We are lifelong Zionists. Here’s why we’ve chosen to boycott Israel.

By Steven Levitsky and Glen Weyl October 23 at 8:01 PM


Steven Levitsky is a professor of government at Harvard University. Glen Weyl is an assistant professor of economics and law at the University of Chicago.


We are lifelong Zionists. Like other progressive Jews, our support for Israel has been founded on two convictions: first, that a state was necessary to protect our people from future disaster; and second, that any Jewish state would be democratic, embracing the values of universal human rights that many took as a lesson of the Holocaust. Undemocratic measures undertaken in pursuit of Israel’s survival, such as the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza and the denial of basic rights to Palestinians living there, were understood to be temporary.


But we must face reality: The occupation has become permanent. Nearly half a century after the Six-Day War, Israel is settling into the apartheid-like regime against which many of its former leaders warned. The settler population in the West Bank has grown 30-fold, from about 12,000 in 1980 to 389,000 today. The West Bank is increasingly treated as part of Israel, with the green line demarcating the occupied territories erased from many maps. Israeli President Reuven Rivlin declared recently that control over the West Bank is “not a matter of political debate. It is a basic fact of modern Zionism.”

This “basic fact” poses an ethical dilemma for American Jews: Can we continue to embrace a state that permanently denies basic rights to another people? Yet it also poses a problem from a Zionist perspective: Israel has embarked on a path that threatens its very existence.

As happened in the cases of Rhodesia and South Africa, Israel’s permanent subjugation of Palestinians will inevitably isolate it from Western democracies. Not only is European support for Israel waning, but also U.S. public opinion — once seemingly rock solid — has begun to shift as well, especially among millennials. International pariah status is hardly a recipe for Israel’s survival.

At home, the occupation is exacerbating demographic pressures that threaten to tear Israeli society apart. The growth of the settler and ultra-orthodox populations has stoked Jewish chauvinism and further alienated the growing Arab population. Divided into increasingly irreconcilable communities, Israel risks losing the minimum of mutual tolerance that is necessary for any democratic society. In such a context, violence like the recent wave of attacks in Jerusalem and the West Bank is virtually bound to become normal.

Finally, occupation threatens the security it was meant to ensure. Israel’s security situation has changed dramatically since the 1967 and 1973 wars. Peace with Egypt and Jordan, the weakening of Iraq and Syria, and Israel’s now-overwhelming military superiority — including its (undeclared) nuclear deterrent — have ended any existential threat posed by its Arab neighbors. Even a Hamas-led Palestinian state could not destroy Israel. As six former directors of Israel’s internal security service, Shin Bet, argued in the 2012 documentary “The Gatekeepers,” it is the occupation itself that truly threatens Israel’s long-term security: Occupation forces Israel into asymmetric warfare that erodes its international standing, limits its ability to forge regional alliances against sectarian extremists and, crucially, remains the principal motive behind Palestinian violence.

In making the occupation permanent, Israel’s leaders are undermining their state’s viability. Unfortunately, domestic movements to avert that fate have withered. Thanks to an economic boom and the temporary security provided by the West Bank barrier and the Iron Dome missile defense system, much of Israel’s secular Zionist majority feels no need to take the difficult steps required for a durable peace, such as evicting their countrymen from West Bank settlements and acknowledging the moral stain of the suffering Israel has caused to so many Palestinians.

We are at a critical juncture. Settlement growth and demographic trends will soon overwhelm Israel’s ability to change course. For years, we have supported Israeli governments — even those we strongly disagreed with — in the belief that a secure Israel would act to defend its own long-term interests. That strategy has failed. Israel’s supporters have, tragically, become its enablers. Today, there is no realistic prospect of Israel making the hard choices necessary to ensure its survival as a democratic state in the absence of outside pressure.

