BDS Movement Flogs Moral Shop

What is the objective of the BDS movement: rights for Palestinians orIsrael’s destruction? There cannot be both – certainly not on the terms BDS dictates forIsrael.Palestinian rights andIsrael’s existence are mutually exclusive. Let’s be clear about this, it’s none other than Norman Finkelstein postulating, a kingpin of the BDS movement, the man to whom Israel is Nazi-like, beyond the Pale, a human rights hell on earth.   

“They (BDS supporters) think they are being very clever; they call it their three-tier. We want the end of the occupation, the right of return, and …equal rights for Arabs in Israel. And they think they are very clever because they know the result of implementing all three is what…?  You know and I know what the result is. There’s no Israel”!

So there we are; it’s not possible to campaign for BDS while at the same time acknowledging Israel’s right to exist. Not if you’re open about it, not if you allow your audience to have a brain. It’s dishonest to hide the clash of objectives, Finkelstein told interviewer Frank Barat. And were he an Israeli he wouldn’t trust a ‘cult’ which hid that clash from the public. Credit where credit is due: Norman Finkelstein, for motives only he would know, chose to come out of the closet and hang his soul army on the line. When you support BDS and its three-tier you are banking on Israel’s destruction.

 BDS campaigners, in their different guises and faiths and shades of extremism will naturally object. Expect to hear from the Presbyterians of America, from Christian Aid, even from Peter Beinart. They’ll want to square the circle, to prove that their intentions are pure and honourable. And unless they try to obfuscate logic with statements on Palestinian rights and Israel’s responsibility for them, one is obliged to hear them out.   

 But now that Finkelstein has boiled and stirred the vat there’s more than one subterfuge to be fetched out the brew. The end of Israel is not the only motive Finkelstein’s cult hides from the world. There’s a packet of barely hidden inflammatory inputs that BDS campaigners would not want disturbed.   

 The Palestinian in the role of persecutor not as victim is one of them. Arab Christians would testify to that if only the PA’s news embargo would relent. Christians fleeing from persecution have poured  out ofGazaand the PA controlledWest Bank. No BDS campaigner would want such unpalatable victims near his platform.

 Equally corroding to the BDS agenda would be the proclivity of Palestinians to celebrate and commemorate suicide missions. They took to the streets not only after 9/11. A carnival atmosphere burst after the pizzeria and disco bombings, and after the Park Hotel seder massacre. Crowds danced and scattered sweets; and afterwards leaders commemorated the martyrs by renaming places of entertainment and culture. The BDS campaigner would sooner die than allow this proclivity near the Palestinian victim.  

 So with the unfulfilled hopes from giving Palestinians freedom to rule themselves. They duly elected Hamas on its genocidal platform, and began to rocketIsrael. The BDS cult would no more put this in its peace pipe and smoke it than it would care to join the dots between Hamas andIran. 

  If BDS had a war cry it would be “Give the Palestinians back their land.” Its every syllable and cadence plays on its rock-solid belief in three faiths: one, the Palestinians are a nation; two, they once had a land whichIsrael took from them; three,Israel is a usurping occupying power. Whether any one of those faiths holds water is a question BDS campaigners would rather not confront, knowing that one failure would fell the cult like an ox.

 And it would crumple to an empty heap when brought to face with a question that logically presents itself. If not the Palestinian’s territory then whose land doesIsraeloccupy? Never mind UN statements; ignore media pundits and diplomatic speak. The BDS’s moral high ground precludes it from supping at those tables. Not for human rights pretenders the art of the possible. If they have not moral courage and integrity they have nothing.  

 So ‘occupation’ is not a word the BDS campaigner should bandy about. Yet bandy it about he does – profusely, even professors of law who should know better. Occupation is the BDS mantra. Its hatred ofIsraelwould be hung out to dry if you remove the creed thatIsraelis an occupier.

 And then there is international law. On the human rights aspect of law the BDS type is well informed, and not shy to vaunt its knowledge. But on international law  relating to the disputed territories it parks its brain. This part of law does not suit the campaigner at all. And so he mumbles ‘breaches’ and stops at that. As well he might, for international law, when applied to the disputed territories, fails to recognize a people called Palestinians; and it favours no side more thanIsrael. Hence the campaigner adopts political speak and skips to muddier human rights law where, kitted up in feelings to admire he can obfuscate and prognosticate and play the part. 

