He’s been writing for a while now and he’s making no progress on the whole brevity thing. Why does Glenn Greenwald use 40,000 words to say what can be said in 5,000? In any case, I’m with him on the criticism of Dershowitz and the collective freakout about Brooklyn College’s political science department co-sponsoring a BDS event. But he really is missing the point, possibly intentionally. This isn’t about criticism of Israel. It is about a campaign to convince people to boycott Israeli products, to prevent any investment in Israeli businesses, to prevent artists and athletes from performing in Israel or competing against Israelis. And it is a movement that wants to convince countries and international organizations to slap sanctions on Israel. In other words, this isn’t merely some academic debate. It is, from the point of view of most Israelis, a national security threat and an economic threat. The reason this seemingly inconsequential event at Brooklyn College is being treated like the Second Intifada is because Israel sees the movement as a real threat.
Yet, Greenwald paints it as nothing more than a reluctance to be criticized. It’s one thing for a political organizer or an academic to make criticisms about Israeli policies, but it’s another to openly advocate a boycott of their products and a sanctions regime.
Maybe Greenwald thinks it makes his case for academic freedom and independence stronger to frame this as a hypocritical reluctance to allow Israel to be criticized on college campuses. I think he fails to get to root of the debate by denying the political nature of the fight. This isn’t Alan Dershowitz trying to crush academic freedom. It’s the Israeli government trying to prevent itself from becoming as toxic as de Klerk’s South Africa.
If you address this dust-up for what it is, it’s both a lot more interesting and a lot more serious.
Oh good, I was waiting for Greenwald to write about this dust-up. I take it you’re opposed to BDS? And it is about academic freedom. It’s politicians (American politicians) openly trying to prevent a college event — an event put together mostly by the students of the college. Alan Dershowitz and his torture-apologia ass can take a hike; I fucking hate that cretin.
It’s one thing for Dershowitz to be acting on his own; it’s quite another to try and get pols involved to shut it down.
No, I don’t oppose BDS, or in any way disagree with what Greenwald is arguing. I am criticizing the way he is making his argument both for it’s intolerable long-windedness and for ignoring the stakes involved.
I don’t really count myself as a supporter of BDS, either. But I don’t oppose their right to make their case and to make it on campuses.
The boycott-divest-sanction movement is what finally unthawed apartheid in South Africa. I’m sure apologists for South Africa argued that its organization on US campuses was not a matter of academic freedom. But the advocacy of the view that it should be done is definitely as much a matter of academic freedom as Mr. Dershowitz’s arguments in favor of torture.
In case I wasn’t clear, it is a matter of academic freedom, but it is really much more than that. To focus on the academic freedom of it only, is to miss why the fight is happening in the first place.
See, Mondoweiss elicited the key element here, and in less than a gazillion words.
Lander is being honest, but what we want to mine is that “particular nerve” to see what is really going on.
I completely agree with you, Boo. The Israelis regard the BDS movement as a mortal threat. And for good reason – it is only the fiction that the occupied territories are in some transitional state that keeps the world from calling the occupation for what it is: apartheid. Which, despite Lander’s claim that Israel’s sins are no different than any other country, really is a somewhat unique and reprehensible evil. This is why the Israelis have reacted so vehemently to BDS, including passing a law last year that effectively made voicing support or sympathy for BDS illegal. (Israeli citizens who voice support for BDS can now be subject to lawsuits.) This is why some of my friends on the Israeli left support BDS – they feel that it is the only hope for getting Israel to change.
On a somewhat different note, I actually went to the same synagogue as Brad Lander and was in the same Sunday school class growing up. I have a funny story about that, which I will tell you sometime off-line.
Showing my ignorance, it is normal for Jewish kids to go to “Sunday” school?
They call it that, BooMan, but of course it is not really “Sunday” school.
It’s common in Reform Judaism. Lots of things in Reform were borrowed from Christianity.
This week the UN Human Rights Commission issued a report on Israel’s actions in the occupied territories and called it what it was–a violation of the Geneva conventions.
Israel has been pretending to be an occupier when it suits them and to deny occupation when it doesn’t. Whichever one it is at the time violates one of the Geneva conventions; at other times it violates another one of the Geneva accords. Either they are civilians under occupation or they are civilians in a state of war. In either case Israel is in violation of the Geneva conventions.
Good point. And Israel’s most important violation of the Geneva Conventions, as well as the UN Charter and other international legal instruments, is its confiscation and colonization of land in the occupied territories, Including the Golan Heights, which clearly has as its goal the eventual annexation of most or all of that territory.
Is it too optimistic for me to hope that maybe this report, in combination with the BDS could be a turning point with Israel and Palestine?
I have never been tuned in to the Israel-Palestine issues to the extent that I am with US politics. For years, I guess I assumed Israel must be mostly in the right, though when I thought about it I felt terrible for the Palestinian people, and then moved on to something else.
