A Boston-area group advocating for boycotting, divesting from, and sanctioning Israel (BDS) has recently produced an elaborate interactive online map purporting to demonstrate the nexus between “local support for the colonization of Palestine” and “policing, evictions, and privatization locally” as well as “U.S. imperialist projects worldwide.” Among the “Zionist” institutions whose “networks” the map exposes are the Anti-Defamation League, Hillel Houses at Boston University and Brandeis, an independent Jewish high school, an organization that runs summer camps for children and young people with disabilities, and the left-wing New Israel Fund. Jonathan Tobin comments:
It’s not clear whether such extremism has much support even in the most woke sectors of one of the country’s most liberal communities. But what makes it truly sinister is the way that it creates maps of synagogues and other Jewish institutions, including schools in the state of Massachusetts, and attempts to hold them out as bastions of “harms” such as “racism,” “policing, “U.S. imperialism” and “ethnic cleansing.”
All of this amounts to a wake-up call for American Jews, both those that are affiliated with the organized community and those who never visit any of the sites that the “Mapping Project” seeks to target as bastions of everything they think the woke should protest. BDS seeks the destruction of the one Jewish state on the planet and is, by definition, anti-Semitic. But its intersectional ideas lead this movement inevitably to a position that treats Jews as hateful oppressors and legitimate objects of protest—something that always leads to violence. BDS isn’t about human rights, helping the Palestinians, peace, or justice. At its core and in action, it is a hate group, and it and all who support it should be treated accordingly.
Read more on JNS: https://www.jns.org/opinion/what-does-the-bds-movement-really-stand-for-unadulterated-hate/