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Un intéressant éditorial du New York Times contre les tentatives du Sénat américain de criminaliser BDS

Opinion | Curbing Speech in the Name of Helping Israel - The New York Times

A Senate bill aims to punish those who boycott Israel over its settlement policy. There are better solutions.

By The Editorial Board
The editorial board represents the opinions of the board, its editor and the publisher. It is separate from the newsroom and the Op-Ed section.

▻https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/18/opinion/editorials/israel-bds.html?action=click&module=Opinion&pgtype=Homepage

One of the more contentious issues involving Israel in recent years is now before Congress, testing America’s bedrock principles of freedom of speech and political dissent.

It is a legislative proposal that would impose civil and criminal penalties on American companies and organizations that participate in boycotts supporting Palestinian rights and opposing Israel’s occupation of the West Bank.

The aim is to cripple the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement known as B.D.S., which has gathered steam in recent years despite bitter opposition from the Israeli government and its supporters around the world.

The proposal’s chief sponsors, Senator Ben Cardin, a Maryland Democrat, and Senator Rob Portman, an Ohio Republican, want to attach it to the package of spending bills that Congress needs to pass before midnight Friday to keep the government fully funded.
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The American Israel Public Affairs Committee, a leading pro-Israel lobby group, strongly favors the measure.

J Street, a progressive American pro-Israel group that is often at odds with Aipac and that supports a two-state peace solution, fears that the legislation could have a harmful effect, in part by implicitly treating the settlements and Israel the same, instead of as distinct entities. Much of the world considers the settlements, built on land that Israel captured in the 1967 war, to be a violation of international law.

Although the Senate sponsors vigorously disagree, the legislation, known as the Israel Anti-Boycott Act, is clearly part of a widening attempt to silence one side of the debate. That is not in the interests of Israel, the United States or their shared democratic traditions.

Critics of the legislation, including the American Civil Liberties Union and several Palestinian rights organizations, say the bill would violate the First Amendment and penalize political speech.

The hard-line policies of Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, including expanding settlements and an obvious unwillingness to seriously pursue a peace solution that would allow Palestinians their own state, have provoked a backlash and are fueling the boycott movement.
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It’s not just Israel’s adversaries who find the movement appealing. Many devoted supporters of Israel, including many American Jews, oppose the occupation of the West Bank and refuse to buy products of the settlements in occupied territories. Their right to protest in this way must be vigorously defended.

The same is true of Palestinians. They are criticized when they resort to violence, and rightly so. Should they be deprived of nonviolent economic protest as well? The United States frequently employs sanctions as a political tool, including against North Korea, Iran and Russia.

Mr. Cardin and Mr. Portman say their legislation merely builds on an existing law, the Export Control Reform Act, which bars participation in the Arab League boycott of Israel, and is needed to protect American companies from “unsanctioned foreign boycotts.”

They are especially concerned that the United Nations Human Rights Council is compiling a database of companies doing business in the occupied territories and East Jerusalem, a tactic Senate aides say parallels the Arab League boycott.

But there are problems with their arguments, critics say. The existing law aimed to protect American companies from the Arab League boycott because it was coercive, requiring companies to boycott Israel as a condition of doing business with Arab League member states. A company’s motivation for engaging in that boycott was economic — continued trade relations — not exercising free speech rights.

By contrast, the Cardin-Portman legislation would extend the existing prohibition to cover boycotts against Israel and other countries friendly to the United States when the boycotts are called for by an international government organization, like the United Nations or the European Union.

Neither of those organizations has called for a boycott, but supporters of Israel apparently fear that the Human Rights Council database is a step in that direction.
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Civil rights advocates, on the other hand, say that anyone who joins a boycott would be acting voluntarily — neither the United Nations nor the European Union has the authority to compel such action — and the decision would be an exercise of political expression in opposition to Israeli policies.

Responding to criticism, the senators amended their original proposal to explicitly state that none of the provisions shall infringe upon any First Amendment right and to penalize violators with fines rather than jail time.

But the American Civil Liberties Union says the First Amendment wording is nonbinding and “leaves intact key provisions which would impose civil and criminal penalties on companies, small business owners, nonprofits and even people acting on their behalf who engage in or otherwise support certain political boycotts.”

While the sponsors say their bill is narrowly targeted at commercial activity, “such assurances ring hollow in light of the bill’s intended purpose, which is to suppress voluntary participation in disfavored political boycotts,” the A.C.L.U. said in a letter to lawmakers.

