BDS: pomaganie Palestyńczykom czy promowanie nienawiści?

Sima Goel tłumaczenie: Małgorzata Koraszewska

Ludzie, którzy twierdzą, że naprawdę leży im na sercu pomoc Palestyńczykom, zamiast tylko próbować zaszkodzić Izraelowi, powinni rozważyć, jak wesprzeć Palestyńczyków, których przywódcy wyprowadzają pieniądze pomocowe otrzymywane od innych krajów. Studenci mogliby zastanowić się, jak zakładać przemysł, który poprawiłby palestyński rynek pracy, zamiast bojkotowania firm izraelskich, które zatrudniają tysiące Palestyńczyków. (Zdjęcie: Takver/Wikimedia Commons)

Ruch Bojkot, Dywestycje, Sankcje (BDS) zajęty jest promowaniem antysemityzmu, a uniwersytety są w awangardzie tego rasistowskiego ruchu.

Niestety, studenci uniwersytetów, związki zawodowe i ludzie z przemysłu rozrywkowego, którzy wierzą, że inwestują swoją energię w poparcie dla narodu palestyńskiego, nie rozumieją, że w rzeczywistości wspierają polityków – zarówno z terytoriów palestyńskich, jak sponsorów terroryzmu – którzy używają Palestyńczyków jako pionki w grze w szachy, w której nagrodami są ropa naftowa, pieniądze i władza.

Tak, czuje się ból Palestyńczyków; tak rozumie się ich ciężkie położenie. Trzeba jednak zobaczyć także, jak studenci mogą być wykorzystywani przez polityków. Pod koniec lat 1970., kiedy Szach Iranu rządził jak dyktator, za wszelką cenę bronił swojej władzy. Nie istniała wolność słowa i zgromadzeń, co spowodowało, że intelektualiści i studenci zbuntowali się z okrzykiem „niech żyje wolność”. Studenci byli młodzi i idealistyczni; popierali tego, kogo postrzegali jako słabszego.

Reżim, który zastąpił Szacha, był jednak jeszcze bardziej represyjny. Islamska Republika Iranu kontrolowała każdy aspekt życia każdego Irańczyka. Irańczycy zostali użyci i zdradzeni. Wielu niewinnych ludzi użyczyło swojego głosu grupie, która nie miała dla nich żadnego szacunku, ale użyła ich głosów do przeprowadzenia własnych planów politycznych.

W Iranie studenci protestowali przeciwko Szachowi w imię wolności i nieświadomie pomogli wynieść do władzy ajatollaha Chomeiniego. Kiedy Chomeini narzucił hidżab wszystkim kobietom, także chrześcijanki, Żydówki i inne musiały go nosić. Kontrolował każdy aspekt życia każdego człowieka. Dopiero później wielu Irańczyków zorientowało się, że zostali użyci i po sfałszowanych wyborach 2009 r. narażali życie – albo idąc do więzienia, albo ginąc – kiedy próbowali protestować przeciwko reżimowi, który wynieśli do władzy.

Podczas gdy politycy palestyńscy próbują wygrać walkę o opinię publiczną, Palestyńczycy są tymi, którzy nieustannie cierpią.

Zwolennicy BDS szybko wskazują palcem na Izrael jako przyczynę nieszczęsnego stanu Palestyńczyków. Nie potrafią dostrzec, że to przywódcy palestyńscy winni są korupcji i nieudolnych rządów. Nie potrafią także zobaczyć, że Izrael jest jedyną funkcjonującą demokracją na Bliskim Wschodzie, jedynym krajem w olbrzymim regionie, którego wszyscy obywatele – Żydzi, chrześcijanie i muzułmanie – są równi wobec prawa i mają te same przywileje.

W skutek tego nie mam żadnego współczucia dla tych, którzy popierają ruch BDS: są ślepi na to, co reprezentuje ruch BDS. Ruch ten stroni od polepszenia życia Palestyńczyków; dostarcza jedynie legitymacji represyjnym przywódcom palestyńskim, którzy pod wieloma względami przypominają swoich irańskich odpowiedników.

