Fighting BDS For 20 Years and How It All Started

 Nadene Goldfoot                                              

   President William J. Clinton, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak, Palestinian Authority Chairman Yasser Arafat on July 25, 2000. Ehud Barak is an Israeli general and politician who served as the tenth Prime Minister from 1999 to 2001. He was leader of the Labor Party until January 2011. Labor is a leftist Political party.  Netanyahu is from the Likud party, from the right.  

 Chairman Arafat used America as a platform to promote the dividing of Israel, and President Clinton warmly received him in March 1997.  Clinton had no horse in this race, so he had no emotional feelings upon hearing Arafat dream on. What happened to Clinton's Arkansas then was it was hit by tornadoes, and the nation was ravaged by storms and floods soon thereafter. The New York Times on March 4, 1997 front- page headlines reported, "In storm's wake, grief and shock" adjacent to a photo of Clinton with Arafat saying, "President Clinton rebukes Israel."   

Ehud Barak, General The team fighting Black September in 1972 was led by Ehud Barak, the joint-highest decorated officer in Israeli history who has had an extraordinary career that took him from special forces commander to IDF chief of staff and later prime minister. He was also part of the team trying to talk about peace to Arafat.  

What is BDS?  The Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement is a Palestinian-led movement promoting boycotts, divestments and sanctions against Israel. They intend to put Israel out of business without the typical war, which they then invest in as Intifadas.  Not only businesses are hit upon, but universities are as well.  

Between 11 and 24 July,2000,  under the auspices of President Clinton, Prime Minister Barak and Chairman Arafat met at Camp David in an effort to reach an agreement on permanent status. While they were not able to bridge the gaps and reach an agreement, their negotiations were unprecedented in both scope and detail. Building on the progress achieved at Camp David, the two leaders agreed on the following principles to guide their negotiations:

1. The two sides agreed that the aim of their negotiations is to put an end to decades of conflict and achieve a just and lasting peace.
2. The two sides commit themselves to continue their efforts to conclude an agreement on all permanent status issues as soon as possible.
3. Both sides agree that negotiations based on UN Security Council Resolutions 242 and 338 are the only way to achieve such an agreement and they undertake to create an environment for negotiations free from pressure, intimidation and threats of violence.
4. The two sides understand the importance of avoiding unilateral actions that prejudge the outcome of negotiations and that their differences will be resolved only by good faith negotiations.
5. Both sides agree that the United States remains a vital partner in the search for peace and will continue to consult closely with President Clinton and Secretary Albright in the period ahead.

Accordingly, these 5 statements were reached at a final conclusion of the meeting.  On 11 July, the Camp David 2000 Summit convened, although the Palestinians considered the summit premature. They even saw it as a trap. The summit ended on 25 July, without an agreement being reached. At its conclusion, a Trilateral Statement was issued defining the agreed principles to guide future negotiations.  The negotiations were based on an all-or-nothing approach, such that "nothing was considered agreed and binding until everything was agreed." The proposals were, for the most part, verbal. As no agreement was reached and there is no official written record of the proposals, some ambiguity remains over details of the positions of the parties on specific issues.

One big unsolved issue was the Palestinian right of return, since Israel has the right of return for Jews.  Due to the first Arab-Israeli war, a significant number of Palestinian Arabs fled or were expelled from their homes inside what is now Israel. These refugees numbered approximately 711,000 to 725,000 at the time. Today, they and their descendants number about four million, comprising about half the Palestinian people. Since that time, the Palestinians have demanded full implementation of the right of return, meaning that each refugee would be granted the option of returning to his or her home, with property restored, and receive compensation. Israelis asserted that allowing a right of return to Israel proper, rather than to the newly created Palestinian state, would mean an influx of Palestinians that would fundamentally alter the demographics of Israel, jeopardizing Israel's Jewish character and its existence as a whole.What has happened to Lebanon would be worse for Israel.  There would be no more Jews in the Jewish State.  

