Three Thoughts on BDS and Liberal Zionism

Since, as proposed it is contingent on the US political system to take clearly anti-Zionist steps (which we all know has a probablity indistinguishable from zero), I’d say its not a serious, but merely a rhetorical move.

I think Corey forgot one thing. (Most) senior Israeli politicians are not US citizens. All persons have some rights in a liberal state, but noncitizens have fewer rights than others. And if citizenship has any meaning in a liberal state, one of these diminished rights is the right to travel into the US.

Opposing annexation bas been the liberal Zionist position pretty much forever, but if you want to take credit for it, knock yourself out.

‘the very same objection that he leveled against the boycott–why are you singling out Israel?–could be made against any move to oppose Israel’

I suppose the response could be: ‘this sounds reasonable on the surface, but why are you singling out liberal Zionists with your demands for logical consistency, when all around the world there are other nationalist ideologues making equally bad arguments???’ (continues on page 643…)

“Annexation (without ethnic cleansing, anyway) is advocated by anti-Zionists as the anti-Zionist “one-state solution”.”

More like, annexation with the ethnic cleansing an unstated but anticipated consequence not far down the road.

What is significant here is that it has become impossible for academics whose whole career has been based on finding a Liberal apology for Zionism have started to abandon the sinking ship. From Isaiah Berlin to Michael Waltzer, there has been a whole parade of ‘philosophers’ that have combined stirring liberal arguments for human rights with tendentious explanations as to why none of them applies to Israel-can-do-no-wrong.

Maintaining the fiction of the two state solution has always been essential for maintaining the pretense of a ‘liberal’ Zionism. But there can be no such thing because the whole project is based on the racist premise that one particular tribe has special rights over another.

There is a significant voting block in Israel that would like to undo Israel’s alliance with the US in favor of an alignment with mother Russia. Once free of US influence, Israel would be free to commit genocide ‘transfer’ and annex the occupied territories outright. One of the reasons for the sudden shift in the Israeli opinion polls is the fear that if elected, they might get their way.

To this extent the BDS movement is actually playing into the hands of the Israeli far right. But the whole project is doomed to failure because while Putin would very much like to disrupt the US-Israeli alliance, an alignment with Israel would mean losing Iran. It would be suicidal for Israel to reject the US Jewish community. ‘Transfer’ is simply not a feasible option.

There is now only one solution to the Israel/Palestine issue and that is for Israel to grant full citizenship to everyone living within the borders controlled by Israel.

JThomas @13: When you quote something as good as that, you have to say where it’s from.

I first heard the teaching the horse to sing story in Niven and Pournelle’s book “The Mote in God’s Eye”–the character says the story appears in Herodotus. I assumed that was true, but after googling around for a few minutes I haven’t been able to confirm it.

6, 17 completely miss the point. ‘Personal sanctions’ is the new part and it’s a response to BDS (see Haaretz).

J Thomas

Abandoning a wicked, racist project isn’t a failure. It is a success.

engels @18: ‘Personal sanctions’ is the new part

New where? Not in Israel, nor in Europe and the US. See also, if the 1980s is too “new.” I first attended a synagogue rally calling for personal sanctions against officers of JDL and Kach in 1974.

Oh, and if personally sanctioning Feiglin is a figure of merit, the bar is actually pretty low. I would welcome Debra Nussbaum Cohen’s insights, in HaAretz or elsewhere, on how BDS pushed the Likud Central Committee into that one.

Hmm, the version of this Nasreddin story I know is about teaching a donkey theology in twenty years. Twenty years makes more sense than one year. And of course there’s no king; it’s emir.

“It tells you something, I think, about the state of contemporary liberalism that when it comes to academic freedom and freedom of speech, some of its most thoughtful voices have a more permissive and indulgent view of the state than they do of students and scholarly associations.”

I don’t think that’s the right way to think about this at all. Lots of things the state does restrict speech as an incidental matter. That’s different in kind from a specific ban on a particular person speaking on a university campus. To make this argument work, you need to compare attitudes toward (1) a state ban on universities hosting particular speakers and attitudes toward (2) the self-initiated adoption of such a ban by universities, at the behest of students and scholarly associations. Correctly framed, your criticism is clearly misplaced: people who oppose (2) would almost invariably also oppose (1).