Zamiast promować BDS, idealiści o dobrych intencjach mogliby rozważyć, jak wesprzeć Palestyńczyków, których przywódcy wyprowadzają pieniądze pomocowe otrzymywane od innych krajów. Studenci mogliby zastanowić się, jak zakładać przemysł, który poprawiłby palestyński rynek pracy, zamiast bojkotowania firm izraelskich, które zatrudniają tysiące Palestyńczyków. Mogliby uczynić wysiłek zrozumienia rzeczywistej sytuacji i pracować na rzecz trwałego pokoju, zamiast pogarszać los Palestyńczyków.

Pokój wymaga empatii; ruch BDS, ze swoim tajnym celem zniszczenia wolnego i demokratycznego narodu, nie promuje niczego poza urazą, podziałami i nienawiścią.

Sima Goel

Pochodząca z Iranu Kanadyjka mieszkająca w Montrealu. Napisała wspomnienia z Iranu Fleeing the Hijab: A Jewish Woman’s Escape from Iran.

The Big Lie: Anti-Semitism and the ‘Occupied Palestinian Territories’

Ziva Dahl

Israeli settlers protest outside their settlement of Kiryat Arba in the southern West Bank after a suspected Palestinian attacker stabbed to death a woman at her home in the Otniel settlement on January 17, 2016. A Palestinian broke into a West Bank Jewish settlement and stabbed Dafna Meir, a hospital nurse and mother of six, to death in her home, the Israeli army said, the first such incursion in a months-long wave of violence.

In January, U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon made the outrageous assertion that the slashing of innocent Israeli civilians by knife-wielding Palestinians is justifiable as a response to “the weight of a half century of (Israeli) occupation.” This contemptible statement from the head of the U.N. reflects years of vicious propaganda against the Jewish state.

The canard that Israel is illegally occupying land belonging to “indigenous Palestinian Arabs” has been repeated so relentlessly, for so many years, in so many international venues, that it is now accepted as a fundamental truth.

When you hear the words “occupied territory,” you’re conditioned to think only of the fictitious Israeli “occupation of Palestinian land.” You’re not reminded of the occupation of northern Cyprus by Turkey or the Western Sahara occupation by Morocco. Why not? Because the international community obsessively promotes the idea of Israeli occupation to defame Israel’s legitimacy. It is the leitmotif of the bien-pensants, echoing through the halls of the U.N., in chambers of government, in academia and the press.

The “occupied Palestinian territory” is neither “occupied” nor “Palestinian.”

For the international community, occupation refers to Israel’s control of territories it obtained during its defensive 1967 Six-Day war, fought against multiple Arab armies to preserve its survival. Palestine has never existed as a distinct political entity. Since Solomon and David ruled the Jewish kingdoms, this area was always part of empires from Roman times to the Ottomans, who lost this territory in WWI.

The 1917 British Balfour Declaration provided for a Jewish national homeland in the area called Palestine. In July 1922, the League of Nations, recognizing “the historical connection of the Jewish people with Palestine,” gave Britain the Mandate for Palestine, including the responsibility to encourage the establishment of a Jewish national home within territory which included today’s Jordan, Israel, the “West Bank” and Sinai. Before the Mandate was finalized in 1923, 75 percent of the land designated for the Jewish homeland was taken away and given to Transjordan, now called Jordan.

Between the world wars, the Arabs in the region fiercely opposed the presence of Jews on what they considered “sacred Muslim territory,” committing continuous terrorism against the local Jewish communities.

Today’s 21st century propagandists employ
the very same Nazi propaganda tactic for
the same purpose—to destroy Jews.

The U.N., whose Charter recognizes the Jewish rights under the League’s Mandate for Palestine, passed Resolution 181 in 1947, recommending a partition of Mandatory Palestine into two states: one Jewish, the other Arab. The Jews accepted partition and, in May 1948, declared their independence.

