BDS Is A Trap For Democrats

Op-ed by Lara Friedman, published in The Forward on January 28, 2019.

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Some are predicting that Israel-Palestine will be the big foreign policy issue in the 2020 Democratic primaries; others disagree.

But the fact is that Israel-Palestine is already being used as a potent weapon in today’s political arena.

Anyone who doubts this should pay attention this week, as the Senate once again considers S. 1, aka the “Strengthening America’s Security in the Middle East Act of 2019.” S. 1 was introduced by an all-GOP set of sponsors back on January 3. A grab-bag of Israel and Middle East-related measures, it also includes the “Combating BDS Act,” a controversial bill which would grant federal cover to laws passed by U.S. states that, in the name of supporting Israel, require companies and even individual contractors to sign away their right to engage in boycotts of Israel or its settlements.

The ACLU says these state laws are unconstitutional. Federal judges in Kansas and Arizona agree. So do constitutional law scholars and free speech experts.

But AIPAC and its fellow travelers, both in the GOP and among hardline pro-Israel forces, reject such views, albeit with arguments that stand up poorly to fact-checking. Instead, they have been framing these state laws, and S. 1, as political litmus tests of pro-Israel bona fides.

For the past three weeks, Senate Democrats, with the notable exceptions of Senators Dianne Feinstein, Patrick Leahy and Bernie Sanders, avoided dealing with the substance of S. 1, arguing instead over its timing and insisting on the impropriety of dealing with any business until the government was re-opened.

Now, with the government open again, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has, predictably, made S.1 the first item on the Senate’s agenda.

In doing so, McConnell, the GOP, and pro-Israel hardliners have set a political trap for congressional Democrats. Anyone who opposes the bill will be labeled anti-Israel and even anti-Semitic.

And yet, those who support the bill will be betraying the free speech rights of American citizens. And not only that; they will betray truly progressive elements in their own party, enraging the growing part of the progressive wing that is no longer willing to tolerate the political hypocrisy and cognitive dissonance of those who are progressive on all issues except Israel.

Senate Democrats are caught between a rock and a hard place. And it’s not the first time. We’ve seen this movie before.

Solidarity with the Palestinians, criticism of Israel, and support for free political speech, including in the form of boycotts, have in recent years been weaponized to attack the most significant progressive grassroots political movements, like Black Lives Matterand the Women’s March.

Legitimate disagreements about Israel have been inflated, inflamed, and cynically repurposed as political cudgels wielded to fracture progressive unity and organizing.

With S. 1 and the Combating BDS Act (and no doubt coming soon, a re-upping of the brazenly unconstitutional Israel Anti-Boycott Act) McConnell and friends are now working to undermine democratic freedoms and further codify a definition of pro-Israel that is as anathema to the real interests of Israel as it is to the American Constitution.

And as important, they are manufacturing a false binary, a “with-Israel-or-against-Israel” debate, designed to divide Democrats, to quash debate, to delegitimize and marginalize powerful emerging progressive voices, and to fracture and weaken the progressive grassroots.

Progressive leaders and elected officials can break this false binary, but only by acting with courage and conviction, re-claiming the moral high ground by affirmatively and unapologetically defining “pro-Israel” in terms that uphold liberal values, protect free speech and defend the legitimacy of differences of opinion among progressives when it comes to Israel-Palestine.

Unless and until they do, progressives will be caught between the same rock and hard place, time and again. So long as the likes of McConnell, AIPAC, Sheldon Adelson and Benjamin Netanyahu are allowed to dictate the limits of acceptable discourse and opinion on Israel, and to impose a definition of “pro-Israel” that is inconsistent with liberal values, progressives are preordained to get hammered politically.

And in that case, the role Israel will play in the 2020 election battle, primaries and general election, is easy to predict.

Op-ed by Lara Friedman, published in The Forward on January 7, 2019.

On November 26, 2018, a New York-based lawyer named David Abrams announcedthat he had filed a lawsuit against Airbnb over its decision to stop providing services in West Bank settlements.

Abrams filed the lawsuit on behalf of a “Jewish-owned” Israeli corporation based in “Judea and Samaria” — more commonly known as the West Bank — which Abrams himself had incorporated in New York in March 2016.

According to the complaint, the corporation recently registered as a user of Airbnb with the intention of acquiring properties and using Airbnb to rent them out, a plan foiled by Airbnb’s decision to no longer list properties in West Bank settlements. The suit, which claims that Airbnb is engaging in illegal discrimination and has “adopted and endorsed the anti-Semitism of Palestinian Arab policy,” is seeking damages of $75,000 and an injunction against Airbnb’s settlements-focused policy.

The lawsuit’s legal merit is dubious, given that Airbnb still operates in Israel proper and provides services to people there — and worldwide — irrespective of their religion. And the settlements are illegal according to international law, and not considered part of Israel proper even by the Israeli authorities.

But the Airbnb lawsuit is interesting for the context that gave rise to it: an ongoing and expanding campaign that seeks to exploit America’s laws, regulations, courts, and financial systems as tools to target Palestinians and to quash international support for and solidarity with them.

In principle, there’s nothing wrong with people or groups challenging discrimination, or raising alarms about work they believe supports terror or breaks U.S. law. In practice, there is cause for concern when weak, immaterial, or unsubstantiated allegations are weaponized to attack businesses, or individuals, humanitarian aid groups, and civil society organizations.

Such attacks are even more problematic when they are motivated by political and ideological goals. They are especially alarming when they target free speech, or threaten non-governmental organizations, known as NGOs, that provide vital humanitarian aid; likewise, when they undermine groups working to promote democracy, support the rule of law, or those that defend human rights, civil rights, women’s rights, or children’s rights.

And they have implications that reach far beyond the Israeli-Palestinian arena.

Abrams’s legal activism began long before the Airbnb case, in May 2015, when he established The Zionist Action Center. Six months later, he filed a whistleblower lawsuit alleging that the humanitarian organization founded by former President Jimmy Carter had defrauded the U.S. government by supporting terrorists.

The Carter Center is a highly respected non-governmental organization that works globally to improve health, resolve conflict, and strengthen democracy — including in the Israel-Palestine arena.

Abrams’s case, kept secret by the court until January 2018, argued that the Carter Center had provided material support to terrorists by way of events it had organized with Palestinian political parties and factions.

Abrams contended – based on information and photos found online – that this material support consistent of providing terrorists with, “physical assets of fruit, cookies, bottled water, and presumably other food and drink,” “a physical facility in which to participate in a meeting,” and a “hospitable place” for networking.

None of this was paid for with U.S. funds. But Abrams argued that it still violated the terms of contracts the Carter Center had signed with the United States Agency for International Development because of something known as the False Claims Act.

Every USAID contract requires its signatory to affirm that in the past ten years the partner organization did not provide any “material support” to terror.

This may seem like a fair expectation, but the term “material support” is treacherously ambiguous. After 9/11, the U.S. adopted a legal definition of “material support” that was both expansive and opaque; in the years since, courts have broadened and blurred its definition further. And Abrams leveraged this ambiguity in his attack against the Carter Center.

Despite this ambiguity, most reasonable people would not view the Carter Center’s convening of dialogues aimed at facilitating peaceful discourse and urging Hamas to recognize Israel’s right to exist, give up violence, and accept previous peace agreements, as material support for terror.

The Department of Justice seems to agree. On May 31, Abrams’s case against the Carter Center was dismissed. Not only was it without merit, but, the DOJ wrote in its motion, “at its essence, the complaint articulates a difference in opinion with the Carter Center about how to resolve the conflict in the Middle East.”