For supporters of Israel like us, all viable forms of pressure are painful. The only tools that could plausibly shape Israeli strategic calculations are a withdrawal of U.S. aid and diplomatic support, and boycotts of and divestitures from the Israeli economy. Boycotting only goods produced in settlements would not have sufficient impact to induce Israelis to rethink the status quo.

It is thus, reluctantly but resolutely, that we are refusing to travel to Israel, boycotting products produced there and calling on our universities to divest and our elected representatives to withdraw aid to Israel. Until Israel seriously engages with a peace process that either establishes a sovereign Palestinian state or grants full democratic citizenship to Palestinians living in a single state, we cannot continue to subsidize governments whose actions threaten Israel’s long-term survival.

Israel, of course, is hardly the world’s worst human rights violator. Doesn’t boycotting Israel but not other rights-violating states constitute a double standard? It does. We love Israel, and we are deeply concerned for its survival. We do not feel equally invested in the fate of other states.

Unlike internationally isolated states such as North Korea and Syria, Israel could be significantly affected by a boycott. The Israeli government could not sustain its foolish course without massive U.S. aid, investment, commerce, and moral and diplomatic support.

We recognize that some boycott advocates are driven by opposition to (and even hatred of) Israel. Our motivation is precisely the opposite: love for Israel and a desire to save it.

Repulsed by the Afrikaners’ ethno-religious fanaticism in South Africa, Zionism founder [url=https://books.google.com/books?id=31LMY9S8IBIC&pg=PA168&lpg=PA168&dq=%E2%80%9CWe+don%E2%80%99t+want+a+Boer+state,+but+a+Venice.%E2%80%9D&source=bl&ots=0-GfoaTeZ3&sig=8Eu7IxVJys0T_7si-I7MGHJ5Tnw&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0CB0Q6AEwAGoVChMI0oed-erWyAIVQdgeCh2ubgsD#v=onepage&q=%E2%80%9CWe don%E2%80%99t want a Boer state%2C but a venice.%e2%80%9d&f=false]Theodore Herzl[/url] wrote, “We don’t want a Boer state, but a Venice.” American Zionists must act to pressure Israel to preserve Herzl’s vision — and to save itself.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/a-zionist-case-for-boycotting-israel/2015/10/23/ac4dab80-735c-11e5-9cbb-790369643cf9_story.html

Absolutely spot on, and that is why the BDS movement is spreading so far and so fast.

My feelings exactly.

• At a time when Israelis are being stabbed in the streets, progressive “lifelong Zionists” encouraging people to boycott Israel is awfully low. And yet that’s what Professors Steven Levitsky and Glen Weyl do in this Washington Post op-ed that goes beyond only boycotting settlements.
Levitsky and Weyl don’t understand that, as David Horovitz recently articulated, this intifada isn’t against occupation, it’s against Israel itself.

For supporters of Israel like us, all viable forms of pressure are painful. The only tools that could plausibly shape Israeli strategic calculations are a withdrawal of U.S. aid and diplomatic support, and boycotts of and divestitures from the Israeli economy. Boycotting only goods produced in settlements would not have sufficient impact to induce Israelis to rethink the status quo.
 
It is thus, reluctantly but resolutely, that we are refusing to travel to Israel, boycotting products produced there and calling on our universities to divest and our elected representatives to withdraw aid to Israel.

Hasbara piffle.

See http://www.newsfixboard.com/t12056-confessions-of-an-israeli-traitor

as to why so many Israeli's are now seeing that they are descending into madness and it has to stop.

One person.

wow

The occupation is destroying our own society, too

I was an Israel Defense Forces soldier in Gaza 27 years ago, during the first intifada. We patrolled the city and the villages and the refugee camps and encountered angry teenagers throwing stones at us. We responded with tear gas and rubber bullets.

Now those seem like the good old days.

