Regular readers will know I am no fan of the Jewish Forward, which seems to never miss an opportunity to beat Israel with a stick.
Which makes this piece of theirs even more noteworthy and worth sharing: I Used To Call For Boycotts Of Israel — Until I Spoke With Holocaust Survivors
Excerpt:
It took me a while to realize that the story in the Middle East is not one of white supremacy vs. People of Color and that the boycott called for total economic, cultural, and academic isolation of Israel, civil society included.
For the most part, I had based my research on articles published by Electronic Intifada, a heavily pro-Palestine website. And since they seemed to support BDS and a one-state solution, I went along with it. It seemed pretty straightforward that since Israel was not going to stop settlement construction, the only moral thing to do was to absorb all the Palestinians into the country and make them full citizens. The demographic threat argument felt racist and flimsy back then.
But that was before I met people who lived through the Second World War, lost family members in the Shoah, and found their only refuge in Israel.
Some of these people fought in the 1948 Arab-Israeli war knowing that to stay and fight was their only option. Israel was all they had and there were no homes in Europe to return to. They were fighting to survive yet again. And for that reason alone, Israel had to be a Jewish state— that should a second Holocaust happen, they would not be at the mercy of other countries that had turned them away and condemned them to Hitler’s extermination camps not too long ago.
Seventy years later, a second Holocaust seems like a highly unlikely thing. However, history has shown us that it takes but a few sparks of bigotry to start a wildfire of mass insanity. Rwanda, Yugoslavia, Indonesia, the partition of India and Pakistan, the liberation of Bangladesh, and the ethnic cleansing of the Rohingya people are a few examples of how empty the words ‘Never Again’ are when hatred goes mainstream.
These genocides also prove that we don’t live in a perfect post-nationalist world. If people cannot live together peacefully, then separation is the only answer, preferably without a civil war. The two deadly intifadas, the hateful rhetoric of the Hamas charter, and the rising tide of far-right anti-Semitism alongside far-left anti-Zionism is a sad testimony to the current reality which cannot be ignored. That is my reason for supporting a two-state solution now.
Unfortunately, the BDS movement only distances us from that option.
I don’t agree with everything in this piece (for example, she seems to pin her views on the Holocaust and not the indigenous status of the Jews in Israel; also, she seems to assign too much blame to Israel for what is happening in Gaza now), but it is still worth reading the views of someone who has changed their views so drastically.
