On boycotting Israel: A pro-Israel pro-peace view

Over the past several years, Meretz USA has consistently opposed the scattered efforts on the American and European left to promote Boycott of / Divestment from / and Sanctions against Israel. Using the acronym "BDS" to refer to such measures collectively, the relatively amorphous Boycott-Divestment-Sanctions movement has been picking up speed and supporters over recent months and weeks.

Two developments in particular have caught the attention of the media and the blogosphere of late:

• On August 20, in an op-ed in the Los Angeles Times, Neve Gordon - a Jewish-Israeli professor of politics at Ben-Gurion University in Beersheba, announced his support for the BDS movement.
• On September 2, a group of filmmakers, actors, writers, musicians, academics and other public figures sent an open letter of protest to the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF). The letter condemned TIFF's decision to focus its "City to City" program this year on Tel Aviv, which - according to the protest - made the Festival, "intentionally or not ... complicit in the Israeli propaganda machine".
  
  Although not technically a call to boycott the Festival, the anti-TIFF protest has been led by activists in the BDS movement. It also bears the distinctive BDS characteristic of framing the Israel-Palestine conflict as a Manichean struggle between "Good" (the ‘indigenous Palestinians') and "Evil" (the ‘Western-imperialist Zionists').

Not every BDS initiative is identical of course; the movement is far from monolithic. Prof. Gordon, for example, is an expert on the Israel-Palestine conflict; a man who cares deeply about his country; a true activist who has been engaged for decades in on-the-ground efforts to foster dialogue, reconciliation and peace, and who remains a supporter of the two-state solution. The same cannot be said for many on the star-studded list of signatories on the TIFF protest letter.

Nonetheless, with the BDS campaign gaining prominence of late, it is important to restate five of the reasons behind Meretz USA's position that BDS is an incorrect approach to ending Israel's occupation.

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