The Limited Times

Now you can see non-English news...

The fight against the boycott is far from over

2019-12-18T22:50:01.016Z


Eli Avraham


This past month I attended an academic conference in the city of Volos, located in the Thessaloniki region of Greece. The city used to have a magnificent Jewish community that was extinct in the Holocaust, but those who survived returned to the city at the end of the war and restored the community. The tourist guide who led us through the city streets insisted on passing by the synagogue located on Moses Street and told us that when the Left Party came to power in the municipality in the 1980s, the synagogue's street name was changed to Palestine Street. Already anti-Israelism has been expressed in anti-Semitism, otherwise how can one explain a shameful and provocative act in a community that has experienced such severe trauma and has almost no connection with Israel?

The BDS movement against Israel is an ongoing battle in which weapons, fighters and arenas change frequently. Recently, Israel has had several victories in the fight against anti-Semitic boycotts, with a series of decisions around the world actually adopting the definition of the International Holocaust Remembrance Task Force (IHRA), which recognizes anti-Israel activity as anti-Semitic.

It began in Europe, with the Bundestag decision stating that anti-Zionism is anti-Semitic, moved to publish a United Nations report linking anti-Semitism to anti-Israel, and ended with the decision of the National Assembly of France, which stated that anti-Zionism was a form of anti-Semitism. Last week, the wave came to the United States, where President Tramp signed a presidential decree defining the violation of Jews as a violation of the civil rights law, which could significantly change the fight against the boycott movement.

As was the case during the Bundestag decision, even in the case of the General Assembly resolution in France, Jewish intellectuals and Israeli academics were quick to declare that there was no connection between anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism, and even sent a petition on these parliaments. They expressed their anger at the decision, claiming that it was a nonviolent movement that only wanted to encourage economic and cultural sanctions on Israel to promote the withdrawal from Judea and Samaria.

This sympathy for the boycott movement is strange, to say the least. These factors were enough to look at the BDS movement website to learn that its goals were not ending on the Green Line. The analysis of the statements of the movement's leaders also indicates that "the occupation of '67" is not the problem, but Israel itself, of '48. The movement's main activists include declared anti-Semites and convicted terrorist activists, as the ministry's report on strategic issues showed. For these boycotts, all of Israel's success in the struggle is like the government's success - and so they feel the need to resist. They are eager to defend the BDS, which is also trying to promote a boycott of themselves, namely the academy in which they operate.

In any case, despite the recent successes, the fight against boycott is far from over. We tend to see the movement struggle in terms of victory or loss, but the boycott movement believes that even when its followers lose some vote, organization, or campus, they win. Since all their purpose is to discredit Israel - even if they lost some vote, they have nevertheless advanced in Israel's de-legitimization efforts and branding it as "the apartheid state."

Prof. Eli Avraham is a lecturer in the Department of Communication at the University of Haifa, and will attend the conference "Confronting Anti-Semitism, Racism and Delegation to the State of Israel" held today (19.12.2019) at the University of Haifa

For more opinions of Eli Abraham

Source: israelhayom

All news articles on 2019-12-18

You may like

News/Politics 2024-03-06T18:35:51.039Z

Trends 24h

News/Politics 2024-03-28T06:04:53.137Z

Latest

© Communities 2019 - Privacy

The information on this site is from external sources that are not under our control.
The inclusion of any links does not necessarily imply a recommendation or endorse the views expressed within them.