The Arabs rejected partition, and five Arab armies invaded the nascent Jewish state. An armistice agreement was signed; Egypt controlled Gaza and Jordan controlled the “West Bank” and eastern Jerusalem. Jordan ruthlessly expelled all Jews and obliterated all historical vestiges of Jewish presence in that land. For 19 years, there was no international pressure to end Jordan’s rule.

In 1967, with Arab armies massing on Israel’s borders, threatening to destroy the Jewish state, Egypt blockaded the Straits of Tiran to Israeli shipping, cutting off Israel’s main supply route for oil. President Lyndon Johnson described this act as the casus belli justifying Israel’s defensive war against Egypt, Syria, Iraq and Jordan. The subsequent Israeli control of land was not a consequence of some grand expansionist scheme, but rather was incidental to Israel’s success in defending itself against an Arab attempt to destroy it.

The Oslo Accords of 1993 and 1995, legal agreements signed by the Palestine Liberation Organization and Israel, provided for Palestinian self-rule in the majority of the “West Bank.” In 2005, Israel withdrew its military and all civilians from Gaza, giving complete control to the Palestinians. Today, most Arab-Palestinians live under Palestinian jurisdiction.

Under international law (Hague Regulations 1907, Articles 42,43; Fourth Geneva Convention), when the military forces of one nation take control of the sovereign territory of another nation (a foreign territory), that situation is legally called “occupation” and the nation taking control is termed an “occupier.” Because the West Bank and Gaza, under international law, were never legal sovereign entities or sovereign territories of any other state, there is no legally recognized owner of these territories to which the land can be returned. Today, the status of the territories remain “in dispute,” subject to the outcome of future permanent status negotiations.

Therefore, it is incorrect to characterize Israel as an occupier and the West Bank and Gaza as occupied territory. So why do the U.N., The New York Times, TV talking heads, government officials and the mass media claim Israel is occupying Palestinian land?

Within the context of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, “occupier” and “occupation” have become political terms applied only to Israel, without regard for their legal meaning. The emotionally charged word “occupation” reduces complex situations of competing claims and legal rights to two categories—right and wrong—clearly implying that occupation (and Israel) is wrong. The term “occupation” has become a pejorative used to vilify the Jews. Branding Israel an “occupier” equates it with brutal military occupations such as Nazi Germany’s occupation of European countries and the Soviet Union’s occupation of Eastern Europe. This “big lie” is exploited to claim that Israel is responsible for the welfare of the Palestinians. It denies Israel’s right of self-defense against Palestinian terror and relieves Palestinians of responsibility for their actions.

In our multicultural world, consumed with Western guilt and third world victimhood, the hostility to Jews and Israel is directly linked to the Left’s disdain of the West and its values. Grossly distorting the facts, the Left views Israel as a Western colonizer, not as a nation achieving self-determination in their historical homeland.

Europe, awash in remorse over its behavior during WWII, cannot seem to forgive the Jews for the Holocaust—a perverted transference of guilt from the perpetrator to the victim that absolves the former of evil-doing.

Hitler’s Minister of Propaganda, Joseph Goebbels, knew that “if you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it.” Today’s 21st century propagandists employ the very same Nazi propaganda tactic for the same purpose—to destroy Jews.

Ziva Dahl is a fellow with the Haym Salomon Center with a Master of Arts degree in public law and government from Columbia University and an A.B. in political science from Vassar College. Her bylines appear in the New York Daily News, the Observer, and The Hill.

