Ken Waltzer

Last month, protestors in the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement who disrupted a Students Supporting Israel event at UCLA shouted the following clarifying words: “We don’t want two states.  We want 48!”  They were affirming that the BDS movement wishes to turn the clock back in the Middle East to 1948, before there was a State of Israel, and thereby to undo history.  They were saying they oppose the existence of any Jewish state in any part of Palestine.

The screed Shaul Magid offers in Tikkun Magazine (November 30, 2017) defending the recent panel on “Antisemitism and the Struggle for Social Justice” held at the New School on November 28, 2017, staffed by Linda Sarsour, Rebecca Vilkomerson, and others, is an exercise in vapid self- and in-group-justification. The panel retailed the same position as does the Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP) in its edited collection On Antisemitism: Solidarity and the Struggle for Justice (Haymarket Books, 2017). This position is that – regarding antisemitism today – the great danger is not so much the threat antisemitism poses to Jews but the threat that Jews employ the charge of antisemitism to silence others. As Maggid suggested last year in an independent talk at Brown University, it is a way of controlling and deforming the Jewish conversation

Once again, a student group at the University of Michigan has put forth a resolution to the Central Student Government asking the university Board of Regents to divest from several companies “that violate Palestinian human rights.” This is the eleventh resolution in 15 years; all preceding attempts have been voted down or failed. Nevertheless, a vocal minority chooses again to force this issue, and the whole campus must therefore enter once more into the land of futile effort and escalated inter-group division.

The Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement has had a cumulative negative effect on academic values and university campus climates In the United States.  The introduction of repeated academic boycott resolutions, the frequent highlighting of discriminatory intentions and opposition to open intellectual exchange clearly violates principles of academic freedom.

Last April at San Francisco State University, anti-Israel protesters connected with the General Union of Palestine Students to disrupt a public lecture on campus by Nir Barkat, the mayor of Jerusalem, preventing him from speaking. Protesters yelled at the Jewish students that they should “get the f— off our campus.”

resolution under consideration before the Student Association at George Washington University pushed by a group called Divest This Time calls upon the university to divest from all investments in companies “that contribute to the suffering of Palestinians.” The vote on the resolution is Monday, May 1st. The companies highlighted are Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Elbit Systems Ltd., Caterpillar Inc., CEMEX, General Electric, Hewlett-Packard Company, Northrop Grumman Corporation, The Raytheon Company, and Motorola Solutions, Inc.

The Jewish people are not renowned for their unanimity—in yeshivas, politics, board rooms, the media and certainly the Knesset docile acceptance of a single point of view is elusive. Jews embrace a wide variety of opinions on virtually every topic.
read more: http://www.haaretz.com/opinion/1.782066

Antisemitism is an animus based on a negative portrait of the Jew as an extraordinarily malevolent and powerful being.

The Jew is depicted as extraordinarily malign and influential. Antisemitism also often involves a threat of action. The negative portrait is linked to a program involving policy or action targeting the Jew. Such actions include marking off for special invidious treatment or discrimination, proscribing, excluding, subordinating, expelling, ghettoizing, removing, or, at the extreme, exterminating.

Antisemitism is an animus based on a negative portrait of the Jew as an extraordinarily malevolent and powerful being. The Jew is depicted as extraordinarily malign and influential. Antisemitism also often involves a threat of action. The negative portrait is linked to a program involving policy or action targeting the Jew. Such actions include marking off for special invidious treatment or discrimination, proscribing, excluding, subordinating, expelling, ghettoizing, removing, or, at the extreme, exterminating.

Speaking on CNN Newsroom after the passage of UN Resolution 2334, Middle East expert Aaron David Miller, called Obama’s action a “parting shot;” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu characterized it as “a shameful ambush”.

Miller said, “It was a parting shot in defense of what the Obama administration and Secretary Kerry believe to be the waning hopes of a two-state solution.”  But Miller expressed his concern that the U.S. action permitting the Security Council resolution to pass would “produce the opposite impact of what the administration intended.”  The resolution would have unintended effects no one desires.