Legislatures in several states have passed, or are now considering, bills intended to combat the movement to boycott, divest from, and sanction Israel (BDS). Together with the movement’s failure to convince any American universities or major corporations to cease investing in Israel, does this suggest that the tide has turned against those wishing to wage economic warfare against the Jewish state? Ben Cohen warns that BDS will undoubtedly adopt new and perhaps more sinister tactics:
Unable to attack Israel directly, the BDSers will increasingly turn their sights on the majority of Jews around them. (To a great extent, this is what they have always done, as the primary harm that comes with their efforts has typically been felt by local Jews, and not the state of Israel.) On college campuses, for example, events showcasing Israel or involving Israeli participants will find themselves more vulnerable. Numerous incidents during the last decade, in South Africa and Europe as well as in the U.S., have demonstrated that there is a corps of BDS supporters with few qualms about violence.
It might even be the case that the BDSers will conveniently park their [professed] First Amendment commitments by trying to ban Jewish associations and societies unless these explicitly reject Zionism. For those who think that’s an improbable notion, well, it happened, in the British student movement during the 1970s. As Dave Rich argues in a superlative doctoral thesis on this under-analyzed episode of contemporary Jewish history, a general anti-fascist policy that “was intended to provide a practical tool for excluding racists and fascists from British campuses . . . came to be used to exclude Zionism.”
If this is, indeed, how the BDS movement twists and turns over the coming years, we shouldn’t simply assume that its appeal will fade as it becomes more transparently anti-Semitic. As to the really interesting question—whether those progressives who have made voguish anti-Zionism a part of their worldview will follow the BDS movement along this particular path—I guess we’ll find out soon enough.
Read more on Tower: http://www.thetower.org/2921-analysis-hindered-by-new-anti-discrimination-laws-bds-may-increasingly-target-u-s-jews/