Somehow People Are Seeing Through Our Denials Of Antisemitism

By the BDS Movement

Our words could be no clearer on the subject: we do not hate Jews. Yet for some reason, people insist on looking at more than just those words – as if other things we say could possibly be relevant to the conversation – and discovering we’ve said some pretty nasty things about Jews. It’s mystifying how they concluded we’re antisemitic.

It’s not easy being a protest movement, all the more so when you have to vie for coverage in the media, media owned and controlled largely by Jews who- no, you didn’t read that. Ignore it. We have nothing against Jews. It’s Israeli policies we oppose. For example, they have this policy of insisting they should continue to exist. Imagine that! The nation-state of the Jews, behaving as if Jews have the right to self-determination! We keep insisting we have nothing against Jews, but many of those Jew-controlled media people keep saying we do. It’s a conundrum, all right.

There’s also the thorny issue of our chosen allies. Sometimes in order to accomplish important things you have to share goals with unsavory characters and organizations. Fortunately for us, none of our partners seem to have those qualms about us. Then we get hit with accusations of antisemtism, as if allying ourselves with people who make no bones about their desire to destroy Jews somehow reflects on our ethos.

We get tired of being asked why we target Israel when there are many far worse violators of human rights: Saudi Arabia, North Korea, Iran, Syria, Sudan, blah, blah, blah, That’s not a fair question, so please stop asking it. Not that we’re going to give a satisfactory answer, mind you; “you have to start somewhere” is about as coherent as it’s going to get. And then, despite this consistency of message, this rhetoric that uses all the right human rights language, people still go and accuse us of singling out the world’s only Jewish state for vilification. Well, let us say this: if there were other Jewish states we’d have no problem vilifying them also. So much for your “antisemitism.”

How many times do we have to repeat that we are a pro-Palestinian movement? How pro-Palestinian? We emulate the Palestinian leadership: use Palestinian suffering as leverage to isolate Israel. We can’t condemn thousands of Palestinians to violent death the way Mahmoud Abbas does by refusing to allow Palestinian refugees in Syrian camps to find asylum or citizenship anywhere lest that seem a concession on the Right of Return and Israel’s demographic dissolution, but we can certainly promote a boycott movement that hurts Palestinian workers more than anyone else. If Hamas can build a campaign to isolate Israel on the backs and corpses of Gaza’s children, the least we can do is sacrifice a few thousand Palestinian wage-earners in pursuit of a similar goal. Somehow, people look at the hurt-Israel-even-at-the-cost-of-hurting-Palestinians-more and conclude that there’s some sort of hate at work.

We have no idea how they figured that out.

Please support our work through Patreon.