 But there’s another ingredient that BDS stashed in the brew. And it starts with a question. What is the Palestinian cause if not one of land and the quest for nationhood? Certainly Finkelstein’s cult holds to the creed that it’s about those two things. But the Palestinians don’t agree – not when they gather in their mosques, in their schools, or around public platforms. But a BDS campaigner will never intrude into those milieus. He is content with statements of moderation and accommodation carried on the wires. And in this caution he displays great good sense, knowing that were he to venture into a mosque or school in the West Bankhe would have the rug pulled from under him. He would learn that the Palestinian conflict is not about land and nationhood. He would learn that Palestinians play a zero sum game.

 Such is the brew that Finkelstein recklessly disturbed. BDS campaigners know perfectly what’s concealed in it. And they would die before allowing it to muddy their agenda.

 

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A BIAS THICKER THAN FAITH:

 

A BIAS THICKER THAN FAITH:

 

CHRISTIANS WHO PUNT FOR THEIR PERSECUTORS

 

Juxtapose two movements of people and lo, the wildest of peculiarities pops up in the window: an anti-Israel Christian element. How a peculiarity? Because there’s one part of the Middle East where a Christian can be a Christian without being hounded, and it happens to be Israel. Population movements tell half the story, though not nearly the absorbing half. In 1949 Israelhad a Christian population of 34000; today the number is 168000, and growing. From the Palestinian side the arrows point the other way. Christians have poured out; perhaps 70 percent who once lived in theWest Bank now live abroad. Bethlehem, Christianity’s cradle, provides stark confirmation. In 1950 the city was 80 – 90 percent Christian; today that fraction is down to no more than 20 percent. So in Muslim Palestine Christians run the gauntlet, while inIsrael they practice their faith freely. Yet churchmen aim their missiles where?

Behind the numbers lies a human tragedy in phantasmal form. Out of Gazaand Ramallah come leaks and whispers, hole-in-the wall fear-ridden testimonies, tearful stories told behind locked doors. Who knows the totality of fear, cruelty, theft, assault, or homicide perpetrated on reclusive Christian pockets? Who cares to know?  When Muslim-Christian strife rocks another country it’s all over the wires, but from the interfaith tinderbox of Palestine, a land bristling with media workers, we hear nothing. When did a flare-up last break out of Mahmoud Abbas’ embargo and find its way into the media?  Fear and self-preservation also account for the silence. Clerics fall back on reaching out to their persecutors, trusting that love will triumph. Meanwhile they try to cosy up by looking for ways to condemn Israel. But the policy has failed even well-connected clerics. There was the Greek Orthodox priest, a one time ally of Yasser Arafat, who ran a Christian TV station from Bethlehem. Eventually he got fed up with what was happening to Christians, and went public with a dossier that he had previously delivered to Arafat and later Abu Mazen. In it he gave 70 detailed cases of attacks on Christians:  beatings, sexual harassment, and scores of land theft cases. After going public he fled abroad.  

In the West meanwhile irate churchmen compete with secular activists to bring Israeli leaders to book for the type of crimes committed by maniacal tyrants and Apartheid architects. Asserts the Archbishop Emeritus Tutu: ‘Israel does ‘things that even Apartheid South Africa had not done.’ The Presbyterian Church of America, helping Tutu’s claim go down, alludes to what those things might be, though what they actually are remains up the Church’s sleeve. It – Israel commits ‘horrific acts of violence and deadly attacks on innocent people.’  If you want the Presbyterians to be specific you are there and then booked into the Zionist camp. These Presbyterians are worth more than a minute of our time. For one thing they blame Jews for getting blown up by suicide bombers. ‘Occupation is the root of terrorism.’ The root of terrorism outside of Israel, where the suicide bombing tally would be in six figures, is different, and we are not surprised; the dead are Christians and Muslims, not Jews. But we don’t ask the Presbyterians about that; Occupation accounts for Jewish dead. Point out that Arabs murdered Israelis before they occupied anything – before they had a state to call Israel – and you’ll be met with a dry look. Point to the genocide laced charter document of Hamas and you’ll raise a chuckle. And you dare not tackle the Presbyterians, or Christian Aid, on their resolve to obliterate Israel by moving refugees around: (We insist) on ‘the right of Palestinian refugees to return to their homeland.’ Ah – where subterfuge treads irony follows hard on its heels. Who are these refugees but Arabs living in countries where Christians are fair game; where religious cleansing has all but wiped out Christendom’s ancient footprint. Don’t ask the Presbyterians to join the dots: (a) the free-for-all cleaning out of their brothers in Christ and (b) Palestinian refugees who have witnessed if not taken part in that religious cleansing. Remember who holds the exclusive Victim rights. If the rights holder proved to be a persecutor it would harm the brand irreparably.

