Mitchell Plitnick adds spice to our blog, but I think it fair to say that he generally approaches issues from our "left" (as conventional parlance would describe it). I too found the J Street panel on BDS (boycott, divestment, sanctions) of great interest, but my take differs from Mitchell's.
First of all, Ameinu president Ken Bob was in no way "reactionary" in his anti-BDS stance (upon reflection, I suspect that Mitchell regrets using this term). Ken noted with irony that he was "comfortably on the right" (in relative terms) on this panel, as opposed to most venues where he's usually the furthest left. Yet his opposition to settlements and the occupation is beyond dispute. And Mitchell doesn't recognize the truth of Ken's statement that the "global BDS movement" uses BDS as a strategy to undermine Israel's existence.
Secondly, the individual he mentioned at the end was not "unruly." He waited patiently on line, while the chair person used her "prerogative" to have a woman jump ahead of him to pose a question, and then he had to assert himself to get his question answered.
He was pointing out the inconsistency in panelist Rebecca Vilkomerson's Jewish Voice for Peace organization following the lead of Palestinian "civil society" groups for BDS against Israel but then not explicitly endorsing the Palestinian Authority's call for a two-state solution. Vilkomerson responded by saying that the JVP is a "rights-based movement" and therefore doesn't take a position on what the ultimate solution to the conflict should be, beyond the fact that it's for Israelis and Palestinians to decide.
I was fine with the inclusion of Vilkomerson's pro-BDS view in a spirited discussion of its pros and cons. Vilkomerson is correct to complain of being shut out of the discourse in most Jewish communal venues. But in not fully accepting Israel's legitimacy as a "Jewish state"--even in the secular and fully democratic vision of Meretz USA and the Meretz party, for example, that Israel should both reflect its Jewish-identifying majority and be the state of all its citizens regardless of their religion or creed (as articulated in Israel's declaration of independence)-- the JVP radically marks itself off from most of the Jewish community.
I fully understand how the interminable conflict, the expanding settlement enterprise, and the obvious injustices and indignities visited daily upon Palestinians living under occupation drive people like Ms. Vilkomerson and Mitchell Plitnick to support BDS tactics. Even we at Meretz USA have recently expressed support for boycotts targeting the settlements.
But Mitchell overstates the notion that Israel has made no effort to end the occupation. Israel has been repeatedly rent apart in the last two decades, with the downfall of more than one governing coalition and even the murder of a prime minister. Although conditions in Gaza remain grim, Israel's grip over the West Bank has loosened sufficiently in the last two years to allow for an impressive level of economic growth and stability. And Hamas, Islamic Jihad and even Fatah-aligned terrorists have helped keep the occupation going with their periodic violence.
The other panelists were also noteworthy. Bernard Avishai is a political economist and widely-read writer on Israel and Zionism. Originally from Montreal, he now teaches at the business school at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem.
Avishai is fine with boycotting settlements (he follows a list of 200 products compiled by the Palestinian Authority), but he favors international business in a way that's unusual for a liberal intellectual who started out as a "Marx scholar." He argues that global corporations, such as General Electric and United Technologies, may make aircraft engines for the Israeli military, but are also engaged in delivering CAT scans to Palestinian hospitals and adapting other high-tech products for Palestinian use. (I believe it was the chair person, Kathleen Peratis, who mentioned in this connection that Caterpillar bulldozers have not only destroyed Arab homes but are also building a new Palestinian city near Ramallah.) And his experience with Israeli business students is that they have very enlightened views regarding the Palestinians.
Last but not least, Simone Zimmerman is an amazing second-year college student at Berkeley. She reported with remarkable poise on the acrimonious struggle in the student senate over a resolution for the university to divest from companies working in Israel. She found that the debate drove both sides to "their extremes," with the polarization causing neither side to acknowledge the humanity of the other and that the air was heavy with anti-Semitic and Islamophobic slurs. Ms. Zimmerman characterized the BDS issue as generating "exhaustion, not engagement."
She was equally scornful of pro-BDS'ers chanting "From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free," and of how the vocally pro-Israel side acted. She sagely commented that current human rights violations cannot be addressed by arguments based on historic Jewish victimhood.
In this connection, I return to Ken Bob's plea to "invest, don't divest." He (or was it Avishai?) mentioned that there are Israeli and Palestinian efforts to sustain joint business ventures. Ken also indicated that he cannot oppose armaments for Israel in the face of ongoing security threats, such as from Hezbollah missiles, which are now believed to have the capacity to reach Tel Aviv. The entire BDS issue is nothing if not complex and J Street should be commended for allowing this discussion.
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5 comments:
So, there is debate among the J Streeters and the Meretz folk about whether or not, or rather about how strenuously to boycott Israel (all seem to agree that Jewish settlers on the West Bank need to be boycotted). There was no debate in the J Street, none that has come to my attention, about what to do about the vicious, deep-seated anti-Semitism on the Arab "street." (The classic scholarly treatment of that subject is Y. Harkabi's "Arab Attitudes to Israel," 1972, essentially still current). So, overall: J Streeters and Meretz folk cling to the outlandish notion that if only Israel behaved differently (like J Streeters, for instance), there would be instant peace in the Middle East
Ralph,
We'll agree to disagree on many of these points, but I will correct you on one point.
The person at the end was not at the microphone at any point, he was sitting not five feet away from where I was at the media desk (he was in the audience) and simply started shouting things. I believe his behavior however, was in fact an ironically welcome exception to the rule of decorum which pervaded the room. The person at the mike who was pushing for his question to be answered was not reacting in any way to the subject in his pushiness, but, as you say, to the chair's decision earlier. That was not who i was referring to.
I have no reason to dispute what Mitchell saw and heard five feet from where he was. But since I have no memory of it, it's clear that, as Mitchell says, it was a unique and minor exception to the polite discourse.
As to Werner's comment, I can't attest to the attitudes on BDS of most of the 2500 people who attended the conference. My guess is that opinions are very divided on this.
It is not a question of "if only Israel behaved differently..., there would be instant peace...." We can't know this. But we do know that the failures of each side to engage adequately with positive developments by the other, have kept the conflict going.
On the Palestinian side, the second intifada, the election of Hamas and the on and off attacks from Gaza were all terrible setbacks. But the rise of Abbas (who has renounced the intifada and "armed struggle"), the Saudi/Arab League peace initiative of 2002 and the far-reaching efforts at compromise depicted in the "Palestine Papers" and more accurately in Bernard Avishai's recent NY Times Magazine article, are all positive elements that undermine the narrow view articulated by Werner in his reference to a work published nearly 40 years ago.
While I was not at the J Street Conference, I have talked to the person that I believe is the one Mitchel Plitnik characterized as "unruly" at the BDS hearing. The point he was trying to make is that if JVP does not accept 2 states it does not accept the legitimacy of Israel as a Jewish state. In fact what JVP is doing is using BDS to delegitimize Israel, rather than the occupation. JVP seeks to hide its real agenda of supporting the old PLO position of a "secular democratic state". As one who has been working for 2 states since the days of Breira, (and who has no problem having a pro-BDS speaker at the Conference), I believe their hidden Agenda should be exposed.
Ken,
I, too, regret that JVP dodges the issue of one state vs. two. I don't know if it's fair to say that they have a 'hidden agenda' - I know a few people who support JVP, for instance, who are most definitely Zionists and obviously support Israel's existence - but I do agree that their ambiguity is very unhealthy - probably for JVP itself, but certainly for the cause of a two-state solution.
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