Ashley Smith of Burlington is a member of Community Voices for Immigrant Rights and the Champlain Valley Chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America.
First the facts. Israel is a colonial settler state that enforces its rule over Palestine through occupation and apartheid. Before the creation of the state of Israel, Palestinians and Jews lived in relative peace in one of the most densely populated areas of the Middle East.
The Zionist settlers collaborated with first the British Empire, and later U.S. imperialism, to destroy that peace. Israel was formed through the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians. To establish the state in 1948, Zionist militias drove nearly a million Palestinians from their lands, towns and cities with the goal of establishing an ethnonationalist Jewish state.
That process of racist colonization continues today. Right now, the Israeli state is collaborating with settlers to drive Palestinians from their homes in East Jerusalem. All of this has created 5 million Palestinian refugees scattered throughout the Middle East in refugee camps and across the world as one of its largest diasporic populations.
The Israeli state denies those refugees the right to return to their stolen homes and land, while its Law of Return grants any Jew in the world the right to settle and become a citizen. It subjects Palestinians outside its formal boundaries to occupation deemed illegal by the United Nations in the West Bank and Gaza.
Inside Israel, it denies Palestinians equal rights through myriad laws so racist in nature that Human Rights Watch concluded in their detailed, 200-page study, “A Threshold Crossed,” that Israel is “committing the crimes against humanity of apartheid and persecution.”
In the wake of Israel’s most recent and barbaric attack on Gaza, which killed 248 Palestinians, 66 of them children, and injured nearly 2,000, activists in Vermonters for Justice in Palestine and Decolonize Burlington scored a big victory, successfully pressuring Ben & Jerry’s to end their sale of ice cream in the occupied territories.
Activists then worked to craft and propose a resolution to the Burlington City Council. It simply calls on the City Council to endorse the Palestinian call for Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) against Israel and support three demands:
- Ending the military occupation and colonization of all Arab lands and dismantling the Separation Wall;
- Recognizing the fundamental rights of the Arab-Palestinian citizens of Israel to full equality; and
- Respecting, protecting, and promoting the rights of Palestinian refugees to return to their homes and properties as stipulated under U.N. Resolution 194.
This resolution was endorsed by 27 organizations from Jewish Voice for Peace to the Vermont AFL-CIO and was scheduled to be voted on during the City Council meeting on Sept. 13.
Faced with facts and unprecedented local and statewide solidarity with Palestinians, Burlington’s political establishment, financial backers, as well as local and national Zionists in collaboration with Israeli state agencies launched a campaign of misinformation, doublespeak, slander and intimidation to pressure the council into withdrawing the resolution.
Amid all their professionally orchestrated talking points, there are a few important ones that must be exposed as cover for Israeli apartheid. The opposition to the resolution claimed it was “one-sided” and wrongly “singled out” Israel for criticism. Of course, and it was entirely correct in doing so.
The U.S. state has a special relationship with Israel. Washington is Israel’s imperial sponsor providing it with billions of dollars in funds and military hardware to enforce occupation and apartheid. Therefore, the people of the U.S. have a special responsibility to oppose our government’s support of Israel.
The opposition denounced the resolution as “divisive” as if it conjured a division out of thin air. There was already a division, or better put, an oppression, an oppression of Palestinians by the Israeli state, and the resolution brought the division between supporters of that oppression and its opponents into the light.
The question is which side are you on, that of the occupier or the occupied, the oppressor or the oppressed? Calling that question “divisive” is a rhetorical trick long used by oppressive regimes from the Slaveocracy in the Pre-Civil South to South African Apartheid to defend their unequal orders.
The opposition called the resolution an international issue “inappropriate” for the city to take a stand on. That’s a bit rich for Burlington that bases at its airport the F-35, a fighter designed to enforce U.S. hegemony throughout the world. It is simply untenable in today’s globally integrated world to separate local, national and international issues.
Trying to do so flies in the face of Burlington’s rich history of supporting movements for liberation and opposing unjust regimes throughout the world. For example, during the 1980s, then-Mayor Bernie Sanders supported Nicaragua’s Sandinista government, and the City Council passed a resolution to divest $1.8 million in city funds from companies that did business in apartheid South Africa.
Today, the opposition, including the city’s mayor, of course, claimed to support human rights and equality. But they opposed a resolution that explicitly calls for equal rights and human rights for Palestinians. Why? Because they support Israel over and above equality and justice.
Adding to this hypocrisy they all likely supported BDS against South African apartheid, a movement, by the way, that Israel opposed. Why the selective solidarity? How can they claim to be for human rights and oppose them for Palestinians?
The opposition denounced the resolution for being brought during the Jewish holy days of Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. But as Marc Estrin argued in VTDigger, those holidays are for seeking forgiveness for past wrongs and atoning for them. Therefore, the resolution’s timing is appropriate for those, including Jews, who are committed to rectifying the injustices done to the Palestinian people.
Finally, the opposition claimed that the resolution is anti-Semitic. Not only is that smear without foundation, but it is also an insult to the many Jews and Jewish organizations like Jewish Voice for Peace that supported it and support BDS as an expression of the Jewish radical tradition of siding with the oppressed.
The truth is that anti-Semitism today is being whipped up not by the BDS movement, but the far right that supports the Israeli state as a model of the ethnonationalist one they would like to build in the U.S. Because of opposition to such racism, BDS supporters have been at all the demonstrations against the far right and oppose all expressions of anti-Semitism.
This allegation like most of the opposition’s arguments is an emotionally charged and cynical ploy to intimidate people from standing in solidarity with the Palestinian people’s struggle for liberation. It provides cover and legitimation for the continuance of colonialism and apartheid.
When you clear all this doublespeak aside, the question of Palestine poses a simple one to everyone in the U.S. Which side are you on? The oppressor or oppressed? Israel and its U.S.-sponsored apartheid state or the Palestinian people and their struggle for liberty, justice and equality? This question will soon be posed again in your campus, city, state and country. Time to take a stand for BDS.