Some of you may have seen posters or FB posts about a bicycle boycott of Jewish-owned businesses to happen soon. (I’m not sharing the poster or details for obvious reasons.)
Let me be as clear as I can be.
This action is antisemitism plain and simple. It is Jew hatred.
No one who lives, works, or visits our city should take part in it. And I encourage all of you, especially political officials who have a broad audience, to condemn it.
It is not an action criticizing the Israeli government. It is not an action supporting the Palestinian cause. I would not be complaining about that. I’ve been a critic of the Israeli government and supporter of a Palestinian state for almost fifty years. I’ve organized and taken part in teach-ins and protests in support of the Palestinian cause.
It is an example of antisemitism–Jew hatred–plain and simple.
This is an attack on individual Jews who own restaurants in Philadelphia. The owners of these businesses are mostly not Israelis. They are Americans. And as such they are not responsible for the actions of the Israeli government.
Even if they were Israelis, they have no control over the actions of the Israeli government.
It is true that some of these businesses have raised money for organizations in Israel.
The most prominent is United Hatzalah, which the Cook and Solo restaurants support. It describes its primary work this way: “When emergencies occur, rapid medical treatment increases chances of survival exponentially. Using specially equipped motorcycle ambulances, United Hatzalah’s network of more than 8,600 volunteer medics help save thousands of lives each year across Israel by providing medical treatment within minutes.” The organization doesn’t provide services only to Jews. They provide it to all Israelis. I believe that some of their volunteers are Palestinians. How is it wrong to support them?
One supporter of the boycott said that he opposes the organization because it does not support medical efforts in Gaza and the need for medical help is greater there. That’s absurd. The volunteers are in Israel not in Gaza. The second claim is about as serious as this one would be: The American Red Cross is racist because it provides services to white Americans even though the greater need is in Black communities. Nor is it a serious criticism of Hatzolah to say that they provide medical and other services to IDF soldiers. When I led and took part in many protests against the Vietnam War, no one ever suggested that we target the USO. We all understood that there is a difference between soldiers drafted to fight in a war and the government that drafts them and sends them to war. Supporting the well-being of soldiers is not supporting the cause for which they fight.
Nor is a boycott justified because one of the businesses supports the Jewish National Fund. If you look at their website, you see that it is not affiliated with the Israeli government. It provides a wide variety of funding for services to individuals, for medical research and other causes that help people in Israel (and other countries) not the state or the government.
Do the owners of these businesses support Israel in some other way?
I don’t really know. But let’s stop and think for a moment about what “support for Israel” means and what kind of response it deserves.
I imagine that like most Jews in America, they probably support the existence of the state of Israel and probably are to one degree or another critical of its government.
They probably support negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians and some kind of just settlement whether a two-state or one-state solution.
Which means they are, like me, some kind of Zionist or at least an anti-anti-Zionist to the extent that they don’t want to see the ethnic cleansing of the Jews of Israel, or the destruction of any kind of Jewish political entity in the land of Israel / Palestine.
If holding that opinion, while not engaging in activism in support of the state, let alone the Netanyahu government, justifies a boycott, then there is justification for boycotting pretty much every Jewish-owned business or individual.
And at this point, the distance between antisemitism and anti-Zionism has pretty much collapsed. If any kind of sympathy on the part of Jewish people for our fellow Jews–many of whom are our actual cousins–in Israel is worthy of boycott, then we are all subject to a boycott.
By this standard, if you support the Palestinian cause, you have a reason to boycott every Jewish-owned business and to not hire any Jew. pretty much no Jew And businesses can rightly deny us services. Because almost all of us, including those who like me have supported Palestinian rights for our whole lives, have some sympathy for the Jews of Israel and their political community.
This is a reductio ad absurdum of anti-Zionism.
And I, like most other Jews, will fight this kind of anti-Zionism to the bitter end. And here is why: In my lifetime Jews were not served or offered rooms in some restaurants and hotels. (I saw this firsthand in Georgia in around 1964). In the lifetime of my father, there were quotas for Jews in most colleges and universities among both students and faculty, as well as in major law firms and businesses. And outside heavily Jewish communities, many businesses were “restricted,” that is, excluded Jews. Since then things have changed and the Jewish community in the United States has thrived in so many ways and also contributed to this country in so many ways.
We don’t intend to see our status in this country backslide.
I imagine that the folks who organized this boycott know all this. Because the goal of their effort is precisely to gain attention for their cause, precisely by attacking Jews and invoking Jew hatred. They chose the evening before Kristallnacht–the terrible attack on tens of thousands of German Jewish businesses by the Nazis–for this event. Their aim is to use their antisemitism to get attention for their cause, and perhaps even worse, to generate antisemitism as a way of attaining their political aims.
This is horribly wrong from a moral point of view. And frankly, it’s a terrible strategy for the pro-Palestinian movement. If there is anything that is going to push American Jews, a majority of whom are, again, highly critical of Israel, to defend the country and the majority of people in this country who reject antisemitism to support the current Israeli government, it is to threaten us with antisemitism.
That’s what this event does. Indeed, someone today wrote me to say that I “risk generating antisemitism” by criticizing this event.
I urge you to speak out against it and join a counter-event at the restaurants that are being boycotted. The details are in the flier at the top of this post.