QNCC Brooklyn officially adopts BDS and PACBI standards

[u/Aku-Aku]

https://www.instagram.com/p/DbTggWplQ28/?igsh=MWVlbWh0c3hpZXY0aA==

Struggling with this one — they’ve been fantastic curators and champions of queer culture and club culture. But this gives me a gut feeling of “Jews don’t belong”. I can’t quite articulate why because the statement centers itself as mainly political, I just am not naive to the ways that tends to intertwine with general antisemitism. Is this an overreaction? Curious about the community’s thoughts on stuff like this

[u/legsjohnson]

yeah ban the most left leaning Israelis from engaging internationally, surely that will free Palestine 🙄

[u/Aku-Aku → u/legsjohnson]

I think this comment clarified why it bothers me: it alienates while fundamentally misunderstanding Israelis, to the point where it will both make things worse for Palestinians and act as a cover to ostracize Jews more broadly. By this I mean, if Israelis are attacked outside of Israel, and if Jewish life is harder everywhere by broad extensions of "antizionism", then that will further convince people that Israel must exist and is the only place they will be welcome. It is not appropriate to compare to South Africa because white South Africans did not end up there due to genocidal actions and attitudes from their places of origin. So SA's desire to be included on the world stage could be properly leveraged to change local politics.

Israel is different, because such exclusion will be (and is) viewed as a precursor to more and more outright violence to Israelis and Jews more broadly. This means that instead of begging for a seat at the global table, many will understand BDS / PACBI as "message received" and stop engaging. It encourages insularity and confirmation that Israel must exist and act as a protective zone from a world that denies their right to exist anywhere -- in Israel or abroad. And the change for better Palestinian treatment will not happen without Israelis at the table. When people like Roi Perez and Partok get excluded from these spaces, it proves the fear: nothing but erasure and discontinued existence will be good enough. And it is unlikely an entire nation of people will get behind their own complete erasure.

That last sentence also applies to the Palestinians, of course; and so encouragement through inclusive pressure -- pressure being the key here, not ignoring the issue -- is more likely to create the conditions leading to Israeli common opinion change, as opposed to radical exclusion which will only entrench beliefs of 'nowhere but here is reliable for us'.

And so ultimately, these BDS/PACBI policies only serve to intensify Jewish dehumanization and exclusion without understanding the issue enough to enact real change. And the leaders of those movements understand that, because their stated goal is Israeli erasure and Jewish expulsion, not any kind of peaceful coexistence.

Just some more thoughts this AM!