BDS and Academic Boycotts

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Comments

[Alexander Tsesis]

Very informative. Thank you.

[Deep State Special Legal Counsel]

If the Palestinians were to unilaterally declare peace, there would be peace. If Israel would do the same, what do you think would happen?

[Patrick S. O'Donnell]

"No justice, no peace," a slogan, yes, but no less true for all that, indeed, unlike the supposition, the slogan has a meaningful connection to history and contemporary reality. The Palestinian struggle for collective self-determination in the form of a nation-state on the lands of their ancestors that were stolen from them by the Zionists (with the collaboration of imperial powers) has taken myriad forms involving both violent and non-violent strategies and methods of resistance, including invocations of both municipal and international law, all to no avail. Given the Israeli penchant for creating geopolitical "facts on the ground" (e.g., apartheid, 'normalizing the occupation,' etc., etc.) that have destroyed any possibility for a "two-state solution," it's harder than ever to imagine an end to this conflict.

[anon]

The comment immediately above is basically hate speech. It amounts to the sort of calumny that was thrown at the Jews in Germany in the 1930s. Hate that blurs the truth:

Jews are thieves ("stolen by Zionists");
Jews are racists ("apartheid");
Jews are duplicitous and war like ("creating facts on the ground"; "[Jews] destroyed the possibility of a two state solution");
And the last one, for the biggest whopper of them all:
Jews are "violent"!

Yes, indeed, I understand the point. When I hear of an act of senseless butchery of innocent men, woman and children, and that the deluded perpetrator(s) screamed out a "slogan", the first thought that comes to mind is that slogan must have been "Moses is Great." After all, everyone knows how violent Jews are. Just ask the UN!

And, of course, it's not like the Jews have been persecuted or anything like that, in Arab countries. No, in Arab countries, Jew are treated with kindness and tolerance! Just like they will be treated when they are driven into the ocean (an outcome officially embedded in the mind set of most of the folks praised above).

I'm looking forward to a book list for a response.

Yes, no shortage of Jew hate out there.

[Deep State Special Legal Counsel]

Mr. O'Donnell,

"imperial Powers." I hate labels. That is a bumper sticker slogan. Save it for the Old Town Head Shop.

The State of Israel was formed through a UN consensus of all member Nations in 1948. It was a partition that was recognized through International Law. That continues to be the case. All Nations' borders are recognized by those Black Letter principles. The Palestinians only recognize International Law where convenient (see the BDS website) and is pledged to her destruction.

[Patrick S. O'Donnell]

Not all Jews are Zionists so "anon" exemplifies for us a non sequitur. In fact, there are _some_ (albeit too few) self-described (neo-)Zionists who support the Palestinian cause. As for a "book list," please see my bibliography on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, a link for which is provided at the bottom (last but not least!) of the Wikipedia entry for "Bibliography of the Arab–Israeli conflict."

More than a few people (often Americans) neither know or understand the history or meaning of imperialism or colonialism (Israel being a 'colonial settler state' as Maxime Rodinson well argued), so a perfectly descriptive (and often normative) social scientific and historical term is characterized as "a bumper sticker slogan."

As for the founding of Israel (and the consequences for Palestinians), the following titles will suffice to make mincemeat of DSSLC's remaining remarks:

