A Medium Corporation, Jan 19, 2017

Labour Friends of Israel adorns itself in the slogan “For Israel, For Palestine, For Peace” while opponents of BDS on campus proclaim an interest in building “bridges” not “walls”. This is hardly Netanyahu’s language; he is the man who hurries voters to the polls with nakedly racist warnings that Arabs are voting too while his ministers openly call for genocide against Palestinian mothers who give birth to “little snakes”.

[...] “Moderation” as the politician’s obfuscation of hard choices is best dented by bringing those choices into sharper relief — raising clear demands of our own policymakers, like BDS, might sort the wheat from the chaff. We cannot from abroad mend the central tragedy of Palestinian politics, which is the long decline of a national liberation movement at the twin hands of fragmentation and NGO-isation. But we can conceive an enemy: state racism, in Israel as everywhere else, though in Israel it is constitutive. Proper universalists, committed to the possibility of human flourishing without exceptions, should cluster under that banner. That liberal Zionists continue to reject it is telling.