Something changed for me maybe 3 years ago, I think when Israel attacked the flotilla near Gaza? Even without being tuned in, that made it onto my radar in a big way and it seemed perfectly obvious to me that Israel was dead wrong on that.
I am more tuned in than I was, but the situation is so complicated that I still don’t understand it and Oui’s diaries on Israel mostly go over my head.
But even without devoting the time it would take to really understand everything, it’s become obvious to me – someone not completely tuned in – that Bibi is not good for Israel and that what he says about wanting peace with palestine is belied by what he does.
None of this has anything to do with how I feel about people who are jewish or the jewish faith – because I don’t really think about that at all, I respect that everyone gets to choose their own faith so what is there to think about. This is all political.
I think the whole thing is a clusterf*ck because both sides are not acting in good faith. Maybe I’m naive and what I’m about to say is completely laughable, but I think if both sides really wanted a solution then we could have a solution during President Obama’s second term.
Between BDS and the recent UN report, it seems to me that it is being pointed out, on multiple fronts simultaneously, that the emperor has no clothes. That, plus Obama choosing Hagel for secretary of defense, gives me hope. Am I crazy?
Well I won’t go too far in-depth, and I am certainly not a neutral observer on this issue, but I can tell you my own history very briefly.
My path followed yours, although I’ve always thought Israel has been a bunch of dicks since Clinton (even though I didn’t know much about the issue on the surface). I don’t know when I started looking into the issue more closely, but I became radicalized the more I looked back into Israel’s history, and the more I learned. What caused me to do more research was their attack in 2008-2009. I mean I was biased against them before, but I still had the “both sides” mentality about it. After the Gaza War, no…I saw the truth. There are no “both sides are at fault” here. I encourage you to look more into the issue as a whole, and though I’m not a fan of Uri Avenry, here is a good starting point:
Gush Shalom: Truth against Truth
And this video is good, too:
Also, unless Meretz, Balad, and Hadash form a coalition, this will continue; none of the main parties want peace, and haven’t since at least 1967 (arguably earlier). Bibi has a lot of company. After all, Bibi wasn’t the PM during the 2008-2009 war, “centrist” Kadima was.
The first 5 minutes of that video were profoundly sad.
Back in the day the “peace-seekers” of Labor were responsible for building and populating more of the major colonies (propaganda term is settlements) than Likud. And yes, if you take an unbiased look at the pre-1967 history and the pre-state history of Israel it is clear that none of the parties has ever had peace as a priority. On the contrary, they have all consistently rejected opportunities for peace from the very beginning.
Ben Gurion was not interested in peace at all, but in achieving his territorial and demographic goals. In 1948 he took a number of steps he knew would guarantee a war. One of his numerous revelatory statements, appears in his diary entry for Feb. 6, 1948. During a meeting that day of the Mapai Party Council, a member expressed concern that the Zionists had no land in the hills and mountains west of Jerusalem. Ben Gurion responded “The war will give us the land. The concepts of ‘ours’ and ‘not ours’ are peace concepts, only, and in war they lose their whole meaning”
(Ben-Gurion, War Diary, Vol. 1, entry dated 6 February 1948. p.211)
Ben Gurion’s reason for refusing to declare borders was exactly about leaving them open for future expansion, and Israel has yet to declare borders for exactly that reason.
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Born in the year Canadian and Polish Allied forces liberated The Netherlands from 5 years German occupation. I have witnessed the devastation of the second World War although my country was barely scathed by the German and Allied bombardments. The yearly commemoration of all victims on May 4 and the Liberation on May 5 does keep the sacrifices for Liberty alive. I live in the Dutch capitol The Hague in an area confiscated and sealed off by the German forces during the war. The bunkers of the German Atlantic wall can still be seen when I stroll in the park with my grandson. The V2 rockets were launched from a site in central The Hague a few hundred yards from my home. So I carry with me in memory pictures of the horror of an occupation, the Gestapo razzias, imprisonment, torture and execution of partisans in the dunes nearby. See the famous diary and Amsterdam museum of Anne Frank.
Nevertheless, during the 1970s the Palestinians used terror tactics of plane hijackings, bombing European airports and joined forces with International terror gangs. Israel was the underdog and my sympathy and most of the world was with the tiny country in the Middle-East. The 1972 massacre at the Munich Olympics of Israeli athletes and the 1976 Entebbe raid by Israel (Yoni Netanyahu) increased the sympathy for the state of Israel. As I have written, the offer of Egyptian President Sadat to travel to Jerusalem and his willingness to negotiate and sign a peace treaty was an eye opener to the possibility of Middle-East peace and a solution to the Palestinian issue. This was meant to be part of Sadat’s peace treaty with Israel.