• Abowd, Thomas Philip. Colonial Jerusalem: The Spatial Construction of Identity and Difference in a City of Myth, 1948-2012. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2014.
• Abu-Lughod, Ibrahim. The Transformation of Palestine: Essays on the Origin and Development of the Arab-Israeli Conflict. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1971.
• Abu-Lughod, Ibrahim, ed. The Arab-Israeli Confrontation of June 1967: An Arab Perspective. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1970.
• Akram, Susan M., Michael Dumper, Michael Lynk, and Iain Scobbie, eds. International Law and the Palestinian Conflict: A Rights-Based Approach to Middle East Peace. New York: Routledge, 2011.
• Aruri, Naseer H., ed. Occupation: Israel Over Palestine. London: Zed Books, 1984.
• Azoulay, Ariella and Adi Ophir (tr. Tal Haran). The One-State Condition: Occupation and Democracy in Israel/Palestine. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2013.
• Beinin, Joel and Rebecca L. Stein, eds. The Struggle for Sovereignty: Palestine and Israel, 1993-2005. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, with the Middle East Research and Information Project, 2006.
• Benvenisti, Eyal. Legal Dualism: The Absorption of the Occupied Territories into Israel. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1990.
• Bowen, Stephen, ed. Human Rights, Self-Determination, and Political Change in the Occupied
Territories. The Hague: Kluwer Law International, 1997.
• Boyle, Francis A. Palestine, Palestinians, and International Law. Atlanta, GA: Clarity Press, 2003.
• Boyle, Francis A. The Palestinian Right of Return under International Law. Atlanta, GA: Clarity Press, 2011.
• Cattan, Henry. Palestine and International Law: Legal Aspects of the Arab-Israeli Conflict. London: Longmans, 2nd ed., 1976.
• Cattan, Henry. The Palestine Question. London: Saqi Books, 2000.
• Cypel, Sylvain. Walled: Israeli Society at an Impasse. New York: Other Press, 2006.
• Davis, Uri. Israel: An Apartheid State. London: Zed Press, 1987.
• El-Eini, Roza I.M. Mandated Landscape: British Imperial Rule in Palestine, 1929-1948. London: Frank Cass, 2005.
• Esber, Rosemarie M. Under the Cover of War: The Zionist Expulsion of the Palestinians. Alexandria, VA: Arabicus, 2008.
• Falk, Richard and Burns H. Weston. ‘The Relevance of International Law to Palestinian Rights in the West Bank and Gaza: In Legal Defense of the Intifada,’ Harvard International Law Journal 32, No. 1 (1991): 191-204.
• Farsoun, Samih K. (with Christian E. Zacharia). Palestine and the Palestinians. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1997.
• Finkelstein, Norman G. Beyond Chutzpah: On the Misuse of Anti-Semitism and the Abuse of History. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2008 ed.
• Fischbach, Michael R. Records of Dispossession: Palestinian Refugee Property and the Arab-Israeli Conflict. New York: Columbia University Press, 2003.
• Flapan, Simha. The Birth of Israel: Myths and Realities. New York: Pantheon, 1987.
• Gerner, Deborah J. One Land, Two Peoples: The Conflict over Palestine. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2nd ed., 1994.
• Glass, Charles. “Balfour, Weizmann and the Creation of Israel,” London Review of Books,
Vol. 23, No. 11, 7 June 2001.
• Gorenberg, Gershom. The Accidental Empire: Israel and the Birth of the Settlements, 1967-1977. New York: Times Books, 2006.
• Gorny, Yosef. Zionism and the Arabs, 1882-1948: A Study of Ideology. Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press, 1987.
• Hadawi, Sami. Bitter Harvest: A Modern History of Palestine. New York: Olive Branch Press, 1989.
• Kattan, Victor. From Coexistence to Conquest: International Law and the Origins of the Arab Israeli Conflict, 1891-1949. London: Pluto Press, 2009.
• Kattan, Victor, ed. The Palestine Question in International Law. London: British Institute of International and Comparative Law, 2008.
• Khalidi, Rashid. The Iron Cage: The Story of the Palestinian Struggle for Statehood. Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 2006.
• Khalidi, Walid, ed. All That Remains: The Palestinian Villages Occupied and Depopulated by Israel in 1948. Washington, DC: Institute for Palestine Studies, 1992.
• Kimmerling, Baruch. Zionism and Territory: The Socio-Territorial Dimensions of Zionist
Politics. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1983.
• Kimmerling, Baruch. The Invention and Decline of Israeliness: State, Society and the Military. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2001.
• Kimmerling, Baruch and Joel S. Migdal. The Palestinian People: A History. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003.
• Krämer, Gudrun. A History of Palestine: From the Ottoman Conquest to the Founding of the State of Israel. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008.
• Kretzmer, David. The Legal Status of the Arabs in Israel. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1990.
• Kretzmer, David. The Occupation of Justice: The Supreme Court of Israel and the Occupied Territories. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2002.
• Laor, Yitzhak. The Myths of Liberal Zionism. London: Verso, 2010.
• Lesch, Ann Mosely. Arab Politics in Palestine, 1917-1939: The Frustration of a Nationalist Movement. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1979.
• Lesch, Ann M. and Ian S. Lustick, eds. Exile and Return: Predicaments of Palestinians and Jews. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005.
• Makdisi, Saree. Palestine Inside Out: An Everyday Occupation. New York: W.W. Norton and Co., 2008.