U.S. law defines terrorism as violent acts intended to intimidate or coerce a civilian population or a government’s policy. And U.S. anti-terror laws and material support regulations are intended to target those who plan, carry out, and fund terrorism.

These laws are reasonable and just, as is the False Claims Act, intended to punish contractors who defraud U.S. taxpayers, and to enable “whistleblowers” to help by bringing non-public information to the government’s attention.

But Abrams appears to have developed a strategy that exploits these laws not to fight terrorists or their funders, but to intimidate and coerce NGOs into abandoning moral, humanitarian, political and financial support for Palestinians. And he seems to be using the False Claims Act not as a tool to go after NGOs that commit genuine fraud or that misuse taxpayer funds, but as a weapon to attack NGOs that he considers anti-Israel.

Indeed, Abrams is not shy about the political motivation behind his work. In a recent article entitled “Suing Anti-Israel Organizations,” Abrams briefly acknowledged “the right of everyone to criticize Israel” before making clear that his lawsuits are meant to serve “as notice on all these NGOs that their anti-Israel activities are being watched carefully and that advocates will react quickly and surely, should they step over the legal line.”

And he does intend it as a notice on “all these NGOs.” In September of 2018, Abrams boasted that he had two more False Claims Act cases pending and another two under preparation, which may or may not include the three new lawsuits he announced on December 18, 2018, each reportedly targeting a university.

Worse, Abrams is not alone. Legal attacks like these are being launched by an array of individuals and groups in the U.S., Europe, and Israel, including Israel’s International Legal Forum (which recently became an official contractor for the Israeli Ministry of Strategic Affairs) and Shurat Hadin; the American Center for Law and Justice and the Lawfare Project; and UK Lawyers for Israel. They are bolstered by NGO Monitor, a Geneva-based organization, largely funded by U.S. donors, that has worked for years to build the case that virtually all work with Palestinians is tainted by terror.

The DOJ sided with reason in the case of the Carter Center. But Abrams had better luck with another NGO target, Norwegian People’s Aid, against which he filed a whistleblower lawsuit in July 2015.

Like in the Carter Center case, Abrams alleged that NPA violated the False Claims Act. He argued that the Norwegian NGO’s programs in Gaza and Iran involved material support for terror, which in turn violated anti-terror certifications NPA signed in connection with USAID-funded work elsewhere.

Abrams laid out his strategy against NPA in a November 2018 article, which involves taking advantage of the ambiguous meaning of “material support.”

“Material support of terrorism is not limited to obvious matters such as providing cash or weapons,” Abrams wrote. Rather, it can include “virtually any support or assistance — such as providing dispute resolution training.”

Similarly, Abrams suggested taking advantage of the fact that the anti-terrorist certification applies not only to activities funded by USAID, but to all of a grantee’s operations, regardless of who funds them.

In contrast to the Carter Center case, the U.S. government opted to support the case against NPA, leaving the NGO two options: pursue a potentially long and costly legal battle which, if it ended in a loss, could bankrupt the entire organization, or accept a settlement.

NPA opted to settle. “Although we have disagreed on the fairness of the claim,” NPA stated, they agreed to settle “due to the estimated costs, resources and time necessary to take this case to trial” and their desire “to focus on our mission of making the world a safer and more just place.”

NPA paid the U.S. $2,025,000 in the settlement.

And the Zionist Advocacy Center’s cut as the “whistleblower” amounted to more than $300,000.

While awaiting movement on his False Claims Act cases, Abrams quietly filed a different kind of legal attack in January of 2016. He petitioned the Internal Revenue Service to revoke the charitable status of Médecins Sans Frontières, also known as Doctors Without Borders.

Abrams alleged that MSF was guilty of “collaboration with Hamas in terms of provision of medical services” in the Gaza Strip. Like in the NPA and Carter Center cases, his evidence consisted of public information gleaned from the Internet.

In August 2018, Abrams announced that the IRS had rejected his petition against MSF. But others were already adopting similar tactics, apparently seeking to undermine the financial operations of targeted organizations.

In October 2018, the British organization UK Lawyers for Israel announced that PayPal had cut off services for the NGO War on Want, following a complaint to UK authorities by UKLFI and the U.S.-based Lawfare Project. In June 2018, UKFLI and the Lawfare Project filed a similar complaint against an NGO called Medical Aid for Palestinians.

Over the course of 2018, UKLFI claimed credit for Citibank and Arab Bank cutting off services to Defense for Children International-Palestine; announced it had pressured a provider into cutting off financial services to a U.S. foundation over its support for several Palestinian NGOs; and boasted that it had gotten Visa, MasterCard, and American Express to cut off services for four Palestinian NGOs.

And on December 21, 2018, it was announced that a U.S. financial service provider had blocked accounts linked to the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement — reportedly in response to a complaint lodged by the Israeli lawfare group Shurat HaDin, working in coordination with the Israeli Ministry of Strategic Affairs.

On October 31 , 2018, Abrams and the International Legal Forum teamed up again to file another kind of politically motivated lawsuit related to Israel.

Six months earlier, activists in Durham, North Carolina had campaigned against what they claimed was the militarization of civilian policing, calling on the city to abstain from police exchanges with Israel. Following controversy and debate, the Durham City Council declined to pass a resolution in the matter, instead adopting a non-binding statement.

In a Facebook post announcing the new lawsuit, Abrams wrote, “Durham’s recent resolution against police exchanges with Israel is a violation of the North Carolina constitution.” Based on this allegation, he and the ILF – representing two “volunteer policemen in Israel” – are suing the City of Durham for illegal discrimination.

The legal merit of the lawsuit appears to be dubious in the extreme: The “resolution” at the core of the complaint does not exist, and no actual discrimination against the plaintiffs is alleged to have taken place.

But this lawsuit is an example of another tactic in the lawfare campaign against those supporting or showing solidarity with the Palestinians: lawsuits filed for the apparent purpose of chilling free speech and political activism, otherwise known as strategic lawsuits against public participation, or “SLAPP suits .”

This isn’t Abrams’s first Israel-related suit of this nature. In July 2016, he sued the American Studies Association, alleging that by refusing to admit his client, “Athenaeum Blue & White, an Israeli not-for-profit” as a member, the ASA engaged in an unlawful boycott of an Israeli academic institution.

But Abrams client, Athenaeum Blue & White, has no online presence and was incorporated in New York by Abrams himself on the day he filed the lawsuit.

Similarly, in June 2016, Abrams sued the National Lawyers Guild, claiming anti-Israel discrimination after the NLG declined to publish in its dinner journal an advertisement Abrams submitted on behalf of another client, “Bibliotechnical Athenaeum.” That client, too, was incorporated in New York by Abrams himself three months prior to the filing of the lawsuit, and as of this writing has no online presence other than a website consisting of five seemingly random posts dating between April and November 2016. They provide neither information about what the organization does nor any names or contact information for anyone associated with it.

It’s the same client Abrams is representing in the case against Airbnb.

These efforts would be alarming enough if they only affected Palestinians and their supporters. But the implications go much further.

The tactics targeting NGOs like the Carter Center and NPA threaten America’s ability to work with critical partners around the world, laying the groundwork for such NGOs to be attacked by litigants pursuing any chosen political agenda, or driven by strictly pecuniary motives. In doing so, these tactics threaten to undermine America’s ability to address critical challenges and promote its own interests – from responding to humanitarian crises, to promoting democracy and rule of law, to preventing actual terrorism.

