http://david-collier.com/?p=2229

Starting just before the 25:00 minute mark...

If we see an injustice being committed, we should be allowed to protest in whatever peaceful manner we want.

It's not as if BDS is an official sports drink that can only be distributed from official Palestinian sources. Everyone can make and serve their own BDS...

It's never been about helping the Palestinians. This is done out of pure hatred against Israel.

Now why do you think it was so important for BDS to claim that their call was initiated by Palestinians? Or that BDS advocates 2 states when it does not? Why does BDS not just admit they want Israel gone altogether & it's not just about ending the 1967 occupation? Why all the lies if it's such a "just and moral" cause?

If the Palestinians had access to the natural resources in the West Bank and could move goods and people freely like in a normal country, the Palestinian GDP would be doubled (!!!) without any investments in infrastructure whatsoever:

Israeli occupation hitting Palestinian economy, claims report
Source: The Guardian, Friday 30 September

Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/sep/29/israeli-occupation-hits-palestinian-economy

BTW, this isn't really connected to the spurious claim of the OP.

That ending slavery in the US would be bad for slaves.

I also do not recall reading of a widespread call for the end of slavery in the United States from the slaves themselves.

Israel seems very unlikely to ever willingly relinquish hold on anything between the river and the sea, and seems unlikely to be able to be forced to do so. It would then seem that the occupation must become more and more harsh to drive out the Palestinians that can be driven out, and at the same time provoking the remaining Palestinians to pointless, impotent violence in order to justify ever harsher measures.

Perhaps I am mistaken, but sometimes it seems that the greatest existential threat to Israel would be the absence of an existential threat to Israel.

What can be accomplished through sheer force of will.

Unsustainable conditions can be sustained for truly awesome lengths of time. That which cannot go on forever, won't, but it can go on for seemingly forever. Being a bully is usually a successful strategy - at least for a time - if one picks one's target carefully.

Believing in a religion, or a mythology, some ideology, or any other lie can drive people to accomplish extreme things, both good and bad. Yet, eventually, all of those models have come tumbling down into ruins. The people at the front edge of the current conflict fervently believe in doing what their invisible friend tells them to do - which is typically violence to somebody else. One wonders why there are not more anti-psychotics prescribed.

This one has some time to play out - probably not in my lifetime, but I am reminded that demographics is destiny.

Israel - like everyone else - has a series of long term problems, and I am not sure that it is addressing them. The segment of Israel's population that has the high birthrate is also the part which has a relatively low secular education, makes the least economic contribution (negative it seems), is politically amongst the most active, and drives a policy of constant confrontation. I am not sure at what point these factors become unsustainable (probably not soon).

Last edited Tue Aug 30, 2016, 09:34 AM - Edit history (1)

BDS doesn't merely oppose settlements, as much as you may try spinning it that way.

settlements...

I know there's a co-op in Brooklyn that boycotts Israel, but apart from that...

For instance... would you a consider a boycott of all Israeli produce (no matter where grown) to be "directed at more than the occupation and the settlements?"

and the list has only companies that divest from the settlements. If you know of other BDSers that should have been on that list, it would be good to know.


Source: http://forward.com/news/338058/did-illinois-bungle-first-in-nation-anti-bds-blacklist/

I hope this list will prevent me from having to backpedal on this issue, which is that actual acts of BDS are directed at the settlements and the occupation. And yes, IMHO a boycott of all Israeli produce would be outside of the mandate of BDS.

And yes, IMHO a boycott of all Israeli produce would be outside of the mandate of BDS.

Sorry. That's incorrect. This from BDSMovement.net:



That's the first non-advertisement hit on a google search of just "BDS". It's easy to find BDS sites calling for avoiding all Israeli products... all entertainers... all university staff. BDSFrance.org is another example.

I hope this list will prevent me from having to backpedal on this issue, which is that actual acts of BDS are directed at the settlements and the occupation.

