Anti Semitism isn’t only from the left wing, and the college students who’ve experienced such should clarify if it was coming from the right or left. Assuming all anti Semitism comes from the left is misguided.
Does Israel have a right to exist? (or How did the Europe thing go? How’s it going now?)
Have Arabs ever answered yes to that? (What is their end goal?)
Have Arabs refused to make bargains on terrritory based on their answer to that question? (that would have made homes for their people)
Should Israel answer aggression?
If they fight a war and win should they give back territory taken? (If so Why not any other country in history including your own?)
Who are the palestinians? How long have they been in palestine and how and why did they arrive? What were the economic reasons?
Not trolling. Always ready to know more.
So, you cannot quote a post where he says what you claimed he said in the OP. I don’t generally agree with Terr, but I suspected you were putting up a strawman.
The trouble is the nebulous condition of indefinite occupation without either annexation or repatriation. The situation now is…neither. It leaves the people there essentially stateless.
For Israel to annex the entire West Bank would mean to make all the inhabitants Israeli citizens, which Israel does not want. Marching them out of the area would be ethnic cleansing, and that much is almost universally agreed to be illegal.
So the next best idea is to allow the area to become its own nation. But the prospective leadership of that nation demands Israeli territory to be incorporated into that nation, and so the nation would be born into a state of war. Israel would smash it, and we’re right back where we are.
The next best idea is to allow the area to become its own nation, within boundaries agreeable to both sides. That seems to be impossible.
After that, it might make sense to give the area back to Jordan. But Jordan won’t accept it.
I don’t see how this is something that can be improved by putting economic pressure on Israel. What, exactly, are we pressuring them to do?
ETA: FWIW, I’m a liberal, and strongly support Israel in all of this.
From Peter ‘Punish Israel’ Beinart’s hostility to fellow Jews - The Jerusalem Post
The BDS movement, along with those who ascribe to it, is about one thing: the destruction of Israel.
It’s easy to prove.
BDS has no interest in protesting an occupation. If it did it would be boycotting Apple products, which are made in China, since that country has been occupying Tibet since 1950 (and they haven’t allowed the Dalai Lama to even visit his people since). I personally saw Peter using an iPhone at our Columbia University debate last year, so clearly Peter couldn’t care less about occupation either.
Likewise, if BDS was motivated by an opposition to occupation none of its adherents would drink Turkish coffee, since Turkey has been occupying Cyprus since 1974. And no BDS person would drink Stoli vodka in opposition to Russia’s occupation of Crimea.
BDS, moreover, cannot claim to have any interest whatsoever in Palestinian rights. If it did, it would be boycotting Egypt for destroying hundreds of Palestinian homes on the Gaza border last October to stop Hamas from smuggling weapons. Moreover, it would boycott Hamas for executing scores of Palestinians without trial (which Israel has never done, even with a trial), while shooting others through the knees for publicly questioning their legitimacy. The Palestinian Authority would also be boycotted for bringing an end to elections and censoring the press. They might also call for divestment from Lebanon for the actual apartheid there against the Palestinian population, which is legally held back from entering the medical, legal and banking fields or from participating in any other mainstream industry.
BDS similarly has no interest in protecting Arab life. If it did it would be boycotting Syria for murdering 200,000 Arabs.
BDS has no interest in promoting Arab human rights.
If it did it would be divesting from Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Egypt, Qatar, Syria, Lebanon and every other Arab country where Arabs are denied the most basic rights like freedom of press, freedom to protest their government, and the freedom to vote – all of which are guaranteed to Arabs only in Israel.
BDS, rather, trades in anti-Semitism, with its primary objective being the economic destruction of the world’s only Jewish state and the Middle East’s only democracy.
I don’t think Palestinians have ever been a state. They originate elsewhere and it is a very tricky business to say who has the right to be where over there, especially considering the economies that Jewish migration brought. My understanding is that Arabs (nations leaders) have never given up the hope that Israel will be destroyed, even if they are not interested in the area they occupy. And that this policy has been disastrous for the regular Arab people, in battles, wars and politesse.
Someone tell me if the Israelis have never offered a solution to this. I think they have, and it was no go basically because of anti jewish sentiment.
Just to be clear, this was the statement made by Terr.
And he later defended the position that there is anti-Semtic liberal by putting forth that
I can find no point that he stated anything like “any criticism of the Israeli state is inherently anti-Semitic” although he was accused early on, falsely, of stating that to be liberal was to be anti-Semitic and that it was worse on the Left than on the Right.
The op is worse than a straw man; it is making clearly false statements about what a poster said.
