BDS is a war Israel can't win

Israeli think-tank fellow Yossi Klein Halevi, writing recently in the Los Angeles Times would have American readers believe that the Boycott, Divest and Sanctions movement is "immoral" and threatens the peace of "the region's only intact society", while simultaneously boasting it can't touch Israel's health and global economic integration.

Yet his reasoning from "morals" rings hollow, and amounts to little more than the shilling of the professional apologist industry deployed on Israel's behalf throughout the Western media, in the never-ending defence of the oppressive status quo in Palestine.

Halevi excoriates BDS, disingenuously, for making the Jewish state "the world's most pressing problem" today, while extolling Israel's freedoms and national righteousness. Of course, his complaint manages to engage in both self-pitying and craven boosterism at the same time - a kind of perverse humble-brag.

People & Power: Boycott Israel
No, Mr Halevi, Israel is not the world's greatest problem - rather, Israel is Palestine's great, existential, enduring problem for a people who have lived their whole lives under the constant, brutal and de-humanising occupation of this enlightened state.
Palestine's ordeal

Most of the world has been content to overlook Palestine's ordeal - fatigued by 68 years of this conflict, and understandably inured to the epic suffering of its people, who understand that their tragic condition can only hold its attention briefly.

The endless failed international "peace" efforts, the vicissitudes of negotiations, and periodic spasms of violence have become like the weather - always there.

This is precisely why the BDS movement has come to figure so prominently in Palestinian hopes - it side-steps the moribund "peace process" and banks on people-power as leverage against state and institutional power, applied against a responsive economy, such as Israel's.

Read the full story at Aljazeera.com