Open Letter to the Edinburgh University Students’ Association

Denis MacEoin

• No one holds meetings to call for reform in Islamic states. Instead, people like yourselves pass resolutions condemning the only country that defends those rights for all its citizens and visitors.
• If your government in Scotland or the UK banned books, imprisoned journalists, censored films, or prohibited campus meetings, you would be rightly outraged. You depend on free libraries, uncensored (though never unbiased) newspapers and journals, and direct access to the Internet. None of those freedoms exists in any Muslim country. Not in Egypt, not in Jordan, not in Saudi Arabia, not in Iran, not in Pakistan.
• Israel is, in every respect, a free society. When you support the Palestinians exclusively, you offer support to censorship and state control of expression. You need to think about this very carefully, because otherwise you reveal yourselves to be hypocrites of the first order. To attack a country that defends the rights you demand for yourselves and your friends is morally unforgivable.
• There are no apartheid laws in Israel. Arabs (both Muslims and Christians) in Israel have the same voting rights as Jews, have political parties of their own, serve as members of parliament, serve on the Supreme Court and other courts, are diplomats, lawyers, military officers, scientists, academics, and anything else they wish.
• “Those who know what real apartheid is, as I know, know that there is nothing in Israel that looks like apartheid. … There is a widespread allegation, really a slander, that Israel is an apartheid state. That notion is simply wrong. It is inaccurate and it is malicious.” — Kenneth Rasalabe Joseph Meshoe, President of the African Christian Democratic Party in South Africa.

Dear Students,

As a concerned Edinburgh graduate, I write you with a sense of déjà vu, as I have done this before.
I want to restate and expand on my objections to your 2016 motion and resolution to boycott the Jewish state of Israel. Let me put that a little differently: the only liberal parliamentary democracy in the Middle East, one of the very few genuine democracies in the world today. I would like all of you to read this; only your willingness to do so, at least to listen to the arguments of others, will justify your claim to be intelligent young people studying at a world-class university.

At Edinburgh, I qualified with a first-class MA in Persian, Arabic and Islamic History, and went on to Cambridge, where I took a PhD in Persian Studies, dealing with a religious and historical topic in 19th-century Iran. After that, I taught Arabic-English translation and Islamic Civilization at a university in Morocco, then Arabic and Islamic Studies at Newcastle University in the UK. Later I accepted an invitation to join the Gatestone Institute as a Distinguished Senior Fellow. There, I research and write on subjects relating to Islam, the Middle East and Israel. I have written about forty books, think tank reports, and a long list of articles on these topics.

I only write the above to explain that I am adequately qualified to address you on the topic of the Israel-Palestinian struggle. It embarrasses me to say that your grounds for passing a boycott motion are unworthy of anyone who claims to be well educated, intelligent, or well informed. Sadly, the reasons given in your resolution are childish, ignorant, and based on nothing but a series of lies or at best misunderstandings. If you stop reading at this point, I call you out as traitors to the most basic principles of academic work: the need for open dialogue, critical debate, and readiness to change one’s opinions in the presence of evidence. If you cannot abide by those principles, you are not fit to be at university at all. If your self-righteousness and your conviction that you are utterly right all the time cannot be changed, you will never understand what it is to take part in any intellectual debate. This is a letter that I hope many of you will read, in the hope that you are not frightened by dissenting opinion.

So, let me begin with some simple points. I assume that most or all of you are feminists, that most or all of you insist on women’s rights and equal status for men and women worldwide. Now, as we are in some measure talking about the Middle East and the Islamic world, it is probably not necessary to spell out to you that no Arab country and no Islamic nation gives full rights to women, and that many openly oppress their female citizens. Forced veiling; beatings, floggings or stonings to death; women who have been raped treated as adulteresses and stoned; the legal status of half a man; bans on travel without permission from a man; women forbidden to drive cars, honour killings of women, female genital mutilation (FGM) of young girls, and non-consensual divorce are commonplace.

I would have thought you might pass a resolution about Saudi Arabia, Iran, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Somalia or somewhere similar. But instead, you pass boycott motions about Israel. In Israel, men and women have equal status under law. Muslim women are free to wear veils and many do, but no woman is ever arrested or fined if she prefers not to wear one. Honour killings or FGM are punishable offences under Israeli law, but few take place. Women in Israel — Christians, Arabs and Jews — are free to walk on the beach in swimsuits, to go dancing in nightclubs, to live with male or female partners with or without marriage, to serve in the army, navy and air force, and to enter any profession, in or out of the government, for which they are qualified. They receive equal justice under law. They live lives identical to yours in free Western countries. So, if you are feminists, why do you sanction Israel and leave brutal misogynist regimes without a word of criticism? Does that seem like hypocrisy to you? It certainly seems so to me.

