On Sunday, Roger Waters announced his support for a boycott of Israel.  Ben-Dror Yemini of Maariv has written him an open letter challenging him.

One thing that strengthens Yemini’s point is actually there in Waters’ own announcement. He declares his support for a boycott aimed at:

Ending its occupation and colonization of all Arab lands [occupied since 1967] and dismantling the Wall;

Recognizing the fundamental rights of the Arab-Palestinian citizens of Israel to full equality; and

Respecting, protecting and promoting the rights of Palestinian refugees to return to their homes and properties as stipulated in UN resolution 194.

Note the section in square brackets above. They look odd, don’t they? Square brackets normally suggest an insertion that’s not in the original text.

This is because Waters is quoting the Palestinian boycott call issued in 2005. That call read:

“1. Ending its occupation and colonization of all Arab lands and dismantling the Wall”

What does “All Arab lands” mean? It’s not clear, but plenty of people would read that to mean all of Israel, and not just the West Bank and Gaza; effectively a call to eliminate Israel. Presumably this is also how Roger Walters read it, or he wouldn’t have felt the need to add his own insertion.

Given this – given that he must know that the boycott movement as a whole is trying to destroy Israel – why is he supporting it at all?

Ben-Dror Yemini’s letter is below.

To Roger Waters, Greetings.

Look Mr. Waters, the Jewish People is already used to blood libels. From using the blood of children for baking Passover matzah, to directing world Communism, to directing world capitalism, to controlling the media, and in the last generation, committing genocide, ethnic cleansing, and crimes against humanity. A generation passes on and a generation arrives, and the number of blood libels forever exist.

Israel, Mr. Waters, is not exempt from any criticism. We’re the world champions of self-criticism. There isn’t another nation in which, in every field – not just the Israel-Palestinian conflict – there is so much biting, roiling criticism – often false and vicious. But even to this we’ve grown accustomed. Usually we’re proud of our democracy, even when it’s biting. But sometimes, Mr. Waters, we’re fed up. We’ve simply had it. Not from the criticism; it’s essential for every community, every society, every nation, like air to breathe.

We’re fed up with the lies. For most of us – if you can read a little beyond the slogans – were fed up with the occupation. So if that’s your thing you would find lots of partners in Israel – most Israelis. But that’s not the story – not for BDS, of which you’ve become a great supporter, and not for the Hamas in Gaza, which only a year ago you announced your support for those who went there to cheer them – another campaign of useful idiots.

Let’s start with the occupation. Only in the last decade Israel announced its willingness to end it, again, again and again. Completely. This began with the Camp David talks. The Palestinians backed away from a serious discussion. Then Clinton offered his proposal, which would have granted the Palestinians a state on 95% of the territory. They decided to say”no”. Right after that, at the Taba talks all the giants of the the Israeli Left showed up. They went another big step towards the Palestinians, but even that didn’t help. Two years ago another generous offer was made by Prime Minister Olmert. He didn’t even get a reply from Abu Mazen.

Back to the BDS. Listen to the leaders of the campaign. Read their manifesto. They don’t want two states for two peoples. Not the end of the occupation, but the end of Israel. You can hear it in their own voices. Yes, there are Israels among us who support this campaign. That’s how we are. Runaway democracy. Everything goes. So instead of marvelling at our unparalleled democracy, you take advantage of the fact that Israeli democracy allows demonstrations like this, and you go and join the gang that is fighting against the very existence of the national home of the Jewish People. That’s the position of Ahmadinejad, Al Qaida and Hamas. Is that your position? Have you gone crazy?

Are you in the peace camp, Mr. Waters? Here’s a simple test for you. Very simple. Ask your friends in the BDS one question: “Do you support an agreement of two states for two peoples?”

We’ve got news for you: They oppose it. They don’t want a Palestinian state alongside Israel, they want a Palestinian state in place of Israel. That’s what’s written in the manifesto of BDS. Read it, it’s in English. They write in it, “Right of Return”, which, loosely translated means “Destruction of Israel”. To remove any doubt, they have the right of return–to a Palestinian state alongside Israel, not in place of Israel.

You and your ilk, Mr. Waters, are simply prolonging the suffering of the Palestinians. You are encouraging the peace refuseniks among them. You are encouraging their illusions.You are creating a new chapter of the Palestinian disaster. Who knows, if it were not for this support – by so many useful idiots – the Palestinians would have emerged from their position of refusal. But when they see you, and you join up with them, they continue to refuse peace.

So this is an opportunity for you, Mr. Waters, to prove that you’re a humanitarian and human rights activist. It’s not complicated. Tell the Israelis and Palestinians and BDS people one thing: the end of the conflict will come only if the two sides recognize the two-state solution. The side that refuses is the side that must be pressured, even boycotted. Only when you say this simple thing to both sides will you truly be in the peace camp. If you continue to support BDS, you are supporting refusal and the continuation of occupation and suffering.