Similarly, the pressure on financial service providers to cut services to Palestinian NGOs and groups that work with them, based on “six-degrees-of-terrorist-contamination”- style allegations, risks creating a how-to guide for parties with any political axe to grind to defame and de-fund targeted organizations, regardless of the nature of the work these organizations do or the weakness of the allegations against them.

And the questionable lawsuits threaten free speech, waste U.S. courts’ time and squander American taxpayer money.

On October 31 , 2018, Abrams and the International Legal Forum teamed up again to file another kind of politically motivated lawsuit related to Israel.

But Abrams client, Athenaeum Blue & White, has no online presence and was incorporated in New York by Abrams himself on the day he filed the lawsuit.

It’s the same client Abrams is representing in the case against Airbnb.

These efforts would be alarming enough if they only affected Palestinians and their supporters. But the implications go much further.

And the questionable lawsuits threaten free speech, waste U.S. courts’ time and squander American taxpayer money.

Op-ed by Peter Beinart, published on The Forward on January 3, 2019.

On New Year’s Day, a young woman rushed the stage at the “MegaEvent” held in Jerusalem for participants in Birthright, the program that takes young American and other Diaspora Jews to Israel on a free ten-day trip.

She unfurled a banner that declared “Birthright Sponsored by Adelson, Trump, Netanyahu” and directed viewers to CostofBirthright.Com, a website sponsored by the anti-occupation Jewish group, If Not Now. Then she was hustled off stage

It’s the new normal. Since June, 22 Diaspora Jews have either walked off Birthright trips in protest against their tour guide’s refusal to take them to meet Palestinians or been kicked off for raising uncomfortable questions about Israeli policy. And If Not Now activists and members of Na’amod, a similar group in Britain, have distributed anti-occupation literature to people about to embark on Birthright trips at airports.

All this is both necessary and tragic.

It is necessary because taking Diaspora Jews to Israel without giving them the chance to hear from Palestinians who live as non-citizens under Israeli control in the West Bank is dishonest and immoral. It’s like organizing a tour to America in the 1950s without introducing participants to blacks in the segregated south.

Birthright’s defenders may argue that the trip isn’t about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, that it’s about using Israel to foster Jewish identity. But Jewish identity is itself inextricably bound up with the way Jews treat the strangers in their midst. The Torah makes that point 36 times.

Still, if the protests against Birthright are essential, they’re also sad. They’re sad because protesting Birthright isn’t like protesting Netanyahu or Trump. Birthright serves a vital purpose.

For several decades now, non-Orthodox American Jews have been conducting a mass experiment. They have raised children radically ignorant of Jewish texts and tradition in a country that offers Jews radical acceptance. The result: Radical assimilation. What’s heartbreaking isn’t that young American Jews choose to assimilate. It’s that many can’t even make an informed choice because they don’t know enough about Judaism to know what they’re giving up.

Birthright is an answer to that. It’s not the only—or even the best—answer. If I had a billion dollars, I’d create state of the art, low-cost, Jewish camps and day schools.

But Birthright is a good answer. It’s a good answer because going to Israel—and experiencing a Jewish society in the land where Jewish history was born—can be life-transforming. It offers young American Jews a glimpse of the beauty and grandeur of Jewish tradition. It helps them appreciate what they have inherited as they begin thinking about what they want to hand down.

Ideally, Birthright would thrive. But it can’t thrive if it makes moral blindness the price of Jewish connection.

Birthright faces largely the same dilemma as another institution designed to connect young American Jews to Judaism: Hillel, the Jewish campus organization. Both claim to be apolitical. Both define “apolitical” as shutting out Palestinian voices, Birthright by rarely including Palestinians on its tours, Hillel by only permitting Zionists to speak at its events.

The problem is that talking about Israel without listening to Palestinians is intensely political.

It’s a form of erasure, and it breeds dehumanization. When educational institutions act as if Palestinian voices don’t matter, they make it easier for politicians to act as if Palestinian lives don’t matter.

Young liberal American Jews know this, which is why they’ve created Open Hillel to protest Hillel’s speaking guidelines.

It’s why they’re protesting Birthright.

If Birthright continues on its current path, fewer and fewer liberal Jews will go. Its clientele will become less and less representative of young American Jews as a whole. And it will increasingly fail to fulfill a mission we should want to succeed.

The alternative is simple: Take Birthright kids to meet Palestinians in the West Bank.

From a security perspective, that’s eminently doable. With less money, organizations like Breaking the Silence, Encounter and Extend run such trips all the time. While they’re at it, participants can meet settlers too. Birthright should let settlers explain why they enjoy swimming pools and irrigated lawns while the Palestinians down the road make do with a few hours of water per day.

This kind of intellectual and moral glasnost would mostly end the protests that are currently plaguing Birthright. It would help sustain its future as an institution that serves American Jewish kids irrespective of political belief.

So why doesn’t Birthright do it?

Because it’s more afraid of alienating racist donors like Sheldon Adelson and the Israeli government than alienating the young people it’s meant to serve.

Some Birthright officials may also feel that if young American Jews encounter Palestinians, it will undermine their connection to Israel and Judaism. But that’s wrong. It will simply change the nature of that connection.

Instead of seeing Israel as a Jewish Disneyland, young American Jews will see it as a country—like their own—that is both precious and in urgent need of moral repair.

What could be a more authentic way to experience Israel, whose very name means not adoration or reverence but struggle.

Young American Jews are ready for that struggle. In fact, they are demanding it. Birthright’s future will rest, in large measure, on whether it is ready too.

Op-ed by Peter Beinart, published in The Forward on November 19, 2018.

It turns out that Ilhan Omar, who this month became the first Somali American and the first Muslim refugee ever elected to Congress, modulates her views to fit her audience.

In other words, she’s a politician.

In February of last year, before she launched her congressional campaign, Omar praised the movement to boycott, divest from and sanction Israel.

In a speech opposing an anti-BDS bill in the Minnesota State legislature, Omar said she didn’t “want to be part of a vote that limits the ability of people to fight towards justice and peace.” She also compared the BDS movement to people who “engage[d] in boycotts” of apartheid South Africa.

A few months before election day, however, at a candidate forum in a local synagogue, Omar changed her tune. “The BDS movement,” she declared, was “not helpful in getting that two-state solution.”

She added, “I think the particular purpose for [BDS] is to make sure that there is pressure, and I think that pressure really is counteractive. Because in order for us to have a process of getting to a two-state solution, people have to be willing to come to the table and have a conversation about how that is going to be possible and I think that stops the dialogue.”

Then, last week, Omar recalibrated again.

Her campaign told the website Muslim Girl that “Ilhan believes in and supports the BDS movement, and has fought to make sure people’s right to support it isn’t criminalized. She does however, have reservations on the effectiveness of the movement in accomplishing a lasting solution.”

When a local Jewish journalist asked about the apparent contradiction, Omar insisted she hadn’t changed her views: “I believe and support the BDS movement and have fought to make sure people’s right to support it isn’t criminalized,” she explained. “I do, however, have reservations on [the] effectiveness of the movement in accomplishing a lasting solution. Which is what I believe I said at the forum.”

It’s not what she said at the forum. Omar appears to support the BDS movement with reservations.

In the heat of the campaign, in front of a Jewish audience, she left out the support part.

That’s unfortunate. Politicians should be rigorously honest even when it means telling people things they don’t want to hear. Omar didn’t do that.

She’ll be right at home in Congress.

But it’s not Omar’s flip-flops that have enraged her conservative critics. It’s the fact that she supports BDS at all.

Since her election, columnists in The Washington Examiner and The New York Post have called her an anti-Semite.