You probably all support rights for LGBTQ communities. Perhaps you take part in gay rights parades, no doubt some of you are either gay or have gay friends, and none of you would tolerate psychological or physical abuse directed against people of diverse sexuality. But take a look at Arab countries and Islamic countries. In Gaza and the West Bank, they kill homosexuals by throwing them off roofs or beat them to death. In Iran, they hang them. In Saudi Arabia, they behead them. Under the Islamic State, they also throw them from roofs. Not a single Islamic country gives any rights whatever to gay men and women, to transsexuals or transvestites. In the Middle East, tens of thousands of gay people live in fear. But no one ever marches against these places, writes petitions demanding gay rights, or passes boycott resolutions against them.

In Israel, gay pride marches take place in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. There are no laws forbidding homosexuality. Tel Aviv has been described as the gay capital of the world. The Israeli army does not sanction soldiers who are gay. Israeli law protects people of all sexual orientations — and it does so because it is a country based on full human rights for all its citizens. This is not “pinkwashing”: using gay rights to cover up other abuses. It is gay rights in practice, which is why many Arab and Iranian gay people flee to Israel. Providing such protection only serves to make Israel even more hated by many countries surrounding it and even many farther away. This too is hypocrisy, pure and simple. To attack a country that defends the rights you demand for yourselves and your friends is morally unforgivable.

You probably agree that all people should be free to worship and practise their religion openly, or not, under the protection of the law. And you all probably agree that religious people and atheists also should have the right to live freely, without persecution. No Arab or Islamic state offers that sort of protection. In Iraq and Syria, in Gaza and the West Bank, Christians have been killed in huge numbers or driven out. In Egypt, the indigenous population of Coptic Christians suffers severe persecution and sees its churches destroyed. In Iran, Christians are regularly arrested, and the country’s largest indigenous religious minority, the Baha’is, are openly persecuted. Baha’is are hanged, imprisoned, denied access to education, forbidden to work in any profession. Their holy places throughout the country have been systematically bulldozed and sometimes mosques have been built on the sites.

In Israel, the Christian community is the only one anywhere in the Middle East to have grown in numbers since 1948. All the holy places of all religions — Muslim, Jewish, Christian — are actively protected under the Law for the Protection of Holy Places. The Baha’i religion has its World Centre (a UNESCO World Heritage Site) in Haifa, and its two holiest shrines there and outside the city of Acco. Pilgrims come from around the world. The Baha’is are among the most hated people for Muslims everywhere. But not in Israel. Yet no one marches to defend the religious rights of Baha’is in the Islamic world; no one brings petitions to the Iranian embassy to protect them or others from persecution; no one holds meetings to call for reform in Islamic states. Instead, people like yourselves pass resolutions condemning the only country that defends those rights for all its citizens and visitors. By siding with the persecutors and sneering at the only country that since its inception has actually implemented all human rights, you show nothing but contempt for those rights. That is not just sad, it is despicable.

You are students, young people with your minds open to new sensations, new information, new questions, a galaxy of differing opinions, learning how to weigh and balance your own assumptions and those of others. You have access to the most amazing technologies and sources of information — resources that simply did not exist earlier. In order to access all this, you require freedom of speech, a world without censorship, a free press, the right to protest, and to question received opinion. If your government in Scotland or the UK banned books, imprisoned journalists, censored films, or prohibited campus meetings, you would be rightly outraged. You would march to defend those freedoms were there a threat to take them away. You depend on free libraries, uncensored newspapers and journals, and direct access to the Internet.

None of those freedoms exists in any Muslim country. Not in Egypt, not in Jordan, not in Saudi Arabia, not in Iran, not in Pakistan. Censorship is rife, secular views are everywhere condemned. Freethinking bloggers such as Raif Badawi in Saudi Arabia, several in Bangladesh, and many in Iran have been imprisoned, sentenced (in Badawi’s case) to lashes, or (in Bangladesh) assassinated. The majority of newspapers in these countries are state-owned. Books are banned and burned across the region. Television stations are closed down for the pettiest of reasons, as happened recently in Egypt to MP Tawfiq Okasha. There is no freedom of speech in Gaza or under the Palestinian Authority, and those who breach the rules are, as often as not, found with a bullet in their head.