#29 JHW

Lots of things the state does restrict speech as an incidental matter. That’s different in kind from a specific ban on a particular person speaking on a university campus. To make this argument work, you need to compare attitudes toward (1) a state ban on universities hosting particular speakers and attitudes toward (2) the self-initiated adoption of such a ban by universities, at the behest of students and scholarly associations.

So, if the US government says that person X is evil and must not be allowed to speak on a college campus, that’s something that right-minded people would oppose.

But if the US government says that person X is evil and must not be allowed to enter the USA at all, which incidentally also prevents him from speaking on a college campus, that’s entirely different and should cause no problem?

WTF?

But wait! If he can’t enter the USA, still he can speak on campus by teleconferencing! He can speak to anybody who wants to listen to him that way. Maybe it isn’t so bad. What he can’t do is things like eat the great New York knishes, or New York pizza. Except by mail order, and then it’s stale. He can’t have sex with US women unless they travel to meet him, although he can send sperm samples.

So a travel ban is a big annoyance to him, without actually interfering all that much with his communication.

Corey Robin: Controversial international leaders may want to speak to audiences when they enter the United States, but that doesn’t convert the punitive measure of barring their entry into a speech restriction. When it comes to penalizing people for wrongful conduct, we don’t apply one standard to people who want to engage in speech and another standard to people who don’t. We don’t generally think there’s a free speech problem, for example, with imprisoning someone who happens to be a political activist, even though it’s likely to impair their ability to reach audiences.

It’s different if we think people are being targeted for speech-restrictive reasons. But it seems unlikely to me that the signatories are seeking an entry ban because they want to bar these Israeli politicians from speaking on campuses. (How many invitations does Moshe Feiglin get anyway?) And if that is in fact a motivating reason for some signatories, I suspect that those signatories would also be okay with a direct university-initiated ban.

@J Thomas 30

No, lumping in a solution that is merely unacceptable to you with a group of solutions that are impossible does not make it impossible.

Israel is going to stop being an apartheid state for Jews. It may take ten years but it won’t take less than fifty. The rest of the world is losing patience with a state that insists on the need to massacre a couple of thousand Palestinians every few years so as to preserve an identity as a ‘Jewish state’.

The idea of a state for one group of people who are recent immigrants with rights that supersede and nullify those of the indigenous population is abhorrent. There is no place for a state that is founded on the basis of inequality.

While there are other states that have a state religion, there is none right now that practices such widespread discrimination against non members of that group. Before the end of the cold war there was no shortage of obnoxious regimes worse than Israel. But that is hardly the case any more.

#36 PHB

No, lumping in a solution that is merely unacceptable to you with a group of solutions that are impossible does not make it impossible.

It makes it politically impossible for Israel to try that solution.

Israel is going to stop being an apartheid state for Jews.

There are basicly two ways for them to stop. One way is to change their minds and choose something else. The other way is to get beat up to the point they have no choice. Like, the US south stopped slavery when they were starved and killed until they could no longer resist.

It’s possible that Israelis could change themselves around about it. It sort of looks to me like the demographics aren’t headed that way. They’re getting more haredi, they’ve got plenty of russians, etc. People I would expect to hold firm will probably get an increasing majority, and as things go bad I’d expect more of the reasonable people to leave instead of keep fighting it. But I’d be very happy to be wrong.

The other approach — South Africa folded without a fight. They wanted to keep doing business more than they wanted to officially stay on top, and they saw a way to do that and get the problem over with.

Would the US South have done that? If the North kept an army strong enough to repel invasion, but apart from that settled for blockade, would the South have gotten bored with a phony war and being blockaded, and negotiated an end to slavery with a million fewer deaths? I don’t know any way to tell. Maybe the British would have intervened if it settled down to a years-long stalemate. From what little I know I guess the British wouldn’t intervene, and it might take 5 to 10 years for the South to get bored enough to quit, but I can’t prove it.

When people are fighting for their lives they get excited and united. When it’s long dreary boring sanctions that prevent rich people from getting richer, maybe not.