A reply from you Mr. Waters, will be greatly appreciated.

This piece, by the Rt Hon Dr Denis MacShane MP, first appeared in the Jerusalem Post.

Kauft nicht bei Juden – “Don’t buy from Jews” – is back. The call to boycott Jewish commerce is Europe’s oldest political appeal. Once again, as the tsunami of hate against Israel rolls out from the Right and the Left, from Islamist ideologues to Europe’s cultural elites, the demand is to punish the Jews. That the actions of the Israeli government are open to criticism is a fact. But what are the real arguments?

Firstly, that Israel is wrong to defy international law as an occupying force on the West Bank. But what about Turkey? It has 35,000 soldiers occupying the territory of a sovereign republic – Cyprus. Ankara has sent hundreds of thousands of settlers to colonize the ancient Greek-owned lands of northern Cyprus. Turkey has been told again and again by the UN to withdraw its troops. Instead, it now also stands accused of destroying the ancient Christian churches of northern Cyprus.

Does anyone call for a boycott of Turkey, or urge companies to divest from it? No. Only the Jews are targeted.

Or take India; 500,000 Indian soldiers occupy Kashmir. According to Amnesty International, 70,000 Muslims have been killed over the past 20 years by these soldiers and security forces – a number that far exceeds the Palestinians killed by Israeli forces in the same period. But the Islamic ideologues focus on Jews, not Indians.

May we talk of the western Sahara and Morocco, or Algeria’s closure of the border there, making life far worse than that of Palestinians in Ramallah or Hebron? No, better not.

Voltaire – anti-Semite that he was – should be alive today to mock the hypocrisy of the new high priests calling anathema on the heads of Jews in Israel.

Second, the desire for peace in the Middle East is a global priority. But peace requires recognition of the Jewish state of Israel. There are 40 member states of the UN which have the words “Muslim” or “Islamic” in their names. No one challenges their right to exist or defend themselves.

Israel unilaterally withdrew from Gaza. Its reward was to have the territory turned into a new launch pad for rockets intended to kill Jews.

More rockets have been fired at Israel from Gaza than V1 or V2 rockets at London in 1944. No one blamed Winston Churchill for responding with all the force he could, as cities like Hamburg or Dresden faced the wrath of the RAF. But if Israel takes the slightest action against the Jew-killers of Hamas, all the hate of the world falls on its head.

Third, it is hard to see how peace can be made with an Israel that so many seek to brand an “apartheid state.”

I worked in the 1980s with the black trade union movement inside South Africa. We lay in ditches as the apartheid police patrolled townships hunting for political activists. I could not swim at the same beach as my wife, a French-Vietnamese, because of the racist laws. Muslims and Jews swim off the same Tel Aviv beaches. They can stay in the same hotels, be elected to the same parliament, and appeal to an independent judiciary for justice.

BY DEFINITION, an apartheid state has no right to exist. It cannot be a member of the UN. The campaign to call Israel an apartheid state is a campaign to make it a non-state. How can peace be made with a state whose opponents say should not exist?

In Britain, there are calls by journalists and professors to boycott the Israeli media or universities. But Israeli writers, journalists and professors are the main opponents of the counterproductive policies of their government. To boycott them is to hand even more power to the haredi and Russian nationalists who now control Right-wing politics in Israel.

By any standard, the attacks on media freedom, on women, on gays or on lawyers is 1,000 times worse in Iran or Saudi Arabia. There is no democracy in Syria or Libya, limited democracy in Jordan, and open anti-Semitism displayed by the Muslim Brotherhood movements in the Arab world. Is there any call to boycott these states, their journalists or professors? No. The call – rightly – is for engagement, contacts, debate and discussion. Many even argue for talks with Hamas, although its charter, with its strident anti- Semitic language, could have been written by a Nazi.

But talks with Jewish politicians, lawyers or intellectuals must be boycotted. This policy of making the Jewish citizens of Israel into objects of global hatred will only make the Middle East crisis worse. If it was directed evenly at all states which occupy and oppress territories, it might have some basis in morality. If the boycott, disinvestment and sanctions movement also called for sanctions against the new anti-Semitism of the extreme Right in Europe, it might make sense. The openly anti- Semitic Jobbik Party in Hungary parades in its fascist uniforms. Anti-Semitic politicians are elected to the European Parliament. The German politician Thilo Sarrazin can describe Jews as having “different genes” from other people. And now Europeans, of all people, once again cry Kauft nicht bei Juden.

