The Editorial Board

Finding joy

From the solemnity of Yom Kippur, we move into the season of rejoicing, Sukkot. As with many of our traditions, this one has multiple layers. The shelters for which the holiday is named represent temporary dwelling places, the transitory generations on the way from bondage in Egypt to the Promised Land and, by extension, the impermanence or fragility of Jewish security.

It would be an understatement to say that the creation of the state of Israel 68 years ago changed Jewish perceptions of ourselves and our place in the world. The existence of a Jewish state presented an alternative for Jewish people living in places of repression and danger. For Jews living in free countries, like Canada, Israel is a source of pride but also the source of a deeply complicated and often challenging reconfiguring of our identities. Diaspora Jews, prior to the success of Zionism, were subject to the changing winds and whims of local populations and leaders. For a few years after the War of Independence, Israel was widely admired around the world as a model of what a new country can be. This was also a time in history when antisemitism may have been at its lowest ebb, or at least at its least visible. For emerging postcolonial states in 1950s and ’60s Asia and Africa, Israel’s head start provided a template for independence and progress.

After the 1967 war, though, the perception of Israel morphed from a model for post-colonialism to one of neo-colonialism, and Palestinians replaced Jews as a cause for progressive peoples. In the time since, Diaspora Jews have often been placed in the position of defending (or not defending) things that Israel does. Yet it remains a haven for Jews who are threatened in their homelands, including, incredibly, in parts of Europe. For those Jews who feel safe in our countries, Israel is also a beacon – of Jewish diversity, knowledge and technological innovation.

The Promised Land, as our historical narrative tells us, was not a place of permanent joy. Twice the Temple would be destroyed and the people dispersed. The impermanence of Jewish sovereignty, even after the ancient return of the exiles, would carry on another two millennia until 1948. The sukkah is a symbol, too, of that impermanence.

And yet, it also represents a joyfulness based on our people’s adaptability and willingness to find a unity and presence even in places and times of disunity and impermanence. And, at the end, we observe Simchat Torah, a celebration of the written word that many believe is the very reason a homeless people were able to maintain cohesion and continuity through generations of dispersion.

Much more yet to learn

Outright denial of the Holocaust is a phenomenon almost exclusively in the realm of utterly discredited figures who deserve condemnation. One of those figures is David Irving, who lost his libel suit against Deborah Lipstadt, an American professor and author, who correctly characterized him as a Holocaust denier in her book Denying the Holocaust. A new film, called Denial, about the trial, opens today in Vancouver and the Independent interviewed Lipstadt earlier this week.

It only takes a quick Google search to find that there are certainly people in the world today who, for various reasons, make it their business to allege that the Holocaust did not happen or, in an insidious manner presumably intended to lend a hint of credibility to their position, acknowledge that it happened but quibble about details – as if the number of millions murdered can be considered “details.”

There is, however, a different kind of Holocaust denial that also deserves attention and is potentially more dangerous. This form of denial does not rest on the supposition that the Holocaust did not happen. Rather, it is more often an expressed view that it doesn’t matter. Of course, these ideas are rarely expressed so crudely. Yet, this is the subtext of a commonly expressed position, even in so-called polite company, that the Holocaust has had its run, that we have spoken enough about it, that it happened 70 years ago, that it is time for people other than the Jews to have their historical grievances addressed.

The idea that we talk about the Holocaust too much has both particular and universal consequences. The Holocaust was particular in its intention to eradicate the Jewish people from the earth. However, as most individuals and organizations devoted to Holocaust education, commemoration and awareness understand, work about the particular experience of Jewish genocide is foundational to the prevention of future genocides affecting other groups, as well as violence and discrimination that does not meet the level of genocide.

This should not diminish the Jewish particularity of the Holocaust, and it need not. However, while the Holocaust was a particular product of Nazism and of Germany, we will fail the future if we do not recognize the Holocaust as a keystone to understanding the human capacity for genocide, as well as less cataclysmic group targeting, isolation and discrimination. Ultimately, the Holocaust was perpetrated on human beings by other human beings.

The word genocide was invented to find language for the Shoah. Tragically, we have been able to apply it to many terrible incidents since – and before, such as the Armenian genocide. To create a better future, we need to devote more resources to understanding these events and their antecedents. These are not pleasant topics to discuss, to put it mildly. There can be nothing in human experience more distressing to confront than genocide. Yet we must.

