It is Time to
End US Aid to Israel and Divest from the Likud and
Right-Wing Israeli Groups
3/20/2015
last revised April 21, 2015
John Davenport
Fordham University
davenport.jj@gmail.com
Like most Americans,
I support Israel's right to exist, and believe that such a
nation had to be created after the Holocaust. So I more
than support Israel; I would fight for its existence. But
genocidal anti-Semitism was not the fault of the Palestinians
who were driven out of their towns and off their farms in the
guerilla wars before and after the creation of Israel. I condemn
rocket attacks and terrorist acts against its people; these are
not the right ways to solve the legitimate grievances of
Palestinians. But I recognize, as a simple matter of factual
history, that the Palestinian nation was supposed to be created
in the very same United Nations resolution that created Israel:
if Israel is legitimate, then Palestine must also be legitimate!
A Prime Minister who denies the right of Palestine to exist
implicitly denies the basis for his own nation, and attempts to
deceive his nation's allies in the United States.
The historical record shows the Likud's treachery: as President
Carter has explained many times, Prime Minister Begin had
promised him at the Camp David Accords that the settlements
would end, not be expanded. He reneged on that promise and his
successors continue to violate it, even though Carter's peace
was clearly an effort to secure Israel's future after decades of
war. Yet Netanyahu and his allies try to make it seem like
expanding settlements, blockading Gaza, and holding territory
taken in war are essential to Israel -- that to reject these
excrable injustices is logically equivalent to saying that
Israel should not exist. This is a brutal misrepresentation of
history and political fact.
Like many Americans,
I'm sick and tired of the Likud's cynical manipulation of US
public opinion. Stop lying to the American people, threatening
our political parties, and buying our legislators. Stop implying
that anyone who opposes the immoral policies of the right-wing
parties in Israel is thereby necessarily anti-Israel, or even
anti-semitic! That is an outrageous offense, as idiotic and
libelous as claiming that anyone who is not Republican is
anti-American. Half of Israel's own citizens clearly do not
support the Likud or other even more extreme right-wing parties.
Israel is NOT the same as the Likud or its right-wing
allies: one can certainly support Israel while rejecting
Netanyahu and condemning the Likud's despicable settlement
policies.
Given the tactics of some Jewish lobbies in the US that
function as agents of the right-wing parties in Israel --
trying to equate support of settlements and rejection of
compromise with Palestinians with support of Israel per se
-- I'm sure I, like other defenders of limited divestment,
will be accused of being anti-Zion and even anti-Semitic for
saying these things, for pointing out that their emperor is a
naked lie. For example, even the very modest request by
European governments that products made in Israeli
settlements be marked as such (so that consumers can exercise
their conscience in refusing the buy them) brought this
response from Avigdor Lieberman, Netanyahu's foreign minister:
the EU should simply "stick a yellow star on the products"
(NYT, April 18, 2015, p.A6). What a despicable statement; how
utterly offensive to people who endured the Holocaust to
compare their plight to that of a Jewish settler who has
illegally taken Palestinian land.
Enduring such slander has clearly become the price of
articulating plain moral truth in the present environment of
distorted discourse. I'm willing to pay it, because such
accusers will only thereby prove their own fanaticism. My
Jewish relatives know that I love them; my Jewish students
over the years know that I have supported them and continue to
do so (just as I do Muslim students); my Israeli friends know
that I would risk my own life to defend Israel's existence. My
wife and I taught our own daughters that they are ethnically
Jewish, and we treasure that heritage. I want them to live in
a United States where Jewish advocacy groups respect American
Jews and their relatives who oppose the Likud, and demand a
two-state solution, rather than an an environment where
powerful monied lobbies try to enforce their own ideology as
the only 'politically correct' or socially acceptable position
on Israeli-Palestine issues. I want them to be able to vote
for politicians, if they so chose, who will support Israel but
stand up to bullying by Netahayu and his right-wing
successors. We need a mass movement in the United States
aimed at this goal. For the continuing plight of the
Palestinians is one of the root causes of instability and
terrorism in the Middle East.
These points do not deny all that Israel had to endure since its
founding, including the grave injustices of the wars against it
from 1948-49 (when the UN should have acted to protect Israel and
to set up Palestine). But it is not the fault of Palestinians --
especially those living now -- that Israel was repeatedly
attached through the 1960s by Egypt, Jordan, and Syria. The UN
Charter embodies the principle of the earlier Kellog-Briand pact
declaring that territory can never be taken in war -- not even
in defensive war. The argument for holding conquered territory
as "buffer zones," is void ab inito according to these
fundamental principles of international law to which Israel, as
a creation of the UN, is obviously bound. The Likud's argument
for holding the West Bank in perpetuity is no more valid than
Stalin's argument for holding Eastern Europe. Israel's right to
defend itself does not extend to denying the Palestinians their
rightful state. Of course that does not mean that Hamas has any
right to target Israeli citizens; its last two wars, in addition
to bringing ruin on Gaza, have pushed many Israelis towards
right-wing parties. If it were not for Hamas's evils and its
mistaken strategy, Netanyahu would no longer be Prime Minister.