• Maoz, Zeev. Defending the Holy Land: A Critical Analysis of Israel’s Security and Foreign Policy. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2006.
• Masalha, Nur. The Expulsion of Palestinians: The Concept of “Transfer” in Zionist Political Thought, 1882-1948. Washington, DC: Institute for Palestine Studies, 1992.
• Masalha, Nur. A Land Without People: Israel, Transfer and the Palestinians. London: Faber and Faber, 1997.
• Masalha, Nur. Imperial Israel and the Palestinians: The Politics of Expansion, 1967-2000. London: Pluto Press, 2000.
• Masalha, Nur. The Politics of Denial: Israel and the Palestinian Refugee Problem. London: Pluto, 2003.
• Masalha, Nur. The Bible and Zionism: Invented Traditions, Archaeology, and Post-Colonialism in Israel-Palestine. London: Zed Books, 2007.
• Masalha, Nur, ed. Catastrophe Remembered: Palestine, Israel and the Internal Refugees. London: Zed Books, 2005.
• Massad, Joseph A. The Persistence of the Palestinian Question: Essays on Zionism and the Palestinians. New York: Routledge, 2006.
• Muslih, Muhammad Y. The Origins of Palestinian Nationalism. New York: Columbia University Press, 1988.
• Pappé, Ilan. Britain and the Arab-Israeli Conflict, 1948-1951. New York: Macmillan, 1988.
• Pappé, Ilan. The Making of the Arab-Israeli Conflict, 1947-1951. London: I.B. Tauris, 1994.
• Pappé, Ilan. A History of Modern Palestine: One Land, Two Peoples. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2003 ed.
• Pappé, Ilan. The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine. Oxford, UK: Oneworld, 2006.
• Pappé, Ilan. The Forgotten Palestinians: A History of the Palestinians in Israel. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2011.
• Pappé, Ilan. The Idea of Israel: A History of Power and Knowledge. London: Verso, 2014.
• Pappé, Ilan, ed. The Israel/Palestine Question: A Reader. New York: Routledge, 2007.
• Pappé, Ilan, ed. Israel and South Africa: The Many Faces of Apartheid. London: Zed Books, 2015.
• Piterberg, Gabriel. The Returns of Zionism: Myths, Politics and Scholarship in Israel. London: Verso, 2008.
• Quandt, William B., Fuad Jabber and Ann Mosley Lesch. The Politics of Palestinian Nationalism. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1973.
• Quigley, John. Palestine and Israel: A Challenge to Justice. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1990.
• Quigley, John. The Case for Palestine: An International Law Perspective. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005.
• Quigley, John. The Statehood of Palestine: International Law in the Middle East Conflict. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2010.
• Rodinson, Maxime. Israel: A Colonial-Settler State? New York: Anchor Foundation/Pathfinder, 1973.
• Rogan, Eugene L. and Avi Shlaim, eds. The War for Palestine: Rewriting the History of 1948.
Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2001.
• Rose, Jacqueline. The Question of Zion. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007 ed.
• Rose, John. The Myths of Zionism. London: Pluto Press, 2004.
• Said, Edward W. The Question of Palestine. New York: Vintage Books, 1979.
• Said, Edward W. The End of the Peace Process: Oslo and After. New York: Vintage Books, 2001 ed.
• Said, Edward W. and Christopher Hitchens, eds. Blaming the Victims: Spurious Scholarship and the Palestinian Question. London: Verso, 1988.
• Sand, Shlomo. Invention of the Jewish People. London: Verso, 2010.
• Sand, Shlomo. The Invention of the Land of Israel: From Holy Land to Homeland. London: Verso, 2012.
• Shamir, Ronen. In the Colonies of Law: Colonialism, Zionism, and Law in Early Mandate Palestine. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2000.
• Shapira, Anita. Land and Power: The Zionist Resort to Force. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1992.
• Shehadeh, Raja. Occupier’s Law: Israel and the West Bank. Washington, DC: Institute for Palestine Studies, 1985.
• Shlaim, Avi. Collusions across the Jordan: King Abdullah, the Zionist Movement and the Partition of Palestine. Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press, 1988.
• Shlaim, Avi. The Politics of Partition: King Abdullah, the Zionists and Palestine, 1921-1951. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1990.
• Shlaim, Avi. The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World. New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2000.
• Shlaim, Avi. Israel and Palestine: Reappraisals, Revisions, Refutations. London: Verso, 2009.
• Shulman, David. Dark Hope: Working for Peace in Israel and Palestine. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2007.
• Slater, Jerome. “What Went Wrong? The Collapse of the Israeli-Palestinian Peace Process,” Political Science Quarterly, Vol. 116, No. 2 (Summer 2001), pp. 171-199.
• Tessler, Mark. A History of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2nd ed., 2009.
• Tilley, Virginia, ed. Beyond Occupation: Apartheid, Colonialism and International Law in the Occupied Territories. London: Pluto Press, 2012.
• White, Ben. Palestinians in Israel: Segregation, Discrimination and Democracy. London: Pluto Press, 2012.
• Whitelam, Keith W. The Invention of Ancient Israel: The Silencing of Palestinian History. London: Routledge, 1997.
• Yiftachel, Oren. Ethnocracy: Land and Identity Politics in Israel/Palestine. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006.
• Zureik, Elia. The Palestinians in Israel: A Study in Internal Colonialism. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1987.