There are many truths around the Holocaust that cannot be denied. One of them is that, because human motivations are not an exact science, particularly when extrapolated into the madness of crowds, we really do not understand why the Holocaust or other genocides have happened. The proof of this statement is that, we hope, if we did understand genocide in a complete way, we would have eradicated it from the world.

In the context of how much it matters and how much we have left to learn, we are certainly not talking too much about the Holocaust, devoting too many resources to it or moving far enough away from it in time to start deemphasizing it. No. We have barely begun to discuss and understand it.

Such hypocrisy

Hypocrisy is everywhere, perhaps, and it can be a full-time occupation to call it out. For years, the anti-Israel movement, which generally comprises advocates of social justice who envision themselves as defenders of human dignity and respect for the diverse experiences of peoples, has employed the most toxic language and imagery imaginable against Israel. This includes the routine equation of Zionism with Nazism, apartheid and even Satanism. “IsraHELL” is commonly used in online commentary, and how frequently have we seen images of Israeli leaders with devil’s horns drawn on them?

Such language and imagery are often condemned as antisemitic, because, well, they are – regardless of the insistence of perpetrators that the target is Israel, not Jews. It is sheer hypocrisy when concern about antisemitism is dismissed as Jewish posturing to “silence” criticism of Israel or deflect attention from Israel’s “war crimes” and other “atrocities.” There is almost certainly no other ethnic or cultural group whose expressed concerns would be so summarily disregarded by people who proudly carry the mantle of social justice and human equality.

Criticism of Israel is not necessarily antisemitic, of course. But sometimes it is. And well-intentioned people will take the time to distinguish when it is and when it is not. Instead, while asserting that Zionists equate “any” criticism of Israel with antisemitism, the anti-Israel side goes full-tilt in the opposite direction, claiming that no criticism of Israel is tainted by antisemitism. Antisemitism, in their narrative, is not a bigotry to be confronted, but an always-false assertion used to deflect or negate criticism of Israel.

Antisemitism, as we have said here before, has its own name because it differs in critical ways from other forms of discrimination and bigotry. For instance, where many forms of racism are premised on the idea that the perpetrator perceives themselves as better than the victim, antisemitism, in some instances, is founded on the assumption that Jews perceive themselves as better than other people – see how often the “chosen people” concept is raised in online dialogue as criticism of Israel and Jews.

Similarly, anti-racism activism sees race as integral to economic and class division, which it often is. But, because one of the key prejudicial assumptions about Jews is that they are both economically and socially advantaged, Jews de facto cannot be victims of discrimination. The corollary of this is twofold. Jews do not (in the narrative of contemporary anti-racism activism) experience economic disadvantage, therefore, there is no evidence of antisemitism. Ergo claims of antisemitism are a cynical attempt to gain sympathy by a group of people who have long since exhausted the world’s reserve of empathy.

Alternatively, there are those who accept that antisemitism may exist. After all, it is hard to ignore the Jew-hatred spray-painted on walls, prevalent on social media and filling the comments sections after almost any news story involving Israel or Jews. Yet even this evidence may not elicit sympathy or allyship. In fact, there may be a counterintuitive response. Given the prejudiced idea that Jews consider themselves superior – usually founded on an ignorant misreading of the concept of chosenness – there may be a frisson of satisfaction among some that the uppity Jews are getting taken down a notch.

In the face of this reality, what should we do? For one thing, we should not allow the hypocrisy of others to distance us from the values we share with those others. We must not abandon the fundamentally Jewish commitment to racial, social and economic justice that has been central to our identity for hundreds of generations before this postmodern incarnation of social justice emerged a couple of decades ago. We should not cower from the concept of chosenness, because we know this is not a symptom of superiority but of a humble role in service of tikkun olam, of a better world.

Concerns about the alt-right

There used to be just conservatives. Then there came the neo-conservatives, a largely American variation on the theme that venerates free markets, but marries it with an interventionist foreign policy. Neo-conservativism got a black eye after the interventionism its proponents advocate led to the quagmire in Iraq. In a resurgence of old-fashioned conservatism, stalwarts proudly adopted the self-deprecating paleo-conservative, a blatant rejection of the neo-conservative moniker.