Since then, the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians has seen stones replaced with guns and suicide bombs, then rockets and highly trained militias, and now, in the past month, kitchen knives, screwdrivers and other improvised weapons. Some of these low-tech efforts have been horrifically successful, with victims as young as 13. There is plenty to discuss about the nature and timing of the recent wave of Palestinian attacks — a desperate and humiliated answer to the election of a hostile Israeli government that emboldens extremist settlers to attack Palestinians. But as an Israeli, I am more concerned with the actions of my own society, which are getting scarier and uglier by the moment.

The internal discussion in Israel is more militant, threatening and intolerant than it has ever been. Talk has trended toward fundamentalism ever since the Israeli operation in Gaza in late 2008, but it has recently gone from bad to worse. There seems to be only one acceptable voice, orchestrated by the government and its spokespeople, and beamed to all corners of the country by a clan of loyal media outlets drowning out all the others. Those few dissenters who attempt to contradict it — to ask questions, to protest, to represent a different color from this artificial consensus — are ridiculed and patronized at best, threatened, vilified and physically attacked at worst. Israelis not “supporting our troops” are seen as traitors, and newspapers asking questions about the government’s policies and actions are seen as demoralizing.

Since the start of last year’s Gaza war, there have been several incidents of anti-leftist violence to go along with the attacks aimed at Palestinians: Left-wing protesters were assaulted at antiwar demonstrations in Tel Aviv and Haifa last summer, during the war; left-wing journalist Gideon Levy of Haaretz was accused of treason by a Knesset member, a crime that during wartime is punishable by death. He’s since hired bodyguards. The comedian Orna Banai lost an advertising job after an interview in which she expressed horror over Israeli actions against Palestinians. This month, people in Afula attacked an Arab correspondent for an Israeli TV network and his Jewish crew while they reported on a stabbing attack. A new bill in the Knesset encourages the thought police by turning away visitors to Israel who have supported the movement to boycott companies profiting from the occupation. On Friday, a masked Jewish settler attacked the president of leftist group Rabbis for Human Rights in a Palestinian olive grove in the West Bank.

On social media, the gloves are taken off, social courtesies abandoned, hatred rears its ugly head. Facebook pages calling for violence against left-wingers and Arabs appear frequently, and even when they’re taken down, they pop up again in one guise or another. Any sentiment not aligned with the supposed consensus is met with a barrage of racist vitriol. One Facebook group calling itself the Shadow Lions discussed how to disrupt a wedding between an Arab and a Jew, posting the groom’s phone number and urging people to call and harass him. On Twitter and Instagram, hashtags like #leftiesout and #traitorlefties abound. Film director Shira Geffen, who asked her movie audiences for a moment of silence to respect Palestinian children killed in an Israeli offensive, was flayed across Israeli social networks. “Shame,” a new and brilliant play by actress Einat Weitzman, brings to the stage a selection of the hateful comments she received after wearing a T-shirt bearing the Palestinian flag. One example from the play: “If the baby that was murdered was yours I wonder which flag you would put on yourself. Now step on it and get your ugly head back to your tiny apartment and bury yourself from the shame until you die there alone and maybe in your funeral we will ask the Jihad to read verses from the Koran.”

In this latest round of fighting, the volume has been turned up still another notch. While the knife attacks are going on, my family and I are in Omaha, where I’m teaching for the semester, and what I hear and read from Israel leaves me appalled. Again led by politicians from the right (with the perplexing support of members of the supposed opposition, such as Yair Lapid), then circulated by the sensationalist mainstream media, there has been a unified demonization of Palestinians and Israeli Arabs. One recent poll by the newspaper Maariv found that only 19 percent of Israeli Jews think most Arabs oppose the attacks. This past week, the trend reached its absurd peak, with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s ridiculous claim that Hitler decided to annihilate the Jews only after being advised to do so by Jerusalem Mufti Haj Amin al-Husseini, the leader of Palestinian Arabs at the time. (Israeli Twitter was full of jokes and memes about the speech, which one image in circulation dubbed “Hitlerious.” Even for Netanyahu’s supporters, apparently, this was too much.)