Even you should be able to see the illogic of proving that BDS doesn't boycott Israel in general... just West Bank products... by producing a short list of companies that fit your description. However, that's particularly challenging for your position because even your own list does not fit your description. "Cut all ties with Israeli mobile phone company" (was the company only in the West Bank?). "Sold all Israeli investments" (were they only invested in the West Bank?). etc.

I can call for a boycott or divestment of anything because of whatever reason, but it doesn't mean an actual boycott or divestment will happen. The burden of proof is on you to prove that these calls are actually heeded, and that there's a link between my BDSers who do the BDSing, and yours, who just talk about it.

My impression is that BDS is about the settlements and the occupation, and that legal and political actions against BDS are intended to protect the settlements and the occupation. I can't see how talking about BDS is the same as doing BDS, sorry.

Why don't you just admit that you don't want peace and justice, you just want your "side" to be able to say it is "winning"?

You don't accept the legitimacy of any group that even questions the settlements...never mind that a viable Palestinian state abd peace(neither of which can happen without the other)are impossible if the settlements remain and continue to "expand".

You just want to preserve the status quo forever...even though it can't BE maintained and even though there is nothing positive at all IN the status quo.

All you do here is try to silence dissent and anathemize dissenters.

No one to the right of the groups you denounce, no one whose views you
consider acceptable stands for any change at all. None want peace and none want an end to the Occupation or the settlements.

First, it's one more lie told by the BDS crowd. Further evidence that the entire enterprise is a massive fraud.

Second, BDS has tried to establish credibility by claiming that it was a grass roots movement among Palestinians. Credibility it doesn't deserve.

Third, it is one more example of Leftists co-opting someone else's cause to advance their own radical agenda, which ultimately ends up hurting the people they falsely claim to be fighting for. In this instance, the primary results of BDS are that the Israelis become more convinced that the Palestinians are too steeped in their own version of antisemitism to ever make peace with the Jewish state, and damage to the Palestinian economy and workers, with no real positive gains (unless you count the rise in antisemitism as a positive).

If they did, BDS would be pointless, and all of us well-meaning idiots could support some other charitable cause instead...

I can't see how trying to make Israel stop oppressing Palestinians could have negative effects - less oppression would have immediate positive effects on the Palestinian economy:

The economic costs of the Israeli occupation for the occupied Palestinian territory
Source: Palestinian Ministry of National Economy in cooperation with the Applied Research Institute- Jerusalem (ARIJ), September 2011
http://www.mne.gov.ps/pdf/EconomiccostsofoccupationforPalestine.pdf

FYI, there's a lot of grass-roots level cooperation between Palestinians and BDS supporters.

Making terrorists out to be innocent lambs shot for no reason other than that Israelis are racist is just one example of many.

You're still avoiding the point that BDS lies and has been caught lying & demonizing repeatedly.

Why? Is it too much to ask that BDS holes stop with the bullshit and hate incitement?

I guess that is too much to ask...

Because if they don't, then Israel withdrawing the Occupation won't bring peace. It only serves to put Israel at a strategic disadvantage. And you are missing the point. BDS isn't about ending oppression of Palestinians any more than the Black Lives Matter movement is about stopping cops from shooting Blacks. They are both about advancing a radical Leftist agenda. In the case of BDS it's about radicalizing the world against Israel's existence.

So let's say that Israel withdraws the Occupation. Would that end BDS? Of course not. BDS' stated goals include first and foremost the enforcement of "Right of Return." So merely ending the Occupation won't cause BDS to stop. It won't stop violence from Hamas or even Fatah. So then what? What would you think is appropriate for Israel to do if they withdraw the Occupation and are then attacked from the West Bank? What would the BDS crowd say about that? They will still call for the boycott until Israel stops "oppressing" the Palestinians.

You seem to have a poor grasp of what both BLM and BDS are all about.

