Economist Joins BDS Whitewash
The Economist is the latest media organization to misinform its readers by whitewashing the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement.
The British weekly stated in a recent article that BDS “wants Israel ostracised until it withdraws to its pre-1967 borders.”
As we and others have noted before, BDS calls for much more than an Israeli withdrawal to the boundaries that existed before Jordan attacked the country in 1967. It seeks the end of Israel.
But don’t take our word for it. Take it from Omar Barghouti, a BDS spokesperson quoted in the Economist’s article. Barghouti has admitted that his goal is not for Israel to change its borders, but for it to be replaced with a “unitary state, where, by definition, Jews will be a minority.”
He has also explained, in so many words, that BDS wants the same thing:
BDS unambiguously de?nes the three basic Palestinian rights that constitute the minimal requirements of a just peace and calls for ending Israel’s corresponding injustices against all three main segments of the Palestinian people. Speci?cally, BDS calls for ending Israel’s 1967 military occupation of Gaza, the West Bank (including East Jerusalem), and other Arab territories in Lebanon and Syria; ending its system of racial discrimination against its Palestinian citizens; and ending its persistent denial of the UN-sanctioned rights of Palestine refugees, particularly their right to return to their homes and to receive reparations.
Got that? While The Economist claims BDS has one demand, its own source has admitted to three demands. And the two demands ignored by the magazine are tied to BDS’s dream of a world without Israel. Demand two, in misleadingly noble-sounding language, actually relates to the demand that the Jewish state no longer be the national home in which the Jewish people exercise their UN-guaranteed right to self-determination. Equally euphemistic is demand three, which envisions the influx into Israel of millions of Palestinians born abroad, the descendents Palestinian refugees from 1948. This would lead to Barghouti’s dream of rewinding history so that the Jewish people are forced back to the dark era in which being a Jew meant everywhere being an ethnic minority.
If the BDS movement’s leaders are willing to tell the truth about the movement, why does The Economist insist on hiding that truth?
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