We Are One

W

e have all heard the term “BDS” so much over the last two decades that the threat the movement poses might seem overstated, even clichéd.

Yeah, yeah, BDS. Pass the salt.

But the threat of BDS is real and should concern us all, even if the goals of the movement have shifted. What could once be billed as a pressure campaign to force Israel to negotiate with the Palestinians has now become a hate campaign that seeks to delegitimize Israel and tar the Jewish People. What once could be considered a strategy within the normal realm of political behavior is now outright racism and bigotry.

The threat is so real that the State of Israel gathered together leaders of the anti-BDS movement recently in Jerusalem for a conference, “We Are One,” where activists shared horror stories and strategized on best practices for defense. A Jewish leader from Latin America, for instance, described the situation in Chile, which he called “ground zero for BDS” on the continent, as a battle of a tiny minority facing a huge and active mass: a few thousand Jews arrayed against an immigrant population of 350,000 Palestinians. Shockingly, the leader of the BDS movement there is an expatriate American Jew from New Jersey.

Across the world in Spain, a Jewish activist detailed how Iran had infiltrated the political system there, sponsoring a party that is among the country’s largest. In his estimation, it’s not that Spaniards are anti-Semitic, but that they’re ignorant of the facts. With immigrant Muslims pressing their own agenda, and a native population that is losing its own identity as ties of religion and country fray, Jews are finding themselves in the middle, and feeling squeezed.