[News] BDS and the Eternal Holocaust

[Anti-Imperialist News]

http://www.telesurtv.net/english/opinion/BDS-and-the-Eternal-Holocaust-20160602-0007.html 



  BDS and the Eternal Holocaust

By: Belén Fernández June 2, 2016

It’s unsettling, to say the least, that the U.N. should lend its 
facilities to an initiative equating BDS with Nazism.

While innocently attempting to access an article on the /Haaretz/ 
website the other day, I was accosted by a sequence of intrusive 
advertisements inviting me to “Fight BDS”—the popular boycott, 
divestment, and sanctions movement that aims to force an end to Israel’s 
denial of Palestinian rights.

The ads featured a fabricated image of a graffito consisting of a 
swastika and the phrase “Jews go home!” Next to this display appeared 
the information that “This is not 1938”; “this is now!” A final 
incitement to “Fight against anti-Semitism; Fight against BDS” then 
materialized, with a link to “more details” about an upcoming venue for 
said fight: the “First International Summit at the UN against BDS.”

Details on the Eventbrite website 
<https://www.eventbrite.com/e/ambassadors-against-bds-international-summit-at-the-un-tickets-24573239220> 
specified that the summit — referred to here with the title “Ambassadors 
Against BDS” — would be held on May 31 at the United Nations 
headquarters in New York, sponsored by Israel’s permanent mission to the 
U.N. in partnership with the usual suspects: the World Jewish Congress, 
the Anti-Defamation League, Hillel, and so on. In attendance would be 
such illustrious personalities as the Vice President of the Supreme 
Court of Israel and the CEO of SodaStream, which was tragically 
BDS-pressured into shuttering 
<https://bdsmovement.net/2014/sodastream-closes-illegal-settlement-factory-in-response-growing-boycott-campaign-12782> 
one of its factories operating in an illegal Israeli settlement in the 
West Bank.

The choice of the word “ambassadors” is perhaps willfully misleading in 
the context of an anti-BDS conference at the U.N., as the casual 
passerby is liable to infer that international diplomats will be there 
on the frontlines. In fact, the term is simply one that Israel regularly 
uses 
<http://www.counterpunch.org/2010/10/01/how-israel-battles-quot-barbs-of-criticism-quot/> 
to refer to its propagandists-in-training; indeed, one of the aims of 
the gathering as stated on the Eventbrite site was to “cultivate 
ambassadors ready to fight the battle against exclusion and 
delegitimization of nations and peoples.”

Never mind that BDS is fighting exactly that battle. Those “peoples” 
aren’t meant to be included.

It’s unsettling, to say the least, that the U.N. should lend its 
facilities to an initiative equating BDS with Nazism. It’s like equating 
symphony orchestras with terrorism; it just doesn’t add up on any plane 
of reality whatsoever.

Of course, Israel’s modus operandi has from the get-go been to hijack 
the international discourse with preposterous logic and a perennial 
inversion of victim and victimizer. And the tradition was once again 
showcased at the conference this week, which according to 
<http://www.timesofisrael.com/israel-hosts-first-ever-anti-bds-conference-at-un-headquarters/> 
the /Times of Israel/ was attended by more than 2,000 people, among them 
students, legal professionals, and representatives of Jewish organizations.

The conference’s opening session, held at the U.N. General Assembly 
Hall, featured remarks by Israeli ambassador to the U.N. Danny Danon, 
who denounced <http://mondoweiss.net/2016/06/israel-commandeers-rally/> 
BDS as “the true face of modern anti-Semitism.”

The Associated Press quoted 
<http://bigstory.ap.org/article/6e4e14425fae4df487b82e70c7b7e684/israel-fills-un-hall-anti-bds-conference> 
Danon’s view that the singular goal of BDS is “to bring an end to the 
Jewish state,” as well as his thoughts on a recent U.N. Human Rights 
Council resolution 
<http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-03-24/un-rights-body-to-create-blacklist-of-companies-in-west-bank> 
to create a database of companies operating in Israeli settlements in 
the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and the Golan Heights:

“With this disgraceful resolution the U.N. crossed a red line. Can you 
imagine that seventy years after the holocaust the U.N. is creating 
lists to encourage the boycott of Jewish companies? This is exactly the 
kind of hatred that the U.N. was founded to eradicate.”

Now, as Danon & Co. take the U.N. by storm, the moral of the story — 
essentially — is that the right of Jewish businesses to turn a profit in 
illegally occupied territory trumps the right of Palestinians to exist 
free of a constant danger of being slaughtered 
<http://www.unrwa.org/gaza-emergency> or otherwise deprived of basic 
dignity.

And if you don’t support the Zionist arrangement, apparently, it means 
you’re pro-Holocaust. Repeat after me: Black equals white. Five equals 
two. Oppressor equals victim.

The /Times of Israel/ meanwhile quotes the president of the World Jewish 
Congress as decrying the BDS campaign “to deny the Jewish people their 
right to self-determination,” a “basic right” that “every other people 
on earth have.” Except for, you know, the people on whose land Israel 
has already determined itself.

But hey, cerebral functioning is overrated.

The AP report incidentally makes note of the fact that the anti-BDS 
gathering took place “in the same hall where 40 years ago 72 nations 
voted to equate Zionism with racism.” Indeed, in 1975 the General 
Assembly passed Resolution 3379 
<http://mondoweiss.net/2015/11/resolution-declared-zionism/> stating 
that “Zionism is a form of racism and racial discrimination.”

When the resolution was repealed in 1991, /The New York Times/ cited 
<http://www.nytimes.com/1991/12/17/world/un-repeals-its-75-resolution-equating-zionism-with-racism.html> 
the opinion of U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Lawrence S. Eagleburger 
that the equation of Zionism with racism “demonstrated like nothing else 
before or since, to what extent the cold war had distorted the United 
Nation’s vision of reality, marginalized its political utility and 
separated it from its original moral purpose.”

We can safely assume that the equation of support for Palestinian rights 
with Nazi genocide won’t be eliciting any such condemnation from the 
United States and its moral entourage.

As for current hysterics over the idea that BDS is intent on 
delegitimizing Israel, suffice it to say that the Jewish state doesn’t 
really require any help in that regard.

/Belén Fernández is the author of “//The Imperial Messenger: Thomas 
Friedman at Work/ 
<http://www.versobooks.com/books/1024-the-imperial-messenger>/,” 
published by Verso. She is a contributing editor at//Jacobin/ 
<https://www.jacobinmag.com/>/magazine./

-- 
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