[Deep State Special Legal Counsel]

Mr. O'Donnell,

Would you kindly abstract each title of your "selected" bibliography for me? I am eager to learn. Thanks.

[anon]

The term “Zionism” (Nathan Birnbaum)refers to a movement for the return of the Jewish people to their homeland in Israel.

Jew haters often claim that they are not Jew haters because they call Jews Zionists. This tactic is as obvious as the Jew hater's usual and complete inability to defend (or even acknowledge) the Jew hate in Arab countries, the treatment of Jews in those countries and the desire of so many in those countries to drive Jews "into the sea." The Jew hater can never admit that barbarism that emanates from those he supports, their abiding hostility and violence, their glorification of the taking of Jewish lives.

Instead the Jew hater will excoriate Jews in the manner demonstrated above, and this is the surest way to identify a Jew hater. The Jew hater cannot discuss both "sides" of an issue. The Jew hater can only hate and repeat, over and over, the same old same old.

Here is an example: "Israel being a 'colonial settler state'." this is basically what we hear the Mullahs say, right before the part about destroying Israel. One can't possibly imagine a more inflammatory, false statement, but, there you have it. The Jew hater would claim even that the word "Israel" was coined in post WWI Europe as an excuse, to claim that Jews had a homeland in Israel, so that European Jews could invade Arab lands. This sort of fantasy is peddled as truth and believed only by those who want to believe that Jews are evil and that the Middle East must be Judenrein.

These claims are made by one who seemingly has never been to a Seder.

What a horrible, horrible hate this Jew hate is. That fact that it is so often tolerated in legal academia is disgusting. ANy person uttering hate speech like that above about any other group (save, perhaps, middle aged white males) would be forbidden from ever setting foot anywhere near a campus.

[Orin Kerr]

Patrick,

You listed 89 books, in alphabetical order by author last name, that in your view explain why "Deep State Special Legal Counsel"'s view is unpersuasive. If you don't mind me asking, when you provide a list like that, are you cutting and pasting from somewhere or do you assemble each list individually in response to the particular comment?

[Patrick S. O'Donnell]

Orin,

I assembled the list from my bibliography on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict which, in turn, owes in large part to titles in my "home library," and thus reflects a bias for titles I've read in whole or part (so, in response to the particular comment). I was going to cite several posts over the years at Ratio Juris* and/or Religious Left Law in which I've addressed some of these issues but as I have to write to Professor Lubet to let him know I have a link in any such comment so it can be retrieved from a spam file/filter, I sometimes choose to do what's simpler or easier from my end.

* For example, on Jan. 9, 2009 at Ratio Juris: "Beyond Militarization: Legalization of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict and The Globalization of Human Rights Law," and Jan. 5, 2009: "Israel & Democracy: Beyond Zionism"

[anon]

Who cares about this list? Is anyone, truly, about to go thru the 89 titles, and attempt to make any sense of it?

Persuasion is not using a computer to generate lists of other people's writings. Persuasion is the ability to articulate something that makes sense. Or, at least, that is not offensive.

So far, let's review:

Jews are thieves ("stolen by Zionists");
Jews are racists ("apartheid");
Jews are duplicitous and war like ("creating facts on the ground"; "[Jews] destroyed the possibility of a two state solution");
Jews are "violent";
Israel is a "colonial settler state."

If this is what the commenter above has gleaned from all those sources, then I would suggest that we are witnessing something akin to David Duke's reading list.

[Deep State Special Legal Counsel]

O'Donnell's list is interesting. It only shows that his reference to "imperialism" is not just a Bumper Sticker slogan... It doesn't reveal any "facts" on the ground or mainstream analysis. These are titles one might find next to the Mumia titles at the Radical bookstore.