I was at a pro-Palestine campus protest and there were times where I was instinctively uncomfortable because they were really hammering in the whole bit about reported 'antisemitic action on campus' being a non-issue and I had to remind myself that they aren't talking about people acting against Jews, they're talking about people acting against Israel.

It's my most personal and privileged grievance against Israel. I no longer know if a supposed threat to my safety is a bullshit bludgeon to silence pro-Palestine voices or if the yank reich is actually in town and I need to commute for the rest of the week.

I'll never forgive them for it. I'll never forgive them for a lot of things, but this is the most personal grievance I have, and since I'm born and raised a cracker suburbanite, it's the only one I truly, directly feel in my personal life.

I don't want this to override, you know, the actually important grievances that are at stake for Palestine here, and I don't want to make myself the center of this issue when I'm very much not at all, but I guess I've just been stewing in this for a bit, and I want to uncap it before it somehow causes me to become a weird crank through lack of addressing the root of the issue and it festering into my belief system shrug-outta-hecks

  • AlyxMS [he/him]
    ·
    8 months ago

    (not going to debate-bro you, genuinely curious)

    What was your reasoning at the time that made you think BDS is counterproductive?

    • Mardoniush [she/her]
      ·
      8 months ago

      It's a bit hard to remember at such a remove, but there was more hope of pressuring leftist organisations inside Israel to support at least a right of return.

      Also i was significantly more Council-com at the time and knew a lot of Syndicalists and Chomsky was against it, not because he thought it was bad but that support for right of return and other demands of BDS could backfire due to lack of public understanding of the conflict. His reasoning was that Israel was not an apartheid state, it was a genocidal state. South Africa needed the Bantustans to provide cheap labour, and was thus open to international censure on their existance. Israel would very much like Gaza and the West Bank to stop existing and increased international pressure might result in "May as well send in the tanks now and wait out the backlash" rather than a forced negotiation.

      Also, the general opinion was that localised boycotts of vocally pro-setter businesses were appropriate, but that more robust boycotts would be tarred as a prelude to Kristallnacht by right-wing and pro-israel press (as, indeed, they were). In any case, the public education for a boycott wasn't there.

      So instead, efforts should be made to increase diplomatic censure and engage in anti imperialist action to reduce weapons shipments. The argument here being that Israel needed those shipments to maintain existence and were thus a single point of failure.

      These were all dumb, because it turned out all Israeli political factions were pro genocide. The US will never stop weapons shipments to anyone, and BDS has in fact accomplished the public education effort Chomsky said was a precondition, despite a substantial propaganda effort against it.