“Behind the Boycott”

“The argument that pushing Israel into economic, academic and cultural purgatory will somehow persuade its government to dismantle the security barrier, evacuate the West Bank and embrace its sworn enemy is misguided. And that’s being generous. Whatever the flaws of the Netanyahu administration — and there are many — it is clearly responding to (and, true, at times stoking) real fears and anxieties among the Israeli population.

The boycotters are either grossly ignorant about the Israeli psyche, or don’t care to understand it. The attempt to isolate and delegitimize “is counter productive because of the nature of who we are. It confirms our worst fears,” says the noted South African journalist Benjamin Pogrund, who now lives in Israel and writes extensively about boycotts, having lived through the apartheid era in his native land.

While the BDS movement hopes to do to Israel what a similar movement claims to have done in South Africa, the economies are not at all equivalent. South Africa’s exports during the apartheid regime were limited, while Israel is intimately connected to the global economy, especially in technology, medicine, finance and scientific research. A real boycott, of course, would eliminate more Israeli-born medicines and technological advances than there is room to recount here, but then, according to the BDS approach, one can still throw mud at those who save you.

A more fair, useful and indeed noble way for outsiders to influence the Israeli government and its people is to engage and encourage both them and the Palestinians to take meaningful steps towards reconciliation and support of human rights across the troubled landscape. Perhaps the first thing that these “boycotters” ought to sacrifice is their self-righteous belief that only one side of this conflict bears any responsibility for its continuance.”

Read it all here:

http://www.forward.com/articles/114907/

From the article:

“From the perspective of a friend and supporter of Israel – wishing to see Israel healed and its future guaranteed – the message is loud and clear. To rephrase a well-known adage, occupation corrupts, but prolonged occupation corrupts profoundly.”

This is nonsense.

Many countries in the world occupy foreign territory from Russia and China, the US which occupied one third of Mexico and India. Not to mention those countries like Great Britain which occupied almost a third of the world at one time?

Are these countries also profoundly corrupt? Was Great Britain “profoundly corrupt the centuries in which it occupied Ireland, India, or most of Africa? Will Levy write an article about the occupation of Tibet?

This must be the third article critical of Israel that mentioned the same adage.