Bull feathers, Tinmore. Read what this fellow has to say about BDS.
As the Middle East devours itself, leaving behind the worst human devastation since World War II, an international movement seeks to delegitimize Israel, the region's only intact society. Israel alone in the Mideast has an independent judiciary, a free press, universal healthcare and religious freedom. Yet the anti-Israel boycott, divestment and sanctions movement, or BDS, has singled out the Jewish state as the world's most pressing problem in the early 21st century.
BDS is at once immoral and a threat to peace. Immoral, because it perpetuates the lie that Israel is solely or even primarily to blame for the absence of a Palestinian state — rather than the repeated rejection by Palestinian leaders of peace plans presented over the decades. Immoral, too, because it ignores the anti-Israel and anti-Jewish hate education on which generations of Palestinians have been raised, an education that denies any place for a Jewish state in any borders.
The BDS movement not only places the entire onus for the conflict on Israel, it is counter-productive. The primary beneficiary of the attempt to turn Israel into a pariah state is the Israeli hard right. Far-right politicians have long argued that the world hates the Jewish state not because of what it does but because of what it is — and therefore Israel should dispense with the niceties of democratic norms in its war against Palestinian terrorism, end the illusion of a negotiated agreement and stake its maximalist claim to the entirety of its ancient homeland. In intensifying the Israeli public’s sense of siege and despair, while encouraging Palestinian intransigence, the international movement to isolate and punish Israel undermines a two-state solution.
Like a majority of Israelis, I recognize that the ongoing occupation of the Palestinian people is a long-term threat to my country’s well-being. The occupation challenges the integrity of Israeli democracy and threatens its Jewish majority, which is demographically essential for maintaining the only corner of the planet where Jews are sovereign. For these reasons, a majority of Israelis, according to polls, supports a two-state solution.
Why the anti-Israel boycott movement is an immoral threat to peace