The argument equating BDS with anti-Semitism isn’t new. In the organized American Jewish community, it’s a cliche. Omar’s case offers another opportunity to explain why it’s wrong.

The claim that the BDS movement is inherently anti-Semitic can be divided into two parts.

The first concerns the movement’s means and the second concerns its ends.

Argument number one is that it’s anti-Semitic to single out Israel for boycotts unless you’re also boycotting every other government that commits equal — or graver — human rights abuses.

In a formulation popularized by Natan Sharansky, holding Israel to a “double standard” is one of the primary features of contemporary anti-Semitism.

The problem with this argument is that anyone who engages in boycotts is likely guilty of double standards.

There are an infinite number of injustices in the world, and even if one could rank them in order of severity, very few people choose their causes that way.

More often, they protest injustices that have particular meaning to them.

In the 1970s, for instance, American Jewish groups boycotted the Bolshoi Ballet when it visited the United States in order to protest the Soviet Union’s treatment of Russian Jews.

Were those Jewish groups guilty of a double standard? Absolutely.

However bad Moscow’s anti-Semitism, it paled in comparison to the crimes committed in the 1970s by Uganda’s Idi Amin or Cambodia’s Khmer Rouge.

But the Jews who protested the Bolshoi weren’t bigots. They simply had a greater personal investment in fighting one form of injustice than in fighting another.

A similar logic applies to many supporters of BDS.

Look at Canary Mission, the website that charges American students and faculty who support BDS with “hatred” of “Jews,” and you’ll notice something: a vastly disproportionate number of the “haters” are Palestinians, Arabs or Muslims.

That’s not surprising. BDS is a Palestinian movement.

It dates from 2005, when Palestinian civil society groups made a public “call” for people around the world to boycott Israel.

Since Palestinians are an Arabic speaking and mostly Muslim population, it’s entirely predictable that Palestinian, Arab and Muslim Americans would find that call particularly compelling — just as American Jews were particularly drawn to boycotts that targeted Soviet oppression of Jews.

It’s no coincidence that the members of Congress who support BDS are Omar, a Muslim American, and Rashida Tlaib, a Palestinian American.

But why, the double-standards-equals-anti-Semitism-crowd might respond, aren’t they boycotting Saudi Arabia, Syria or Iran?

Don’t those regimes oppress Arabs and Muslims too?

In fact, Omar does support boycotting Saudi Arabia.

In general, however, the reason those regimes have not elicited BDS-style movements is simple: There’s been no mass call for BDS from inside those countries themselves.

In Iran, for instance, dissidents mostly oppose US sanctions.

People don’t generally boycott countries unless the people suffering inside those countries ask them to.

It was the same in the 1980s.

Why was there a global movement to boycott apartheid South Africa but not Amin’s Uganda or Mobutu Sese Seko’s Zaire? In large part because the African National Congress called for a boycott and the political opposition in Uganda and Zaire did not.

There’s a second argument for why BDS equals anti-Semitism, which doesn’t concern the boycott itself but rather than goals the boycotters espouse.

In the 2005 statement that launched BDS, Palestinian civil society groups called for boycotting Israel until it cedes control of the territories it conquered in 1967 (the West Bank, Gaza Strip, East Jerusalem and Golan Heights), offers “full equality” to Palestinian citizens living inside Israel’s 1967 lines, and allows the return of Palestinian refugees.

Critics argue that the second and third criteria would make it impossible for Israel to remain a Jewish state. And they’re probably right.

The BDS movement doesn’t officially oppose the existence of a Jewish state, but some of its most prominent advocates do.

This is why I oppose BDS. (I do support boycotting settlements in the West Bank). Its goals are inconsistent with my own. But opposing the movements’ goals and calling them anti-Semitic are very different things.

There’s nothing inherently bigoted about opposing a people’s desire for an ethnically based state.

In recent decades, after all, many peoples have demanded their own state: Kurds, Basques, Catalans, Kashmiris, Scots, Quebecois and Igbos, not to mention Palestinians.

Foreign observers generally weigh these claims against the alternatives: Would a Basque state be economically viable? What would happen if the Kurds seceded from Iraq? Can Scots secure their individual and communal rights within the United Kingdom?

Underlying these pragmatic arguments is the recognition that an ethnic majority state is only one of the varieties of legitimate options in today’s world.

If it’s not — if every people has the right to its own country — then why isn’t opposing a Palestinian state as bigoted as opposing a Jewish one?

The acid test of bigotry isn’t whether you support a particular people’s right to a state of its own. It’s whether you support that people’s right to enjoy citizenship, free movement, due process and the right to vote in any state.

It’s not anti-Kurdish to oppose a Kurdish state but it is anti-Kurdish to deny Kurds both their own country and equal treatment in the countries of Iraq, Iran, Turkey and Syria, in which they live.

Similarly, what makes Hamas and Islamic Jihad’s political vision anti-Semitic isn’t their opposition to a Jewish state per se. It’s their insistence that Jews live in a single state as political and religious inferiors.

Naftali Bennett’s political vision is bigoted against Palestinians for the same reason.

He would both deny them their own state and permanently deny them citizenship in the one state in which Jews and Palestinians both live.

Critics might respond that there’s something fundamentally different about dismantling an ethnically based state like Israel and opposing the creation of one.

By that standard, the Jews who opposed Zionism in the early twentieth century weren’t anti-Semites but the Jews who oppose it today are.

This logic requires viewing the Satmar Rebbe — who this summer vowed to “continue to fight God’s war against Zionism” — as an anti-Semite, which is awkward.

But it’s incoherent for other reasons as well.

Take the case of apartheid South Africa.

It was an ethnically based state; the only one in the world built around Afrikaner identity.

Yet dismantling it didn’t constitute anti-Afrikaner bigotry.

My point isn’t that Israel is an apartheid state.

Inside the green line, I don’t think it is.

But the apartheid example shows that it’s possible to rescind an ethnic group’s self-determination without being bigoted against it.

Ethnically based states are neither inherently good nor inherently bad. What matters, ultimately, is what kind of government best protects the rights of all the people in a given space.

Can BDS supporters and anti-Zionists be anti-Semitic?

Of course. So can BDS opponents and Zionists.

Some white nationalists, for instance, embrace Israel precisely because it gives the Diaspora Jews they want to get rid of somewhere to go.

But the argument that Ilhan Omar is anti-Semitic because she supports BDS makes no sense.

In the past, such arguments haven’t needed to make sense.

The whole point of branding BDS as anti-Semitic has been to quash a conversation about the injustices that gave rise to BDS in the first place.

The election of Omar and Tlaib is a sign that this conversation may finally be breaking out in Washington DC.

It’s long overdue.

Peter Beinart is a Senior Columnist at The Forward and Associate Professor of Journalism and Political Science at the City University of New York.

Op-ed by Peter Beinart, published in The Forward on October 9, 2018

When I was detained at Ben Gurion airport in August, Benjamin Netanyahu apologized. So why isn’t he apologizing to Lara Alqasem? After all, I was only detained for an hour; she’s been detained for a week. I was allowed into the country; she’s facing deportation.

One answer is that while at the University of Florida, the 22-year-old Alqasem participated in a group that supports boycotting Israel. That runs afoul of a law Israel passed last year granting authorities the right to bar people active in pro-boycott organizations from entering the country.

But that same law also gives Israel the right to bar people who publicly call for boycotting only Israeli settlements in the West Bank, something I’ve done.

I’m as guilty as her. Perhaps more so because Alqasem now denies that she supports boycotting Israel at all while I still proudly scour the labels at my local wine store to make sure I’m not buying vino from the West Bank.

