We are not obligated to take claims of caring about “Palestinian human rights” at face value from people who:
- Belong to leftist groups whose scorn for the concept of human rights worldwide is active and consistent - the loudest advocates for “Palestinian human rights” are also the biggest supporters of the bloodthirsty Maduro, Putin, Kim, Xi, Khameini, and Assad regimes. There is no such concept as “human rights” in Marxism, a philosophy that rejects the notion that individual human freedom has any value or even meaning, and the actual people claiming that their motivation re: the fate of Jews in the Middle East is “Palestinian human rights” defend every genocide, every dictator, and every human rights violation in the world as a righteous act of “anti-imperialism.”
- Actively defend the slaughter of Palestinians in particular and Muslims more generally when done by people they support. The biggest killer of Palestinians for the past 10 years has been the Assad regime, but you not only don’t support even treating a totalitarian, mass grave-generating successor to Hitler on par with what you want done to relatively democratic and cautious Israel, you support him and oppose any effort at all to control his genocidal activities. The worst things that have happened to Muslims in modern history were the genocides in Bosnia and the ongoing Holocaust in Xinjiang, and again the left alternately denies and supports these atrocities. Don’t claim that you actually care about the lives or rights of these groups when you obviously do not.
The leftist support of Arab terrorism (what you actually support, not “Palestinian human rights”) and opposition to Jewish community existence (what you actually oppose, not “the Israeli government”) goes back to Cold War loyalties. The Soviet bloc found that Jews in their prison countries were not a compliant group of people because they maintained loyalty to their religion and their community in a system where loyalty to anything but the state was a threat, around the same time that they found financing and supplying Arab terrorists was an effective strategy for weakening the West. So, the Arab bloc became pro-Soviet, forcing Israel to align with the West. The Communists’ useful idiots abroad of course fell in line, and in 1967 “anti-Zionism,” a term coined by the Polish government to justify its purge of Jews, suddenly became mandatory for leftists in the English-speaking world.
Here we are 50+ years later and the momentum has taken on a life of its own, with leftists lusting for the destruction of Israel and conservatives pledging their support of it even though neither really knows why.
This is not to say that everything Israel’s government does is acceptable to me. But I’m not obligated to believe your claims about your own motivations when they don’t jive with reality, and I can object to more than one thing at a time.
Let’s posit that China is the world’s major violator of human rights at this time on a number-of-cases basis. This is of course true, though of course many of the people who are very concerned about “Palestinian human rights” will argue it. If I said that the solution to the Chinese government’s human rights record was to dissolve the country of China, give control of the entire land to Falun Gong or some putative organization whose stated goal is to kill as many Han Chinese as possible, boycott interaction with anyone who speaks Chinese, and morally allow for the slaughter of any Chinese person anywhere in the world by anyone who deems themselves a “human rights activist,” then you would conclude two things about my plan:
- It’s morally insane.
- It’s not a serious proposal to fix the issue of human rights in China since the entity whose behavior we have to change (the Chinese government and its popular support) would never entertain as much as negotiating with it for a moment, let alone actually implement it.
This is where we are with Israel. The open goal of Fatah and Hamas is to exterminate, at a minimum, every Jew in what is known today as Israel. As part of this goal they frequently target Jews outside of Israel as well. Movements such as BDS whose stated objective is to dissolve Israel and put the land in charge of Arab terrorist organizations are not morally defensible and are not serious attempts to change the Israeli government’s behavior, they are simply pretexts for supporting atrocities.
Here is what your “not anti-Semitic” “human rights movement” actually does:
Murders people at kosher supermarkets in Paris
Refuses to recommend Jewish students from the U.S. to study in Israel
Demands that British supermarkets remove kosher sections
Demonstrate against Jews owning cafes in San Francisco
Blows up Jewish community centers in Argentina and targets Jewish institutions worldwide on a constant basis
Worships at the grave of a terrorist who killed 17 Jews in Germany
And of course,
Perpetrates the most common kind of hate crime in the U.S., not that you would know it from the way racial politics are generally covered in the news.
By the way, national origin discrimination has been illegal since the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The only reason that we need to remind people that they may not participate in it with regards to Israel is that it’s the only country that people who claim to be “human rights activists” insist on breaking the law regarding. If people were refusing to hire or do business with Pakistanis then a pledge to respect civil rights law regarding Pakistan would be equally appropriate.
This is the face of “pro-Palestinian activism” that’s about the “Israeli government’s human rights record” - constant violence and discrimination against all Jews everywhere, who are presumed collectively guilty of every real and imagined crime of the Israeli regime, and the lying, morally abhorrent BDS movement, which claims on one hand not to target anything but the government and on the other gives is full support to locking out any Israeli, and often any Jew despite no connection to Israel, from any institution it controls.
This not even to plumb the depths of dishonest word usage and conspiratorial thinking, in which many people who claim no ill will towards “the Jews” define “Jews” in some wildly nonstandard way (including as blacks, Arabs, or as those who agree with their own politics) while maintaining that they only wish to harm “Zionists” which is a notion broadly construed enough to include “anyone who goes to a synagogue in Michigan.” The more someone foams at the mouth when discussing “Zionists” the more their definition of “Zionist” converges with what a normal person calls a “Jew” - funny, that.
BDS activist Shalija Patel, in a rare moment of honesty, revealed who the legitimate targets of “anti-
Zionist” violence are:
every single Israeli, from birth to death
I guess we should be thankful that she doesn’t include random Jews walking the streets of New York and London in her conception of who can justifiably be killed. Of course, we know she does, she just hasn’t openly said it yet.
Now, if you want me to believe that you aren’t on her team? No BDS, no support for Hamas, no equivocation on people like Corbyn who literally worship the murderers of Jews as mere “Palestinian rights activists”, and maybe some concern for the piles of dead Palestinians that Syria is creating. That’s a good faith starting point. Until then you’re just another Cold War relic supporting Władysław Gomułka’s paranoia and not even able to explain why beyond shouting slogans.