Lawrence Summers says BDS movement is ‘persecuting’ Israel
http://mondoweiss.net/2015/02/lawrence-movement-persecuting
But Summers frames his speech as a criticism of abdications of moral responsibility; and there is not a word about the slaughter in Gaza last summer, not a word about Palestinian conditions under occupation, nothing about the statelessness of 350,000 Palestinians who have the misfortune to live in East Jerusalem, and just a glancing criticism of Israeli “intransigence” on settlements. You would never know that Israel’s actions are causing its crisis in legitimacy, and fueling the BDS movement. How can it be anti-Semitic to focus on Israel when we see Jewish writers (Henry Siegman, Noam Sheizaf, Eva Illouz) saying that Palestinians have no rights in the occupied territories or are living in a form of slavery. A friend writes:
Summers fails to offer his own moral or political statement one way or another, or any way, on the Occupation, Gaza, discriminatory laws in Israel proper, and the anti-democratic laws and bills. He does not deal at all with the subject at hand. Logically, having avoided the issue, he’s just engaged in name calling.
As BDS becomes more effective, this charge, that it is anti-Semitic, is going to become the rallying cry among Israel defenders. Roger Cohen says as much in his new book. Richard Cohen says so in the Washington Post. Richard Cohen takes it a step further into Islamophobia, saying that Arab Muslims are blaming the Jews for “their own helplessness” and unemployment.
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But anti-Zionism is clearly a legitimate belief. It rests on mainstream evidentiary/philosophical grounds: that Zionism has patently failed to produce a fair system after many decades of application, that societies should not legally privilege one ethnic group over another and seek to segregate and ethnically-cleanse the second-class group, that the Jewish Question should not be resolved by taking other people’s lands. Let’s have the debate without the name-calling.