You've been directed to the BDS website before. You know that a primary goal of BDS is enforcement of "Right of Return". You are on record as supporting it. "Right of Return" isn't a civil right. In fact, there is no such right at all. It was manufactured by the anti-Israel crowd as a way to attack the Jewish state. That's why Finklestein believes that the BDS crowd is dishonest. He understands that if BDS gets it's way that there won't be a Jewish state of Israel. Which means that anyone who supports BDS and claims to support two states is lying or seriously deluded.

As for BLM read their platform. It isn't about civil rights so much as it is radically restructuring America. Google Black Lives Matter Orlando, and you'll find a BLM website that claims that the attack on the Pulse Nightclub in Orlando was caused by capitalism and white supremacism. If that isn't radical then nothing is. But you're a Leftist yourself, so of course it looks mainstream to you.

Both BDS and BLM encompass a wide range of views, and using one segment to characterize the whole is deliberately misleading or perhaps stemming from a lack of understanding of what it's all about. I could use Lieberman to "prove" that Zionism is a fascist ideology...

On top of that, I fail to see how not buying settlement goods or forcing companies to stop supporting the settlements will facilitate the return of refugees to Israel.

Let's be clear. Your opinion of what BDS is about simply is not relevant. What matters is what the leadership of BDS say it's about. Virtually all of them affirm that enforcing "Right of Return" is a fundamental component of BDS. That the rank and file do gooders and cause joiners think it's about something else doesn't mean squat. In fact, the entire point of the BDS fraud is to sucker those fools into supporting something as hateful and antisemitic as BDS.

As far as BLM, the websites that I have cited are also in the leadership of the movement. Do you know of any other platform for BLM? If they are the only ones speaking and leading, then it's fair to say that they speak for the movement.

But the truth is that you support all those radical goals, don't you? You support "Right of Return", yes? So why with the obfuscation and cover up?

against it.

This doesn't mean that I have anything to do with the self-appointed leaders of BDS. BDS is a method, not an organization. I'm sure that most people who support BDS have nothing to do with the BDS you refer to as some kind of organization. My argument is bolstered by the fact that all forms of actual BDS target the occupation and the settlements, and have nothing to with the supposed leaders of BDS.

When it comes to BLM, it's a movement driven by the consensus of its participants and supporters. They're not doing what they're told by their leaders - if anything, it's the leaders who are doing what they're told. It may be a bit confusing with an organization where the direction of leadership goes in the opposite direction than you're used too. You're making a fundamental mistake by using some of its supposed leaders to characterize the whole of BLM.

You've written before that you think a Jewish state is racist. You support right of return. Please don't try to hide behind the smokescreen of the "apartheid" lie.

I also believe that every person should have a right to live in their ancestral homeland.

We seem to disagree whether racism is sometimes justified or not. I believe that racism is never justified.

You think a state with a Jewish majority that expresses the majority culture in the state is racist. Don't you?

If something would be considered racist in the US, then it's considered racist in Israel.

Go figure.

By American standards a Jewish state isn't racist at all. So stop with the smokescreens and the shell games already. Why hide? You support "Right of Return," yes? Just say so, and we can move on.

Just look at the Jim Crow laws in the South - they were deemed to be unconstitutional and were abolished. Israel has a similar political system for its non-Jewish citizens, but unlike the US, there's no constitution or similar that can be used to challenge it.

When it comes to right of return - I support the right for everyone to live in their ancestral homeland - Jew or Palestinian doesn't matter.

I'm very keen on equal rights...

I've just had a discussion on another board with someone claiming that the US society is just like Jim Crow. These ideas are crazy. Israel is not a Jim Crow society, not even close. As for your belief in "Right of Return," why?

There never HAD to be mass dispersal. And if you're thinking of bringing up India and Pakistan...news flash...sixty-eight years after THEY did coerced mass population transfer and those two countries are STILL effectively at war. What was done there didn't turn out to be "no biggie".

