This month, an anti-BDS resolution—sponsored by a far-left student group—was adopted by the Austrian national student union; the Green party of Bavaria passed a similar resolution, specifically connecting BDS with anti-Semitism; the Left party in another German state rejected a pro-BDS motion. If the movement to boycott, divest from, and sanction the Jewish state can’t survive in such fertile ground, writes Evelyn Gordon, it’s unlikely to succeed at all. She explains how the movement has failed:
[E]ven many people who oppose boycotting Israel as a whole still think boycotts are acceptable as long as they target the settlements alone. The problem . . . is that this isn’t actually possible. . . [T]o satisfy the boycotters, Israeli companies wouldn’t merely have to stop providing essential services to hundreds of thousands of Israelis in the West Bank; they’d also have to stop providing services to hundreds of thousands of Israelis in Israel’s capital, not to mention the tens of thousands of non-Jewish, non-Israelis living in both eastern Jerusalem and the Golan, [all considered “occupied” by BDS advocates]. Complying with the boycott would, thus, cause a humanitarian crisis of major proportions—and, therefore, it isn’t going to happen. . . .
When the BDS movement first emerged, many well-meaning people advocated ignoring it rather than fighting it on the grounds that fighting it would simply inflate the importance of an otherwise insignificant movement. But victories like those of the past few weeks show why that strategy was wrong. The growing understanding that BDS is anti-Semitic didn’t happen because Israel and overseas activists ignored the movement; it happened because both the Israeli government and overseas activists relentlessly explained the connection between boycotting Israel and anti-Semitism. And a similar effort will be needed to explain that “boycotting the settlements” is just a euphemism for boycotting Israel.
Even though large swaths of polite society are now perfectly comfortable with anti-Semitism as long as they can tell themselves it’s just “anti-Zionism” or “fighting the occupation,” open avowals of anti-Semitism are still taboo. Once stripped of the comforting pretense that it’s not anti-Semitic, BDS will be finished. And groups like the Austrian student union and the Bavarian Green party are now tearing that pretense to shreds.
Read more on Evelyn Gordon: http://evelyncgordon.com/outside-the-un-bds-is-losing-badly/