Why I can’t bring myself to support boycotts against Israel
Apropos of Sally Rooney’s decision not to have her latest book published in Hebrew.
This is Sally Rooney, who is very popular with anti-Zionists for being stalwart and dogged in her support for boycott, divestment, and sanctions against Israel. The following essay dissents from her position.
I just found out that one of the writers who is most popular in my group of friends, the very gifted young Irish novelist Sally Rooney, has elected not to allow her latest novel to be published in Hebrew, as a result of the fact that she supports academic and cultural boycotts of the state of Israel. The noted Black feminist writer Alice Walker famously feels the same way, and so do notable names such as Roger Waters of Pink Floyd, the justly legendary music producer Brian Eno, the outstanding rap group Run The Jewels, and the remarkable pop star Lorde. I thought I would write a piece discussing what I make of this perspective, because I don’t agree with it, but I admit that it’s motivated by earnest human rights concerns, and I think it’s the responsibility of humane Zionists who care about the human rights and dignity of the Palestinian people to engage with these arguments in good faith and explain why we see these issues differently than people who support boycott, divestment, and sanctions do. Many of them hate us so much that they will refuse to listen at all costs and will take great pleasure in demonizing and dehumanizing us, but I don’t think this gives us license to dehumanize them in exchange, so I think it’s healthy and salutary to attempt to make the case for why we believe what we believe, even if they insist on ignoring us or misrepresenting our arguments.
It might make sense for me to begin by making the case as to why I believe Israel deserves to exist. I’ve already written quite a bit on the question, but just for the sake of making my argument easy to understand, please allow me to recap it. What I believe is that Israel is the authentic realization of the legitimate and morally just longing of the Jewish people to return to the only land to which we have ever been indigenous, and to which our claim to be indigenous is not remotely undermined by the fact that the Palestinians often attempt to claim indigeneity as well and to portray the Jews as European interlopers and settler-colonizers. I also don’t think the various crimes committed under the aegis of Zionism, such as the Deir Yassin massacre and the liquidation of roughly 530 Palestinian villages between the years 1947 and 1949, necessarily makes Zionism illegitimate. I think Zionists have the responsibility to take seriously our culpability for Palestinian suffering, but I don’t think that necessarily requires us to abandon our claim that the country we’ve set up deserves to exist, any more than the responsibility I have as a white settler in Canada to acknowledge, renounce, and oppose my white privilege and promote First Nations welfare requires the dismantlement of the liberal parliamentary democracy here in favour of whichever forms of government the First Nations peoples of this land might prefer. I acknowledge that it’s crucially important to take First Nations treaty rights and land claims seriously, and to integrate their wisdom traditions and worldviews into the policies made by our government to the maximum possible extent, but I don’t think it would be a good idea to undo our parliamentary system as such, and my thoughts regarding the moral legitimacy of Zionism are very similar.
Notably, Omar Barghouti, who leads the BDS movement, has called for “a Palestine next to a Palestine”, and has been open about the fact that he wants to Islamize the only homeland the Jews have ever known. I happen to think it is disreputable that the BDS movement almost never acknowledges the salience of the way Muslims are traditionally supposed to treat unbelievers according to the classical formulations of Islamic law which are typically represented as orthodox and normative according to mainstream Muslim theology. The truth is that mainstream Islamic theology licenses a parade of human rights violations, notably the system of institutionalized discrimination, harassment, subjugation, and cruelty known as “the dhimma” or “dhimmitude”, and I think it’s perfectly legitimate and reasonable for the Jews of Israel to take seriously the claim of many hundreds of thousands of Palestinians who have claimed that they want to subjugate the Jews there and make their lives hell. It is true that some secularists exist among the Palestinians, but it’s also true that even these people generally don’t consider themselves to have any responsibility to distance themselves from the sickeningly and frighteningly cruel supremacists who very much do want to cause the Jews to suffer as much as humanly possible. Because the BDS movement doesn’t face this reality squarely, I regard it as fundamentally morally unserious.
Fair enough, one might say, but what about the ongoing brutality and cruelty of the Israeli occupation of the lands it won in the 1967 war? Am I justifying house demolitions, the uprooting of olive groves, arbitrary detentions, wanton murders by Israeli soldiers of civilians such as medics at the border fence, and similar abominations? The answer is a firm no, and in fact, I think the concerns of people such as Sally Rooney and Brian Eno and Lorde about the human rights catastrophe represented by many of the actions of the Israeli government and military are perfectly legitimate. I also think the authors of the Jerusalem Declaration, which was designed as an alternative and corrective to the International Holocaust Remembrance Association’s definition of Judeophobia (which considers most anti-Zionism a manifestation thereof), have a point when they say that boycotts are not in and of themselves expressions of prejudice against people-groups, such that it is not remotely fair to call someone a hater of the Jews simply because they support a boycott of Israel. Being a Zionist, I don’t think there’s a good case to do it, but I think the common canard that everyone who does it must be Judeophobic is very firmly wrong. And when such boycotts target only the settlements in the 1967 lands, I consider them not only morally unproblematic but roughly justifiable. I very much long for the creation of a Palestinian state which is a stable liberal democratic polity, and I can respect the BDS people to whatever degree they would like to bring such a country into being.
