Into the fray: Delegitimization, anti-Semitism & BDS: Sharansky’s misdirected lament

Martin Sherman

---

In his recent Jerusalem Post article the Jewish Agency Chairman, was spot on in his diagnosis; but totally off target with his prescription for dealing with anti-Israel defamation on US campuses.

I shoot the Hippopotamus with bullets made of platinum; Because if I use leaden ones his hide is sure to flatten ‘em. – The Bad Child’s Book of Beasts, Hilaire Belloc (1870-1953)

This week, the chairman of the Jewish Agency, Natan Sharansky, published an anguished opinion piece in The Jerusalem Post (May 19) titled “Campuses are flooded with Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions.”

In it he bemoaned the fact that “…today, nearly every American campus is as awash in double standards, efforts to delegitimize the Jewish state and rhetoric demonizing Israel as the newspapers of Europe or the committees of the United Nations.”

Right diagnosis; wrong prescription

Although Sharansky was entirely correct in diagnosing the gravity of the situation, he was badly off course in prescribing the required response to this rapidly spreading malaise – both as to the necessary scale and scope of the remedy, and as to who should be responsible for administering it.

The growing delegitimization/ demonization of Israel as the sovereign nation-state of the Jewish people is certainly one of the most severe strategic dangers confronting the country today. In many respects it may be the most severe of all – for it has a pervasive and debilitating effect on the ability to contend with the myriad of other existential challenges Israel currently faces.

It constricts its freedom of action in the military sphere, and the severity of the coercive measures (both preemptive and punitive) it can take against it enemies. It diminishes its ability to rally international support to deal with threats such as the Iranian nuclear program.

Indeed, in the eyes of increasing numbers across the globe, an increasingly delegitimized Israel becomes an increasingly legitimate target for attack by its enemies.

Sharansky was therefore quite right to raise the issue of this burgeoning peril, and to focus attention on one of the most potent and pernicious centers of propagation – the American academe.

‘The atmosphere more difficult by the day…’

However, his depiction of the problem, his presentation of past measures and his proposal for future ones are wildly inappropriate and hopelessly inadequate.

Thus Sharansky specifies his organization’s response: “… the Jewish Agency’s Israel Fellows program, designed to connect Jewish college students with Israel, is the most quickly growing of all of the agency’s initiatives. From its humble origins just five years ago, with representatives, or emissaries, on a dozen campuses, it now reaches more than 80 colleges and universities” – barely 1.1 percent of the more than 7,000 institutes of higher learning in the US.

He continues: “These dedicated men and women, who operate as part of each college’s local Hillel team, work to bring Israel-related events to their campuses, to encourage students to visit Israel, and to strengthen the pro-Israel voice in campus debates. They are charged not only with convincing students to join Israel-experience programs, but also with accompanying them while there, developing relationships and encouraging them to speak up for Israel when they return to school.”

But all this effort – by Sharansky’s own implicit admission – has been largely ineffectual. For in spite of what he dubs as ”the most quickly growing of all of the agency’s initiative,” matters have only gotten worse.

For despite this well-intentioned endeavor “to help change the atmosphere on campus,” in Sharansky’s own words: “That atmosphere is becoming more difficult by the day.

Campuses are flooded with Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) resolutions, which this year increased in both reach and intensity, appearing at a greater number of institutions and with a relentlessness that we had not seen before.”

‘Shooting hippos?’: ‘Leaden bullets’ don’t work

Clearly then, current efforts are not working.

Sadly, Sharansky’s characterization of what should be done, and who should do it, appears, to reflect a woeful lack of understanding and a gross underestimation of the problem.

He seems to believe that the problem is one that can be effectively dealt with – or at least perceptibly diminished – by individual enterprises carried out by privately funded organizations.

He cites such an initiative by an American NGO, Advancing Human Rights, headed by the energetic David Keyes, which protested Iran’s hanging of political dissidents by handing out free ice cream to passersby on a New York sidewalk and heckling Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif, and which reportedly attracted considerable media attention.

Sharansky thus urges: “Why not organize more such events to remind college students of which countries are in fact the world’s worst violators of human rights? Why not counter the theatrics of Apartheid Week, with its simulated walls and checkpoints, with equally visceral demonstrations of true atrocities such as Saudi Arabia’s flogging of liberal blogger Raif Badawi, or the massacre of thousands of Palestinians by Islamic State in the Yarmuk refugee camp?” Significantly(?), he refrains from recommending exposing and underscoring human rights abuses in the Palestinian-administered territories – which is something I will come back to shortly.

While I have great respect for Keyes and his Advancing Human Rights organization, highlighting human rights abuses in Iran, Syria and Saudi Arabia, in itself a measure of commendable moral merit, will do little to diminish the criticism of Israel – and the accompanying attempts to undermine its legitimacy – for purportedly depriving the Palestinian- Arabs their alleged “rights” to statehood.

Peashooters against charging rhinoceroses?

Read more: Into the fray: Delegitimization,…

---

 

---