Why the BDS Movement is a Major Step Backwards for Palestinians

[Mosby]

Why the BDS Movement is a Major Step Backwards for Palestinians

July 2014, the Palestinian BDS National Committee (BNC) issued revised guidelines for their proposed International Academic Boycott of Israel. The guidelines are remarkably coercive and illiberal even for the fanatical BDS movement.

They include no less than twelve different sub-sections for regulating and guiding the intended isolation of Israeli academics. Supporters of the BDS movement are advised to boycott Israeli academic events, research and development activities, funding, addresses and talks, study abroad schemes, academic honours or recognition, and the reviewing of articles in Israeli journals or the marking of Israeli higher degrees.

The American academic Cary Nelson, former President of the American Association of University Professors, has rightly called the guidelines an unprecedented attack on the concepts of "freedom of choice, agency and association that have defined higher education's principles and ideals for a century."

But what is arguably most alarming is sub-section 7 which refers to the banning of what the BNC call "Normalization Projects." This includes any academic activities or projects between Arabs/Palestinians and Israelis that involve an equitable discussion of the competing national narratives, and promote reconciliation. Conversely, such activities are permitted if they involve a recognition of the distinction between Israelis as "oppressors" and Palestinians as "the oppressed." The BNC endorses dialogue that "addresses the root causes of injustice and the requirements of justice" and contribute to "co-resistance rather than co-existence."

In short, Palestinians will only speak with Israelis who endorse the Palestinian narrative of the conflict, and agree to surrender and give up their statehood. This would mean absolute justice for the Palestinians (the Greater Palestine agenda) while creating absolute injustice for Israelis (their reduction to a minority religious group tolerated at best by an Arab majority in Greater Palestine).


http://www.abc.net.au/religion/articles/2014/10/20/4110629.htm

[TexasProgresive]

1. For those of us who are challenged by alphabet soup:

BDS=Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions
BNC= Palestinian BDS National Committee

[hack89]

2. BDS is their own worse enemy

sometimes I wonder if they have been infiltrated by the Mossad.

[aranthus]

3. No it it's not.

The author is naïve if he thinks that the Palestinian leadership has at all changed it's core positions in the last fifty years or so. the changes that they have made have been tactical, not philosophical. They don't accept Jews as a nation any more than they ever did. BDS is simply the next morphing of Palestinian rejectionism.

[King_David]

4. Yes

Hard to argue with your post

[grossproffit]

5. +1