{"id":108160,"date":"2016-02-09T12:46:31","date_gmt":"2016-02-09T12:46:31","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/footballagainstapartheid.wordpress.com\/?p=108160"},"modified":"2017-10-31T13:07:13","modified_gmt":"2017-10-31T13:07:13","slug":"the-best-way-to-change-the-hostile-anti-israel-tenor-of-the-bds-movement-is-to-flood-it-with-liberal-zionists","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/footballagainstapartheid.org\/fr\/2016\/02\/09\/the-best-way-to-change-the-hostile-anti-israel-tenor-of-the-bds-movement-is-to-flood-it-with-liberal-zionists\/","title":{"rendered":"“the best way to change the hostile, anti-Israel tenor of the BDS movement is to flood it with liberal Zionists”"},"content":{"rendered":"
\u00a0Larry Derfner is an Israeli journalist and copy editor at Haaretz.<\/em><\/div>\n
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An awakening among liberal Zionists has begun in recent weeks. Some influential voices in this camp, mainly overseas but also here, seem to have run out of patience with Israel and its occupation. They\u2019ve started speaking out for the definitive liberal Zionist goal \u2013 the two-state solution \u2013 in ways that are generally considered radical.<\/div>\n
Roger Cohen, a New York Times columnist, joined the boycott movement. Quoting a recent Human Rights Watch report, he called for pressure on international businesses \u201cto comply with their own human rights responsibilities by ceasing settlement-related activities.\u201d<\/div>\n
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\"If<\/div>\n
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David Remnick, editor and star writer of The New Yorker magazine, did a profile of Joint Arab List chairman Ayman Odeh that was also an implicit political endorsement. \u201cOdeh\u2019s message is built around the rarest commodity in the desert after water: hope,\u201d Remnick wrote. Even more notable was the author\u2019s extremely unflattering depiction of Zionist Union leader Isaac Herzog\u2019s view of Arabs. The article pointed up Herzog\u2019s \u201cbreezy condescension\u201d toward Odeh and his ugly remarks about Arabs in last year\u2019s election campaign (such as that he understood \u201cthe Arab mentality\u201d and, as a soldier, had seen Arabs through \u201cthe crosshairs\u201d of a gun).<\/div>\n
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\"IDF<\/div>\n
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Amos Schocken, publisher of Haaretz, wrote an essay that marked quite a departure for an Israeli newspaper publisher, and whose title tells it all: \u201cOnly international pressure will end Israeli apartheid.\u201d<\/div>\n
And I would add to this list Ban Ki-moon, secretary general of the United Nations, who challenged the holy of holies of Israeli propaganda: that Palestinian terror, not Israeli conquest, is the root cause of the conflict. \u00a0\u201cAs oppressed peoples have demonstrated throughout the ages, it is human nature to react to occupation,” Ban said, thereby linking the Palestinian cause to the anti-colonial movements of history.<\/div>\n
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\"Israel<\/div>\n
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I don\u2019t know if this trend among liberal Zionists and friends of Israel will grow or peter out, but I\u2019m convinced that the only way to end the occupation is for people who know that it\u2019s wrong, that it\u2019s immoral, to finally stop equivocating. I believe that if Barack Obama, Angela Merkel, Francois Hollande and countless other liberal politicians, diplomats and commentators said aloud what they really think of Israel\u2019s policy toward the Palestinians \u2013 and acted on those convictions \u2013 the occupation would be finished. Facing the threat of severe sanctions by the West, Israel would fold its hand in the West Bank and around Gaza.<\/div>\n
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It\u2019s a long way off. If I was a bookie, I\u2019d lay odds against it ever happening. But there have been much greater turnarounds in history; no one can say it can\u2019t happen here, too.<\/div>\n
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What we can say, though, is that it won\u2019t happen at the rate things are going. It won\u2019t happen under the leadership of Herzog, Tzipi Livni and Yair Lapid; they\u2019re going backward, offering the Palestinians continually less than they (justifiably) rejected in the past. Nor will it happen, or not soon, anyway, under the leadership of the United States, where threatening sanctions on Israel would be seen, by now, as tantamount to treason.<\/div>\n
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But to get Europe and much of the Democratic Party ready to sanction Israel, which is what it would take to force Israel\u2019s hand, liberals have to start talking and acting more like radicals \u2013 not in their goals, but in their tactics.<\/div>\n
In these desperate times, the next step for supporters of the two-state solution is not advocating the one-state solution, but speaking and acting on behalf of the two-state solution with appropriate desperation.<\/div>\n
