Last week, members of the American Studies Association [ASA] voted overwhelmingly to affirm a resolution boycotting Israeli academic institutions.  The membership vote followed unanimous approval of the resolution by the ASA National Council.  Intense debate has followed the affirmation.

Much of the reaction from the boycott’s opponents has been infantile:  threats of lawsuits, screams of anti-Semitism, vulgar trolling, ear-piercing hysteria, and various strategies of derailment borrowed from the Glenn Beck playbook.  These tactics are fit to ignore.

More thoughtful responses have emerged, however, and provide opportunity for serious engagement.  One such response arrived from Peter Beinart, who supports a boycott focused on West Bank settlements but not on anything to do with 1948 Israel (i.e., anything inside the so-called green line).

While Beinart’s piece is thoughtful, it has serious problems, especially in its unexamined assumptions.  Rejecting the “singling out” of Israel and academic freedom as viable arguments against boycott, Beinart opposes the ASA resolution because “it’s denying the legitimacy of a democratic Jewish state, even alongside a Palestinian one.”

Here is Beinart’s argument:

The Association’s boycott resolution doesn’t denounce “the Israeli occupation of the West Bank.”  It denounces “the Israeli occupation of Palestine” and “the systematic discrimination against Palestinians,” while making no distinction whatsoever between Israeli control of the West Bank, where Palestinians lack citizenship, the right to vote and the right to due process, and Israel proper, where Palestinians, although discriminated against, enjoy all three.  That’s in keeping with the “boycotts, divestments, and sanctions” movement more generally.  BDS proponents note that the movement takes no position on whether there should be one state or two between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea.  But it clearly opposes the existence of a Jewish state within any borders. The BDS movement’s call for “respecting, protecting and promoting the rights of Palestinian refugees to return to their homes and properties” denies Israel’s right to set its own immigration policy.  So does the movement’s call for “recognizing the fundamental rights of the Arab-Palestinian citizens of Israel to full equality”, which presumably denies Israel’s right to maintain the preferential immigration policy that makes it a refuge for Jews.  Indeed, because the BDS movement’s statement of principles makes no reference to Jewish rights and Jewish connection to the land, it’s entirely possible to read it as giving Palestinians’ rights to national symbols and a preferential immigration policy while denying the same to Jews.

The errors of fact and delusions of victimhood in this passage are remarkable, encapsulated in Beinart’s use of two terms:  “although” and “presumably.”

Palestinian citizens of Israel, “although discriminated against,” Beinart declares, waving away discrimination, pooh-poohing it as a mere aside, a trifling factoid worthy only of a meager adverb clause.  Yet the discrimination he passingly references is the heart of the matter, not an inconvenience to be acknowledged then promptly ignored.

The boycott targets Israel in addition to the Occupied Territories precisely because of the discrimination to which Beinart haltingly accedes.  The boycott doesn’t make the distinction Beinart would like to see because the same state that pulverizes democracy on the West Bank makes a mockery of democracy inside Israel.  There is no such thing as real democracy in legal systems that create hierarchies of access and belonging based on nothing more than biology.