Terrorism And Economic Warfare
By Clifford D. May/Washington Times June 27, 2016 Share this article:
Tel Aviv's Sarona Market bills itself as the "heartbeat of Israeli
culinary art." Dozens of small restaurants and shops offer cheeses,
wines, breads, fish, olives, pastas, burgers -- pretty much anything you
can imagine, and quite a bit that you probably cannot.
I had a nice lunch there recently. Exactly
a week later, two Palestinian men sat down in a cafe, ordered dessert,
pulled handguns from beneath their dark suit jackets, and began firing
at everyone in sight.
Four civilians were
murdered and more than a dozen wounded before the killers were stopped
-- one shot by a security guard, the other arrested without a fight. The
following day, the Sarona Market was up and running again.
It's
not that Israelis have grown blase about such bloodshed. But shutting
down the market for more than a few hours would have provided the
terrorists with a bonus.
Israelis also
recognize that terrorists can strike anywhere -- even places you might
not expect (like Orlando, Florida) and against those you might not
expect to be in the crosshairs (though if you didn't know that Islamists
target gays, you haven't been paying attention).
One difference: When it comes to Jews, guns, bombs and knives have long been coupled with economic weapons.
In
the 1930s and early 1940s, the project of serious anti-Semites was a
Europe without Jews. No Jewish-owned stores in Berlin. No Jewish
professors teaching in Viennese universities. No Jewish villages in the
Polish countryside.
Immediately after becoming
German chancellor in 1933, Adolf Hitler proclaimed a boycott of Jewish
shops. Five years later came Kristallnacht, the "Night of Broken Glass,"
in which 7,500 businesses were destroyed (along with synagogues,
schools, even cemeteries).
At a meeting of
National Socialist leaders a few days later, Hermann Goering declared
that "the Jewish question" needed to be solved once and for all.
"Since
the problem is mainly an economic one, it is from the economic angle it
shall have to be tackled," he said. "I implore competent agencies to
take all measures for the elimination of the Jew from the German
economy."
"Don't buy from Jews" became a Nazi
slogan. Death squads, concentration camps, gas chambers, ovens, genocide
-- all that soon followed.
After the defeat of
Germany in 1945, serious anti-Semites moved on to a new goal: a Middle
East without Jews. The Arab League immediately organized a boycott of
the yishuv, the pre-state Jewish community in Palestine.
The
U.N. plan to partition Palestine into an Arab state and a Jewish state
-- the original two-state solution -- was accepted by the Jews but
turned down by Arabs. In 1948, Israel declared its independence. The
boycott continued.
Next, the armies of Egypt,
Syria, Jordan and Iraq attacked, waging a war to wipe the fledgling
Jewish state off the map. They failed. The boycott continued.
The
rulers of Egypt, Iraq, Libya and other Middle Eastern countries then
turned on their own Jewish subjects. Whether those subjects favored or
opposed the rebirth of a Jewish homeland didn't matter.
Hundreds
of thousands were driven from their homes. Many sought refuge in
Israel. Today, about half of all Israelis are from families with roots
in Arab and Muslim countries.
In 1967, Israel's neighbors launched
another conventional war aimed at eliminating Israel. When that too
failed, terrorism became the weapon of choice. But economic warfare
continued as well.
In the 1970s, the United
States adopted two significant laws making it illegal to comply with
boycotts imposed by foreign governments waging war against Israel.
Today,
nonstate actors lead the campaign. Omar Barghouti, credited as a
co-founder of the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement, has stated
plainly that the goal is not to pressure Israelis into making
concessions that might lead to peace.
"We oppose a Jewish state in any part of Palestine," he has said.
With
two BDS supporters appointed -- courtesy of Sen. Bernie Sanders -- to
the Democratic Party's platform committee, even Jeremy Ben-Ami,
president of left-leaning J Street, seems to have grasped the truth.
The
movement, he now says, "fails to recognize Israel's right to exist, to
support a two-state solution, to differentiate between the occupation
and opposition to Israel itself."
In recent
months, more than 20 governors have signed anti-BDS laws. In response,
BDS advocates are angrily asserting that their freedom of speech is
being violated.
That's a canard. These laws
simply make clear that taxpayers -- in Illinois, South Carolina,
Colorado, Florida and a growing list of other states -- will not support
companies that discriminate against Israel.
"The
Supreme Court has repeatedly held that conditioning government money on
compliance with anti-discrimination policies does not violate the First
Amendment," legal scholar Eugene Kontorovich pointed out.
He
added: "Israel boycotts -- which target all businesses from a
particular country -- have the key hallmark of impermissible
discrimination: They cut off business to people and companies not
because of their own particular conduct, but on the basis of who they
are."
BDS advocates claim to fight for "social
justice," but they turn a blind eye to the Muslim-on-Muslim wars in
Syria, Libya and Yemen, the genocide of Middle Eastern Christians and
Yazidis, the enslavement of girls in northern Nigeria and the routine
executions of gays in Gaza, Iran and other corners of the Islamic world.
"Anti-Semitism,"
the British rabbi/philosopher Jonathan Sacks recently observed, "is a
virus that survives by mutating. In the Middle Ages, Jews were hated
because of their religion.
In the 19th and
20th centuries, they were hated because of their race. Today they are
hated because of their nation state, Israel." There may be treatments
for this virus but no one has a cure.
Originally published at Washington Times - reposted with author permission.
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