However, as Shin Beth and Mossad agents traveled the globe to assassinate the plotters of the Munich massacre, Israel made choices to opt for pre-empting any security risk by military force. From 1981 to the present, Israel has used extreme military force in the region. A new peace treaty with Jordan King Hussein was put at risk by an assassination attempt of Hamas leader Khaled Mashaal – see Al Jazeera documentary “Kill him silently”. I believe my sympathy for Israel and its policy turned around in 1995 with the assassination of PM Yitzak Rabin. A sphere of fear was created in national politics and hatred was introduced by Benjamin Netanyahu. Netanyahu used this propaganda instrument to get rid of the Oslo Accords prepared by James Baker III and signed under President Clinton.
After the failed peace negotiations in 2000 by Bill Clinton, the right wing politicians like Sharon, Olmert and Netanyahu did everything to destroy any further possibility for peace in the Middle-East. The Bush administration and the Obama administration in its first term could not cope with the bullying by Natanyahu and Israel. US Congress members are fully in the pockets of Israeli lobbyists like AIPAC and they go to extreme measures to equate Palestinians with Islamic terror groups under the protection of US veto at the UN Security Council. The 9/11 attack on America has played out well for the propagandists of Israel.
Shin Beth leaders in a filmed documentary “The Gatekeepers”
PS Israel’s PM Sharon was a strong advocate and supporter of President Bush to attack, invade and occupy Iraq.
“uniquely call out the Jewish state for sins that unfortunately in my experience are perpetrated by almost all nation-states“
REALLY?! Almost all nation-states conduct brutal and oppressive decades-long occupations that include confiscation of land and resources for the purpose of colonizing the occupied territory with their own citizens and depriving the people under occupation of basic necessities of life, such as water and shelter? Almost all nation-states keep hundreds of children under indefinite detention without charges, or for things like suspicion of rock-throwing? Almost all nation-states take women, children, and elderly people hostage in order to coerce their relatives to turn themselves in, or as bargaining chips? And so on…?
Wow. I didn’t know that.
maybe not all nations, but certainly the British, French, Germans, Russians, Americans, Canadians (yes, the damn CANADIANS), Japan, China (modern and historic), Australians, South Africans, Sudanese, Belgians, Spanish, Portugese, Turks, Iranians …. that about covers it.
I might have missed a few, but hey? You do what you can.
Funny, I haven’t noticed any nation states but Israel doing those things since at least the mid-20th century.
Maybe if Israel stopped treating Palestinians as third-class citizens, they wouldn’t have this problem. As far as ignoring the stakes involved. Why not email him, or ask him on Twitter, why he “ignores” the bigger issue?
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A state completely isolated by its own politics vs. the Palestinians, finds its primary defence in bullying any and all protesters of its policies in the illegal occupation and settlement expansion of the West Bank.
Cross-posted from my diary – What’s the Fuzz? BDS Movement.
This is a home system for production of carbonated drinks. I learned today that the plant is on the west bank on confiscated land. For me, that makes this unacceptable.
Guess who is promoting these systems (unless they’ve recently dropped the ads) – Ed Schultz on radio, for one.
Yep! And SodaStream boasts that they provide employment to a hundred or so Palestinians, thus providing support for 1,000 Palestinians (on the assumption that every Palestinian man is responsible for supporting 9 or 10 other Palestinians). What they don’t talk about, of course, is that they exploit this cheap labor force by paying them less than half the minimum wage (for the OPT, not for Israel), and not only firing them but making sure they cannot get a permit to enter the industrial park if they complain.
Now I had to look it up because I wasn’t positive.. but for a guy who was born in Queens, and whose parents moved to South Florida in his childhood..
Is it just possible that Greenwald isn’t attacking Dershowitz on the politics because he still has some lack-of-foreskin in the game?
I know he attacks Israeli foreign policy, but that’s not necessarily the same as wanting to bring the whole rest of the world down on the country. Sure, the entire American right thinks of him as “a self-hating Jew”, but there could be room for wanting to promote change that doesn’t go to ‘at any cost’.
Admittedly, this would be the first time I’ve considered that Greenwald might modify his positions to account for the real world, other than the utopian policies he tends to demand in any other case.
I try not to channel Dr. Bill Frist by making remote diagnoses.
Any other country that thumbed its nose at international law the way Israel does would be lucky if having international sanctions slapped on them was the worst thing that happened. Countries have been bombed into near-oblivion for a whole lot less.
OK, GG is prolix and obnoxious and always was, and his attitude toward Israel may in the end represent a real threat to it’s international position, but (a) that’s what he wants and (b) here you are off the rails.
“This isn’t Alan Dershowitz trying to crush academic freedom. It’s the Israeli government trying to prevent itself from becoming as toxic as de Klerk’s South Africa.”
No, it’s the the Israeli government (AD, really) trying to prevent itself from becoming as toxic as de Klerk’s South Africa by crushing academic freedom.
But here you are saying it’s not about academic freedom (actually, free speech in an academic setting) unless somebody wants to silence everybody.
It’s not about free speech if the speech X is trying to suppress puts his policy goals at risk.
And a blatant effort to stifle free expression doesn’t count as an effort to stifle free expression, if it’s “the Israeli government trying to prevent itself becoming as toxic as de Klerk’s South Africa.”
Interesting.