Those who dislike Israeli rightwing policies must find other language than that of classical anti- Semitism. I am not Jewish. As a British MP, I work with thousands of Muslims in my constituency. I am more often in mosques than in churches. I am proud of my Muslim friends who are MPs, peers, municipal councillors or prominent as journaiists, lawyers, doctors and intellectuals. The 20 million European Muslims face new hates which must be combated. But there is no profit for them in joining the hate campaigns against Jews in Israel.

As Europeans we must reject the old language of boycott and economic campaigns against Jews. Israel, Palestine and Europe must all have a 21st century future, and not return to the hates of the past.

There is currently a public debate in South Africa about boycotting Israel.   As part of this debate, Rabbi Warren Goldstein, Chief Rabbi of South Africa, wrote an open letter to Archbishop Desmond Tutu. It was published a few days ago in the Jerusalem Post. We reproduce it in full below:

Dear Archbishop Desmond Tutu, I write to you with a heavy heart.

You are a revered leader in South Africa, but recently have added your iconic voice to the campaign for sanctions against Israel.

Archbishop, I believe you are making a terrible mistake. Without truth there can be no justice, and without justice there can be no peace. The Talmud says: “The world stands on three things: justice, truth and peace.” These three values are inseparable. Archbishop, I am convinced that the sanctions campaign against Israel is morally repugnant because it is based on horrific and grotesquely false accusations against the Jewish people.

The truth, archbishop, is that Israel is simply not an apartheid state. In the State of Israel all citizens – Jew and Arab – are equal before the law. Israel has no Population Registration Act, no Group Areas Act, no Mixed Marriages and Immorality Act, no Separate Representation of Voters Act, no Separate Amenities Act, no pass laws or any of the myriad apartheid laws.

Israel is a vibrant liberal democracy with a free press and independent judiciary, and accords full political, religious and other human rights to all its people, including its more than 1 million Arab citizens, many of whom hold positions of authority including that of cabinet minister, member of parliament and judge at every level, including that of the Supreme Court. All citizens vote on the same roll in regular, multiparty elections; there are Arab parties and Arab members of other parties in Israel’s parliament. Arabs and Jews share all public facilities, including hospitals and malls, buses, cinemas and parks. And, archbishop, that includes universities and opera houses.

The other untruth is the accusation of illegal occupation of Arab land. Like the apartheid libel, this is outrageously false. There is no nation that has a longer, deeper or more profound connection to its country than the Jewish people have to the land of Israel and the city of Jerusalem.

Archbishop, you and I as religious leaders always turn to the Bible as a source of truth. What does it mean that Israel is the “promised land”? It means, as we both know, that it was promised by God to the Jews – the descendants of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. This promise was first fulfilled by God more than 3,300 years ago, when Joshua led the Jewish people into the land of Israel. Since then there has been an unbroken Jewish presence in the land, albeit small during the Roman exile.

All the books of the Old Testament – Joshua, Judges, Samuel, Kings, Isaiah, Jeremiah, etc. – describe the deep connection between the Jews and the land of Israel, including the West Bank, known in the Bible as Judea and Samaria – the area that contained the great cities of the two previous Jewish commonwealths, such as Jericho, Shiloh (where the Tabernacle stood for hundreds of years), Beit El (where Jacob had his vision of the ladder) and Hebron (where Abraham, Isaac and Jacob are buried with their wives Sarah, Rebecca and Leah).

Three thousand years ago, there was no London or Paris, no Washington or Moscow, no Pretoria or Cape Town, but there was a Jerusalem, capital of a Jewish state.

“If I forget thee O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget its cunning… if I fail to elevate Jerusalem above my foremost joy.” Those words from Psalms are recited by Jews at every wedding. At every funeral, the statement of comfort given to the mourners refers to Zion and Jerusalem. Jews pray for Jerusalem three times a day, and also after every meal.

Archbishop, the Arab/Israeli conflict is not a struggle against apartheid or occupation. It is a century- long war against the very existence of Jews and a Jewish state in the Middle East. There have already been seven major Arab/Israeli wars since the birth of modern Israel.

Today the front includes an alliance between Iran, Syria and Hizbullah, the latter now with 40,000 rockets aimed at Israeli cities. Iranian officers train Hizbullah forces, while Iran pursues nuclear weapons and openly declares its intention to wipe out Israel. Hamas, the terrorist Palestinian government in Gaza, sides with Iran and Hizbullah in rearming with the declared aim of destroying Israel.

Since 1967, one aspect of this century- long conflict has been the demand for a Palestinian state. In spite of the deep historical and religious roots of Jews in all of Israel, generations of Jewish leaders have been prepared, for the sake of peace, to give up ancestral and covenantal land to establish a Palestinian state.

