NIF opposes BDS but only because it doesn't work
Contrary to the picture at left, the New Israel Fund admits in a fascinating note to the anti-Israel Mondoweiss blog that BDS doesn't work. We believe that global BDS is a counter-productive and inflammatory strategy, for the reasons Professor Chazan discussed exhaustively in Australia and elsewhere. We think that both the proponents and antagonists of the global BDS movement exaggerate its impact to elevate their own ideologies and the threats of their opponents; as a study by The Forward demonstrated, global BDS has created a lot of heat but very little light. That said, Professor Chazan acknowledged in Australia that it is generally a legitimate, non-violent tool of democratic action. It is not one that we support or fund. We are not “aggressively campaigning” against the global BDS movement – it is a distraction from our job of serious social change in Israel. Every organization working in Israel sooner or later faces the BDS question, and we’ve answered that question to our own, if not to everyone’s, satisfaction. We surely are not defending the American arms industries! We are going about our business, painfully difficult and challenging now, of strengthening Israeli democracy and supporting hundreds of organizations and thousands of activists working in dozens of sectors for equality and justice.This is like the 'Palestinian Authority' opposing terror attacks because they are not helpful to the cause. The terrorists see nothing morally wrong with terrorism. And the anti-Israel Israeli Jews at the New Israel Fund see nothing morally wrong with BDS.
With 'friends' like this, who needs enemies?
Labels: BDS, Mondoweiss, New Israel Fund
posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 12:47 AM
2 Comments:
It's enough of a win to neutralize the "soft" BDS'ers with the argument that BDS doesn't work, and is actually counter-productive. The institutional power that an organization like NIF can bring to the BDS table, with tens of millions in yearly handouts, dwarfs what the rest of the movement can muster.
Instead, now we can go to all the Europeans who are pursuing BDS and argue that even esteemed Israeli human rights groups like the NIF don't support BDS.
I wrote a bit on another aspect of the BDS issue here.
I read Victor's post. Interesting.
As someone who stands on the outside, an American Christian who has always strongly believed in Israel, BDS seems strange and evil...otoh, for me, at any rate, BDS is inextricably linked with Bush Derangement Syndrome, so when I see that -- would you call it 'Beedus' if you were trying to say it? -- I am reminded to go online and buy something from Israel.
I'd need to get up to speed on this subject in order to post on it, but my spirit is not strong enough to crawl thru the sewers right now. Maybe when we do our next quarterly fund-raiser...
IIRC, there were pictures somewhere of those people at the Norwegian island "camp" with big BDS posters and some of them were draped in Israeli flags. Creepy. Especially when one realizes that those 'kids' in the photos are probably among those the robo-killer slaughtered.
[He couldn't have carried that out in Israel. Not after the first few rounds. It can only happen in Kumbiyah welfare states where the men are all feminized. Nor would Israeli media helicopters ever have followed him as he went along finishing off people lying of the edge of the water.]
-----------------------
NOTE: if this is a double posting, would you delete the first one? Blooger seemed to erase it rather than sending it to moderation.
Post a Comment
<< Home