Could that work with Israel? I can imagine reasons that would work against it. First, the USA is nowhere near ready to accept it. If we wanted to, we could blockade Israel but we might never be ready to do that or to allow anyone else to.

Second, there’s Jordan. When Iraq was smuggling oil across the border to Jordan, where did the smuggled oil go? Looking at a map, the obvious place was Israel. They could maybe ship a little through Aqaba, or send some to Syria. But Israel was the obvious choice. Similarly, smuggling stuff into Iraq despite the sanctions, Israel was the obvious source. The Jordanian economy depended on smuggling between Israel and Iraq, and they suffered when we destroyed the iraqi economy. If they had a chance to smuggle stuff into Israel, would they? How could they not?

Third, there are zionists scattered throughout the industries that would need to maintain and record an embargo. They would break the rules for Israel, far more than they did for Iraq or Iran or Syria. It would not be possible to freeze Israeli assets.

Fourth, about the time lots of US citizens get upset about Israeli policies, some arab terrorists will perform a horrible atrocity. Maybe they will rape and torture-to-death 50 Israeli schoolchildren, making public statements that no compromise is possible and this is what all Jews in the world deserve. Maybe it would be 500 US schoolchildren to punish the USA for supporting Israel. And the USA would go back to 100% unconditional support for Israel. Whenever Israel really *needs* arab terrorists, some reliably show up to do whatever Israel most needs.

Of course all of that will change in unknown directions over time.

J Thomas, 38

As with all countries, Israeli power depends on its economy. It does not take much to disrupt a modern economy and send it into a recession. Israel is already an island economy with all goods having to come in and out by sea.

You seem to be unable to accept any comparison to South Africa. The Afrikaners were just as attached to their country and political system. The reason that they abandoned apartheid was the psychological impact of the sanctions. The rejection by the West really did have an impact.

Israeli apartheid would not last very long if it was subject to US sanctions.

Corey Robin: Your original claim was that contemporary liberal thinkers were more indulgent of state speech repression than student/academic speech repression, because they’re fine with this entry ban but would be against students or universities preventing these politicians from speaking on campus. I pointed out that these cases are qualitatively different from reasons that have nothing to do with the enacting agent: one is an incidental burden on speech (“You can’t come here,” which prevents you from speaking here), while one targets speech explicitly (“You can’t give a speech on this campus”).

We tolerate incidental burdens on speech all the time, even as directed against people whose main business is speaking. Stephenson-quoter kun’s example of the political activist imprisoned for car theft is nicely illustrative. (You can imagine lots of others. Maybe a political organizer gets lots of DUIs and gets her license suspended, and now has a far harder time doing her work. Maybe a professor is fired for sexual harassment and now has less opportunity to advocate his views.) You suggest that my view is comical, alluding to the pretextual use of the criminal law to target activists, but the fact that sometimes a person’s speech isn’t actually incidental to the choice to go after that person doesn’t itself alter the distinction between incidental and non-incidental burdens on speech.

Of course, the pretext problem is important here if we suspect that the real motive of the signatories is to keep people like Naftali Bennett and Moshe Feiglin from speaking at US university campuses. Do we have any reason to think that this is true? I don’t see any.

#40 PHB

Israeli apartheid would not last very long if it was subject to US sanctions.

I hope you’re right.

My concern is that first, Israel has enough connections to prevent US sanctions from actually taking effect. If the banks didn’t really cooperate, or any major businesses, what could the government do about it? Particularly when various government bureaucrats would be continually throwing figurative monkey-wrenches in attempts to monitor the situation. Plus there would be lots of smuggling. All that might keep the Israeli economy going long enough to get the US president impeached or assassinated etc.

Also, the US public is nowhere near ready for anything like that yet, and may never be. Any time they get too sympathetic to palestinians some sort of terrorists will reliably do something awful to persuade them that the towolheads don’t deserve any rights. It’s consistent. Whenever Israel needs terrorists to show up and do something awful to influence public opinion in favor of Israel, arab terrorists show up and do something awful to influence public opinion in favor of Israel.

Still, I hope that Israel would respond well to sanctions. And I hope that they will choose to do the right thing even quicker, before sanctions can take effect, out of their own free will.