Israel has as much freedom of speech as the UK, France, Germany, Denmark, the United States, Canada, Australia or any other Western democracy. The only restrictions on the press are those relating to national security — as in all democracies. Anti-Israel NGOs operate freely in Israel, anti-Israel articles appear daily in the press, notably in the left-wing newspaper Haaretz. Arab politicians speak against Israeli policy daily in parliament or in interviews with the press. When arrests are made, Jewish extremists are as likely to be charged as Arabs. Israel is, in every respect, a free society. Yet you choose to condemn it. By doing so, you condemn the very freedoms you yourselves benefit from in your ivory towers in Scotland. And when you support the Palestinians exclusively, you offer support to censorship and state control of expression. You need to think about this carefully, because otherwise you reveal yourselves to be hypocrites of the first order.

Let me take this one step further. Are you aware that your motion is anti-Semitic? I want you to think about this carefully, too. What, you may ask, does boycotting Israel have to do with hating Jews? You are, I do not doubt, fiercely anti-racist, and for that I strongly commend you. Racism is still an ugly feature of modern life, not only in the West, but across a swath of other countries. It is ironic in the extreme, therefore, that your boycott motion was presented by the BME [Black and Minority Ethnic] Liberation Group. Ironic, because anti-Semitism has been and remains one of the most poisonous and genocidal forms of racist hatred. Across Europe, anti-Semitism is growing to levels reminiscent to that of the 1930s. The 2015 figure for anti-Semitic incidents was 53% higher than for 2014. Jews are leaving Europe and taking refuge elsewhere, most of them in Israel.

Fair criticism of Israel is not anti-Semitic. But exaggerated, libellous, and false criticism most certainly is. That is not my opinion, but the view of several major bodies dedicated to anti-racist work. At the university level, the Regents of the University of California, along with many other American universities, have just condemned anti-Zionism as anti-Semitic. Another official body you should know and recognize, the European Monitoring Centre on Racism and Xenophobia, has the following as their working definition of anti-Semitism:

Antisemitism is a certain perception of Jews, which may be expressed as hatred toward Jews. Rhetorical and physical manifestations of antisemitism are directed toward Jewish or non-Jewish individuals and/or their property, toward Jewish community institutions and religious facilities.

In addition, such manifestations could also target the state of Israel, conceived as a Jewish collectivity. Antisemitism frequently charges Jews with conspiring to harm humanity, and it is often used to blame Jews for “why things go wrong.” It is expressed in speech, writing, visual forms and action, and employs sinister stereotypes and negative character traits.
Contemporary examples of antisemitism in public life, the media, schools, the workplace, and in the religious sphere could, taking into account the overall context, include, but are not limited to:

• Calling for, aiding, or justifying the killing or harming of Jews in the name of a radical ideology or an extremist view of religion.
• Making mendacious, dehumanizing, demonizing, or stereotypical allegations about Jews as such or the power of Jews as collective — such as, especially but not exclusively, the myth about a world Jewish conspiracy or of Jews controlling the media, economy, government or other societal institutions.
• Accusing Jews as a people of being responsible for real or imagined wrongdoing committed by a single Jewish person or group, or even for acts committed by non-Jews.
• Denying the fact, scope, mechanisms (e.g. gas chambers) or intentionality of the genocide of the Jewish people at the hands of National Socialist Germany and its supporters and accomplices during World War II (the Holocaust). Accusing the Jews as a people, or Israel as a state, of inventing or exaggerating the Holocaust.
• Accusing Jewish citizens of being more loyal to Israel, or to the alleged priorities of Jews worldwide, than to the interests of their own nations.

Read more : Open Letter to the Edinburgh University Students’ Association