Answer to BDS is Jewish power
Posted on December 20, 2013 by Ben Cohen / JNS.org and filed under Israel, Opinion, U.S..
By Ben Cohen/JNS.org
On a virtual stroll through the website of the “U.S. Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel”—a deeply unpleasant experience, I should add—I came across an article that drew an analogy I hadn’t encountered before. Intellectually ludicrous and morally ugly, the writer compared the situation of Aida, a Palestinian refugee camp near Bethlehem, with the bombing by the German Luftwaffe of the Basque city of Guernica in 1937, during the Spanish Civil War.
The Aida camp is not the most luxurious place on earth, yet it is far from being the worst. Its residents don’t live in tents, but in proper housing that clusters tightly around dilapidated-looking streets, a common enough sight across the developing world, and certainly far better conditions than prevail in large parts of Africa or Asia. By contrast, the bombing of Guernica—the subject of a famous Picasso painting—was one of the true horrors of the 20th century. The destruction wrought by German bombers, wrote George Steer, a British journalist who witnessed it firsthand, was “unparalleled in military history.” Steer described the human cost of the raid in plain terms: “In a street leading downhill from the Casa de Juntas I saw a place where 50 people, nearly all women and children, are said to have been trapped in an air raid refuge under a mass of burning wreckage... When I entered Guernica after midnight houses were crashing on either side, and it was utterly impossible even for firemen to enter the centre of the town.”
Here, in a nutshell, is why Jews are so rightly infuriated by the movement to boycott Israel. In its quest to portray the Palestinians as the most oppressed, downtrodden people on the face of this earth, there are few comparisons to which Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) proponents won’t stoop, no matter how outlandish—whether that’s the parallel with Guernica, or the Holocaust, or apartheid South Africa, or the slander that what Israel has done to the Palestinians approximates a genocide.
http://www.jns.org/latest-articles/2013/12/20/answer-to-bds-is-jewish-power