often oppose sanctions on Iran, for example, while supporting them against Israel. This is a morally bankrupt choice, but they are within their rights to make it; just as it is within our rights to make the opposite choice and campaign for the governments we vote and pay for to do the same.
However, while the BDSers’ new narrative on Ukraine and Israel may be inaccurate and indeed monstrous, Israel and its supporters should take it seriously. At the moment, it exists on the fringe, but given the popularity of anti-Israel sentiments on the left, in the Muslim community, and on social media — which reached new heights of antisemitic violence during Israel’s war with Hamas in May of last year — it could well gain traction. In fact, it could metastasize, and metastasize rather quickly, into the next stage of the BDS movement. That movement is already making its first halting attempts to seize on the war in Ukraine to advance its agenda, and there is little doubt that the movement is nothing if not relentless and obsessive. The Israel-haters will push their new narrative with everything they have, and we should be prepared to face them down.
Photo by Takver
Excellent, insightful, and dare I say prescient piece. I wonder if, strangely, Putin’s bizarre-o attempts to equate Ukrainians with Nazis might be of use to us in pointing out the equally bizarre-o claims of equating Israelis with Nazis. Could make for a powerful meme…