In recent months, a new term has come into common usage in American politics: alt-right. The contraction of “alternative right” is a sort of whitewashing umbrella for a range of ideological streams that were, until recently, considered well outside the mainstream. White nationalism, itself a whitewashed term for white supremacy, is chief among these. While not precisely defined, alt-right has also been said to encompass the anti-immigration and xenophobic nativism that has been articulated by Donald Trump, the Republican candidate for U.S. president. Populism is a term also associated with the alt-right, although Bernie Sanders’ challenge to Hillary Clinton for the Democratic nomination was also defined as populist.

The banality of the term “alt-right” – it almost sounds like something you do with a computer keyboard – masks the mainstreaming of terrible ideas. Concurrent to, and not the least bit unrelated to, the rise of alt-right as a term is the rise of Trump as a political phenomenon. The Republican standard-bearer has said, on an almost daily basis, things that would eliminate any other candidate in history from contention. Yet his supporters dismiss (or embrace) his hateful, ignorant and, seemingly as often as not, outright false statements. The litany is endless. Last week, he suggested that Clinton’s secret service details should disarm and “see what happens to her.” This unsubtle allusion to violence is not at all uncommon in Trump’s rhetoric. That he remains a contender for the presidency is alarming. That he is rising in the polls, almost tying Clinton in aggregates and leading her in many polls, suggests that Americans are seriously considering taking a dangerous political turn.

Trump idolizes “strongmen.” He has reveled in the admiration of Vladimir Putin, the Russian leader who has undone that country’s nascent steps toward democracy. He is unequivocally a solo act, openly insisting that he will run roughshod over Congress and the judiciary, the institutions that the founders of the United States set up as checks and balances on the presidency. He has stated that the electoral system is rigged against him and predicted rioting in the country should he lose. The image he projects of America is of a third-world economy, and the vision of political violence he purveys is more suited to an unstable dictatorship than to the reality of American government.

It is in the nature of human beings to take for granted what we have the moment we possess it. Readers of a certain age remember The Jetsons, with its incredible futuristic gadgets, a cartoon we can now watch on a device we carry in our pocket that contains all the accumulated knowledge of humankind, and we have the ability to speak face-to-face with almost anyone in the world instantaneously, in real time. And yet, when this gadget alerts us that we have a message or a call, we are as likely to respond with a weary, “Oh, what is it now?”

Likewise, perhaps, with democracy. In its modern incarnation, democracy was born 240 years ago in what is now the United States of America. In the span of human history, this is the blink of an eye. About Trump, many commentators, most recently this week in the Washington Post, have said, “This is how fascism comes to America.”

On numerous occasions over the years, we have used this space to condemn flippant use of such terms as fascism, warning that overuse will dull sensitivity to the seriousness of the language and its threat. We are less reticent to condemn the use in this case. The rise of Trump and the “alt-right” ideologies he empowers are cause for very real concern.

About the cover art

Shula Klinger creates her vibrant, whimsical designs with cut paper. The art is then scanned and reproduced as prints and greeting cards. Selections of her work can be purchased at Delish General Store (Granville Island) and Queensdale Market (North Vancouver). To see her full range of work, visit niftyscissors.myshopify.com or find her at the Artisan Fair, hosted by the North Shore Jewish Community at Congregation Har El in West Vancouver on Oct. 16, noon-4 p.m.

Will state be free?

Binyamin Netanyahu may not have expected the international reaction he received when he accused opponents of Jewish settlements in the West Bank of supporting the ethnic cleansing of Jews. While he went too far, there is some truth to be learned from the fallout.

The Israeli prime minister made the comments in a video, where he noted that nobody suggests that two million Arab citizens of Israel are an obstacle to peace. Yet the presence of Jews in the areas most people assume will eventually be Palestine under a two-state solution, he said, is repeatedly held up as proof that Israel is not acting in good faith toward a two-state objective.

Netanyahu was pointing out one of the glaring hypocrisies in the discussion of an eventual peace agreement and a two-state solution. He was intentionally inflammatory but, in the process, he set off a reaction that is illuminating and worth consideration.

First, we need to understand this basic fact: nobody expects Jews living outside the Green Line to voluntarily become citizens of a future Palestinian state. The entire discussion is an exercise in rhetoric. But this fact, too, raises other issues. Not many believe that Jews in an independent Palestine could live as citizens the way Arab citizens of Israel do under law (however imperfect this ideal might be in practice), partly because it’s probable that nobody would be free in an independent Palestine. If history is any measure, an independent Palestine might be a theocracy run by Hamas, a kleptocracy run by Fatah or some hybrid thereof. Regardless, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, among others, has insisted that no Jews will be permitted to live in an independent Palestine. The world ignores these racist statements, or excuses them as the legitimate reaction of a people long oppressed by the Jewish state.