There happens to be at least 48 states that are of Muslim Majority; of which about 24 are in the Middle East.  There is only one Jewish country in the world, Israel.  The Palestinians were not native to the soil; they came in to get jobs from the Jews.  The Jews had been natives to the soil since the ancient biblical days as well as a population who never left. This is why the Jewish leaders created Israel, as a refuge for Jews, homeless since 70 CE when Rome burned down Jerusalem and the 2nd Temple.  Jews have been treated as a pariah in every country.  It's taken 2,000 years of patiently waiting for this time to regain their own land once again.  The land means everything; part of their historical creation as Jews.  They were told to live there by G-d!  

At Camp David, the Palestinians maintained their traditional demand that the right of return be implemented. They demanded that Israel recognize the right of all refugees who so wished to settle in Israel, but to address Israel's demographic concerns, they promised that the right of return would be implemented via a mechanism agreed upon by both sides, which would try to channel a majority of refugees away from the option of returning to Israel. According to U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, some of the Palestinian negotiators were willing to privately discuss a limit on the number of refugees who would be allowed to return to Israel. Palestinians who chose to return to Israel would do so gradually, with Israel absorbing 150,000 refugees every year.

The Israeli negotiators denied that Israel was responsible for the refugee problem, and were concerned that any right of return would pose a threat to Israel's Jewish character. In the Israeli proposal, a maximum of 100,000 refugees would be allowed to return to Israel on the basis of humanitarian considerations or family reunification. All other people classified as Palestinian refugees would be settled in their present place of inhabitance, the Palestinian state, or third-party countries. Israel would help fund their resettlement and absorption. An international fund of $30 billion would be set up, which Israel would help contribute to, along with other countries, that would register claims for compensation of property lost by Palestinian refugees and make payments within the limits of its resources.  (Because Arafat didn't get his own way totally, which he should have known would be turned down, he lost the chance to have his own state.  Jewish leaders didn't get their Jewish Homeland as first promised either.  They had to sit back and see 80% of it go to Jordan and then what is left is supposed to cut in half now for the Palestinians?) Heaven help us!  

The BDS Movement against Israel grew out of the UN's World Conference against Racism in Durban, South Africa on August 31-September 8, 2001, which turned into a notorious hate-fest against Jews and their State of Israel. Two delegations, the United States and Israel, withdrew from the conference over objections to a draft document equating Zionism with racism. The final Declaration and Programme of Action did not contain the text that the U.S. and Israel had objected to, that text having been voted out by delegates in the days after the U.S. and Israel withdrew.                                     

 BDS was conceived one year after Prime Minister Ehud Barak of Israel at that time, had offered  historic concessions to PLO head Yasser Arafat. This happened in 2000 at the Camp David Summit.   Arafat shockingly turned down his over-generous offer and launched the 2nd intifada-a brutal uprising that included suicide bombings and other attacks against Israeli civilians.  Marked on September 29, the day after Yom Kippur, this 2nd Intifada took place during a period that somewhat resembles the days of the exploding buses. The current terrible stretch, too, is characterized by a general malaise, great personal concerns and questions about when everything will be over. (This was written in October 2020).  

The prevailing narrative is that whenever Israel withdraws from land, either unilaterally or as part of an agreement, the territory evacuated becomes a launching pad for more attacks (the West Bank cities under Oslo, the withdrawal from southern Lebanon and the Gaza pullout). 

The goal of the BDS movement, funded largely by European governments through a variety of participating NGOs, is to enfranchise Palestinians by turning their oppressors into a global pariah.  BDS activists hold Israel alone responsible for the lack of peace between Israelis and Palestinians and seek to coerce the Jewish state into making more and more unilateral and unreciprocated concessions through an unrelenting global campaign of political, economic and cultural isolation.  (By supporting BDS, one is cheering on the destruction of Israel.) 