The more honest answer is that Alqasem is a Palestinian-American and I’m an American Jew. And the Israeli government assumes that when it comes to Americans of Palestinian, Arab or Muslim descent, its actions won’t garner much attention from the American press or much outrage from the American government. It can do pretty much whatever it wants.

That assumption, sadly, is correct.

Because of its man-bites-dog quality — because American Jews aren’t usually hassled at Ben Gurion — my detention garnered a story in The New York Times.

Alqasem’s story is deemed less newsworthy because it’s less unusual. The Arab American Institute has chronicled hundreds of cases of Arab American visitors to Israel “being detained for hours of questioning; being denied entry and forced to purchase a ticket to return home; being forced to surrender their American passports and made to secure, against their will, a Palestinian ID document; being denied permission to exit; being strip searched; or having their possessions stolen or deliberately destroyed by Israeli airport inspectors.”

The United States government actually tells Palestinian and Arab Americans to expect to be hassled when entering Israel. In 2008, the State Department noted that “American citizens whom Israeli authorities judge may be of Palestinian origin are likely to face additional, and often time consuming, questioning by immigration and border authorities.” In 2015, it declared that “the US government remains concerned at the unequal treatment that Palestinian-Americans and other Arab-Americans receive at Israel’s borders and checkpoints.”

But that concern doesn’t translate into meaningful pressure. The Arab American Institute’s James Zogby has presented American officials with “documentary evidence” about the abuse dished out to Arab and Palestinian Americans entering Israel. The response: “my government has shrugged its shoulders as if to say ‘We tried. There is nothing more we can do.’”

That’s Alqasem’s problem: In both the American press and the American government, Israel’s mistreatment of Palestinian and Arab Americans is so normalized that it elicits merely a shrug.

It’s dog bites man.

But why shouldn’t people like Lara Alqasem receive extra scrutiny? Aren’t Palestinian Americans more likely to commit violence in Israel than nice American Jewish boys like me?

There are a couple of problems with that logic. First, even if it were true, liberal democracies shouldn’t engage in racial, religious or ethnic profiling because it’s a form of collective punishment. Rather, they should scrutinize individuals who, as individuals, have acted in such a way as to suggest they pose a greater threat.

Imagine that the United States gathered evidence suggesting that Israeli visitors to the United States are more likely to commit crimes than Swedish visitors, and then decided to routinely question Israeli tourists for hours, often going through their cell phones and laptops, while Swedes were waived on through. The Anti-Defamation League would go nuts.

Besides, it’s far from clear that Palestinian or Arab Americans do pose a greater threat of violence in Israel than American Jews. Between January and April of this year, the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs recorded 84 acts of violence or property damage by settlers against Palestinians in the West Bank. The number is likely far higher. Because Israel punishes settlers for violence so rarely (according to the Israeli human rights group Yesh Din, only three percent of Israeli police investigations of ideologically motivated crimes by Israeli Jews against West Bank Palestinians resulted in convictions between 2005 and 2017), many Palestinians don’t bother to report settler attacks. Even when Yesh Din itself had documented an attack, only about four in ten Palestinians in 2016 reported it to the Israeli police.

According to Oxford lecturer Sarah Hirschhorn, author of City on a Hilltop: American Jews and the Settler Movement, American Jews constitute a disproportionate share of the settler population. So if Israel singles out Palestinian-Americans like Alqasem for scrutiny because they supposedly pose a threat of terrorism, why shouldn’t it also single out American Jews traveling to settlements in the West Bank? Or at least those traveling to settlements like Yitzhar that are known for being particularly violent.

The answer is obvious: Because settlers would cry discrimination. And since settlers — unlike West Bank Palestinians — are Israeli citizens, their voices carry more weight with the Israeli government. They carry more weight with the American government too. America’s current ambassador to Israel, David Friedman, served for many years as the head of a charity that raised money for the settlement of Bet El.

The abuse of vulnerable people often hides in plain sight. Many women — and some men — knew how prevalent sexual harassment and assault were in the United States. But until a mass movement changed America’s political culture, many abusers enjoyed impunity. (Some still do).

It will take another mass movement for justice to end the impunity that allows Israel to detain Lara Alqasem, and the double standard that makes my detention a bigger story than hers.

I hope it comes speedily, in our days.

Op-ed by Peter Beinart, published in The Forward on August 13, 2018

Like many Jewish parents, I try to create memorable Jewish experiences for my kids. Last weekend I can say, with some confidence, that I succeeded.

The weekend started on Rhodes, the Mediterranean island on which my maternal grandmother’s family spent more than four centuries following their 15th century expulsion from Spain. We travelled there for my mother’s seventieth birthday, and the trip culminated on Friday night when I led Kabbalat Shabbat and Maariv services at the island’s lone surviving synagogue. My ancestors might have found my Ashkenazi tunes jarring. But when I descended the bimah, my kids ran to me, and I knew it was an experience we would not soon forget.

Then, on Sunday, we flew to Israel for my niece’s Bat Mitzvah, where I was detained and interrogated about my political activities at Ben Gurion airport. We won’t soon forget that Jewish experience either.

It began when we handed our passports to the official at security. He breezed through the passports of my wife and two kids, then looked at mine and made a call. After hanging up, he asked me—for reasons I can’t explain—the names of my father and grandfather. Then he asked me to step aside for extra screening.

Our family entered a modest room filled with Israeli tourist photographs and a widescreen television playing the Israeli news. Three Asian women sat quietly. Later, a young man with a beard, a tall black man and an elderly couple—none of them speaking Hebrew—came and sat down too. My son and I debated the relative merits of him preparing the Devar Torah for his upcoming Bar Mitzvah or playing games on his phone.

After a while another security official, a middle aged man with closely cropped hair, escorted me alone to a small room and took a seat behind a desk. He asked why I was in Israel and I told him about the Bat Mitzvah. He asked who I know in Israel and I mentioned two families that have recently returned to the country after attending my kids’ Jewish day school in New York. I got the feeling these weren’t the answers he wanted.

Then the political questions began. Was I involved in any organization that could provoke violence in Israel? I said no. Was I involved in any organization that threatens Israel democracy? I said no—that I support Israeli organizations that employ non-violence to defend Israeli democracy.

Then he told me that on my last trip to Israel I had participated in a protest, which is true. He asked where it occurred and I answered “Hebron.” He asked its purpose and I answered that we were protesting the fact that Palestinians in Hebron and across the West Bank lack basic rights. (I wrote about the protest at the time). He asked how I had become involved in the protest and I mentioned The Center for Jewish Nonviolence. He asked if the Center had incited violence, and I replied that, as its name suggests, it practices non-violence. My interrogator then replied that names could be misleading. The government of North Korea, he observed, calls itself a democracy but is not. I told him I didn’t think the Center for Jewish Nonviolence and the North Korean government have much in common.

I don’t remember all the dialogue that followed but two things stand out. First, my interrogator never offered any legal basis for my detention. A recently passed law permits Israel to bar entry to people who advocate boycotts of Israel or Israeli settlements in the West Bank—and I have done the latter. But my interrogator never mentioned boycotts.

What he did do was ask, again and again, for the names of objectionable organizations I was associated with. His definition of objectionable, however, kept changing. At one point he asked about groups that incite or provoke violence. At another he asked about groups that threaten Israeli democracy. At another he asked about groups that promote anarchy. Then he simply asked if I was connected to any organization—or involved in any activity—that he should be concerned about. I laughed and told him that if I thought he should be concerned about it I wouldn’t be involved. But his imprecision was telling: He established no consistent or objective standard for my detention. His standard was whether I planned to cause trouble—trouble meaning whatever he and his superiors wanted it to mean.