Since most Jews would flee of their own volition if they found their homes outside the new borders of Israel, Netanyahu’s claims of ethnic cleansing can be seen as inflammatory and false, since it is not the Palestinians who would evacuate the Jews from the West Bank, but the West Bank Jews themselves, knowing the place held no future for them. But, while Netanyahu should be criticized for exploiting the term ethnic cleansing, perhaps to deflect criticism from the settlements, he has also drawn attention to the uncomfortable truth that the dream of Palestinian “freedom” for which so many in the world (including, for instance, most delegates to the recent Green Party of Canada convention) have devoted so much of their energies, is in fact a cause that may instead create a country that is nobody’s dream of a free and independent homeland.

Netanyahu is guilty of poking a hornet’s nest. However, his critics, too, should look at their own assumptions and motivations. The prime minister went too far in summoning imagery of mass deportations, but others have not gone far enough in addressing the reality that the movement for Palestinian independence in infused with unhealthy ideologies, of which excluding Jews from citizenship is just one.

We have our own issues

American politics, these days, attracts global disbelief and revulsion. The contest pits against each other two of the most unpopular candidates since polling began. One of them, the Republican nominee Donald Trump, is endorsed by the country’s leading white supremacists.

There is no question that Trump has tapped into something. Most of his supporters are not now and never have been members or supporters of the Ku Klux Klan or similar fringe groups. They are, in fact, a large and mainstream enough group that he won the nomination of the Republican party and now stands just a couple of points behind Democrat Hillary Clinton in polls, with at least two in five Americans saying they intend to vote for him. Among white Americans, if they alone were the electorate, polls say Trump would win a landslide.

Leaving aside his nonchalance about the fact that David Duke, the former imperial wizard of the KKK, and other of America’s most prominent racists think he would make a top-notch president, Trump has legitimized a host of barely more discrete forms of bigotry, chauvinism and hatred. People who strive for human respect have responded with two approaches. They have condemned the most overt examples of Trump’s racism, while acknowledging that many Americans are experiencing economic and social displacement that could justify their scapegoating of other groups or otherwise find reason to support a candidate whose policy positions are nothing more than accumulated Twitter tantrums.

If Trump wins, there will be more issues to address than this space can accommodate. If he loses, there will still be a divided country where parents have to explain to their children why it is inappropriate for them to express ideas that have been so effortlessly articulated by one of the two leading candidates for the highest office in the country.

Incongruously – or is it? – we are also in a time when the United States is engaged in a deep public reflection on race. The Black Lives Matter movement, which is partly a result of the murder of young African-Americans by police officers but also of broader systemic racism, has opened an overdue public discussion. Decades after legal racism was upended, there remain serious issues that the country needs to confront. Small gestures like that by Colin Kaepernick, a football player who is refusing to stand for the national anthem as a protest against discrimination, have aroused outrage but also raised legitimate awareness. Can you love your country and still condemn aspects of its nature?

Israelis, perhaps foremost among others, have faced this question for decades. And Canada is also engaged in a discussion around race. While we, too, have a history of racism against people of African descent, this history is different from that of the United States in myriad ways, including the absence of slavery in our history. But our past includes racist and antisemitic immigration policies, social and systemic antisemitism, racism and mistreatment of women, degradations of many varieties and, in something we are only beginning to come to terms with, treatment of indigenous Canadians that was intended to erase their cultural identities. And these are not the only areas where our society fails to live up to our ideals.

It is certainly tempting to look at what is happening to our south and feel superior. It would be more productive as a society for us to acknowledge that, while we see fault in others, we will be a better country when we keep our gaze closer to home, and use our stones for repairing, not throwing.

Beneath burkini

The burkini fiasco, if it has had any positive effects, should have opened some eyes to how silly human beings can behave when we become enmeshed in a fabricated social panic. The issue, for those who have not seen the image of French police standing over a woman at a beach, requiring her to remove articles of clothing, is the idea that Muslim women in modest beach wear are a threat to Western civilization.

About 30 coastal towns in France banned the “burkini,” swimwear that generally covers all but a woman’s face, hands and feet. Even after a French court ruled the ban illegal, most of the mayors insisted they would continue enforcing the dress code.

