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 on Los Angeles Times: http://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-halevi-bds-is-immoral-20160628-snap-story.html