Finally, I asked him why a democracy should object if people peacefully protest. He responded that if he came to the United States to protest America’s occupation of native lands, the United States government would put him on the first plane back. That’s not true, I began to insist. Then I realized that with Donald Trump as President, I couldn’t be entirely sure. I wonder how many other security officials across the world are similarly emboldened by the realization that America’s president doesn’t believe in the principles of free expression that America’s Constitution is supposed to protect.

The session ended when my interrogator asked me, point blank, if I was planning to attend another protest. I answered truthfully: No. With that I was sent back to the holding room.

The conversation was depressing but not frightening. I never felt scared or victimized. I’m a white American Jewish journalist with influential Israel and American Jewish friends. My situation wasn’t remotely comparable to the black, brown and non-Jewish visitors with whom I shared the holding room. I may not have felt protected by Israeli law but I felt entirely protected by my national, religious and class privilege.

My moral dilemma lay in how to use that privilege. Before the trip I had asked friends at the New Israel Fund what to do if I were detained. They had generously put me in touch with the renowned Israeli human rights lawyer Gaby Lasky. Upon returning to the holding pen I knew that by calling Lasky and asking her to intervene, I could likely end my ordeal—something the people sitting around me could not do. I looked at my wife—who would not leave me and as a result was about to miss the first evening of Bat Mitzvah activities for her sister’s daughter—and made the call. A few minutes later I was free. The whole experience took just over an hour.

My detention is one more, not particularly significant, example of how Trump has emboldened Netanyahu. An Israeli government led by men who respect neither liberal democracy nor the rule of law now knows it has kindred spirits in Washington. A week before my detention, something similar happened to my friend and former colleague Simone Zimmerman. The day before, Netanyahu all but incited violence against the New Israel Fund’s director in Israel. The month before, his government pushed through a Nation State law that downgrades the legal status of Arabic and limits the ability of human activists to speak in Israeli schools.

Israel, like America, is getting uglier. And yet I can’t imagine not coming here. I’ll keep doing so until they bar me outright. When I left the interrogation, my kids ran to me and I realized: This too was a Jewish experience to remember. Our family went to Rhodes to honor the Jewish past. We went to Israel to celebrate the Jewish future—the coming of age of a new generation of our family. And by detaining me, the Israeli government reminded us that if we want to be proud of that future, we’ll have to fight for it.

Op-ed by Lara Friedman, originally published in The Forward on June 18, 2018.

A recent poll found that three out of four Israelis approve of U.S. President Donald Trump’s handling of U.S.-Israel relations, while nearly 60% of American Jews disapprove of it.

In the wake of these results, an Israeli colleague asked me: Is it possible that Israelis are right? That Trump is actually good for Israel?

It’s a fair question, but, upon reflection, I concluded that it was formulated incorrectly. The question should be: Is it possible that the willful destruction of the post-World War II, rules-based liberal international order is good for Israel? Because, whether they are conscious of the fact or not, in standing with Trump, this is what Israelis are supporting.

Almost from the moment of its creation, Israel has chafed under the restrictions placed on it by the rules-based order, most notably with respect to its military conduct in the region and beyond, and to its treatment of land occupied in the 1967 War and that land’s residents. With the breakdown of the peace process over the past decade, and the disappearance of any pretense that Israel wants peace with the Palestinians or intends to ever end the occupation, this chafing has reached a critical point.

International law cannot accommodate Israel’s continuing project to change the facts on the ground in the West Bank and East Jerusalem or the ongoing mass human rights violations the occupation entails; Israel’s annexation of territory acquired by military force in 1967 is fundamentally incompatible with the rules-based international order.

This context is key to understanding why the majority of Israelis, and a smaller number of right-wing American Jews, apparently have come to believe that Israel would be better off in a world order that tears up the existing rules. For some, this preference seems rooted in an ideology that prioritizes settlements and the expansion of Israel’s borders over all else. Others embrace the simplistic argument that international institutions and law are inherently anti-Israel and therefore not worth preserving.

Still others, bolstered by the self-exonerative narrative holding that Israeli efforts to achieve peace have been rewarded with terrorism, are almost certainly driven by the conviction that liberalism — and especially concern for liberal values like human rights and civil liberties — is for freiers — Yiddish for “suckers.”

In contrast, most American progressives, including the vast majority of American Jews, are deeply alarmed by Trump’s assault on the current order, both foreign and domestic. The liberal world order that exists today came out of the Holocaust, and the values around which it is organized still define the identity of most American Jews. That liberal world order was designed — with significant participation of Jewish jurists — to ensure the world would never again permit genocide. It was built to enshrine a set of norms and rules according to which all members of the community of nations must refrain from the most inhumane of policies, must set aside the most heinous of weapons and must respect the fundamental and inalienable rights of every human being, especially the most vulnerable.

Clearly, this order is imperfect, as demonstrated by the myriad atrocities and injustices that have in part characterized this era. Yet, by every measure, it has given rise to a sustained period of greater peace, stability and standards of living for people across the globe than any time in the past.

This order, likewise, created the modern state of Israel — and it is within this order that Israel has prospered for seven decades. Israel has benefitted, no doubt, from the energy and ingenuity of its citizens, as well as from the extraordinary economic, military and diplomatic support of the United States. But more broadly, Israel has reaped the fruits of being born into a stable world and an international environment supportive of political and economic cooperation in every sphere.

It is an understatement of the highest magnitude to observe that, throughout history, Jews have fared poorly under illiberalism. Jews have learned through generations of painful experience that in a might-makes-right world order, the vulnerable suffer.

Perhaps Israelis have such confidence in their country’s powerful army, nuclear arsenal, flourishing economy and alliance with the Trump Administration that they are certain they will be beneficiaries, not victims, of a new illiberal world order. But Israelis’ embrace of illiberalism, both in their own domestic politics (which have been sliding rapidly down the illiberal slope for more than a decade) and in the world, hints at something deeper. It suggests that the majority of Israelis have come to believe that so long as their own personal and tribal interests are assured, the welfare of the rest of humanity — whether this means vulnerable populations inside Israel, Palestinians living under occupation or anyone else — is not their concern.

Many have sought of late to illuminate the challenges plaguing liberal Zionism and to diagnose the causes for the growing gap between American Jews and Israel. Israelis’ continued strong support for Trump, alongside the readiness of Israeli leaders and their American fellow travelers to make common cause with “pro-Israel” neo-Nazis, fascists and anti-Semites, shines a harsh spotlight on the core of the problem.

Is President Trump good for Israel? The answer will depend on whom you ask, and on whether that person believes the lesson of the Holocaust is “never again,” or “never to us.”

Op-ed by Lara Friedman published by Frankfurter Rundschau on March 19, 2018.

Während die EU-Mitgliedstaaten im Außenministerrat diskutieren, wie der Nahost-Friedensprozess wiederbelebt werden könnte, wird über den Plan der US-Regierung spekuliert. Niemand kann mit Sicherheit sagen, wie er aussieht und ob er je veröffentlicht wird. Präsident Donald Trump hat aber die Richtung seiner Politik angezeigt, als er in der Frage Jerusalems nach Jahrzehnten mit der US-Politik brach.

