“It was an encounter of a strange kind,” says Charles Abelsohn, a graduate of a South African University and a retired lawyer in Israel referring to his brief encounter earlier this year with BDS at the Birchwood Hotel & OR Tambo Conference Centre in Johannesburg.
Staying overnight in transit before catching a connecting flight, Charles was making his way to breakfast when he could not escape the mass of people attending a conference of the South African Municipal Workers Union. He stepped inside, “and immediately my attention was drawn to a booth displaying the BDS banner.” Most familiar with this organisation’s position and activities he made his way to the booth.
Having engaged with BDS over the years with his proverbial pen, the lawyer in Charles relished the opportunity to engage “on the issues” person-to-person.
Breakfast could wait!
Clueless
On display on the table were the usual one-sided books and pamphlets verbally abusing Israel, “the usual BDS fare.” Anyway, what interested Charles was the three men manning the booth.
Feigning ignorance, Charles asked “What is this BDS all about?”
“It’s about bad people,” one replied.
Hardly a reply reflecting any depth or understanding, Charles persisted.
“Who are these bad people?” he probed “and what exactly do they do?”
This was met with sheepish grins and raised eyebrows.
Not only were they clueless but also speechless.
He prodded them with “And where do these ‘bad’ things happen?”
One of the three ventured forth into totally unknown terrain, muttering “In Israel.”
Was it a response to an earlier brief? Or was the name ‘Israel’ automatically equated with evil – like a Pavlovian response – imbedded by constant pounding by the lies and deception of South Africa’s BDS and Media Review Network (MRN)?
While aiming to “dispel the myths and stereotypes about Islam and Muslims”, MRN ignores dictatorships, violence, human rights abuses, poverty and genocide everywhere in the world – especially those committed by fellow Muslims in Arab countries – except when it imagines Israel is the perpetrator.
When the truth doesn’t suit them, they create their own version.
Charles asked his final question:
“Do you know where Israel is?”
The vacuous facial expressions said it all.
If history was baffling to the three ‘BDS wise men’, so was the geography!
Who’s the Boss?
Cleary feeling the need for reinforcements one remarked:
“I’m going to fetch the boss.”
Who exactly was the “boss” or what he would have been able to contribute, Charles never discovered. After waiting a while – and the hunger pains creeping in – a delightful South African breakfast seemed far more urgent than an encounter with the trio’s BDS “boss”.
At the breakfast table, Charles sat “with a brilliant maxillofacial surgeon from Nablus.” He was a Palestinian invited to address the Trade Union Conference on worker’s rights relating to medical services in the Palestinian Authority. “We enjoyed a delightful breakfast together, and he mentioned how colleagues of his at Israel’s Meir Hospital in Kfar Saba, frequently visit him.” Most significant, Charles stressed, “was that we shared our vision for peace and prosperity in a negotiated deal between our people.”
This would have been totally contrary to BDS philosophy.
BDS activist As’ad Abu Khalil acknowledged in 2012 that “the real aim of BDS is to bring down the state of Israel.”
Many claim, particularly South Africans, that they support BDS because “it’s a vehicle supporting the two-state solution”. This is fine. Most Israelis support a two-state solution in a genuine peace deal.
However, who does not support this vision – is BDS.
Its founder, Omar Barghouti, who graduated with a PhD from Tel Aviv University, never disguises the fact that he does not subscribe to a two-state solution. He calls for a binational state which would effectively replace the State of Israel and restore the name “Palestine” for the entire area from the river to the sea. He believes that the creation of a Jewish state “was a crime” and his vision is for Israel to be “ethnically cleansed” of Jews.
In other words, Israel, the ancestral home of the Jews from the time of Abraham, Moses, and Isaac “is a crime” and needs to be “cleansed of its Jews.”
Is this what the activists of BDS in South Africa support?
So, while at a breakfast table in Johannesburg, a Ramallah maxillofacial surgeon can engage conversationally with a Tel Aviv lawyer, BDS’s founder, Barghouti has no such inclination to engage with Israelis, even if they are sympathetic to his cause. He has said Palestinians who engaged with Israelis have “moral blindness,” calling them in an article in 2005 as “clinically delusional”.
The BDS founder calls for a right of return for Palestinians from 1948 for as he puts it, “If the refugees were to return, you would not have a two-state solution, you’d have a Palestine next to a Palestine”.
Barghouti’s answer to the problem would be to wipe Israel off the map; in other words, his SOLUTION is DISSOLUTION – dissolution of the State of Israel.
These could have been the questions Charles could have confronted the BDS “boss” had they met.
On the other hand, if the people the “boss” had installed to man the BDS booth was anything to go by, “I doubt he would have had any better understanding of the issues. South Africans are battling to understand their own problems and challenges, I’m not sure the “boss” would have been any the wiser on the where’s and what’s of Israel.”
“He may have been just as clueless.”
Not all was lost.
“The breakfast was delicious.”
However, walking away from the breakfast table, what suddenly flashed through Charles’s mind, was a time as a young student, when the word “boss” had another meaning and conjured up fear.
He was reflecting on the apartheid regime’s dreaded Bureau of State Security(BOSS).
Maybe the recollection was not so surprising.
“Where BOSS was evil, so is BDS today,” expressed Charles and referred to the perspective of the former Chief Rabbi of the Commonwealth Lord Jonathan Sacks who accuses the BDS movement of engaging in ‘blood libel’:
“In the Middle Ages, Jews were hated because of their religion. In the nineteenth and early twentieth century, they were hated because of their race. In the 21st century, they are hated because of their nation state. Anti-Zionism is the new anti-Semitism.”
On a satisfying note – over and above the superlative breakfast – Charles saw that there were no visitors to the BDS booth. “There were none when I was there earlier before breakfast and there still none when I passed by 45 minutes later. Nobody appeared to be interested.”
Clearly the delegates to the Conference, “knew what the B in BDS really stood for!” observed Charles.