The irony is jarring. Ostensibly based on the idea that Islam or Islamism – the motivation and the perceived threat are blurry – oppresses women by forcing them into extensive body-covering clothing, police in a democratic Western country force a woman to disrobe. (It was inevitable, also, that photos would soon go viral depicting nuns frolicking in the ocean in full Christian religious regalia, unmolested by authorities.)

France’s Prime Minister Manuel Valls has called the burkini a “provocation” and “an expression of a political project, a counter-society, based notably on the enslavement of women,” an “archaic vision” in which women are “immodest, impure and that they should be totally covered. That is not compatible with the values of France and the Republic.”

We can leave to the French what is compatible with the values of France and the Republic, yet surely a nation founded on the pillars of liberty and equality must find something amiss when its police devote their time and resources to enforcing swimwear rules.

France is singular among European countries for its stated commitment to laïcité, the prohibition against religious involvement in government affairs in service of a secular ideal. Similar issues have been addressed in Quebec, where overtly religious Christian symbols, including the crucifix, were deemed part of the province’s cultural heritage and thereby conveniently exempted from the ban on religious imagery. But, in France, as elsewhere in Europe, more is at play than ideas of secularism. In fact, the imperfect heritage of secularism is being manipulated as an excuse to target a particular group.

On the one hand, let us not pretend that there are not legitimate concerns and issues raised by the increasing population of Muslims in Europe. Among this population, both among immigrants and those born in Europe, are a small number who have become radicalized and are a genuine threat to society. A larger number holds ideas that challenge the European consensus on the role of women in society, pluralism and the rights of people to live free from religious coercion. These are legitimate concerns that require addressing through long-range integration strategies and societal accommodation between traditions – as does the rise in Europe of nationalism, xenophobia and racism.

But the burkini is, at best, a side issue; a symptom of a few things, none of them healthy. Regardless, the “solution” to any social coercion around women’s clothing is certainly not legal proscription, at least it should not be in a Western democracy. Burkini-banning has more in common with religious extremism – modesty “police” exist in various communities around the world – than the Western freedoms the burkini-bashers claim to defend.

Tempest in coffee pot

The BDS movement – which seeks to boycott, divest from and sanction the state of Israel – is having an impact. Though maybe not exactly as they’d hoped.

There was a tempest in a coffee pot recently when an East Vancouver café waded into the topic, angering some customers and, we surmise, perhaps some of the establishment’s own employees and investors.

As we addressed in this space last week, Elizabeth May, leader of the Green Party of Canada, was dismayed by the vote by her party in convention to support the BDS movement. She pondered resigning her position but this week announced that she would remain at the helm and seek to revisit the issue with her party.

A social media feed for Bows & Arrows Coffee, on Fraser Street, declared that May’s lack of support for BDS meant that she “got cowardly” on the issue and “caved.” One online commentator responded that the café’s coffee “tastes a little too antisemitic for my liking.”

After some social media back and forth, the co-owner of the café, which is headquartered in Victoria and only recently opened the Fraser Street location, published a statement acknowledging that he had “tweeted without consultation with staff and business partners.” Seemingly surprised that a simplistic #BDS hashtag and name-calling would elicit strong and equally simplistic reactions, he says that he blocked other posters and deleted tweets. He did these things, he claims, because he “wanted to address real arguments, not stand in a storm of accusers that would not engage or address my criticism of a state.”

Hopefully, he has learned that Twitter is not designed for intelligent and in-depth debate or discussion. More hopefully, perhaps he will now consider the possibility that BDS is not necessarily about “solidarity with oppressed peoples everywhere.”

While BDS supporters, including the one involved in this instance, reject the idea that the movement has any antisemitic elements and insist it targets “Netanyahu’s administration and policies of expansion in the territories,” plenty of evidence exists to suggest that BDS aims to end the existence of a Jewish state and, some would argue, this is perforce antisemitic.

Nonetheless, at least one member of the Jewish community went beyond Twitter and invited the B&A co-owner to discuss the issues surrounding BDS. In his email, the community member included a link to an article by Alan Dershowitz that was published by Haaretz, called “Ten reasons why BDS is immoral and hinders peace.” It can be found on the Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs’ website.