There have been calls to kill attackers in every situation, in defiance of the law or any accepted rules of engagement for the military. Lapid, for example, said in an interview, “Don’t hesitate. Even at the start of an attack, shooting to kill is correct. If someone is brandishing a knife, shoot him.” Minister of Public Security Gilad Erdan also gave his blessing to that notion. And the head of the Jerusalem police department, Moshe Edri, announced, “Anyone who stabs Jews or hurts innocent people is due to be killed.” Knesset member Yinon Magal tweeted that authorities should “make an effort” to kill terrorists who carry out attacks.

Such sentiment has led to incidents like the death in East Jerusalem of Fadi Alloun, suspected of a knife attack but shot by police as they had him surrounded. Sometimes, it backfires: This month, a Jewish vigilante near Haifa stabbed a fellow Israeli Jew who he thought was an Arab. Late Wednesday, soldiers killed an Israeli Jew whom they mistook for a Palestinian attacker.

The low point (so far) was last Sunday night’s lynching of 29-year-old Eritrean asylum seeker Haftom Zarhum, mistakenly identified as a perpetrator of a terrorist attack in Beersheba. Zarhum was shot by a security guard then beaten to death by a mob of passers-by in a predictable response to the incitement from our own politicians to kill as revenge. And the increasingly intolerant, boiling, racist tone of the Israeli conversation is — there is no other way to put this — a result of 48 years of occupying another people: of Israelis receiving a message (or at least understanding it as such) that we are superior to others, that we control the fate of those lesser others, that we are allowed to disregard laws and any basic notions of human morality with regard to Palestinians.

The cumulative effect of this recent mindless violence is hugely disturbing. We seem to be in a fast and alarming downward swirl into a savage, unrepairable society. There is only one way to respond to what’s happening in Israel today: We must stop the occupation. Not for peace with the Palestinians or for their sake (though they have surely suffered at our hands for too long). Not for some vision of an idyllic Middle East — those arguments will never end, because neither side will ever budge, or ever be proved wrong by anything. No, we must stop the occupation for ourselves. So that we can look ourselves in the eyes. So that we can legitimately ask for, and receive, support from the world. So that we can return to being human.

Whatever the consequences are, they can’t be worse than what we are now grappling with. No matter how many soldiers we put in the West Bank, or how many houses of terrorists we blow up, or how many stone-throwers we arrest, we don’t have any sense of security; meanwhile, we have become diplomatically isolated, perceived around the world (sometimes correctly) as executioners, liars, racists. As long as the occupation lasts, we are the more powerful side, so we call the shots, and we cannot go on blaming others. For our own sake, for our sanity — we must stop now.

By Assaf Gavron October 23
Assaf Gavron's latest novel, "The Hilltop," is out in paperback.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2015/10/23/confessions-of-an-israeli-traitor/?postshare=9631445816207744

He's right on the money, although he did miss out the family burnt to death and the fact that their relatives are still being threatened and having the fields set alight and fire bombs on their houses, all done by the nice settlers accompanied by the IDF.

Maybe somebody should tell Sassy, that the BDS does not recognise the right of Israel to exist.
Its a hate movement, which seeks to sell a fabrication, with the intent of hate direct at Israel and by proxy its people. They make the hate of Zionists acceptable, as the new name for antisemitism/ Zionism is bollocks, but hating people for these beliefs is wrong. Just as it would be to hate Muslims for believing in Islam. Sadly those full of hate, make hate acceptable, when there is never any justification.You can ridicules the ideologies here but should never discriminate against the believers of that belief.

The land that people now classify as a nation called palestine, has been under occupation since for centuries under the Ottoman Turks. In fact it was only an issue under non Islamic control.. As no nation has ever been formed there, prior to the British mandate rule. The Palestinians should rightfully have independence, but not at the expense of the Israeli nation.