Even the Anti-Defamation League, which has lobbied for the proposal, seems to agree. A 2016 internal ADL memo, disclosed by The Forward last week, calls anti-B.D.S. laws “ineffective, unworkable, unconstitutional and bad for the Jewish community.”

In a properly functioning Congress, a matter of such moment would be openly debated. Instead, Mr. Cardin and Mr. Portman are trying to tack the B.D.S. provision onto the lame-duck spending bill, meaning it could by enacted into law in the 11th-hour crush to keep the government fully open.

The anti-B.D.S. initiative began in 2014 at the state level before shifting to Congress and is part of a larger, ominous trend in which the political space for opposing Israel is shrinking. After ignoring the B.D.S. movement, Israel is now aggressively pushing against it, including branding it anti-Semitic and adopting a law barring foreigners who support it from entering that country.
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One United States case shows how counterproductive the effort is. It involves Bahia Amawi, an American citizen of Palestinian descent who was told she could no longer work as an elementary school speech pathologist in Austin, Tex., because she refused to sign a state-imposed oath that she “does not” and “will not” engage in a boycott of Israel. She filed a lawsuit this week in federal court, arguing that the Texas law “chills constitutionally protected political advocacy in support of Palestine.”

Any anti-boycott legislation enacted by Congress is also likely to face a court challenge. It would be more constructive if political leaders would focus on the injustice and finding viable solutions to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict rather than reinforcing divisions between the two parties and promoting legislation that raises free speech concerns.

Democratic Candidate Who Criticized Israel Faces Charges of Anti-Semitism - The New York Times
▻https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/29/us/politics/democrat-israel-anti-semitism.html

À cause d’un livre écrit en tant que journaliste il y a 27 ans, livre que le #new_york_times, dont l’objectivité envers #Israël est légendaire, avait jugé partisan et injuste à l’époque.

WASHINGTON — On Monday evening, at the home of a retired rabbi in Charlottesville, Va., the Democratic nominee for the Fifth Congressional District of Virginia sat down with about 40 Jewish leaders to try to defuse Virginia Republican charges that she was a “virulent anti-Semite.”

At issue was the candidate’s 27-year-old book, “Dangerous Liaison: The Inside Story of the U.S.-Israeli Covert Relationship,” a broadside written by Leslie Cockburn, a journalist-turned-politician, with her husband, Andrew Cockburn, that was panned in several reviews as an inflammatory screed.

[...]

When the book was published in 1991, a review in The New York Times described it as “largely dedicated to Israel-bashing for its own sake.”

“Its first message is that, win or lose, smart or dumb, right or wrong, suave or boorish, Israelis are a menace,” the review said. “The second is that the Israeli-American connection is somewhere behind just about everything that ails us.”

Ms. Cockburn told the group on Monday that she was being critical of government policy from a fact-based perspective, not out of animus toward Jews. In the interview, she said she was seeking the endorsement of J Street, a Jewish political group that has set itself up as a progressive alternative to other American Jewish organizations more uncritical of Israeli government policies.

Sanders Inspires Debate on Democrats’s Language on Israel

Discussions about whether to include Palestinian rights and Israeli occupation in the platform were more robust than ever before in party history, a development J Street has advocated.
The Forward and Nathan Guttman Jun 11, 2016 12:23 AM
▻http://www.haaretz.com/world-news/u-s-election-2016/1.724381

Washington – The Democratic Party’s first round of platform committee hearings had something for everyone, from AIPAC to J Street.

Discussions about whether to include Palestinian rights and Israeli occupation in the platform were more robust than ever before in party history, a development J Street has advocated.

For AIPAC, the meeting sent a clear message that despite the concerted effort by Bernie Sanders and his supporters, the platform is not going to change.

“What everybody tends to forget, with all due respect, is that there was a winner of the Democratic primaries and her name is Hillary Clinton and Hillary Clinton has a long established, decades-long policy regarding Israel,” said former Florida congressman Robert Wexler after delivering his forceful pro-Israel testimony to the platform committee. “It is Hillary Clinton’s view that won out.”

But as committee members argued under the watchful eyes of the lobbyists in the audience, the debate’s direction became more clear. Supporters of changing the platform, backed by Sanders and by J Street, have succeeded in raising new issues and grabbing the headlines. But Democratic establishment members will have the last word, win the majority of votes and preserve the current AIPAC-supported language.

Wexler represents the thinking of many in the Democratic National Committee who believe it is best to leave the plank on Israel untouched, with a possible addition of a clause denouncing efforts to boycott and delegitimize Israel. That means preserving language that focuses on the rights and needs of Israel, couching support for a two-state solution as an Israeli interest and continuing to omit the word “occupation.”

