Berkeley's Israel boycott: The occupation's new friend [View All]

[Jefferson23]

By Bradley Burston

JERUSALEM - If I were a person who wanted to see the Israeli occupation of Palestinian land continue for as long as possible, I would be beside myself with relish at the thought of the current Boycott,Divestment,Sanctions (BDS) campaign at the school I love, the University of California, Berkeley.

A word of background. At the time when I was an undergraduate at Berkeley, to talk with Palestinian peace activists and to back a two-state solution was to risk arrest in Israel.

I strongly believed then that a Palestinian state should be established on the West Bank and Gaza land which Israel captured in the 1967 Six Day War, and that the capital of that independent nation should be in East Jerusalem.

I still do. And because when I left Berkeley, I went to Israel and have lived here ever since, I take heart in the polls which for years have shown that a majority of Israelis want to see an eventual two-state solution to their long conflict with their Palestinian neighbors.

This is something else I have learned about living in this place: You get to know acts of political narcissism when they see them. You get to know when people, in the guise of putting themselves on the line, are merely putting themselves in the spotlight. And you get to know double standards like nobody else.

That is why, when right-wing organizations like CAMERA and NGO Monitor pretend to fight bias by attacking only bias against Israel, their efforts are a dismal, baldly disingenuous failure - except, that is, in soliciting donations and publicity.

remainder in full: http://haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1161713.html