 Are there no Christians willing to blow the whistle? To be sure there have been stirrings that augured well. In March 2012 theBethlehemBibleCollegeheld the largest Christian conference in theMiddle East. Our ears prick. The plight of Christians in the region was the main agenda item surely. But no – evangelicals from all parts of the world gathered not to defend their faith but to promote a new Muslim state. They came to support ‘a just solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict,’ a code easily cracked by looking not at the meaning of the words, but at what the words mean. To the Russell Tribunal they meant finding Israel guilty of Apartheid crimes; to the ‘Christ at the Check Point’ (CATC) conference ‘finding a just solution’ is the code for supporting the Palestinian bid for statehood, peace with Israel be damned. In supporting the bid CATC participants attacked their brothers – Christian Zionist groups that supportIsraelout of a belief that the return of Jews to theHoly Landis a condition for the return of the Messiah, and final redemption. They denounced Christian Zionism as ‘an exclusive theology of the land that marginalizes and disenfranchises the indigenous people;’ quite at odds with their in-flavour theology that God’s promises toIsraelare null and void. After that it was the turn of the Jews. Participants heard that Israelis have no connection to the people of the bible. Mitri Raheb, a pastor of the Evangelical Lutheran Christmas Church in Bethlehem, denied the connection between modern Jews and those of the Bible: ‘I’m sure (he said) if we were to do a DNA test between David, Jesus and I Mitri, born just across the street from where Jesus was born…the DNA will show that there is a trace. While, if you put King David, Jesus and Netanyahu (together) you will get nothing, because Netanyahu comes from an East European tribe who converted to Judaism in the Middle Ages.’ An architect of that first CATC was cleric Stephen Sizer, the vicar who on a trip toTehranmade a defense of Ahmadinejad’s Holocaust denial.

So evangelicals, straining not to see fellow Christians under the whip, follow the star toBethlehemto help the Victim in its cradle. And even as the Catholic’sMiddle Eastfootprint is being wiped out the Pope utters hardly a peep. Perhaps then we must look outside the Church, to the King of Human Rights kings. The United Nations would surely act… One would think. But when last did the UN Human Rights Council vote to condemn a Muslim country for abuse of Christian people? When did the Security Council hold an emergency debate over the perilous plight of Christians inGazaand theWest Bank?  

These, are they not, glaring ambivalences? Christianity under the whip, yet people of the church clamber to help Christian persecutors and punish Christian-protectingIsrael. Can men of the cloth, even pooling their faith, justify the perversity? Can they square the circle of anti-Israel activism mixed with indifference to Christendom’s plight hard onIsrael’s borders? What if, in good faith and without bad conscience, they cannot? And if goaded to action what would matter most to men of the cloth: attackingIsraelor defending Christians?

 

Steve Apfel           

 

Bio

Steve Apfel is Director of the School of Management Accounting, Johannesburg. 

 

WHAT ARE WE PAYING FOR DEPLOYMENT?

Deployment. A neutral nice word for… what’s the real word?  Jobs: jobs  for political buddies, for ANC cadres, nice fat-paying comfortable secure jobs. 

 So! Let them give jobs! Eskom CEO, Transnet CEO, SABC CEO,… You name it they give it.  OK, buddies get the top jobs, we’ve got a life to live. Ah, but you see there’s the rub! We pay for it, through the nose through the pocket, everyway you can think of.

 It’s through some mundane unconnected experience that we often stumble upon truth.    In December I was on the road from Jo’burg toCape Town, following the rails, fifteen hundred kms of pristine perfect railroad infrastructure. A train spotter’s dream, you would think.  What should I tell you – a whole day next to the lines and not a train spotted. But on the roads traffic. Big traffic: containers, abnormal loads, rumbling juggernauts, double-decker Translux coaches, carrying people equipment commodities goods between Gauteng hub and coast, burning fuel at R10.50 to the litre, thundering up and down the devastated highway. And next to the frenetic road train tracks demurely gleam in the sun. Oh bitter irony, oh height of blindness and folly.

 And how we pay for it! When did you shop at Pick n Pay or Checkers and connect to the political buddies that man the department of transport, the cadre deployed to head Transnet? Next time the fuel price goes up and goods in supermarkets cost more, think of it.  Had the goods travelled by rail there would be no fuel-effect. That’s one of the ways we pay for deployment, for political buddies in Transnet and Department of Transport.   Now cast your mind adrift and think of all the different and diverse ways we pay for deployment.

 

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