Usually, when the letters B, D and S are strung together within spitting distance of a college campus, you can expect the Jewish community to mobilize the shock troops, whip local Jewish students into a frenzy and escalate the situation from crummy to nuclear.
That is, until now. The Jewish community’s reaction to an entire BDS conference at the University of Pennsylvania on the weekend of Feb. 5 was a model of restraint.
Before we wade deeply into the issue, it’s worth defining our terms. BDS refers to boycott, divestment and sanctions, specifically the use of those tactics against Israel. There is an international BDS movement, founded in the wake of the United Nations International Court of Justice’s 2005 determination that the separation barrier erected between Israel and the West Bank by the Israeli government is illegal. In truth, the barrier has been effective at stopping terrorist attacks in Israel. On the other hand, the barrier does not follow the actual outline of the West Bank, cutting Palestinian families off from their land in several places.
While we have mixed feelings about the barrier itself, BDS is clearly misguided. (But we urge you to be careful in distinguishing the general BDS movement from the more specific call to boycott Israeli settlements in the West Bank, which is supported by many Jews in the United States and in Israel.)
BDS employs tactics that are at least as divisive as the separation barrier itself. The call to engage in a cultural and academic boycott of Israel is particularly counterproductive. In part, this element of BDS calls on high-profile musicians to refuse to perform in Israel, while calling on universities to refuse to engage in partnerships with Israeli academic institutions. Even if you believe that BDS’ end goals are worthy, the success of tactics such as these call for effective construction of a new barrier between Israel and the rest of the world. If cutting off Palestinians from the rest of the world has only served to impoverish and radicalize them, why assume that doing the same thing to Israel would improve the situation overall?
On the contrary, the success of BDS would mean a deterioration of the situation for all. BDS is not only bad for the Jews, but it’s bad for the Palestinians because it agitates against the kind of cultural exchange that will have to precede a lasting peace in the region.
But here’s the good news: Every BDS campaign on a U.S. campus so far has fallen completely flat. No student government nor university administration has accepted a resolution to divest from Israel. While that’s clearly a good thing, it’s nothing to congratulate pro-Israel activists for. Until last week’s event at Penn, every time BDS has reared its head on a college campus, the Jewish community has reacted with the gnashing of teeth and the donning of sackcloth and ashes.
If you’re wondering how we can find BDS so deplorable, while at the same time chastising the Jewish community for lashing out against it, consider the following scenario:
Imagine if some group of fringe activists with no support in the political mainstream proposed a resolution in a student government on some college campus to boycott some country. The most coverage the resolution would get would be an op-ed in the school newspaper. Now imagine that the most media-savvy minority in America dispatched a fleet of lawyers, fired-up students and press releases in reaction to it and you can see how harmful the Jewish community’s usual reaction to BDS is.
The rabid reaction of the Jewish community only overheats the hearts and minds of Jewish students, aiding and abetting the BDS folks in the creation of a needlessly tense atmosphere on campus.
“On Penn’s campus, people don’t know what BDS is,” Penn Hillel Director Rabbi Mike Uram told The Jewish Daily Forward. “To engage them in a conversation is to engage them at a level that they are not at.”
And super-special bonus brownie points to the American Jewish community’s king of the knee-jerk reaction, Alan Dershowitz for arriving on the scene without getting into one of his usual spitting matches with the BDS folks. The Dersh spoke at an event held by the Jewish Federation of Greater Philadelphia the night before the conference started — the closest thing to an official communal response to the conference.
The Forward reported, “Though a staunch supporter of Israel, Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz affirmed the BDS movement’s right to be on campus, saying that had the university rejected it, he would have defended it on free speech grounds.”
It’s easy to get donors excited when you can claim that there’s an existential threat to Jewish life in college campuses, but that’s far from the reality of the situation. Though support for BDS on U.S. campuses is growing, we believe it is enjoying the same kind of temporary fervor that Ron Paul’s campaign for president and a thousand other radical ideas that inevitably enjoy among our peers.
Reacting to a bad idea that isn’t ready to go toe-to-toe with mainstream political thought by whipping yourself up into a PR frenzy only helps raise your opponents up to your level. One day maybe BDS will deserve the kind of knee-jerk, “Help us stop these people before they form the Fourth Reich” fundraising emails it often provokes today, but it’s just not there yet.
It’s hard to see the result of the remarkable restraint shown by the Jews of Penn, since the most important result was the telling absence of something: Last week, if you squinted, tilted your head like so and looked real hard, you might have seen the striking lack of a media frenzy. Kudos to the Jews of Penn for taking a chill pill and sitting this one out.
New Voices editorials reflect the opinion of the New Voices editorial board.