While the brewmaster may contend, as he implies in his statement, that he was a victim of “[t]he silencing that occurs daily via the repetition of the dominant narrative,” what he really experienced was disagreement with his beliefs and a resulting effect on his business. He was not silenced. He voluntarily chose to exit a discussion he started.

In Canada, thankfully, the freedom to speak one’s mind comes with the freedom of others to criticize the views that come from that mind. Such discussions are healthy and can even be enjoyable – especially over a nice cup of coffee.

BDS infiltrates Greens

In a turn of events that party regulars and, really, no Canadians anticipated, Elizabeth May is spending her vacation this week considering whether to resign as leader of the Green Party of Canada.

The impetus, apparently, is her party’s decision at its recent convention to adopt a resolution that attacks Israel and calls for boycotting, divesting from and sanctioning the Jewish state. It’s all part of a movement (shorthanded BDS) that hides behind the language of human rights to separate Israel from the community of nations, while ignoring not just the atrocities perpetrated by the Palestinian governments of Hamas and Fatah but also the most serious human rights abuses in the world.

May made it clear before the convention that she opposed the resolution, though most delegates probably did not realize it was a stay-or-quit litmus for the leader. After the vote, May complained that the issue was not subjected to a fulsome debate at the convention and that she did not have the opportunity to explain why she opposed the policy and why delegates should join her in rejecting BDS. Still, most delegates would surely have known how their leader – who earlier this year was endorsed in a leadership review with a whopping 93% – stood on the issue, given extensive media coverage.

There was something odd even in some of the remarks by opponents of the BDS policy, which emphasized the electoral albatross BDS would hang around the party’s neck, rather than the inherent immorality and hypocrisy of BDS. Critics seemed to assume BDS is a vote-loser, but is this assumption based on the fact that informed Canadians would oppose the movement? Or on the stereotype-founded idea that messing with the “Zionist lobby” is a no-win proposition? This may be unfair criticism if we assume rational people equate immoral, hypocritical policies with electoral failure.

May has spent a decade attempting to put the Green Party of Canada on the political map and succeeded, in 2011, in becoming the first Green MP elected to Canada’s House of Commons. She was reelected in 2015. She is almost certainly the only Green party public figure most Canadians can identify. Without her at the helm, the party would lose its sole recognizable face.

After the convention vote, May said there were plenty of issues she was happy to defend going into the next federal election, but BDS is not one of them. The anti-Israel movement has put her in this spot and it is an object lesson for Canadian politics more broadly.

BDS is a parasitic movement, attempting to infiltrate vulnerable hosts like the Green party and other well-intentioned trade unions, academic groups and social justice movements with an ideology that is not progressive at all, but anti-democratic and anti-intellectual.

BDS, and the anti-Israel movement more broadly, has attempted and in many cases succeeded in convincing progressive Canadians that they share values and ideals. Had the Green party engaged in the fulsome debate May says she wishes had happened, there would have been an opportunity to point out that BDS presents a one-sided, unbalanced interpretation of events that does not advance peace, that demonizes Israel and that makes common cause with the world’s most misogynist, homophobic and illiberal forces.

It was when the New Democratic Party of Canada was at its lowest ebb, in the 1990s and early 2000s, that the party’s policy was co-opted by extremists who used the language of human rights to advance an anti-Israel agenda that was anything but rights-oriented. Since then, the anti-Israel movement (because, as we have reiterated here, “pro-Palestinian” does not do justice to the injustices the movement excuses) has tried to graft itself onto any emerging cause.

It began, most visibly, with the eccentric Queers Against Israeli Apartheid – who privilege official Palestinian oppression of LGBTQ people over the reality that Israel is (at the very least) an oasis of freedom for gay people in a desert of sexual repression – and has spread to other movements, including Black Lives Matter.

Black Lives Matter, a desperately necessary effort to confront police violence and systemic discrimination against African-Americans, recently adopted a manifesto rife with boilerplate loathing of Israel and attestations of support for the national cause of Palestinians. Black Lives Matter has no foreign policy, except inasmuch as smearing Israel constitutes a worldview.

Why? Because the anti-Israel movement is adept at playing on the guilt of progressive people and movements to advance an agenda that is, at root, backward, violence-justifying and ignorant of history.

The BDS movement succeeded in co-opting the Green party into adopting its regressive position and now, depending on May’s decision on her future, may have done irreparable harm to the party, as BDS continues to harm the prospect of peace in the Middle East and a better life for Palestinians, the ostensible beneficiaries of the movement.