The closest he gets is his* latest* post in this thread in which he paints the complete BDS with the paintbrush of aiming for the destruction of Israel. But he “didn’t shoot the deputy.” 
I quoted someone’s article. I generally agree with it, although I do think some BDS followers are not anti-Semites but rather “progressive” ignorant useful idiots for the anti-Semites.
This seems like a poor argument. Lots of activists focus only on a single cause. There are plenty of reasons for this, not least of which is people only have so much time and energy. It doesn’t follow that they must have chosen that cause because of bigotry.
Ok, so - what is the “single cause”? Because as the article shows, it cannot be Palestinian Arabs’ welfare or human rights or protecting Palestinians’ lives. If you imply that the “single cause” is destruction of Israel - I agree. Whether it is because of bigotry - you decide for yourself.
Whereby it is proven that no group can legitimately protest unless they can prove that they there are… entirely and perfectly and without exception!.. the very embodiment of the virtues they demand of others? Does one need a judgement, a license to protest injustice because one is free of hypocrisy?
Then no humans need apply, hypocrisy is as common with humans as navels. OK, so I am not a saint, does that mean someone twice my size can beat me up and take my stuff?
The crux of the BDS=anti-Semitic argument in Terr’s linked pdf is summarized here:
This doesn’t strike me as a very good argument.
As pointed out upthread, the existence of a double standard doesn’t necessarily demonstrate anti-Semitism. BDS supporters could be focused on Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and Gaza and not, say, China’s occupation of Tibet for lots of reasons, among them: that Israel is a democracy whose policies can be influenced by public opinion; Israel conducts its policies with the overt or tacit support of the US and other Western nations; or the role the Israel-Palestine conflict plays in aggravating anti-Americanism in the Middle East.
Demonization: some supporters of BDS may liken Israeli policies to those of the Nazis. Some, I’m guessing most, do not.
Delegitimization: the BDS movement does not deny Israel’s right to exist. If Israeli policies in the West Bank and Gaza changed, the BDS movement would lose all steam. Or, more likely, the only remaining proponents of BDS WOULD be a fringe of true anti-Semites who deny Israel’s right to exist, but BDS would not persist as a large-scale movement.
I’d agree, if it weren’t for their insistence on the Right of Return.
Have you read the thread on “dog whistles”? To outsiders - like all y’all - it’s just another point on a list, but to both Israelis and Palestinians, it’s a dog whistle powerful enough to shatter plate glass at 100 paces, and it means the destruction of Israel. The rank and file of the BDS movement may not know that little factoid, but its leaders certainly do.
The argument that boycotts directed at only one country are legitimate because other, much worse human rights violators “won’t pay attention” is pretty weak.
Iran for instance only made an effort at bargaining over its nuclear weapons program because it was taking a serious economic hit from sanctions.
You lose moral authority by singling out Israel for boycotts and ignoring other nations.
I don’t have a problem with economic boycotts/sanctions against Israel - especially ones involving companies doing business in territory desired for a Palestinian state. But that’s only as long as economic pressures are also directed at recalcitrant Palestinian governments. Put the heat on all of them - make it clear that business as usual isn’t going to be tolerated any more.
Speaking for myself, I mostly believe such people with one caveat, which is that one of the pernicious things about being subject to prejudice is that many situations are ambiguous. Often all you know is that you were treated in an odd way. And maybe it was just odd. Or maybe it was bias. So you get can get pretty divergent answers about the prevalence of mistreatment depending on how you ask the questions.
Beyond whether it is just or not, I had understood the problem with the right of return to be both the impracticality of carrying it out seven decades later, and the demographic problem it poses for Israel if Israel is to be both a Jewish and Democratic state. But calling it “destruction” sounds like something more violent. Is that just a metaphor?
What do you think will happen when a country of 7 million people lets in 5 million people who have spent the past 70 years hating and resenting them? What do you think will happen when they start demanding that hundreds of thousands of Israelis give them “their” property back? It’ll make what’s happening in Syria look like a squabble over a parking space.
Countries routinely give back territory taken in wars. The Allies never annexed Japan, Italy, West Germany or West Berlin. Britain returned occupied French territory at the end of the Napoleonic Wars. The US returned a number of captured territories to Spanish control after the Spanish-American War.
The latter was not a false accusation; he strongly implied that it was worse on the left, and didn’t seem interested in clarifying if that was not his meaning.
Wrong.
I don’t address strawmen.
The history of the world is filled with stories of people at war or under subjugation re-entering society en masse and decades being spent sorting out who owes what to whom. I don’t understand why it’s inevitably Worse-than-Syria 2015 and not, say, Mississippi 1866.