I don\u2019t feel comfortable advocating a boycott of my own country, but a few years ago, after it became clear to me that neither the Israeli peace camp nor the White House was going to end the occupation, the choice came down to supporting the boycott or supporting the status quo forever, and I chose the former.<\/div>\n
I am a liberal Zionist, I want Israel to remain a Jewish state, and I support the boycott of this country, in whatever form, because it is the only thing out there with the potential to gradually convince the world to force an end to the military dictatorship known as the occupation.<\/div>\n
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I have serious problems with the tenor of the BDS movement \u2013 but not nearly as serious as those I have with the occupation. Moreover, the BDS movement may want to dismantle the Jewish state, but the West merely wants to dismantle the occupation \u2013 and only the West, not the BDS movement, can force its will on Israel. Finally, the best way to change the hostile, anti-Israel tenor of the BDS movement is to flood it with liberal Zionists.<\/div>\n
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\"Israel<\/div>\n
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Yet there are other relatively radical options for liberals besides supporting the boycott. They can call on Israeli army reservists to refuse to serve in the West Bank. Meretz and Peace Now could charter a Gaza-bound flotilla filled with humanitarian supplies and flying Israeli flags. That would raise some consciousness.<\/div>\n
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But maybe the radicalization of liberal Zionists begins with the word, not the deed. These folks cannot go on being afraid to blame Israel and \u201ctake sides\u201d with the Palestinians. They can\u2019t keep saying \u201cboth sides are to blame.\u201d Israel is a free country that denies millions of Palestinians their freedom at gunpoint, and has done so since 1967. There is no moral equivalence between the two sides in this conflict.<\/div>\n
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These folks also must stop pretending that the occupation is unsustainable, because after all this time, that\u2019s obviously not true. Calling the occupation \u201cunsustainable\u201d is how liberals salve their consciences, how they excuse their timidity in the face of this historic injustice \u2013 by telling themselves it can\u2019t last.<\/div>\n
In doing so, they are helping it last. Meanwhile, some liberal Zionists are changing, becoming radicalized \u2013 becoming part of the solution, the only one we\u2019ve got left.<\/div>\n
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Larry Derfner is an Israeli journalist and copy editor at Haaretz.<\/div>\n
read more: https:\/\/www.haaretz.com\/opinion\/.premium-1.702155<\/a><\/div>\n
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\u00a0Larry Derfner is an Israeli journalist and copy editor at Haaretz. An awakening among liberal Zionists has begun in recent weeks. Some influential voices in this camp, mainly overseas but also here, seem to have run out of patience with Israel and its occupation. They\u2019ve started speaking out for the definitive liberal Zionist goal \u2013 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11,6],"tags":[19],"class_list":["post-108160","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-bds","category-palestine","tag-english"],"translation":{"provider":"WPGlobus","version":"2.12.2","language":"fr","enabled_languages":["gb","es","fr","pt","ru","no","ar"],"languages":{"gb":{"title":true,"content":true,"excerpt":false},"es":{"title":false,"content":false,"excerpt":false},"fr":{"title":false,"content":false,"excerpt":false},"pt":{"title":false,"content":false,"excerpt":false},"ru":{"title":false,"content":false,"excerpt":false},"no":{"title":false,"content":false,"excerpt":false},"ar":{"title":false,"content":false,"excerpt":false}}},"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/footballagainstapartheid.org\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/108160"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/footballagainstapartheid.org\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/footballagainstapartheid.org\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/footballagainstapartheid.org\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/footballagainstapartheid.org\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=108160"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/footballagainstapartheid.org\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/108160\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/footballagainstapartheid.org\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=108160"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/footballagainstapartheid.org\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=108160"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/footballagainstapartheid.org\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=108160"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}