A record that's anything but straight

Omar Barghouti's article Setting the record straight on BDS raises more questions than it answers and omits much of the important history of the BDS campaign including Barghouti's own public advocacy.

Barghouti’s views are in conspicuous conformity with those of other BDS leaders like Ali Abuminah and Ronny Kasrils.  Ali Abunimah states: “The two-state solution as typically expressed is no more than a last-ditch plan to save Zionism,”  Ronnie Kasrils suggests: “BDS will help bring about the defeat of Zionist Israel, and victory for Palestine.”

The original BDS movement was established following the NGO Forum that was held during the World Conference against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance in Durban in September 2001 ('Durban 1")

Article 425 of the Declaration issued by the NGO Forum announced:

a policy of complete and total isolation of Israel as an apartheid state...the imposition of mandatory and comprehensive sanctions and embargoes, the full cessation of all links (diplomatic, economic, social, aid, military cooperation and training) between all states and Israel.

But the NGO Forum was thoroughly discredited by overt displays of naked Jew hatred. During a BBC interview, Mary Robinson, who was then UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, said of Durban 1 that:

there was horrible antisemitism present - particularly in some of the NGO discussions. A number of people said they've never been so hurt or so harassed or been so blatantly faced with antisemitism".

The "remake" of BDS in 2005 occurred precisely because of its toxic association with Durban 1, and the singular failure of the campaign to gain any results. The proponents of BDS hoped that re-packaging BDS as a call from Palestinian civil society would give the campaign more credibility.

Despite the re-make, the BDS campaign can boast few tangible achievements. It has not managed to advance practical academic or consumer boycotts, divestment or sanctions. Since 2005, Israel's economy has enjoyed strong growth despite the intervening global economic crisis. In 2010, Israel was accepted as a member of the prestigious group of OECD countries.

The lack of success of the BDS campaign to date is at least partly due to the fact that it is deliberately and deceptively slippery about its ultimate aims. Even when its proponents appear to formulate their goals, they do so in a way that intentionally leaves much unsaid, and much unexplained. Barghouti's piece is a prime example.

He tells us that the BDS movement "has consistently advocated a rights-based approach, consistently refraining from endorsing either of the one-state or two-state solutions." Then he tells that "the position of the BDS movement" must be distinguished from the unambiguous repudiation of a two-State solution that he and other founders and leaders of the BDS movement have publicly advocated in their "personal capacity". Personal capacity? Pull the other one!

Speaking at Carleton University in Ottawa in 2010, while he was a PhD student at Tel Aviv University, Barghouti had this to say in his "personal capacity".

I clearly do not buy into the two-state solution… If the refugees were to return, you would not have a two-state solution. You would have a Palestine next to a Palestine, rather than a Palestine next to Israel.

In another interview, Barghouti stated:

If the occupation ends, would that end our call for BDS? No it wouldn't.

He wrote an even more damning piece in Electronic Intifada on 31 May 2009:

...people fighting for refugee rights like I am, know that you cannot reconcile the right of return for refugees with a two state solution. That is the big white elephant in the room and people are ignoring it ­ a return for refugees would end Israel's existence as a Jewish state.

Note that a 'right of return' is demanded not just for the limited number of 1948 refugees who are still alive but for all their descendants ad infinitum, who were born and have lived in other countries for their entire lives. Thus, somebody born and bred in Lebanon or Syria, who has never fled from anywhere, is considered to be a 'Palestinian refugee' if that person has, say, a grandfather or great grandfather who was a 1948 refugee. This is without parallel in international law. A right of compensation for lost family property can legitimately be inherited, but not refugee status itself.

It follows that the final goal of BDS, as Barghouti himself admitted in his 2009 piece, is not merely to end Israel's military and civilian presence in the West Bank but to change the demographic composition of Israel itself. This would transform the existing Jewish majority into a disempowered and vulnerable minority.

BDS thus implicitly rejects the internationally-endorsed principle of "two States for two peoples" and is at odds with the global consensus which has always recognized Israel's right to exist specifically as the nation-State of the Jewish people legitimately created under international law and the UN Charter.

The objective effect of the BDS campaign, regardless of the naive and well-intentioned wishes of some of its supporters, is thus to attack Israel's legitimacy so as to isolate it internationally and clear the way for its eventual destruction.

What is too terrible to be stated, but is implicit in the assault on Israel's legitimacy placed in historical context, is that the fate of Israel's Jewish majority if BDS realises its final goals will be mass expulsion or even extermination and, for the remnant who survive, disempowerment and the denial of basic rights. Even though the leaders of the global BDS movement are political and philosophical opponents of Hamas, this end result is the secular equivalent of the "Islamic" solution which is called for in explicit terms in the Hamas Charter.

For all his high-sounding talk about universal human rights, Barghouti's prescriptions would result in the fundamental rights of the Jewish people, including their internationally recognized right of national self-determination, being trampled into the dust. But of course, that's just a view he has expressed in his "personal capacity".