But I still don’t think it deserves to come at the expense of the only indigenous homeland the Jewish people will ever know. I realize that a large number of people who hate Israel are motivated primarily by the fact that they despise ethnic nationalism, but such people never seem to get concerned about Japan, or Thailand, or the two Koreas, or Pakistan. This latter is notable for being not just an ethnostate but an ethnostate which is explicitly governed according to the principles of a fascist religious ideology. I understand that many anti-Zionists regard it as tendentious and mendacious when we point out that they generally don’t give a shit about human rights violations by egregious offenders such as China, Russia, North Korea, Venezuela, Eritrea, the Central African Republic, Iran, Cuba, or Equatorial Guinea, and I suppose they have a point, because on some level it makes more sense to pressure a liberal democracy than a despotism, and these people know in their hearts that Israel is an authentic liberal democracy, which is why they bother to put pressure on it in the first place. But the fact that they say fuck-all about the appalling treatment meted out to the Christians, Hindus, and Sikhs of Pakistan, as well as Afghanistan, is extraordinarily telling. The majority of these people simply don’t give a shit about oppression unless they can blame the Jews for it, and I don’t think that’s an unfair point to make.
So have I made the case against the boycott? Well, no, not exactly. But I maintain that people who want to boycott Israel fundamentally misunderstand what it’s up against, probably because they haven’t sufficiently humanized the Jews to be able to convince themselves that they have any right to defend themselves against terrorism. Many such people believe that Palestinian terrorism is fundamentally justifiable as a result of the fact that they think the Palestinian national struggle is anti-colonial, but these people are sadly and dangerously mistaken, not only because very many Palestinians are fascists who want to reimpose the dhimma and who also demonize, mistreat, and abuse feminists, LGBTQ+ people, atheists and apostates, and religious minorities such as the Palestinian Christians and Palestinian Shí’ah and Ahmadi Muslims in ways that Israel simply does not, but also because they’ve misapprehended what many if not most Israelis actually want.
Think of it this way. Look how enthusiastic Israel has been to conclude peace agreements with Morocco, Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates, and Sudan. Think of how routinely, unselfishly, and proudly it sends aid to its Muslim neighbours when they experience natural disasters. Think of how eager it is to help continental Africa with projects such as drip irrigation. Think of how carefully it makes sure to provide equal levels of access to healthcare to those of its citizens who are not Jewish. Think about the fact that, a certain very real level of discrimination notwithstanding, citizens of Israel who are Muslim, Christian, Druze, Buddhist, Sikh, or Hindu, as well as the small number of Bahá’ís who serve at the World Centre in Haifa, really do enjoy equality of rights and dignity there, as do Ahmadi Muslims, who have in common with the Bahá’ís that they are viciously persecuted by conservative Muslims elsewhere. (Being a Bahá’í by religious conviction myself, it’s important to me to show Israel a certain level of respect for affording my religious community rights that are generally denied to it in all Muslim environments, with very few exceptions.) What I take this record of Israeli cooperation in a spirit of amity and goodwill with various non-Jews around the world to indicate is that that’s what the relationship between the Israelis and the Palestinians would be like if the Palestinians would abandon their jihadist determination to destroy the region’s lone non-Muslim state. (Which is, of course, forbidden to exist according to classical Islamic law, because the interpretations of such theological material as saheeh hadeeth #4294 and Qur’án sura 2 ayat 191 and 192, sura 48 ayah 29, sura 9 ayah 29, sura 5 ayah 82, and sura 98 ayah 6 which are taken seriously by many conservative Muslims, as well as the legal principle of “waqf”, disallow peaceful coexistence between Muslims and non-Muslims on principle.)
I am not denying that anti-Arab and anti-Black racism exist in Israeli society, and I’m also an ardent opponent of fascist interpretations of Judaism, which leads me to condemn popular Israeli political figures such as Benzi Gopstein, Miri Regev, Ayelet Shaked, Avigdor Lieberman, Bezalel Smotrich, Yoav Eliassi, Itamar Ben-Gvir, Oren Hazan, David Amsalem, and Michael Ben-Ari. I hate these people, and also Prime Minister Naftali Bennett and former Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, with a very intense, fiery passion.
