In short, he presents the BDS campaign’s positive support for Palestinian rights as if it were intended to be a negative campaign to harm Jews. The illogic of that ought to be obvious to all.<\/p>\n
But let’s dig deeper. Here’s Carver in the LRB:<\/p>\n
I would be more inclined to respect the bona fides of the BDS movement if it were equally exercised about China, Morocco, Turkey or any other country engaged in long-term illegal occupations \u2013 or, for that matter, war in Syria, torture in Egypt or suppression of dissent in Iran. But the Jewish state is judged by a different standard, which is precisely the phenomenon described by the concept of the \u2018new anti-Semitism\u2019.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
How derisively would we have treated an academic \u2013 an expert in human rights, no less \u2013 who argued back in the 1980s that those who supported a boycott of apartheid South Africa were secretly anti-white or anti-Christian unless they equally prioritised a boycott of Israel?<\/p>\n
Carver can get away with his intellectually risible logic \u2013 and get his letter published in the LRB \u2013 only because the combination of words \u201cIsrael\u201d and \u201canti-semitism\u201d make otherwise sensible people become gibbering idiots.<\/p>\n
In fact, if we apply some proper logic to Carver\u2019s position, we find that even my counter-proposition above is too kind to him.<\/p>\n
Apartheid South Africa was, and Israel still is, a product of western political, diplomatic and economic patronage. Grassroots campaigns like boycott movements can make, and have made, a difference to the viability of these European-originated settler colonial regimes. South Africa was, and Israel is, vulnerable to sanctions from western allies.<\/p>\n
Much harder to make the same case for western activism against China, Iran and Syria, for example, which are official \u201cenemies\u201d of the west.<\/p>\n
After all, grassroots action in the west is designed to discomfit not just Israel, or before it apartheid South Africa, but the western elites who prop up these regimes. Activism in the west was \/ is targeted chiefly against the complicity of western elites in these colonial offshoots.<\/p>\n
None of that is true of China, Syria or Iran. Western governments are only too ready to harm these states \u2013 and the civilians in them \u2013 if they think they can get away with it. They don\u2019t need our encouragement. Any grassroots activism directed against Syria or Iran is, at best, doomed to be wasted energy and, at worst, likely to be exploited to justify intensifying the west’s hostile manoeuvres against official enemies.<\/p>\n
Those are deductions a schoolchild could make. And yet, for some reason, they elude our esteemed professor of human rights.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
How is that highly schooled people, those who have risen to positions of authority and influence within the west’s higher education systems, so often behave as if the bit of their brain governing rational thought has turned to mush whenever the issue of Israel is raised? Let’s take the case of Richard Carver, a senior […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[34,7],"class_list":{"0":"post-2957","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-uncategorized","7":"tag-bds","8":"tag-israel-lobby"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jonathan-cook.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2957","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jonathan-cook.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jonathan-cook.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jonathan-cook.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jonathan-cook.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2957"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/www.jonathan-cook.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2957\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2970,"href":"https:\/\/www.jonathan-cook.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2957\/revisions\/2970"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jonathan-cook.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2957"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jonathan-cook.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2957"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jonathan-cook.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2957"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}