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BDS

The American Jewish Left has once again fallen in line with the Palestinian demand that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict always be conflated to a problem of โ€œoccupation,โ€ regardless of facts or history. By leaping to condemn Mike Pompeoโ€™s factual statement that Israeli West Bank โ€œsettlementsโ€ do not violate international law, American Jewish leftists joined forces with the BDS movement, which views the entirety of Israel as โ€œoccupied.โ€
Fatou Bensouda, the chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC) at the Hague, has decided to indict senior Israeli policymakers and military officers for committing war crimes in the West Bank and Gaza. Her decision is baseless, preposterous, and discriminatory, and it violates the ICCโ€™s own mission and rules. Bensoudaโ€™s action should be placed within the wider context of the Palestinian disinformation, delegitimization, and demonization campaign against Israel at international organizations. Israel should discredit and delegitimize the ICC in turn via aggressive political measures and collaboration with concerned liberal democracies, primarily the US.
Contemporary antisemitism has the ability to graft itself onto a variety of causes and movements. But the social and information environment in the US and Europe is strongly conditioned by virtue-signaling among elites and increasingly among portions of the middle class. Antisemitism, in part through BDS-fueled antipathy toward Israel, is becoming a signal of middle class respectability. At the same time, though left-wing Western elites remain strongly anti-national, the working classes and other parts of the middle class are becoming renationalized. These and other class conflicts will shape antisemitism in the next decades.
The dual abilities of Congresswomen Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar to arouse the ire of President Trump and spout antisemitic, anti-Israel messages with impunity has raised their profile well beyond that of other junior representatives and significantly boosted their popularity. Supporters of Israel, as well as those who care about the interests of the US, will have to strive to defeat them in the next congressional elections.
An original analysis of the global distribution of BDS Internet searches revealed disproportionate interest in countries such as New Zealand, Ireland, and Sweden, as well as in coastal US states with large academic institutions. In the former regions there are few Jews and little contact with Israel, while in the latter, there are many Jews but proportionately fewer Christian supporters of Israel. A simple explanation for these patterns is that BDS interest correlates with post-Christian contexts in which Jews are relatively absent, or with โ€œwhiteโ€ class anxiety emanating from academia. In the US, growing negativity about Israel in liberal Western communities is likely a class-based transfer of anxiety regarding โ€white privilegeโ€ onto Israel and Jews.
The persistent affiliation of the American Jewish diaspora with the Democratic party โ€“ a party that is vocally and increasingly critical of Israel โ€“ raises concern over what will happen when the US eventually elects another Democratic president. When that happens, the gap between Israel and American Jewry, one of its most powerful and necessary diplomatic assets, will be even bigger than it is today.

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