But they don’t exercise the kind of control over the body politic that Islamic fascism does in Palestine! I’m pretty sure this is empirically verifiable! The peace movement in Israel is so much stronger than the peace movement in Palestine that there’s simply no comparison! Israel allows for a wide spectrum of dissent (although it was still wrong to bar entry to Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar), and its tolerance for critics is so much greater than that of the Palestinian fascists that the difference of degree is absurd! The pro-Israel Palestinian peace activists Rami Aman, Khaled Abu Toameh, Bassam Tawil, and Bassem Eid are so routinely demonized in Palestinian society simply for daring to humanize the Jews and make common cause with them that it seems as though there’s almost no hope that there will ever be a plurality of Palestinians in favour of peace, despite what the polling sometimes tells us. All due respect to any and all Palestinians (or other Muslims, anywhere!) who genuinely believe in a two-state solution and want peace with the Israelis, but anyone who tries to deny that it’s much safer for an Israeli to express support for Palestinian human rights than the other way around is telling a disgusting lie.
I’m saying this not to let Israel off the hook, but to make a contrast in terms of the way society is organized and run in the two countries. Israel’s government is reprehensible! But I am of the belief that the wider Palestinian society is in a sicker and more damaged place than the wider Israeli society, primarily because the norms of liberal democracy are taken more seriously by Israelis in the aggregate than by any of the Palestinians we hear from publicly. Even people with whom the contemporary English-speaking Left is relatively comfortable, such as the loathsome Mohammed El-Kurd, have no problem at all calling for genocide when they feel like it, and it simply isn’t acceptable in Israel to call for genocide of the Palestinians the way that it is normative in Palestine to call for a genocide of the Jews. Because of all this, I believe the BDS campaign to be morally skewed and unfair at its very core. I think it fundamentally misreads and misdiagnoses the problem.
Again, this is not to say that Israel is always and everywhere on the side of the angels. Notably, it allied with apartheid-era South Africa, and it has a sordid history of treating its Black citizens, as well as non-Jewish African migrants, in ways that don’t line up with the human rights norms it claims it respects. Its marriage laws are also contemptibly illiberal. But I believe that ongoing and productive dialogue with left-wing Zionists is healthier and saner than blanket boycotts of the entirety of the Jewish nation-state. Those Israelis who believe in the boycott are welcome to participate in it themselves, but I resent the BDS campaign for trying to deny left-wing Zionists a place at the table. Those of us who believe in the existence of a state with a Jewish cultural character that is also a liberal democracy which respects the human rights and dignity of those of its citizens who are women, LGBTQ+, and/or members of non-Jewish religious minorities tend to feel insulted by the degree to which we are simply regarded by the BDS movement as accessories to oppression.
And its ongoing denial of our very real indigeneity to the area is gross and immoral. The ethnogenesis of the Jews began in Judea! “Palestine” is the name the Roman conquerors gave to the area after throwing the Jews out, and they specifically named it after the people who were among the adversaries of the Jews in the era of the Bible! Muslims later conquered and Islamized the area, but I am of the genuine belief that Arabs, and by extension Muslims and Islam, are indigenous to Arabia and Arabia alone, and that denial of this fact represents significantly more egregious colonialism- and genocide-denial than that participated in by those Zionists who excuse the crimes of the Israelis. I really believe this! I hate to say it, because I don’t wish to make it seem as though I don’t care about Palestinian rights! I just think that there is a clear truth regarding who the rightful indigenous people of the land of Israel are, and it’s the Jews, goddammit! If the Palestinians want to claim co-indigeneity, that’s fine with me, but could they please stop attempting to bring about a second genocide of my people? And could the BDS campaigners please start being honest about what their movement represents in terms of its complicity with genocidal Islamic supremacist hatred of Jews in particular and unbelievers in general, as well as the historic legacy of Muslim colonialism and imperialism that has caused untold suffering for not just Jews but also for Christians (notably the Copts, Igbo, Maronites, and Assyrians), Hindus, Mandaeans, Shabaks, Zoroastrians, Sikhs, Kalasha, Buddhists, Kurds, Amazigh, Yarsanis, Bahá’ís, Baloch, and others for hundreds if not thousands of years? (I think bringing up the conquest by non-Palestinian Muslims of various non-Muslim people groups across history is perfectly reasonable in this context, because the animating principles of those evil Muslim imperialists are exactly the same as those of the people who are trying to destroy Israel now!)
I recognize that Zionists have the moral responsibility to reckon with the appalling nature of the crimes of the Israeli government and military in the 1967 lands, but the grotesquerie of the refusal of the partisans of the Palestinians to acknowledge their responsibility to reckon with the legacy of Muslim supremacism and cruelty, in which so many Palestinians are actively invested and a revival of which they are working to bring about, is something that I find sickening and that makes me very angry. I genuinely wish more pro-Palestinian commentators on these issues would be honest about that shit. It is incredibly fucking tiresome to realize that so many of them are so committed to dehumanizing us and to denying their own culpability for a variety of human rights catastrophes at all costs. I wish these people would bother seeing us as their equals in terms of human dignity for even five seconds.
Why I can’t bring myself to support boycotts against Israel
It's almost as if treating a group of people like animals for long enough will make them act like animals! Who'd have guessed?
A few things I would quibble about but otherwise right on the money.