What makes an op-ed on BDS in the Washington Post by Jewish academics Steven Levitsky and Glen Weyl (more on their backgrounds courtesy of the JTA) so outrageous? While most supporters of BDS have a singular and obsessive hatred of Israel, Levitsky and Weyl open their piece by stating: “We are lifelong Zionists.”
Expressing their disappointment at the direction Israel is going is their right. Indeed, many Israelis themselves express their legitimate criticisms and opinions as part of a free press and thriving democratic system. But it is not Levitsky’s and Weyl’s prognosis that is so problematic even though it is divorced from reality and viewed from an academic ivory tower.
Levitsky and Weyl, while claiming to “love” Israel, set out a solution to Israel’s ‘problems’ that is no different from the worst Israel-haters:
For supporters of Israel like us, all viable forms of pressure are painful. The only tools that could plausibly shape Israeli strategic calculations are a withdrawal of U.S. aid and diplomatic support, and boycotts of and divestitures from the Israeli economy. Boycotting only goods produced in settlements would not have sufficient impact to induce Israelis to rethink the status quo.
It is thus, reluctantly but resolutely, that we are refusing to travel to Israel, boycotting products produced there and calling on our universities to divest and our elected representatives to withdraw aid to Israel. Until Israel seriously engages with a peace process that either establishes a sovereign Palestinian state or grants full democratic citizenship to Palestinians living in a single state, we cannot continue to subsidize governments whose actions threaten Israel’s long-term survival.
Israel, of course, is hardly the world’s worst human rights violator. Doesn’t boycotting Israel but not other rights-violating states constitute a double standard? It does. We love Israel, and we are deeply concerned for its survival. We do not feel equally invested in the fate of other states. …
We recognize that some boycott advocates are driven by opposition to (and even hatred of) Israel. Our motivation is precisely the opposite: love for Israel and a desire to save it.
We do not need to get into the argument over BDS or the one-sided charges against Israel as laid out by these self-confessed Zionist lovers of Israel who wish to boycott Israel in totality beyond the “boycott-lite” of targeting settlements.
David Bernstein (credit to the Washington Post for hosting his critical comments) makes an important point while demonstrating that Levitsky and Weyl represent a tiny, fringe proportion of American Jewry:
Yet The Post (which hosts this blog) and even more so the New York Times feel the need every so often to publish an “I’m a left-wing Jewish academic and I’m disgusted and fed up with Israel” article, even by people who have no particular expertise in the subject beyond what you might find from any interested American Jew you picked at random. I’m not sure what finding a Jew or two here or there out of 6.5 million to articulate an anti-Israel position is supposed to prove, but apparently the opinion editors think there’s a substantial market for such pieces.
HonestReporting Managing Editor Simon Plosker adds:
Steven Levitsky and Glen Weyl are the equivalent of child abusers who claim to love their children while at the same time beating them for their own good. This is just the type of love that leads to harm for both the abuser and the victim.
By promoting BDS on the pages of the Washington Post, Levitsky and Weyl have surrendered their right to call themselves Zionists or supporters of Israel. That the Post has chosen to give two token Jewish BDS supporters the time of day merely demonstrates that both the aforementioned academics and the newspaper are divorced from reality.
How is it that something like this can be published at the same time that Israelis are suffering from an appalling Palestinian wave of terror?
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