On July 1, Israel plans to move forward with settlements in the occupied West Bank. The plan has been condemned by the UN. In contrast the EU has shown support for the annexation plan-with the European Investment Bank providing Israel a $170 million dollar loan for a desalination plant.
This kind of double talk from international institutions regarding the apartheid state of Israel is not new, and it is just as prevalent in the media. Any outrage over Israel’s continual subjugation of Palestinians is qualified, if it comes at all. A clear example of this narrow field of acceptable criticism can be seen when looking at the BDS movement and its subsequent coverage in the media.
In early 2005, as the Iraq occupation took a turn for the worse and George W. Bush began his second term, a violent Palestinian uprising against the apartheid Israeli state came to an end. It’s often called the Second Intifada or Al-Aqsa Intifada.
The Second Intifada began in late 2000 after Israeli politician Ariel Sharon visited the Temple Mount, known to Palestinians as Haram esh-Sharif. In a moment darkly reflective of struggles to come, Palestinians threw rocks at police and were met with rubber bullets and tear gas in response. The following five years was marked by continual violence and bloodshed.
As this second attempted shirking of colonizers ran aground, organizers in the West Bank and Gaza moved forward with a new strategy: the Boycott, Divest and Sanction (BDS) movement. The change in tactics marked by the BDS movement terrified the right wing Israeli government. So much that they have spent the following 15 years criminalizing it any way they can.
BDS is a call for consumers to boycott Israeli goods, producers to divest from their profits with Israel and, most importantly, sanctions to be levied on the government of Israel in response to the repeated abuse and violence by the colonial occupiers against the Palestinian people.
As a strategy, the movement draws comparisons to the Anti-Apartheid movement of the 1990s in which organizers across the world were successfully able to pressure the apartheid government of South Africa, eventually leading to a formal end of the apartheid there. The Israeli government is very aware of this comparison, and this is particularly why they’ve spent so much time and money opposing the mobilization of BDS.
In 1947 after a UN partition resolution dictating a two-state split of Palestine, civil war broke out. It was brutal and bloody. The British empire formally withdrew on May 14, 1948. That same day, the Jewish leadership in Palestine—most of whom emigrated there from Europe in the late 19th and early 20th century—declared the establishment of the state of Israel. It would be a bit gouche to point out the similarities between this kind of statehood and the statehood of one massive north american power that systematically killed off the population there for its own statehood—ah but there it went.
The ensuing exodus of Palestinians from their natural homeland is called al-Nakbah, literally translating to “disaster.” Roughly 700,000 Palestinians were displaced from their ancestral homes, many families had been there for generations living off the land. Those that were not outright murdered were legally barred from returning to their land. Stateless and criminalized, many of them found a home in the small territory allotted to them by the UN resolution—what are now the West Bank and Gaza, both under Israeli military control.
The ensuing 70 years has seen repeated occupation and brutalization campaigns by Israel against the Palestinian people. Nearly eight decades later and the violent legacy of Nakba is still used as a cudgel for the justification of continual oppression. Gaza and the West Bank are akin to open air prisons, Palestinians cannot leave and are subjected to horrific living conditions—often struggling to get clean water.
Democrats, for their sake, are just as bad as Republicans on this issue. Those terminally online will remember the 2018 saga in which Ilhan Omar tweeted an accurate and funny quip about the nature of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) in American politics. Many of the people loudly decrying this as antisemitism were ostensibly on the left side of the aisle.
There is a tension undergirded any criticism of Israel; a weariness to say the wrong thing, a weariness to be called anti-semitic.
This weariness—much like the case against BDS—is a fabrication. A false sense of aggrievement based on a false equivalency: Zionism is Judaism.
It is not.
Zionism was a colonial and political project from the start and over the past two and half-ish decades we’ve seen that project meld itself inextricably to the ideology of Judaism, so much so that any criticism of Israel is deemed anti-semitic.
This careful realignment is a driving force behind the continued Israeli apartheid state, it is an allowance for colonization. While Trump has defended Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at every turn, the liberal icon Obama continually allowed Israeli settlements to grow during his eight years.
The allowance by liberals and conservatives bolsters Israel’s occupation in the West Bank and Gaza, and bolsters the Israeli case against BDS.
So much so that Israel has gone to extraordinary lengths criminalizing, tormenting or discrediting anyone who expresses support for BDS —shit anyone with a BDS retweet. The McCarthyite Canary Mission is a such an example; where pro Palestinian teens are equated to KKK member David Duke. The organization is funded by an arch-conservative named Adam Milstein.
Canary Mission is one of many fingers of the anti-BDS campaign. Much of the campaign’s ground work happens on college campuses as the younger generation of Jews is less susceptible to the Zionist rhetoric.
Representatives from any number of Zionist organizations work seemingly around the clock to paint any student group expressing pro Palestinian sentiments as hateful; using that Zionism and Judaism conflation as evidence.
BDS is effective, and that’s why this much time and money is being spent to push back against it. That’s also why it’s imperative to support it, vocally and loudly. It is not a hateful or antismeitic movement, it is an impassioned anti-apartheid movement and-most importantly—it is a chance at a materially better life for the Palestinian people.