A recent collection of essays on the so-called BDS (boycott, divestment, and sanctions) movement explores the twisted ideologies that have led to increased calls from university faculties to isolate Israel. The essays expose the intellectual vacuity of the movement, how easily it slips into overt anti-Semitism, and how hating Israel “has become arguably the single most potent marker of being of the left today.” Andrei Markovits writes:
[T]he New Left . . . shifted the axes of theory and practice from the Old Left’s proletariat as the subject of history and prime agent of salvation to third-world peoples. This also entailed a much more comprehensive reorientation of progressive politics from extolling the Enlightenment, as virtually all major agents of the Old Left did with gusto, to its total dismissal. Indeed, for the New Left, the Enlightenment—and its main global representative, “the West”—mutated into the all-powerful oppressor which had to be confronted on all fronts by new agents of progress and revolution, none more potent than Third World liberation movements of whatever ideological bent. Few, if any, became more beloved for the new progressives than the Palestinians, victims of the Jews, who, a-priori suspect as paragons of the Enlightenment, became doubly evil by virtue of attaining power in a “settler” state and thus becoming Exhibit A of a Western-implemented (neo-)colonialism at the behest of the source of all evil—the Great Satan, as it were—called the United States of America.
Read more on Fathom: http://fathomjournal.org/book-review-the-case-against-academic-boycotts-of-israel/