Washington Two establishment Jews (Harvard and Microsoft) endorse boycott of Israel and ‘single state’ in Post
Glen Weyl
We’ve
long predicted that liberal Zionists will start coming out for boycott
because there’s no other peaceful way to end the conflict; and they will
even abandon Zionism in the name of a peaceful transition to democracy.
This has now happened in the Washington Post: the
week after Lawrence Summers tried to hold the line in the Jewish
community with an ill-informed speech against boycott in New York, and
after J.K. Rowling sought to hold off boycott in England, two young
Jewish academics of some standing, Steven Levitsky and Glen Weyl, say
they are for boycott because they want to save Israel from itself. And
that new Israel could be a “single state” with full democratic
citizenship for Palestinians.
The
piece is titled, “We are lifelong Zionists. Here’s why we’ve chosen to
boycott Israel.” Note that Weyl and Levitsky endorse boycott because
they “love” Israel and they do not mention the vanguard Palestinian-led
movement, the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement, nor the Right
of Return, a critical component of the BDS movement. I don’t believe
that Palestinian solidarity activists will embrace this move, because it
largely ignores their struggle; but for anyone who wants to transform
the U.S. discourse and liberate the Jewish community from blindness,
it’s welcome.
Open the floodgates. These men have prestige. Levitsky is a 47-year-old Harvard professor and Weyl is a 30-year-old Senior Researcher at Microsoft, though
he does not give that i.d. for the piece, just that he is an assistant
professor of economics at University of Chicago. Puts Microsoft in a
tender position!
The
two intellectuals do not deny the rightward trend in Israeli society or
the unending occupation. They address it forthrightly. The occupation
is now permanent. Boycotting settlements is not enough. Excerpts:
As
happened in the cases of Rhodesia and South Africa, Israel’s permanent
subjugation of Palestinians will inevitably isolate it from Western
democracies….
We
are at a critical juncture. Settlement growth and demographic trends
will soon overwhelm Israel’s ability to change course. For years, we
have supported Israeli governments — even those we strongly disagreed
with — in the belief that a secure Israel would act to defend its own
long-term interests. That strategy has failed. Israel’s supporters have,
tragically, become its enablers. Today, there is no realistic prospect
of Israel making the hard choices necessary to ensure its survival as a
democratic state in the absence of outside pressure.
For
supporters of Israel like us, all viable forms of pressure are painful.
The only tools that could plausibly shape Israeli strategic
calculations are a withdrawal of U.S. aid and diplomatic support, and
boycotts of and divestitures from the Israeli economy. Boycotting only
goods produced in settlements would not have sufficient impact to induce
Israelis to rethink the status quo.
It
is thus, reluctantly but resolutely, that we are refusing to travel to
Israel, boycotting products produced there and calling on our
universities to divest and our elected representatives to withdraw aid
to Israel. Until Israel seriously engages with a peace process that
either establishes a sovereign Palestinian state or grants full
democratic citizenship to Palestinians living in a single state, we
cannot continue to subsidize governments whose actions threaten Israel’s
long-term survival.
Israel,
of course, is hardly the world’s worst human rights violator. Doesn’t
boycotting Israel but not other rights-violating states constitute a
double standard? It does. We love Israel, and we are deeply concerned
for its survival. We do not feel equally invested in the fate of other
states.
Unlike
internationally isolated states such as North Korea and Syria, Israel
could be significantly affected by a boycott. The Israeli government
could not sustain its foolish course without massive U.S. aid,
investment, commerce, and moral and diplomatic support.
We
recognize that some boycott advocates are driven by opposition to (and
even hatred of) Israel. Our motivation is precisely the opposite: love
for Israel and a desire to save it.
Repulsed by the Afrikaners’ ethno-religious fanaticism in South Africa, Zionism founder Theodore Herzl wrote,
“We don’t want a Boer state, but a Venice.” American Zionists must act
to pressure Israel to preserve Herzl’s vision — and to save itself.
I
assume the authors’ professions of love for Zionism/Israel are purely
tactical, I can’t imagine it ever crossed these guys’ minds that they
needed a Jewish state when things got too hot in the U.S. Weyl is the opposite of tribal.
Of
course, this piece once again demonstrates the supremacy of Jews in the
American discourse of Israel/Palestine. Just as Chuck Schumer and
Debbie Wasserman Schultz and Ron Wyden were granted super-voter status
by the press during the Iran deal discussions (presumably because of the
west’s overriding concern with Jewish safety after the Holocaust, a
concern that Israel has manipulated to a fare-thee-well), these two
Jewish intellectuals will have far more clout in the U.S. press than the
Palestinian-led solidarity movement. That’s unfortunate, and racist.
Would we have taken white people’s actions against Jim Crow more
seriously than the blacks who had so much more at risk in that struggle?
No. But Jews count. We are the big liberals in American discourse, and
an outsize presence in the establishment. Yousef Munayyer made the argument against settlement-only boycotts years
ago and far more eloquently than these guys, but he’s just a
Palestinian who can’t live in Israel, the place he was born, because his
wife is a West Bank Palestinian.
But
I don’t make the rules, and those are the rules. It’s vital that the
Jewish community be liberated so that the American establishment can
shift. So this is a very important piece. It will give a lot of elite
non-Jews permission to support boycott. And other thoughtful
establishment Jews who know the story should follow– Peace Now, Peter
Beinart and David Remnick. Terry Gross needs to interview these guys on
NPR.
- See more at: http://mondoweiss.net/2015/10/
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