Europa sollte sich darauf einstellen, dass Trumps Plan weder dazu angetan ist, Frieden zu schaffen, noch Verhandlungen in Gang zu bringen. Vielmehr wird er neue US-Positionen enthalten, die darauf angelegt sind, auch die übrigen Kernstreitpunkte zwischen Israel und den Palästinensern „vom Verhandlungstisch“ zu nehmen. Sie werden einen neuen Status quo schaffen, der nicht mit Frieden oder der Zweistaatenlösung verbunden ist, sondern mit den Bestrebungen der Verfechter eines Groß-Israel, sowohl in Israel als auch unter Trumps Beratern und seiner politischen Basis.

Trumps Jerusalem-Entscheidung enthielt vier Elemente. Das erste war ein rechtliches: Israels Anspruch auf Jerusalem als Hauptstadt wurde anerkannt, ohne parallel eine Legitimation palästinensischer Ansprüche vorzunehmen. Das zweite war normativ: Die Entscheidung sei „nicht mehr oder weniger als die Anerkennung der Realität“, obwohl der Status und die Zukunft Jerusalems heftig umstritten sind.

Das dritte Element war vorschreibend: Trump versicherte, seine Entscheidung sei ein Schritt „für den Friedensprozess und ein dauerhaftes Abkommen“, obwohl sie die Grundvoraussetzung israelisch-palästinensischer Friedensbemühungen verletzte, dass Kernfragen nur durch Verhandlungen entschieden werden.

Das vierte Element war entlastend: Trump insistierte, er „beziehe keine Position hinsichtlich irgendwelcher Endstatusfragen einschließlich der Grenzen israelischer Souveränität in Jerusalem oder anderer umstrittener Grenzen“. Anschließend prahlte er, Jerusalem „vom Tisch“ genommen zu haben.

Ein verstörendes Bild

Die Anwendung derselben Elemente auf die übrigen Endstatusfragen – Siedlungen, Flüchtlinge, Grenzen und Sicherheit – ergibt ein verstörendes Bild der politischen Verschiebungen, die Trump wahrscheinlich vornehmen wird.

Bald könnte seine Administration Israels Recht anerkennen, wegen der eigenen Sicherheit große Teile der Westbank zu annektieren oder dauerhaft zu kontrollieren. Trump wird solche politischen Richtungswechsel als bloße Anerkennung existierender „Realitäten“ darstellen. Wie im Fall Jerusalems sind diese „Realitäten“ aber Falschmeldungen, die regelmäßig eingesetzt werden, um die Besatzung zu verteidigen und Frieden unmöglich zu machen.

Der Politikwechsel gegenüber dem Siedlungsbau wird damit begründet werden, dass daran nichts kontrovers sei, weil „jeder weiß“, dass Israel die Siedlungsblöcke bei einem künftigen Friedensschluss behalten wird – trotz der Tatsache, dass der Siedlungsbau die Idee einer Verhandlungslösung verletzt, die Auslöschung der Grenzen von 1967 vorantreibt und die Schaffung eines zusammenhängenden palästinensischen Staates mit Ost-Jerusalem als Hauptstadt verhindern soll.

Der Angriff auf das UN-Hilfswerk für Palästinaflüchtlinge, UNRWA, suggeriert einen anstehenden Politikwechsel in Richtung der Übernahme der alten Forderung der Rechten nach einer restriktiveren Definition des Begriffs „palästinensische Flüchtlinge“, nach der Auflösung der UNRWA und der Übertragung ihrer Zuständigkeit an das Flüchtlingshilfswerk UNHCR.

Nicht auf Palästinenser anwendbar

Keine der Lösungen des UNHCR für Flüchtlinge – die Rückführung in die Heimat, die Ansiedlung an ihrem Aufenthaltsort oder in Drittstaaten – ist auf Palästinenser anwendbar. Bis zur dauerhaften Ansiedlung ihrer Familien klassifizieren die UN alle Babys, die in Flüchtlingsfamilien geboren werden, in jedem Konflikt als Flüchtlinge.

Europa sollte seine irrationale Hoffnung aufgeben, dass Trumps Plan es Europa erlauben würde, in seine bevorzugte Rolle als Nebenakteur einer US-geführten Friedenspolitik zurückzukehren.
Die EU sollte einsehen, dass weitere gefährliche Politikwechsel Trumps bevorstehen, und sie sollte ihr Engagement gemäß ihren Verpflichtungen nach internationalem Recht und für eine verhandelte Zweistaatenlösung verdoppeln: Die Resolution 2334 des UN-Sicherheitsrates schreibt die Differenzierung zwischen Israel und seinen Siedlungen, die Verteidigung der palästinensischen Präsenz in den „C-Gebieten“ der Westbank und die Unterstützung zivilgesellschaftlicher Stimmen vor.

Nur so kann die EU hoffen, ihre eigenen Interessen gegen die Politik eines US-Präsidenten zu verteidigen, der in jeder Hinsicht die Agenda eines „Groß-Israel“ der israelischen Rechten zu seiner eigenen gemacht hat.

Op-ed by Lara Friedman originally published in Euractive, March 20, 2018

As EU member states continue discussing in their monthly Foreign Affairs Council meetings ways of reviving the Middle East peace process in an inclusive manner, speculation is rampant regarding the Trump Administration’s widely touted plan to achieve Israeli-Palestinian peace.

Nobody can say with certainty what the plan will entail or when (or even if) it will be released. However, President Trump has already given a powerful clue indicating the direction his policies are likely to take, in the form of his historic 6 December 2017 decision to change decades-old US policy vis-à-vis Jerusalem.

Based on that decision, Europe should anticipate that Trump’s peace plan, if it is ever released, will be designed neither to achieve peace nor to re-start negotiations. Rather, it will be a platform for new US positions designed to take the remaining core issues of contention between Israel and the Palestinians – the Oslo Accords’ permanent status issues – “off the table,” creating a new Israeli-Palestinian status quo aligned not with peace or a two-state solution, but with the aspirations of Greater Israel zealots, both in Israel and among Trump’s key advisors and political base.

Trump’s Jerusalem decision had four distinct elements. The first was substantive: the decision endorsed Israeli claims with respect to Jerusalem as its capital, while offering no parallel legitimacy claims of Palestinians.

The second was normative: Trump justified his decision saying it was “nothing more, or less, than a recognition of reality,” despite the fact that the status and future of Jerusalem are hotly contested.

The third was prescriptive: Trump assured the world that his decision was a step to “advance the peace process and to work towards a lasting agreement,” notwithstanding the fact that his decision violated the fundamental premise of Israeli-Palestinian peace efforts, i.e., that core issues will be decided only by negotiations.

And the fourth was exonerative: Trump insisted that he was “not taking a position on [sic] any final status issues, including the specific boundaries of the Israeli sovereignty in Jerusalem, or the resolution of contested borders” – despite subsequently boasting that he had taken Jerusalem “off the table.”

Applying these same elements to the remaining permanent status issues – settlements, refugees, borders and security – produces a disturbing picture of the policy shifts Trump is likely to adopt going forward, whether in the context of a peace plan or piecemeal.

Substantively, the Trump Administration – which since taking office has been unwilling to publicly criticise settlements and whose ambassador to Israel openly supports the most expansive aims of the Israeli settlement enterprise – is already on a path toward formally shifting U.S. policy to legitimize Israeli construction in the West Bank.

Likewise, the ongoing U.S. assault on UNRWA suggests an imminent policy shift on Palestinian refugees, likely in the direction of adopting longstanding right-wing calls for a more restrictive definition of the term “Palestinians refugee,” demanding the dissolution of UNRWA, and calling for the transfer authority over the (diminished) Palestinian refugee population to the United Nations High Commissioner on Refugees (UNHCR).

Similarly, smart money should be on the Trump Administration sooner rather than later endorsing Israel’s right, for the sake of its security, to annex or maintain permanent control over significant areas of the West Bank, including the Jordan Valley.