And no, what happened to the Mizrahim didn't "even the score". The Palestinian refugees weren't to blame for what was done to the Mizrahim and it goes without saying that that was the LAST thing the Palestinians would have wanted. Why would thay have wanted something to happen that would make it harder for THEM to get home?

Both transfers were equally wrong, but neither excuses the other. And the judgment of history is now clear that all forced population transfers(including those done to Native Americans and the indigenous populations in Australia and New Zealand)were unnecessary and indefensible.

I agree that complete physical RoR isn't realistic...which is why the "compensation, acknowledgment and apology" concept needs to be used as a middle ground. For most Palestinians, recognition of the fact that wrong WAS done to them and their ancestors would do a lot to change their feelings towards Israel for the better. Most Palestinians aren't soulless, heartless murderous automatons. They are human beings who have made both bad and good choices while being put through decades of hell. It hasn't worked to try to crush them into accepting Israel as a state. Why not try something else? Why not try admitting that they have legitimate grievances, that they have suffered far more than Israelis in this conflict, and that they might actually be people of goodwill and reason if treated like they ARE, in fact people, rather than monsters?

It's been fifteen years of everything being done your way now, aranthus. How much more proof do you need that your way can't ever work?

and in the occupied territories the best analogy is Apartheid South Africa.

I guess you'll just have to endure the Jim Crow analogy until you find a way to refute them, or circumstances in Israel are improved.

As for the right of return - Isn't the ancestral homeland of the Palestinians in the areas now controlled by Israel?

to achieve that end. It's not as though this "majority culture" can only be expressed if the Occupation goes on and the settlements keep getting expanded(as it is now, there isn't enough contiguous territory left in the West Bank for a Palestinian state to survive).

It was European Christians who persecuted the Jews and North American Christians who barred them from sanctuary in the hour of need-Not Palestinian Arabs.

There has to be a two-state solution and that can only be achieved if all the settlements are removed from the West Bank and, at the very least, if the relentless collective punishment of all Palestinians is significantly scaled back. It's simply not reasonable to take one nation to take one other nation's land and most of its sovereignty away and then expect the second nation to see the first nation as "the REAL victims". Why is that so hard to accept.

It's been fifteen years now of the unrelenting Netanyahu iron fist. If fifteen years of that hasn't changed Palestinians to Netanyahu's liking, how can Netanyahu and those here who defend him think that another five, ten, fifteen or twenty years of the same can possibly lead to anything else but what is has led to?

I'd suggest reviewing the definition of insanity for insight on this.

than it did about peace. If Netanyahu hadn't been obsessed with discrediting and humiliating Arafat, Hamas would never have emerged as a rival for Palestinian leadership(and there was NEVER ever going to be a credible Palestinian leadership that could possibly have settled for anything less than an actual state-none would ever have accepted Likud's proposals for Tibetan-style "autonomy" and nothing more).

As to Right of Return, why can't the Israeli side make a compromise offer? Something like this:

1)physical RoR and restoration of original property and homes for the elders of 1948(there are only a few thousand of them left);

2)Compensation for property loss at real present-day valuation, acknowledgment of dispossession and unjust treatment and sincere, heartfelt apologies for the dispossession and injustice for the rest?

3)Resettlement funds to move the rest into the West Bank with the right to visit their older relatives in group 1 as they wish.

I think the vast majority of Palestinians could live with that.

This is not about antisemitism(though there are Palestinian antisemites just as there are Israeli Arabophobes-and both forms of hate are equal and equally wrong). It is about a huge number of people being driven from their homes, it is about a genuine injustice in that act, and it is about a non-European people(Palestinian Arabs) essentially being punished for the crimes of European Christians(the Inquisition, the ghettos, the pogroms and the Holocaust), crimes the Palestinians bore no responsibility for and could have done nothing at all to prevent.

The State of Israel exists. Everyone knows it exists. It's always going to exist. It should exist in peace(on the pre-1967 lines). It doesn't need to treat Palestinians like this in order to exist.