Editor’s note: This commentary is by Jules Rabin, who came to Vermont in 1968 to teach at Goddard College and 10 years later shifted to baking bread in a wood-fired oven. He lives in Plainfield.
A letter to Rep. Peter Welch, D-Vt.
Dear Peter,
[T]here is something screwy about House Resolution 246 which you, along with the great majority of your fellow House members, have voted to support.
That’s the resolution condemning the BDS (Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions) movement which criticizes Israel for its treatment of the stateless and voteless Palestinians who live confined within the territories allowed them by Israel. All exit and entry controlled by Israeli armed forces
You and your colleagues have affirmed in this resolution my constitutional right to engage in any boycott I may wish to. For which I thank you. Permitted or not, I mean to keep on supporting the boycott and divestment of Israel.
But you, by the evidence of your signature on this resolution, seem to discern in the BDS movement specifically and importantly a sinister chain of events not yet actual but conceivable, and therefore worthy of specific condemnation by the august body you sit in.
I quote here as one astonishing example of the resolution’s crunched-up reasoning the 15th of the series of 17 “Whereases” that stand at the beginning of the resolution. That is the key whereas that H.R.246 itself cites as its basic reason for condemning the BDS boycott movement.
“Whereas the Global BDS Movement promotes principles of collective guilt, mass punishment, and group isolation [emphasis mine], which are destructive of prospects for progress towards peace and a two-state solution ….”
That’s how this resolution conceives and frames the punishment that BDS inflicts on Israel: “collective guilt, mass punishment, and group isolation.”
Now I ask you: With Sigmund Freud long dead, isn’t this charge in the 15th whereas of the House resolution nevertheless a clear and almost hilarious example of Freudian projection? In that hot armpit of the Near East that Israel and Palestine are both jumbled into, which entity is it, Israel or Palestine, that’s stunningly guilty of inflicting “collective guilt, mass punishment, and [imposing] group isolation” on the other?
With regard to the first charge, of BDS inflicting “collective guilt” on Israel, I submit that something very nearly the reverse is also true, and massively so: that it is the Palestinian people who are prima facie presumed by Israel and its supporters to be the guilty party, a people to be wary of and kept under constant watch. They are presumed to carry among them a burning resentment against Israeli control and occupation of their ancestral communities. Might not, could not any one of them, any Palestinian, in a fit of rage, turn against members of the master population — as has sometimes happened — happened awfully?
So there is set over the Palestinians an occupying army of incalculable power and demonstrated meannesses … as due response to the collective guilt ascribed to them, the people of the Underneath. Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto, Palestinians “occupied” from the soles of their feet to the crowns of their heads — who among them had or has the heart to love or smile at their overlords and occupiers?
Regarding mass punishment, the second threat to Israel alleged to be carried by BDS, there comes to mind the more than 10 to 1 ratio, in favor of Israel, of fatalities in the two intifadas of 20 and 40 years ago — pitched and prolonged battles between Israeli and Palestinian fighters — that have occurred in the last decades. Almost literal decimations those were (10 to 1; even 10 or more to 1), if you remember your Latin, and those battles. And in more recent times, super decimations have transpired. In operation Cast Lead, 2008, 1,398 Palestinians died and zero Israelis. In operation Protective Lead, 2,200 Palestinians died and 68 Israelis.
Mass punishment indeed. But of whom?
And as for the “group isolation” inflicted on Israelis by the BDS movement that the resolution you signed onto speaks of … why, that assertion is a laugh, isn’t it? While Israelis can whiz around the length and breadth of their country to their heart’s delight, and on to Paris and New York, if they wish, Palestinians are confined to what remains of their ancestral lands. In huge numbers, on their way to work or to see auntie or a doctor, they are daily driven crazy at the mobbed border crossings of the filigreed territories remaining to them, by the crazy-making presence of Israeli checkpoints manned by tough and wary Israeli troops trained to regard Palestinians as hostiles and an abiding underclass.
And, under the hot sun of the Mideast, and in their numbers, a royal pain in the ass.
Will you blame the shoe that pinches, or the foot in the shoe that yells out at the pinch?
Have a care, Peter, about what you put your signature to.
(I should note that I’m Jewish myself, a fact that should have no bearing on the case I’m making, but does. I grew up in a deeply Jewish household, where Yiddish was the first language.)