And whether articulated as part of a new peace plan or as isolated decisions, the Trump Administration should be expected to frame such policy shifts, like it did its Jerusalem Declaration, as merely a recognition of “realities,” and as pro-peace steps that do not prejudge final status.

As was the case with Jerusalem, however, the “realities” in question are nothing of the sort. Rather they are well-worn canards, regularly trotted out in defence of Israeli occupation policies and to thwart any possible peace agreement.

For example, a shift in policy on settlements will likely be grounded in the canard suggesting that there is nothing controversial about Israel building in parts of the West Bank, like settlement blocs, that “everybody knows” Israel will retain in a future peace deal – although such construction violates the very notion of a negotiated agreement, erases the 1967 border as the basis for an agreement, is designed to prevent the establishment of a contiguous Palestinian state or a Palestinian capital in East Jerusalem, and undermines the viability of land swaps.

Likewise, a shift in policy on refugees will likely adopt the canard which holds that UNRWA artificially perpetuates the Palestinian refugee issue and inflates the refugee numbers – despite facts like: that Palestinians refugees, like any refugees, define themselves as such based on their experience, not the permission of the UN; none of UNHCR’s solutions for helping refugees – returning them to their homes, settling them where they are, or settling them in a third country – can be applied to Palestinians; and until families are permanently settled, the UN classifies babies born to refugees from any conflict as refugees.

The time has come for Europe to abandon any remaining, irrational hopes that Trump will surprise the world by leveraging his own dangerous Jerusalem decision to now propose the “ultimate deal,” or put forward any plan that will allow Europe to return to playing its preferred role as a supporting actor in a US-led Israel-Palestine peace policy.

Recognising that further dangerous Trump policy shifts on Israel-Palestine are imminent, Europe should redouble its commitment to critical EU policies grounded in its commitment to international law and a negotiated two-state solution: implementation of UN Security Council 2334, upholding differentiation between Israel and settlements, defending the Palestinian presence in Area C, empowering civil society voices, and supporting Palestinian unification.

Only in this way can the EU hope to defend its own interests and equities against the policies of a US president who, for all intents and purposes, has adopted the Israeli right wing’s “Greater Israel” agenda as his own.

Op-ed by Lara Friedman originally published on Medium, March 19, 2018. For a compendium of resources and expert views on the threat to free speech posed by allegedly pro-Israel/anti-BDS bills in Congress & states, see FMEP’s regularly updated post: Constitutionality Issues & BDS Legislation: Expert Views

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In the turbulent Trump era, concern about free speech is a bipartisan affair. Republicans decry efforts to silence voices of the political and religious Right; Democrats celebrate protests against the Trump administration and its policies. At the same time, however, lawmakers from both parties are working together to erode the First Amendment, in a joint effort to create a new political free speech exception for Israel. The potential ramifications of this effort are far-reaching and should provoke deep bipartisan alarm.

In Congress, these efforts take the form, most prominently, of pending legislation — long a key element of AIPAC’s legislative agenda — that would criminalize many voluntary boycotts of Israel or Israeli settlements, if the decision to boycott is undertaken in support of a call by the United Nations or the European Union. Grounded in the clear goal of preventing pressure on Israel for its policies vis-à-vis the territories it occupied in the 1967 War, most notably with the construction of civilian settlements, this legislation is justified as nothing more than an “update” to existing U.S. laws that prohibit compliance with the Arab League boycott of Israel. This justification discloses at best a flawed understanding either of the new legislation or existing law, and at worst a deliberate effort to deceive the public about both.

In fact, the Arab League’s policy is coercive, requiring a boycott of Israel as a condition for doing business with its member states. Thus, businesses that comply with the Arab League boycott in order to maintain trade with member states are not seeking to exercise their political free speech rights. In contrast, neither the EU nor the UN call for, let alone compel, boycotts of Israel. Moreover, the policy they do support — calling for differentiation between sovereign Israel and the occupied territories, consistent with international law — has no coercive element.

An American’s decision to boycott Israel or settlements as a means of making a statement about Israeli policies — whether or not that decision has any relation to EU or UN policies — is not a case of coerced behavior in which U.S. citizens or companies are, in the words of the office charged with fighting the Arab League boycott, “being used to implement foreign policies of other nations…” Rather, it is a case of constitutionally protected expression, consistent with the landmark Supreme Court ruling that found that boycotts are a form of political free speech protected by the First Amendment. Accordingly, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) has denounced the pending legislation as unconstitutional and suggested that, if it took effect, there would likely be a court challenge. Likewise, CATO Institute fellow Walter Olson observed that, “By punishing boycott participation grounded in political belief, it [the legislation] would infringe on individual liberty.”

Even Americans who don’t care about Israel-Palestine issues should be deeply concerned about the broader implications of this wrongheaded legislative effort, given the extraordinary breadth of issues on which the views of current U.S policymakers differ dramatically from those of the UN, EU, and most of the world. On issues like climate change, LGBT rights, refugees, or animals (think ivory trade bans versus the Trump Administration’s decision to lift the ban on elephant hunting), it requires little imagination to see how criminalizing Americans’ participation in political boycotts of Israel could pave the way for further infringements to Americans’ right to support or join internationally-backed protests on other issues.

Concurrently, laws are being introduced in state legislatures across the country — and enacted in more than 20 states so far (three by Executive Order) — barring states from doing business with Americans who refuse to actively renounce their right to boycott Israel and Israeli settlements. State legislators and governors continue to pursue and defend such legislation, despite: (a) the Supreme Court’s ruling on boycotts, (b) the fact that requiring a person to relinquish a right protected under the Constitution in order to receive a government benefit is the definition of an “unconstitutional condition,” (c) constitutional concerns raised by various groups concerned about free speech, and (d) a categorical ruling against the Kansas version of the law in January 2018, handed down by a federal judge. That ruling found that the First Amendment fully protects political boycotts of Israel, and that the law in question was fundamentally designed to achieve, “impermissible goals under the First Amendment…”

Like the effort at the federal level, the potential repercussions of these state laws are alarming, as they provide a template for free speech-quashing legislation on virtually any politicized issue. For example, in states that have adopted conservative definitions regarding when life begins or rights of a fetus, minimal tweaks could transform an Israel gag law into one requiring that, as a condition for state contracts, individuals and companies certify they do not support Planned Parenthood. Other tweaks could produce legislation prohibiting contracts with supporters of movements engaging in civil disobedience — as a possible means of targeting Black Lives Matter or Dakota Pipeline protesters, for example. The template could likewise be adapted to target those engaged in boycotts of, say, any organization operating legally in a given state — as a possible means of shielding groups like the National Rifle Association from pressure. In short, this template could be re-purposed to bar contracts with individuals or groups affiliated with or supportive of any political cause or organization — from the political Left or Right — that the majority in a legislature or the occupant of a governor’s office deemed undesirable.

In this highly partisan, intensely politicized phase of U.S. history, lawmakers who support a free speech exception for Israel — whether for reasons of ideology or political expediency — run the risk of shoving the country down a very slippery slope that ends in a broad assault on the First Amendment. The dangers inherent in such an assault cannot be overstated. Free speech is the bedrock of America’s democracy. It is not absolute, but the exceptions recognized by the Supreme Court do not permit the suppression of political speech, especially speech that may be unpopular or run counter to the views of those currently in office. Regrettably, lawmakers thus far appear entirely indifferent both to the avoidable legal costs these Israel gag laws will inflict on tax payers, and to the far heavier costs they threaten to impose on American democracy.