BDS’s scorched-earth approach

Michael Makovi (“BDS blacklist punishes thoughtcrimes,” Comment & Features, January 11) is spot-on about two wrongs not adding up to a right. The problem lies in the conflation of the two in respect to BDS.

Restrictions against entry to Israel of proponents of BDS have zero to do with retribution for “thoughtcrimes,” real or imagined. They are, rather, a completely rational response to the BDS movement’s apparent declaration of war on the economy of the Jewish state and its 8 million citizens, 20% of whom are Arabs, a kind of scorchedearth pursuit of a holier-than-thou moral standard that seems oblivious to the damage it is capable of inflicting on Jewish and Arab families alike.

The BDS movement’s demand for unfettered access to the land on which its rhetorical guns are so definitively targeted gives chutzpah a whole new meaning. BILL MEHLMAN Efrat

Michael Makovi takes too narrow a view on the issue of freedom of the individual. Every democratic nation has to tread the narrow line between permitting – indeed fostering – individual liberty in all its forms, and in protecting the state and its citizens from those who would use those very liberties to undermine or destroy it.

The claim that BDS is simply advocating a boycott of products emanating from Israel is demonstrably untrue. BDS apologists are quite unequivocal about their true intention – to eliminate the State of Israel.

BDS founder Omar Barghouti has said on many occasions: “We oppose a Jewish state in any part of Palestine.” Pro-BDS author Ahmed Moor: “BDS does mean the end of the Jewish state.” As’ad Abu Khalil: “The real aim of BDS is to bring down the State of Israel.” Anna Baltzer: “We need to wipe out Israel.”

When a movement is explicitly engaged in undermining and eventually destroying a nation-state, that state has an obligation to its citizens to sanction it. NEVILLE TELLER Beit Shemesh

Michael Makovi apparently doesn’t understand the difference between thought and action.

Thinking you would like to destroy Israel is thought, and nobody is being punished for that. Joining and supporting an organization working to destroy Israel is action.

He also doesn’t understand what he calls the “right to freely travel.” While many of us have fought for the right of people to leave a country that is persecuting them, those people don’t automatically have the right to go wherever they want. Every sovereign country has the right to control its borders and determine whom it allows to enter.

It is foolhardy for a country to allow free entry to people working to destroy it and its people. Israel’s restrictions on the entry of some people working to destroy it is simply common sense – and long overdue. ALAN STEIN Netanya