No excuse for isolating and vilifying Jews

Were an alien from Mars to visit Earth tomorrow and observe international affairs, it would likely leave utterly perplexed by one specific issue: why Israel, a country smaller than Tasmania and with a population comprising just over 0.1 per cent of the human race, manages to stoke fire and fury among so many, so often.

Nevertheless, that is the reality in which we exist, and once again Israel has landed in the headlines, albeit this time for unexpected reasons: an Australian arts festival, minuscule funding from the Israeli embassy, and an ensuing boycott campaign.

But amid calls to boycott the Sydney Festival over its Israeli sponsorship, there has been little discussion about what this actually achieves.

Inspired by the boycott, divestment, sanctions movement, which claims to seek “freedom, justice and equality” for Palestinians, proponents of boycotting Israel assert that as an unrepentant human rights abuser, it must be isolated internationally until it ends its oppression of the Palestinian people.

And yet, despite BDS’s distortions of history, its well-documented ties to Palestinian terror groups and its co-founder Omar Barghouti’s insistence that the movement “oppose(s) a Jewish state in any part of Palestine”, BDS’s ultimate achievement is often ignored – isolating Jews.

After all, says BDS, Israel is an irredeemable, colonialist, racist endeavour. And if Israel is supported by the vast majority of Jews worldwide, then that makes Jews, well, racists.

And we all know what should happen to racists.

The boycott tactic is nothing new. Arab leaders called for boycotts of Jewish products in British Mandatory Palestine in 1922, 1933 and 1945. After Israel’s founding in 1948, the boycott was expanded to companies that did business with Israel. But when that failed to bring about Israel’s demise, its detractors sought new means to isolate the Jewish state. In 2005, they found it, forming a new boycott movement under the guise of human rights.

But rather than fighting for Palestinian rights – which Israel does at times ignore – BDS supporters isolate, stigmatise and demonise Jews who don’t accept their demands. Wherever BDS takes hold, it targets Jews. After all, in the eyes of the boycotters, Jews are the physical manifestations of this “racist” regime, and thus oppressors.

This has been perhaps best demonstrated on university campuses, where BDS is increasingly in vogue with progressives.

Blake Flayton, a self-described “gay, left-wing” Jewish student at George Washington University, recalled in The New York Times being “marginalised as someone suspicious at best and oppressive at worst” after his student government passed a pro-BDS resolution. Why? Because, like most Jews, he is Zionist, meaning he supports the Jewish right to self-determination.

Flayton, now a Jewish activist, explained to me that rather than “standing up for Palestinians”, “BDS is more focused on marginalising Jewish life on campus by building a coalition of left-wing activism against Israel and against Jewish interests”.

And that’s just what happened at the University of Toronto’s Scarborough campus in November, when its student union passed a resolution that, to assert its support for BDS, banned kosher food from caterers who “normalise Israeli apartheid”. The resolution, however, had nothing to do with Israel; it merely served to attack Jewish life on campus.

Australian universities are not exempt, the Australasian Union for Jewish Students told me, highlighting “the BDS movement’s silencing of Jewish voices on campus” as one of its “biggest challenges”. This comment brought to mind an ugly incident from 2014, when Jessica Cornish, a Jewish student at La Trobe University, was targeted by left-wing, pro-BDS students who subjected her to relentless bullying, calling her, among other things, a “Zionist piece of shit” and “genocidal pig”.

And all this was acceptable, because, for BDS’s most avid proponents, so long as Jews support Israel, they are worthy – even deserving – of vilification. We’ve seen this before, and we know how it ends.

The ruckus surrounding the Sydney Festival reminds us that such sentiments are not confined to universities. By all means, individuals are free to boycott who they wish. Likewise, Palestinians cannot be blamed for focusing on an issue so close to their hearts. But when the road taken leads to the demonisation of Jews, serious questions must be asked.

So no, the Sydney Festival’s boycotters are not “standing up for human rights”, as comedian Tom Ballard suggested. Rather, they are bringing us closer to a society in which Jews are not welcome; a society which we supposedly steered away from after the horrors of the gas chambers and crematoria.

As Jennine Khalik, one of the boycott’s organisers, wrote in The Sydney Morning Herald, “Palestine is a litmus test for progressives today”. She’s right. As BDS gains traction among progressives, they’ll be forced to choose: will they opt for an inclusive and constructive campaign for Palestinian rights, or the millennia-old tradition of excluding the Jew?

Josh Feldman is a Melbourne writer on Israeli and Jewish issues.