“Whenever Israel needs terrorists to show up and do something awful to influence public opinion in favor of Israel, arab terrorists show up and do something awful to influence public opinion in favor of Israel.”

Also when Israel doesn’t have any such need. Why, you’d almost think they were doing awful things because they’re awful people, rather than because it was convenient for Israel.

Talk of US sanctions seems rather silly. There aren’t enough antisemites in the US to support such sanctions, even if they are a bit concentrated in influential places, especially on the left. Just another way the US isn’t like Europe.

Hmm evasive. And you are usually very wordy and eager to reply. I wonder why you prefer not too in this case.

” If the banks didn’t really cooperate, or any major businesses, what could the government do about it? Particularly when various government bureaucrats would be continually throwing figurative monkey-wrenches in attempts to monitor the situation. Plus there would be lots of smuggling. All that might keep the Israeli economy going long enough to get the US president impeached or assassinated etc.”

Come on J, what exactly are you saying here. And be specific.

Come on J. You can do better than that. What are you trying to implying about Jewish control over the banks and the government?

Interesting that you refuse to elaborate. I mean you are normally exceptionally eager to write thousands of words yet not about this. Why is that?

Fair enough Corey. Just to clarify though J. Thomas brought it up not me.

“Talk of US sanctions seems rather silly. There aren’t enough antisemites in the US to support such sanctions, ”

You really think the only folk who are calling for sanctions are neo-NAZIs?

Take a look at who is running the BDS movement. It is largely a Jewish concern. The idea that anger at Israel is limited to anti-semites and a handful of ‘self-hating’ Jews is self deception.

AIPAC, CAMERA and the like have done a bang up job of alienating the liberal blogosphere. Telling folk that they are either with Israel 110% or they are against Israel has driven pretty much everyone outside the Zionist tent. The only prominent Jewish blogger who still calls himself a Zionist is Josh Marshall and he is certainly not an Israel firster.

Fuzzy Corey?

“it is generally accepted in diplomatic circles that Israel has annexed East Jerusalem.”

Not sure at all this is the case. There is a general acceptance that a lot of annexed Jerusalem will stay with Israel in the event of an agreement but there’s also a view that Palestine has Jerusalem as its capital so at least some goes to Palestine. Even the US though, as far as I am aware, doesn’t recognise the annexation of Jerusalem hence the constant goings on about moving the embassy from Tel Aviv by congress and even the most pro Likud Presidents like W vetoing this. How many Israelis would be willing to give up any part of Jerusalem in return for peace is unclear, I suspect very few but this could change in the unlikely event of serious pressure by the US.

@65, South Africa was mentioned here. Out of curiosity: do you interpret the story there among the same lines? A brave little ethno-religious group of Afrikaners, trying to survive in a sea of genocidal black Africans?

“There are still (and have always been) many, many people in the world who quite sincerely, as my relatives of the WW2 generation used to say, “don’t want to kill Jews; they want to mourn Jews.”

Evidence? That’s an awfully convenient accusation to have in one’s pocket to be pulled out when needed. I’m trying to think of who it could even mean. The closest I can come to would be fundamentalist Christians who are pro-Israel, but it’s not fair even to them. They see themselves as philo-semitic and see the Jews as part of the Biblical story, but also want them all to convert to Christianity (perhaps as “Messianic Jews”). Or maybe secularists who wish all religions would go away, which would include Judaism of course. But most of that type seem to focus on Islam these days.

There are anti-semites of varying degrees of intensity, but Brett is just making the usual sweeping statement about critics and mischaracterizing the issues so he can dismiss Israel’s crimes, which are supported and partly funded by the US. In some circles you can hear the same type of nonsense from the sillier segments of the far left–anyone who criticizes Hamas is really a white supremacist or anyone who criticizes Mugabe is really just a mouthpiece for British colonialism and so on. It’s a standard feature of discussion whenever human rights issues come up–the apologists for their favorite war criminals always find some way to claim the critics are really motivated by hatred.

Hmm if you were Westerner who doesn’t violently hate race X but just wishes they’d go someplace else, what position would you be likely to adopt re Zionism?

Ps. This is a predictably godawful thread- does noone have anything to pay about Walzer et al?