Full article at:
Boycott? As my Palestinian friends in the West Bank and Gaza sink deeper into depression, watching their lives ticking away without the chance to give their kids (never mind themselves) a wholly free and dignified place in the sun, the Palestinian-led BDS movement for boycott, divestment, and sanctions doesnít look to me like a nefarious ìArab plotî anymore. Now, with international energy behind it, it seems like the last best hopeóboth for Israelis and for Palestinians. Maybe the BDS campaign will really develop enough heft to counter Israelís overwhelming military advantage, by upping the economic and social cost of self-defeating supremacist-separatist policies . . . until even total equality for Palestinians might begin to seem like the less scary alternative!
Deciding to endorse BDS was not something I have come to out of hatred for Israel, despite what the talkbacks will say. I live here, after all; Iíd like to see this country get a life. Everything else has already been tried, and my friend Sam and his family are still locked up in Al Bireh and my friend Maha and her family are still locked up in Gaza City and I cannot, in good conscience, sit here in my pleasant little village near Jerusalem in silence and play it safe while they and millions of other Palestinians sit in their respective cages. Iím not an ideologue and I canít say I much like the basic idea of boycotts: they are nonviolent but they run on a kind of negative energy (donít buy, donít sell, donít invest, donít visit . . . ). On the other hand, the relentless, intensifying dehumanization of people I love and respect would seem to leave me no choice. Inaction is not an option.
Note that the BDS strategy targets, not Israel itself or Israelis as such, but rather Israeli transgressions of international law and the Israeli authorities and institutions that drive those transgressions and the Israeli cultural icons who refrain from denouncing them and the Israeli universities that cooperate with them. As a law-abiding Israeli, I am not in favor of Israelís (or anyoneís) transgressions of international law and therefore I must not support them with my silence. When I realized that the only thing still keeping me from publicly and prominently endorsing BDS was my fear of punishment (losing friends, losing a job, losing my personal freedom if the BDS activism here is finally, thoroughly, criminalized), I understood that it was time to speak out.