Pro-Palestinians keep on harming Palestinians
With the same sad inevitability of death and taxes, a body professing to care about the Palestinians but mostly rabidly opposed to Israel took action this month that followed a familiar pattern: invoking the plight of Palestinians while doing them damage.
For the umpteenth time, the source of the disconnect was the UN Human Rights Council, a bureaucracy long recognized by Democratic and Republican administrations alike as so debilitated by hypocrisy in general and anti-Israel bias in particular as to have precious credibility left.
The action: the Council’s publication of a blacklist of companies, including American ones, that in some fashion “do business” with Jews living in Israeli settlements, including settlements that everyone, including Palestinian negotiators, acknowledge will formally become part of Israel in any eventual peace deal.
The purpose: to support the anti-Israel Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement, the vehicle of choice for those whose detestation of Israel outpaces their concern for the welfare of actual Palestinians.
For starters, the UN’s encouragement of the boycotting of businesses that engage with Israeli settlements on the West Bank largely hurts Palestinians. According to a report issued by the watchdog group Palestinian Media Watch based on interviews with Palestinian workers and lawyers and the Palestinian Bureau of Statistics, Palestinians prefer working for Israeli companies on the West Bank to Palestinian ones. Israeli employers pay substantially higher wages and provide Palestinians with the same health care benefits, sick leave and vacation time as Israelis. The boycotts of these companies, therefore, disproportionately harm Palestinians.
This did not stop the vapid endorsements of the Council’s move by Palestinian leaders, who compete with one another to find slogans that make the least sense. “A timely message for those who push us toward chaos and lawlessness,” tweeted Husam Zomlot, the head of the Palestinian Mission to the United Kingdom about a boycott which may separate Palestinians who want to work from the jobs that permit them to do so. He was trumped by Palestinian Foreign Minister Riyad al-Malik, who called the UN’s call for a boycott “a victory for international law and diplomatic efforts,” a head-scratcher if ever there was one.
The history of Palestinian self-harm is long, wearying and depressing. Had Palestinian leaders accepted the independent Palestinian state created for them by the UN in 1947, there would never have been any Israeli settlements on the West Bank. Had they chosen to create a Palestinian state when Israel had no presence on the West Bank — likewise no settlements. Had they accepted the Palestinian state on virtually all of the West Bank and all of Gaza with a capital in East Jerusalem offered by Israel in 2000, 2001 and again in 2009, ditto. The narrative peddled by Israel’s detractors so insistently that the source of the unending Palestinian-Israeli conflict is Jewish settlements isn’t merely ahistoric. It’s balderdash.
It reflects no love for the knot of right-wing religious zealots who have Israel’s democracy in their grip to point that out. One may be repulsed by Benjamin Netanyahu’s noxious authoritarianism, or by how the Netanyahu-Trump lovefest is degrading American empathy for Israel, and still stipulate the obvious: When Palestinians reject an independent Palestinian state over and over, offered to them by left-leaning Israeli leaders and centrist ones, it ain’t Netanyahu or West Bank settlements that pose the real problem.
Whether it is boycotts bathed in the clever rhetoric of human rights but guaranteed to hurt Palestinians most of all, or the organized terrorizing of Jewish kids on college campuses aimed at browbeating them into abandoning their support for a Jewish national homeland, the BDS movement has made intimidation its trademark. As Arab and African states have drawn closer and closer to Israel, and patience in the Mideast for the Palestinian preference for victimhood over statehood has waned, BDS has grown ever angrier and ever less credible. This is too bad for Palestinians, and too bad for the prospects for peace.