What is disgusting is that a myriad of perennial human-rights violators do not face any meaningful protests, much less a global boycott which Israel has been facing for 20 years, and why?  Because a group of Arabs, calling themselves Palestinians, as if the Jews of Palestine before 1948 were called something else-like Jews-happened to also be called Palestinians, wanted to take over all of Israel and Israel wasn't letting them.  They were trying to take the land away from the Jews without actually going to an official war as they needed the help of other surrounding Muslim countries.  The UN has continually picked on Israel wrongly for the accusations the Palestinians throw at them, as wild as they are from the truth.   Burma, Equatorial Guinea, Eritrea, Libya,

                                                 
                                North Korea's Kim Jong un

 North Korea and Sudan are at the top of the global list for countries that are among the worst abusers of human rights, but you'd never know it at the UN.   

Clinton blamed Arafat after the failure of the talks, stating, "I regret that in 2000 Arafat missed the opportunity to bring that nation into being and pray for the day when the dreams of the Palestinian people for a state and a better life will be realized in a just and lasting peace." The failure to come to an agreement was widely attributed to Yasser Arafat,as he walked away from the table without making a concrete counter-offer and because Arafat did little to quell the series of Palestinian riots that began shortly after the summit.  Arafat was also accused of scuttling the talks by Nabil Amr, a former minister in the Palestinian Authority. In My Life, Clinton wrote that Arafat once complimented Clinton by telling him, "You are a great man." Clinton responded, "I am not a great man. I am a failure, and you made me one."

In 2001 Robert Malley (Robert Malley (born 1963) is an American lawyer, political scientist and specialist in conflict resolution whose father, Simon Malley, was an Egyptian-born Jewish journalist who grew up in Egypt and worked as a foreign correspondent for Al Gomhuria.), present at the summit, noted three "myths" that had arisen regarding the failure of the negotiations. Those were "Camp David was an ideal test of Mr. Arafat's intentions", "Israel's offer met most if not all of the Palestinians' legitimate aspirations", and "The Palestinians made no concession of their own" and wrote that "If peace is to be achieved, the parties cannot afford to tolerate the growing acceptance of these myths as reality."

                                               

  Jews rounded up in Lithuania ...living there since 1321;  wearing the Jewish badge in 1566; WWI-100,000 Jews expelled or emigrated to the Russian interior;  received national autonomy in 1918;25,000 deported by Russians from Lithuania and Latvia in July 1940;  remaining Jews massacred by Germans and Lithuanians by 1943.. Holocaust 

What gets me riled up is that Jews have not been given human rights in this world since 70 CE.  Life was bad in Europe where Jews were not given citizen status but looked upon as something much less;  and life was much better in the Middle East for them even though they were 2nd class Dhimmis-2nd class and were forced to pay and pay and pay more for their lives, (Although dhimmis were allowed to perform their religious rituals, they were obliged to do so in a manner not conspicuous to Muslims. Loud prayers were forbidden, as were the ringing of church bells and the blowing of the shofar. They were also not allowed to build or repair churches without Muslim consent.) until Israel was created.   The one thing Jews decided to do was not to treat others like this; for it was one of the Jews who wrote the Golden Rule-don't do to others that which you don't want to have happen to you... , taken from the Torah.  Israel has tried every which way to treat Palestinians fairly.  And what do they get?  From a people conditioned to kill when they hear the word, Jew?  Burning kites to destroy Jewish fields; rocks thrown at their heads to kill;  tunnels to leap out and kidnap civilians; and a few ready to live in peace but can't out of fear of their own leaders.  And then the world's most religious citizens, the Methodists, Presbyterians and Episcopalians,  join their BDS movement to force Israel to disband.                                      

 

kite fires in Jewish wheat fields 

One thing I understand;  Palestinians are not interested yet in peace with Israel.  They keep passing up great opportunities.  Maybe the Abrahamic Accords with other Muslim countries will help them to see the light.  

Resource:

The Jerusalem Report, July 13, 2015, p 16...by Tibor Krausz Taking on BDS-seeing double standards at the heart of the global boycott Israel movement

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boycott,_Divestment_and_Sanctions

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2000_Camp_David_Summit

https://forward.com/news/455764/second-intifada-20-years-on-haaretz/

https://bds.jij.org/

Eye to Eye, facing the consequences of Dividing Israel,by William Koenig