Others who testified that day pushed to include it.

“The word occupation is not a pejorative, it is a legal category and the situation in the Palestinian territories clearly meets it,” said Matt Duss, president of the Foundation for Middle East Peace, in an interview outside the committee room. Duss, in his testimony to the platform committee, tried to make the case for including the term in the plank and adjusting the language in a way that would recognize Palestinian rights as well as those of Israelis, a point Sanders and his supporters have been stressing for months.

“These two things, supporting the rights of the Palestinians and the rights of Israelis, are entirely consistent with each other,” Duss said.

But the idea of adopting the term occupation into the platform is a non-starter for Wexler.

“If there are minor modifications that allow people to coalesce around language, sure, everyone should be amenable to hearing other people’s views,” said Wexler in response, “but adding language such as occupation is not a minor change.”

Scholar and activist Cornel West, a Sanders representative, delivered the most vocal defense of the candidate’s wish to change the party’s discourse on Israel.

West, known for his outspoken criticism of Israel, as well as that of mainstream Democrats and of President Obama, called Israeli officials, especially newly-appointed defense minister Avigdor Lieberman “Trump-like figures in Israeli life.” West asked his fellow committee members to explain why they are so quick to criticize the Republican presumptive nominee for his racist comments, but are hesitant to speak out when it comes to Israeli politicians. “Why can we focus on xenophobes here, and seem to be so reluctant to call out xenophobes in Israel and other places?” West asked.

As Wexler tried to convince members of the committee that current pro-Israel platform language should be adopted, West pushed for denouncing the Israeli occupation in the party’s official document. “If there were a Palestinian occupation of Jewish brothers and sisters would we respond the same way?” he asked. West also turned to committee members and posed an even tougher question: Could they agree “that life of Palestinian baby is just as valuable as Jewish baby.” America’s commitment to its allies, he added, “can never be predicated on occupation.”

West is one of five members appointed by Sanders to the 15-member Democratic platform drafting committee. At least two of Sanders’ other picks, James Zogby who is the president of the Arab American Institute, and Rep. Keith Ellison of Minnesota, the first Muslim-American elected to Congress, believe the Democratic Party should adjust its position to include greater recognition of Palestinian rights.

But they are a minority within the party and its institutions. A polite, but forceful, pushback from other committee members made it clear that while the party mainstream will continue to support a two-state solution, they are unwilling to consider taking any deliberate step to address concerns of pro-Palestinian activists in their formal platform.

Clinton’s delegates to the committee also alluded to political concerns.

“We should make sure that Hillary Clinton is the next president of the United States,” Berman said, “and I think of our responsibility of this platform in terms of what can bring us together,” said committee member Howard Berman, a former California congressman and chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee.

In a written testimony provided to the committee, J Street’s president Jeremy Ben-Ami sought to dispel this notion, which he described as an “erroneous understanding of American Jewish opinion.”

According to Ben-Ami, Jewish Democratic voters are, in fact, much more progressive when it comes to Israel than the party gives them credit for. ”In Congress, in Jewish communities and at the ballot box, this gap is now closing,” Ben-Ami wrote. “The drafting committee has an opportunity to close the same gap in their platform.”

Cornel West made the same argument in a blunter way: The Democratic Party, he said, has been “beholden to AIPAC for too long.”

In the coming weeks, the platform drafting committee will hold another public hearing and then move to voting on the language. Sanders’s and his supporters’s best hope right now is for a large enough dissenting minority to get the question of Israel and the Palestinians to a floor debate at the party’s convention in Philadelphia.

Reform Jews threaten to leave Conference of Presidents
Haaretz
By JTA | May 1, 2014
▻http://www.haaretz.com/jewish-world/jewish-world-news/1.588581

The Union for Reform Judaism is seeking an overhaul of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations in the wake of its rejection of J Street’s bid for membership.

The Reform group in a statement posted Thursday on its website said leaving the Presidents Conference, an umbrella body, is an option.

“As of yesterday, it is clear that the Conference of Presidents, as currently constituted and governed, no longer serves its vital purpose of providing a collective voice for the entire American Jewish pro-Israel community,” URJ President Rick Jacobs said in the statement.

“In the days ahead, Reform movement leaders will be consulting with our partners within the Conference of Presidents to decide what our next steps will be. We may choose to advocate for a significant overhaul of the Conference of Presidents’ processes. We may choose to simply leave the Conference of Presidents. But this much is certain: We will no longer acquiesce to simply maintaining the facade that the Conference of Presidents represents or reflects the views of all of American Jewry.”