SO WHY has there not been peace? The ANC taught us you can’t make peace on your own. No matter how deeply the ANC was committed to a peaceful resolution of the South African conflict, until the National Party was prepared to accept that black South Africans had a place in their own country, there could be no peace. And so too, until the Arab/Muslim world accepts that Jews have a right to a state of their own on their ancestral land, there will be no peace.

In 1948, the Jews accepted the UN resolution establishing a Jewish state and a Palestinian state, but the Arab world rejected it and five Arab countries invaded Israel to destroy it.

After that, the West Bank and Gaza were in Arab hands until 1967.

There was an opportunity then – every day for almost 20 years – to establish a Palestinian state. It never happened. And since then there have been numerous opportunities – each rejected by Arab leaders.

Why? Because this war has been more about the destruction of the Jewish state than about the establishment of a Palestinian state. Even today, so-called moderate Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas denies Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state.

In 2000, the Palestinian leadership launched a massive wave of suicide bombers into Israel, leading to more than 1,300 civilian deaths and 10,000 injuries. Proportionately, such carnage in South Africa would mean more than 10,000 killed and over 80,000 injured! Israel erected a security fence with checkpoints to shield it from such attacks launched from the disputed territories.

Archbishop, you compare these checkpoints to apartheid South Africa. But they are not about pass laws, which don’t exist in Israel. The checkpoints are on the border between sovereign Israeli territory and the disputed territories of the West Bank and Gaza in order to keep civilians from being murdered, and have been very successful in doing so. These checkpoints – like those found in all airports – are there to prevent suicide bombers from blowing up innocent people.

Archbishop, do not bestow respectability on an immoral sanctions campaign that is an affront to truth and justice, which prevents peace and prolongs the terrible suffering of people on both sides of this painful conflict. Archbishop, let us pray for an end to all this agony, and for the fulfillment of the verse in Isaiah: “And the Lord God will wipe away the tears from all faces.”

by Jeremy Newmark

The matter-of-fact Office of Judicial Review ruling, reprimanding Judge Bathurst-Norman for making observations based upon personal political views, may seem a little lame. Despite the involvement of the Lord Chancellor and Lord Chief Justice, this will not overturn the trial verdict itself; it is very hard to retry people once they’ve been found Not Guilty.

Nevertheless, coupled with last week’s confirmation by William Hague that Parliament will now consider new laws to prevent abuse of Universal Jurisdiction, this decision represents a significant setback to those working to import the Israel/Palestine conflict into our judicial systems by engaging in what has been aptly described as “Lawfare”.

Groups including the Board of Deputies and Zionist Federation were right to pursue a series of official complaints against Bathurst-Norman. This was always about more than the grotesque comparison between Israeli actions and Nazi atrocities. This was the thin end of the wedge. It opened the possibility of UK Foreign Policy being made in our courtrooms, circumventing the democratic process.

This is not just a matter of Israel Advocacy. Lawfare also threatens to impact upon our lives as British Jews. Other recent cases have used legal justifications which argued that vandalism and disruption in the UK can be legalised by political anger at events in the Middle East. Ironically, they claim that international law gives them the right to commit these crimes. This trend surfaced in the assault on BICOM’s office during Operation Cast Lead, the attacks upon Carmel Agrexo warehouses, and vandalism of Starbucks branches during anti-Israel protests. Less dramatically, but arguably more significantly, attempts to challenge the legal status of Jewish schools based upon their teaching of Zionism show how prevalent Lawfare is starting to become.

The Office of Judicial Review may appear to have only slapped Bathurst-Norman on the wrist. In fact it has established an important precedent – that political attitudes to the State of Israel will never be an acceptable defence for criminal activity. This is a serious setback for those who seek to institutionalise the delegitimisation of Israel in the UK.

Jeremy Newmark is Chief Executive of the Jewish Leadership Council, and a member of the Board of the Fair Play Campaign Group

This is a guest-post by Gavin Gross

I was at Elton John’s sold-out concert last night at Ramat Gan stadium, and thought this greeting he delivered was spot-on and deserves wide distribution.

Elton told the crowd that he was happy to be back in Israel (he played here in 1993), and in a reference to anti-Israel boycotters who called on him to cancel the show, proudly proclaimed “ain’t nobody gonna stop us from coming here.” He said that as a musician his job was to spread love and peace, and that “we don’t cherry-pick our conscience,” a line for which he received extended applause.

I took this to be a sharp dig at the hypocrisy and sanctimoniousness of figures in the West who focus their ire almost exclusively on Israel, and particularly at his fellow musicians who have recently cancelled their shows here, such as Elvis Costello, the Pixies, Gil Scott-Heron and others.

How many musicians have cancelled their concerts in America because of the thousands of civilians the U.S. military has killed in Iraq and Afghanistan and in drone attacks in Pakistan?