The Anti-Israel Boycott Movement is a Bigoted Threat to Peace

While the movement to boycott, divest from, and sanction the Jewish state (BDS) often masquerades as a campaign to liberate Palestinians, its true purpose, writes Yossi Klein Halevi, is to destroy Israel:

The BDS movement . . . promotes [a] vision of a world without Israel. BDS dupes those of its supporters who genuinely seek a two-state solution into believing that they are working for peace. Indeed the BDS website doesn’t even mention two states for two peoples among its goals. Even if Israel were to uproot every settlement, re-divide Jerusalem, forfeit its claim to the holy places, and return to the eight-mile-wide borders of the pre-1967 war, the BDS movement presumably would press on until Israel was erased from the map.

BDS activists brand Israel as an illegitimate colonialist state, a European transplant in the Middle East. This historical distortion erases 4,000 years of intimate connection between the Jewish people and the land. It [also] ignores [the fact that] a majority of Israel’s Jews don’t come from Europe, but from the Arab world, descendants of the nearly 1 million Jews effectively expelled from Arab countries where Jews had lived for millennia. . . .

As a means of applying economic pressure on Israel, BDS has failed. . . . The attempt to turn Israel into a version of the old, apartheid South Africa will also fail because there are too many people around the world who admire Israel. . . .

The real threat of BDS, though, is more subtle than economic pressure. BDS creates an atmosphere in which Israel is solely to blame for the failure of peace between Jews and Arabs, and it negates the very idea of a nation-state for the Jewish people. . . . Rather than Israel, it is the BDS movement that must be exposed and ostracized for its bigotry and hatred.

Read more at Los Angeles Times

More about: BDS, Israel & Zionism, Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, Two-State Solution, Yossi Klein Halevi

What a Strategic Victory in Gaza Can and Can’t Achieve

On Tuesday, the Israeli defense minister Yoav Gallant met in Washington with Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin. Gallant says that he told the former that only “a decisive victory will bring this war to an end.” Shay Shabtai tries to outline what exactly this would entail, arguing that the IDF can and must attain a “strategic” victory, as opposed to merely a tactical or operational one. Yet even after a such a victory Israelis can’t expect to start beating their rifles into plowshares:

Strategic victory is the removal of the enemy’s ability to pose a military threat in the operational arena for many years to come. . . . This means the Israeli military will continue to fight guerrilla and terrorist operatives in the Strip alongside extensive activity by a local civilian government with an effective police force and international and regional economic and civil backing. This should lead in the coming years to the stabilization of the Gaza Strip without Hamas control over it.

In such a scenario, it will be possible to ensure relative quiet for a decade or more. However, it will not be possible to ensure quiet beyond that, since the absence of a fundamental change in the situation on the ground is likely to lead to a long-term erosion of security quiet and the re-creation of challenges to Israel. This is what happened in the West Bank after a decade of relative quiet, and in relatively stable Iraq after the withdrawal of the United States at the end of 2011.

Read more at BESA Center

More about: Gaza War 2023, Hamas, IDF