Didge wrote:Maybe somebody should tell Sassy, that the BDS does not recognise the right of Israel to exist.
Its a hate movement, which seeks to sell a fabrication, with the intent of hate direct at Israel and by proxy its people. They make the hate of Zionists acceptable, as the new name for antisemitism/ Zionism is bollocks, but hating people for these beliefs is wrong. Just as it would be to hate Muslims for believing in Islam. Sadly those full of hate, make hate acceptable, when there is never any justification.You can ridicules the ideologies here but should never discriminate against the believers of that belief.

The land that people now classify as a nation called palestine, has been under occupation since for centuries under the Ottoman Turks. In fact it was only an issue under non Islamic control.. As no nation has ever been formed there, prior to the British mandate rule. The Palestinians should rightfully have independence, but not at the expense of the Israeli nation.

Show me where the BDS movement explicitly state they don't recognise Israel or even are against the 2 state solution. Failure to do so will expose you as a liar, again.

And FYI: Zionism is an ideology and is rightly vilified as an apartheid movement.

Glad to see you've calmed down and returned, as predicted. Let's see how long you last before throwing another hissy fit.

Didge really does need to stop reading all that hasbara and find out the FACTS for himself:

Stated aims of the BDS Movement on the day of it's inception in 2005 here:
http://www.bdsmovement.net/call

One year after the historic Advisory Opinion of the International Court of Justice (ICJ) which found Israel’s Wall built on occupied Palestinian territory to be illegal; Israel continues its construction of the colonial Wall with total disregard to the Court’s decision. Thirty eight years into Israel’s occupation of the Palestinian West Bank (including East Jerusalem), Gaza Strip and the Syrian Golan Heights, Israel continues to expand Jewish colonies. It has unilaterally annexed occupied East Jerusalem and the Golan Heights and is now de facto annexing large parts of the West Bank by means of the Wall. Israel is also preparing – in the shadow of its lanned redeployment from the Gaza Strip – to build and expand colonies in the West Bank. Fifty seven years after the state of Israel was built mainly on land ethnically cleansed of its Palestinian owners, a majority of Palestinians are refugees, most of whom are stateless. Moreover, Israel’s entrenched system of racial discrimination against its own Arab-Palestinian citizens remains intact.

In light of Israel’s persistent violations of international law; and

Given that, since 1948, hundreds of UN resolutions have condemned Israel’s colonial and discriminatory policies as illegal and called for immediate, adequate and effective remedies; and

Given that all forms of international intervention and peace-making have until now failed to convince or force Israel to comply with humanitarian law, to respect fundamental human rights and to end its occupation and oppression of the people of Palestine; and

In view of the fact that people of conscience in the international community have historically shouldered the moral responsibility to fight injustice, as exemplified in the struggle to abolish apartheid in South Africa through diverse forms of boycott, divestment and sanctions; and

Inspired by the struggle of South Africans against apartheid and in the spirit of international solidarity, moral consistency and resistance to injustice and oppression;

We, representatives of Palestinian civil society, call upon international civil society organizations and people of conscience all over the world to impose broad boycotts and implement divestment initiatives against Israel similar to those applied to South Africa in the apartheid era. We appeal to you to pressure your respective states to impose embargoes and sanctions against Israel. We also invite conscientious Israelis to support this Call, for the sake of justice and genuine peace.

These non-violent punitive measures should be maintained until Israel meets its obligation to recognize the Palestinian people’s inalienable right to self-determination and fully complies with the precepts of international law by:

1. Ending its occupation and colonization of all Arab lands and dismantling the Wall
2. Recognizing the fundamental rights of the Arab-Palestinian citizens of Israel to full equality; and
3. Respecting, protecting and promoting the rights of Palestinian refugees to return to their homes and properties as stipulated in UN resolution 194.


Perhaps he'd like to point out where it says it doesn't recognise Israel, and you can't say 'until Israel meets its obligation to recognize the Palestinian people’s inalienable right to self-determination' without recognising it!!!!