Moreover, beyond the basic points of moral and legal principle,
we have the pragmatic reality that today, there are only two
alternatives to (a) the two-state solution: (b) Israel could
offer complete citizenship to all Palestinians and on this basis
ask the UN to bless a one-state solution; or (c) it could
continue indefinitely occupying the West Bank, controlling East
Jerusalem, and chipping away at these territories with
settlements (themselves surrounded by massive 'buffer' areas)
while denying Palestinian residents of these areas Israeli
citizenship. The Likud and their hardliner friends will
obviously never support solution (b); for they know that in that
case, people of Jewish ancestry would quickly become a minority
of Israeli citizens. So, having in fact abandoned any serious
effort towards a two-state solution, they can only support
option (c). But this amounts to a type of Apartheid: Israel will
control foreign territory while denying anything like kind of
equal citizenship to its residents. This is what Netanyahu meant
when he promised right-wing voters that he would never support a
two-state solution; and that's what he really stands for,
whatever he may now say or whatever false symbolic gestures he
may subsequently make.
The situation has become bad enough, after this election, that I
think limited divestment against businesses tied
directly with the Likud and other right-wing Israeli parties
(for example through large donations to them) is warranted. This
could legitimately extend to businesses involved directly or
indirectly with the building of illegal settlements, or
operating primarily from such settlements. Institutions should
also be able to ensure that they are not buying products from
Jewish settlements in the West Bank, if they so chose. It could
even extend to US businesses that make large donations to US
politicians supporting Likud policies in Israel. The mass US
movement against the Likud should include calls for fund
managers to set up funds that are free of stocks in such
companies. I do not yet see a sufficient case for broader
sanctions, such as wholesale divestment from all Israeli
businesses. I would also emphasize that for US colleges and
universities to ban academic visitors from Israel, including
even Likud-supporting scholars, is stupid and counterproductive:
the aim should never be to stifle academic exchange, scholarly
debate, or freedom of speech. On the contrary, a central goal of
the anti-Likud campaign should be to restore genuine freedom to
criticize Likud policies and still be respected by colleagues
and friends within the US, and recognized as a supporter of
Israel. For again, Israel is not the Likud: to support
Israel does not require supporting Netayahu. Indeed the
opposite is true: Americans who lobby for Netayahu's policies
are, contrary to their intentions, harming Israel's long-term
interests; for they are condemning Israel to a path that is as
unsustainable as that taken by the defenders of Apartheid in
South Africa. That's the whole point.
Now critics of such sanctions, such as Robert George at
Princeton, are right that some other governments -- such as
Saudi Arabia or China -- have human rights records that are as
bad or worse than the Likud's. I would support divestment from
products made in those nations; but there are significant
differences in the instrumental value of divestment in these
cases. Against China or Russia, such a movement would be
successful only if it were a broad set of sanctions joined by
many democratic nations; that is the right way to go against
Russia and China. Such sanctions are currently impossible
against the Likud, so divestment remains a better option --
especially because divestment from significant US and European
institutions would be enough to make a real impact in Israel.
And the United States in particular bears a special
responsibility for administrations having supported Likud
hardball tactics since the time of President Carter; civil
society action needs to make up for those wrongs. Limited
divestment is one such tool. Finally, unlike grave injustices in
China and Saudi Arabia, the grave injustices of the Likud in
Israel are directly affecting American security and inflaming
threats to the United States (which the Likud does not seem to
care about at all).
George is simply wrong when he says that the basic questions of
the Israeli - Palestinian relations remain issues on which
"reasonable people can disagree," and thus questions on which
non-sectarian colleges and universities should take no position
(Tigers for Israel event at Princeton, April 16, 2015 --
online). Several of the fundamental points have long ago passed
from the realm of reasonable disagreement to matters of
fundamental moral line-drawings: indefinitely holding conquered
territories on grounds that it was taken by force, or that it is
needed as a buffer, is against the most bedrock principles of
international law. As a defender of the natural law, George --
if anyone -- should be the first to defend the peremptory force
of those principles, and the absence of any morally legitimate
disagreement with them: might never makes right, and
that is the meaning of Kellog-Briand, along with the UN Charter.
There can be no more doubt about the facts of what the Likud has
done on the ground in the West Bank than there can be doubt
about the glaciers and snow caps melting due to climate change:
the reality is visible, recorded, and not subject to
non-ideological dispute. In his co-authored book Do the
Right Thing, Professor George compares apartheid to
slavery and genocide, though the latter were obviously morally
graver crimes (Intro p.2). But as I have argued here, the
Likud's real policy rejecting any serious effort for a two-state
solution, combined with their certain unwillingness to grant
full citizenship to occupied Palestinians (including those still
living in camps outside Israel and Palestinian territories),
leaves only an apartheid-like policy of two classes of people
living in semi-one-state de facto situation
indefinitely. There is no moral room anymore for reasonable
disagreement on this matter, and that is precisely the claim of
the pro-divestment voices whom I now join.
Back
to John Davenport's editorials
Back
to John Davenport's home page