The departure of the umbrella body for Reform movement congregations, which bills itself as the largest single Jewish organization in the United States with 900 congregations representing 1.5 million Jews, could undercut the Presidents Conference’s claim to speak for the community on foreign policy.

On Wednesday, Presidents Conference members voted 22-17 with three abstentions against admitting J Street, a Jewish group that calls itself “pro-peace and pro-Israel.” J Street has criticized Israeli government policies on peace and backed the Obama administration’s nuclear talks with Iran that many Jewish groups have opposed.

Separately, Rabbi Julie Schonfeld, the executive vice president of the Conservative movement’s Rabbinical Assembly, said her group also would seek an overhaul.

“The Conference of Presidents has 50 or so organizations, each one has one vote, the majority of those organizations are quite tiny,” she told JTA. “The fact that J Street did not pass today’s vote is reflective of structural anomalies of the conference.”

A source close to the Presidents Conference said it was not clear from the secret ballot that J Street’s rejection was driven by the smaller groups, and that previous attempts to change the system failed in part because members could not agree on criteria that would determine the proportional weight of a member organization.

B’Tselem “proud” partner of war criminals, enemies of Palestinian rights
▻http://electronicintifada.net/blogs/ali-abunimah/btselem-proud-partner-war-criminals-enemies-palestinian-rights

B’Tselem USA, the American arm of Israel’s B’Tselem human rights group, is once again proud of its partnership with J Street, the Israel lobby group that forcefully campaigns against Palestinian human rights and hosts war criminals at its conferences.

Obama campaigns with rabbi who doesn’t want “too many Arabs” in Israel | Al Akhbar English
►http://english.al-akhbar.com/blogs/gadfly/obama-campaigns-rabbi-who-doesnt-want-too-many-arabs-israel

Obama was introduced with warm praise by Rabbi Eric Yoffie, the outgoing president of the Union for Reform Judaism, and arguably the most prominent Reform Jew in the United States. Yoffie is a major Obama campaign surrogate, whose endorsement is featured on a pro-Obama website created by the liberal Zionist Israel lobbying group, J Street.

[…]

Earlier this year, Yoffie published the transcript of an argument he had with a right-wing friend who helped him lobby against the Palestinian Authority’s bid for statehood at the UN. He entitled the piece, “I prefer to live with Jews.”

Exposing J Street: Jewish Supremacy At Its Finest « Adam Akkad
►http://adamakkad.com/2011/11/19/exposing-j-street-jewish-supremacy-at-its-finest

The first and main J Street representative began speaking by admitting he was just a boy from Queens, New York having no real ties to Israel. But since he was Jewish “Israel mean a lot to [him]” He then went on to announce how happy he was that SJP agreed to engage them in conversation and announced “This is not a debate.” This was a clear attempt by J Street to force us to participate in the normalization of Zionist racism and Palestinian suffering. I made it clear in my opening statement that these are not 2 equal and opposite parties, and I did not sign up for a discussion. We were there to debate the issues head on, not to feel good about racism and oppression.

Now, I have always said J Street is worse than AIPAC from what I have read and heard of the organization. After experiencing it first hand, my feelings are all the more real. At the end of the day, AIPAC is principled in its Zionism. J Street markets itself as a liberal middle ground organization seeking a just solution to the Israeli-Palestinian impasse for all parties. This is entirely false and misleading.

Debating #BDS At #Princeton
►http://maxblumenthal.com/2010/12/debating-bds-at-princeton

The presentation by Daniel May of #J_Street was the most significant of the evening, simply because it revealed how far J Street is willing to go to stop BDS. I have nothing personal against May. In fact, I know him and like him a lot. He is a decent, enormously talented guy. But he is also an employee of J Street and that means that he had to recite the talking points that Jeremy Ben-Ami and his inner circle had crafted for him based on their own focus groups and polling.

Tragically, May’s case — and by extension, J Street’s case — against BDS boiled down to the Bible and the Holocaust: BDS undermines the 2000-year-old dream that Jews supposedly have of “returning to Israel,” he said, and it denies the persecution Jews have suffered “everywhere they went,” especially in Europe during the Holocaust. Aside from a few token nods May made to the Palestinian popular struggle (which ironically is linked the BDS movement), his case against BDS seemed contrived to trigger the most base emotional responses from Jewish-Americans, especially those who had been subjected to sustained Zionist conditioning. What that says about J Street’s long term political strategy and the case against BDS will be the subject of a much longer piece I plan to post in the coming days.