Fuzzy Zack wrote:

Didge wrote:Maybe somebody should tell Sassy, that the BDS does not recognise the right of Israel to exist.
Its a hate movement, which seeks to sell a fabrication, with the intent of hate direct at Israel and by proxy its people. They make the hate of Zionists acceptable, as the new name for antisemitism/ Zionism is bollocks, but hating people for these beliefs is wrong. Just as it would be to hate Muslims for believing in Islam. Sadly those full of hate, make hate acceptable, when there is never any justification.You can ridicules the ideologies here but should never discriminate against the believers of that belief.

The land that people now classify as a nation called palestine, has been under occupation since for centuries under the Ottoman Turks. In fact it was only an issue under non Islamic control.. As no nation has ever been formed there, prior to the British mandate rule. The Palestinians should rightfully have independence, but not at the expense of the Israeli nation.

Show me where the BDS movement explicitly state they don't recognise Israel or even are against the 2 state solution. Failure to do so will expose you as a liar, again.

And FYI: Zionism is an ideology and is rightly vilified as an apartheid movement.

Glad to see you've calmed down and returned, as predicted. Let's see how long you last before throwing another hissy fit.

1) Never claimed it was stated openly, but it is well known that the core of the BDS are against the state of Israel. Even you  have argued off a one state solution.  The very fact people like Finkelstein came out and condemned them, was just confirming much of what already was known about the BDS.

2) Zionism has no connection or comprability to Apartheid. Again its up to you if you hate the ideology of Zionism, whuich is not a dangeroeus ideology like Wahhabism. You also find zionists with different Political view points, just as you do with the ideology Islam.

3) Irrelevant and poorly trying to deflect.
Stay on topic, you either debate the points or get left hung out to dry..

Didge wrote:

Fuzzy Zack wrote:

Show me where the BDS movement explicitly state they don't recognise Israel or even are against the 2 state solution. Failure to do so will expose you as a liar, again.

And FYI: Zionism is an ideology and is rightly vilified as an apartheid movement.

Glad to see you've calmed down and returned, as predicted. Let's see how long you last before throwing another hissy fit.

1) Never claimed it was stated openly, but it is well known that the core of the BDS are against the state of Israel. Even you  have argued off a one state solution.  The very fact people like Finkelstein came out and condemned them, was just confirming much of what already was known about the BDS.

2) Zionism has no connection or comprability to Apartheid. Again its up to you if you hate the ideology of Zionism, whuich is not a dangeroeus ideology like Wahhabism. You also find zionists with different Political view points, just as you do with the ideology Islam.

3) Irrelevant and poorly trying to deflect.
Stay on topic, you either debate the points or get left hung out to dry..

So your claim that the BDS movement is against a 2 state solution is utterly groundless and based on supposition.

Not groundless at all and is backed by those who once glowingly apporved of them like Finklestein.
Or did you miss that part, that he is one of several important Jewish academic supporters of the Palestinian cause.The BDS call for a right of return, which would basically mean the end of Israel from people displaced nearly 70 years ago. To put this into context this would be like move 16 million displaced Germans and their ancestors back into former lands. Note that I say former territory, as Palestine never existed independenty as a state. What is even worse here is that nopw at least 3 to 4 generations of Palestinian refugees have been used as pawns, kept in limbo by Arab nations I might add, denying them what they should hav been given long ago. Citizen status. Of course you do not see the BDS call fopr the right of return to the hundreds of thousands of Jews at the same time displaced as refugees from many Muslim majority ccountries.  Which is another lie promoted with some invented maps.


I will repeat again for you that any boycotts placed on nations collectivelly are fundementally wrong. Even here when it is nothing more than either left wing or Muslim hate of Israel within the BDS. The problem with making a nation culpable, for a claimed wrong, is you are then judging all the people of that nation as guilty. Which is inherantly wrong. I back individual sanctions onto economic, political leaders who are infuencial in a society, but I do not back sanctions to boycott aa whole nation. That is nothing short of the worst xenophobia, as it is judging all Israeli's, as guilty through association.