Anti-Zionists Deserve Free Speech
Michelle Goldberg.
Subtitle:
The Trump administration bars a critic of Israel from America.
They would like to force her to resign (Trump has demanded it), or force the House to deny her her seat.
Yes,
pour encourager les autres.
The Palestinian activist Omar Barghouti, one of the founders of the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement, was supposed to be on a speaking tour of the United States this week, with stops at N.Y.U.’s Washington campus and at Harvard.
He was going to attend his daughter’s wedding in Texas.
. . . .
Yet when Barghouti, a permanent resident of Israel, showed up for his flight from Israel’s Ben Gurion International Airport last week, he was informed that the United States was denying him entry.
. . . .
Around two dozen states have laws and regulations denouncing, and in many cases penalizing, B.D.S. activities, and the Senate recently passed a bill supporting such measures.
According to the American Association of University Professors, some public universities in states with such laws require speakers and other contractors to “sign a statement pledging that they do not now, nor will they in the future, endorse B.D.S.”
It’s hard to think of comparable speech restrictions on any other subject.
It's also hard to imagine any of that is constitutional.
The B.D.S. movement doesn’t engage in or promote violence.
Its leaders make an effort to separate anti-Zionism from anti-Semitism; the Palestinian B.D.S. National Committee recently demanded that a Moroccan group stop using the term “B.D.S.” in its name because it featured anti-Semitic cartoons on its Facebook page.
Barghouti couches his opposition to Zionism in the language of humanist universalism.
The official position of the B.D.S. movement, he says, is that “any supremacist, exclusionary state in historic Palestine — be it a ‘Jewish state,’ an ‘Islamic state,’ or a ‘Christian state’ — would by definition conflict with international law and basic human rights principles.”
The movement is agnostic on a final dispensation of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
But it calls for the right of Palestinian refugees — both those displaced by the creation of Israel and their descendants — to return to their familial homes, which would likely end Israel’s Jewish majority.
A one state solution increasingly popular among liberal Americans.
Quite different from the one state solution Bibi is moving toward, one far less dangerous to the Jews of Israel than the liberal one.
And less dangerous, probably, than a two state solution relying perilously on arrangements even more restrictive than those of the Versailles Treaty that ended the Great War.
We know how well that worked out.
Fortunately for the French, the Germans at no point threatened, considered, or even entertained their complete annihilation.
Yet exactly that is the proclaimed desire of many of the Palestinians, many in important leadership positions, who would live in that other state, disarmed and humiliated.
Disarmed?
Well, at least officially, probably.
And at least at first.
Barghouti told me he personally believes in the creation of a single state in which Israeli Jews, as individuals, would have civil rights, but Jews as a people would not have national rights.
I’d planned to argue with him about this view, which is largely dismissive of Jewish claims on Israel, and would likely lead to oppression or worse for Israeli Jews.
My guess is that many if not most Jews find such a position offensive, even frightening.
. . . .
A government that tries to prevent Americans from engaging with his views cannot claim a commitment to free speech.
. . . .
Ultimately, Barghouti threatens Israel’s American defenders not because he’s hateful, but because he isn’t.
Israel has aligned itself with the global far right.
Recently re-elected Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu wants to unilaterally annex the West Bank, which would create a single state where Jews rule over Arabs.
That prospect makes it ever more difficult for Israel’s American defenders to make coherent arguments against the sort of one-state solution that Barghouti espouses. “
