The British National Union of Journalists has voted for a trade boycott of Israel, and Britain’s University and College Union, representing 120,000 instructors, has urged its members to shun Israeli counterparts. Unison, the public employee union which, with 1.3 million members, is Britain’s largest, will take up a boycott resolution at its June 13 annual conference.
It’s all because, the boycotters say, Palestinians are in a bad way, as indeed they are, and no wonder.
When the United Nations in 1947 created Israel in a small part of the Palestine Mandate, Israel, as expected, declared independence and the Arab nations attacked. Hundreds of thousands of Arabs fled Israel, and hundreds of thousands of Jews fled hostile Arab states.
Israel created an absorption program that integrated Jewish refugees into its population, but with the honorable exception of Jordan, Israel’s neighbors shunted Palestinian refugees into festering camps, where most of their descendants remain.
When the Arabs states ganged up again on Israel in 1967, they lost the West Bank and Gaza, which Jordan and Egypt, respectively, had annexed at Israeli independence.
Those populations have lingered in Israeli occupation thanks mainly to the proclaimed Arab-Palestinian preference for an armed, not a negotiated, solution, a preference that spawned repeated intifadas and terrorism.
Through the years, Arab leaders – and Syrian and Persian – have found the Palestinians’ genuine wretchedness a handy casus belli when they have wanted to start another war.
And Israel’s refusal now to commit demographic suicide by letting in the few still living refugees and their descendants, numbering more than 4 million, offers a useful Arab alibi for rejecting the two-state solution Israel has repeatedly endorsed.
The boycott fad – also favored by some U.S. Christian denominations and at several colleges – is the natural child of the It’s-all-Israel’s-fault school of Middle East studies.
That proposition was given a nice little boost recently by Jimmy Carter’s wildly one-sided book “Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid,” wherein the former president declared, “Peace will come to Israel and the Middle East only when the Israeli government is willing to comply with international law...”
Israel has sometimes been hardnosed needlessly. Its justified 1982 invasion of Lebanon to quash the terrorist Palestinian ministate there, which was attacking northern Israel, was recklessly extended toward Beirut in a failed stab at regime change. And the Israeli settlements in the West Bank and Gaza have been worse than a bad idea.
But the Palestinian Authority in 2000 turned down the best deal for a Palestinian state it will ever see, and Israel’s unilateral withdrawal from Gaza two years ago, instead of inspiring Palestinians to create a model that would validate their ambitions, set them at one another’s throats and sparked new rocket attacks on Israel. Israel’s corollary plan to begin unilateral withdrawals from the West Bank is a collateral casualty.
Perhaps Israel would feel able to adopt decorum more pleasing to the sensibilities of Jimmy Carter and the righteous boycotters if – speaking of international law – the Palestinians and Arab states would respect the United Nations’ vote which set up a sovereign Israel 60 years ago.
Tom Teepen is a columnist for Cox Newspapers. He is based in Atlanta.
