BDS Is Not Anti-Semitism

Krauthammer Just Doesn't Get It

Thomas L. Are

Charles Krauthammer just doesn’t get it.  In this morning’s newspapers, he writes that the boycott of Israel is nothing short of anti-Semitism.   He is wrong. The world did not boycott South Africa in the 1980s because it was white but because it had become a brutal apartheid state treating those under its control as somewhat less than human.

Which is exactly how Israel now treats its non-Jewish citizens and those people whose land they have militarily occupied for more than six decades.

I support BDS, (Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions), not becauseIsrael is Jewish, but precisely because it does not act Jewish.  The heart and core of Judaism is justice and compassion for those in need.  Krauthammer seems far more committed to his Jewish state than to his Jewish scriptures. My friend, Jim Beaty says, “Tel Aviv is no more Jewish than Washington is Christian.”[1]

Many Jewish historians (Norman Finkelstein) intellectuals (Mark Braverman) artist (Gilad Atzman) ex-IDF soldiers (Eran Efrati) and refuseniks (Maya Wind) are touring the US asking the citizens of this country to do exactly what Krauthammer labels anti-Semitic.

Krauthammer  writes:

And don’t tell me this is merely about Zionism. The ruse is transparent. Israel is the world’s only Jewish state. To apply to the state of the Jews a double standard that you apply to none other, to judge one people in a way you judge no other, to single out that one people for condemnation and isolation – is to engage in a gross act of discrimination.[2]

Does Krauthammer not connect the dots?  It is precisely this kind of discrimination which Israel applies to the Palestinians that motivates so many to call for a boycott.  Is he not aware that, as he writes, bulldozers are rumbling through the streets of East Jerusalem to tear down the homes of Palestinians by the hundreds to build more Jewish only houses? His state for Jews is stealing Palestinian land and water, constructing an apartheid wall through Palestinian towns, denying basic human freedoms such as movement and assembly, and doing all that the world will allow it to do to deliberately make life in Gaza and parts of the West Bankunlivable.  Krauthammer knows all this. He is just hoping you don’t know it. And that is why the call to BDS scares him so much. It is attracting the world’s attention to how Israel is treating those under its military occupation, those in refugee camps and even its own non-Jewish citizens.  It’s not anti-Semitism that Israel and its lackeys fear, it is exposure.  

Maybe I am wrong. Maybe Charles Krauthammer does get it. He cries anti-Semitism because it’s just getting harder and harder for him to disguise it.