4 ms·

Israel Wants US States to Enforce Anti-BDS Laws Against Ben and Jerry’s

6 points by jules-jules 5y ago

Tabular-Iceberg 5y ago
Let them eat Häagen-Dazs, I suppose?
salawat 5y ago
Pro-tip: If you find yourself on one side of a decision branch, and on the other side is ice cream; you may want to take a moment to think about how you got into this position in the first place. There is nothing either fundamentally anti-semitic or even anti-Zionist to disagreeing with the way Israel operates either diplomatically abroad or in terms of domestic politics. About the only anti-anything at play is anti-occupying-things-that-aren't-yours-on-paper-the international-community-agrees-on-and-expecting-everyone-else-to-cut-you-a-sweetheart-deal-to-help-you-hold-it-whilst-treating-those-who-lived-there-already-as-garbage-while-demanding-everyone-else-buys-into-your-rationalizatio ns-to-avoid-coming-to-a-peaceful-compromise-on-threat-of-being-branded-an-anti-semite. Anti-semitic? Nope. Nothing there against the Jewish faith. Anti-Zionist? Nope. Have your State, just don't ignore or marginalize indigenous populations there at the same time. I don't care if everyone else has done it in the past , that doesn't make it okay to do now. That doesn't really fit in a snazzy headline though, one, and number two, anti-BDS laws are exactly the kind of foreign entanglements George Washington cautioned against.
- jfengel 5y ago
  The difficulty is that without a largish anti-zionist and anti-semitic contigent, this would be just another ethnic conflict in a tiny country -- the kind we regularly ignore. That's not a good thing, but the inconsistency happens in part because there are people pushing it to happen for racist reasons. There's practically no way to engage in it without engaging with anti-semitic elements. You have to ask yourself why you're engaging it at all, rather than any of thousands of other ethnic conflicts you could be picking. To come up with an answer, you have to engage the whole question -- which also means dealing with the inherent anti-semitism. I need to make abundantly clear that none of this is intended to excuse any of the abuses the Israeli government is engaging. Just because the well is poisoned doesn't mean that there aren't genuine atrocities being committed, and that they may well merit sanctions. But it really figures into your very last assertion: the best reason to avoid foreign entanglements is that you probably don't understand them. And picking some subset of foreign entanglements will always leave you open to incoherent actions, especially when you've picked that subset for reasons you never fully understood in the first place.

6 points by jules-jules 5y ago

Let them eat Häagen-Dazs, I suppose?

Pro-tip: If you find yourself on one side of a decision branch, and on the other side is ice cream; you may want to take a moment to think about how you got into this position in the first place. There is nothing either fundamentally anti-semitic or even anti-Zionist to disagreeing with the way Israel operates either diplomatically abroad or in terms of domestic politics. About the only anti-anything at play is anti-occupying-things-that-aren't-yours-on-paper-the international-community-agrees-on-and-expecting-everyone-else-to-cut-you-a-sweetheart-deal-to-help-you-hold-it-whilst-treating-those-who-lived-there-already-as-garbage-while-demanding-everyone-else-buys-into-your-rationalizatio ns-to-avoid-coming-to-a-peaceful-compromise-on-threat-of-being-branded-an-anti-semite. Anti-semitic? Nope. Nothing there against the Jewish faith. Anti-Zionist? Nope. Have your State, just don't ignore or marginalize indigenous populations there at the same time. I don't care if everyone else has done it in the past , that doesn't make it okay to do now. That doesn't really fit in a snazzy headline though, one, and number two, anti-BDS laws are exactly the kind of foreign entanglements George Washington cautioned against.

jfengel 5y ago
The difficulty is that without a largish anti-zionist and anti-semitic contigent, this would be just another ethnic conflict in a tiny country -- the kind we regularly ignore. That's not a good thing, but the inconsistency happens in part because there are people pushing it to happen for racist reasons. There's practically no way to engage in it without engaging with anti-semitic elements. You have to ask yourself why you're engaging it at all, rather than any of thousands of other ethnic conflicts you could be picking. To come up with an answer, you have to engage the whole question -- which also means dealing with the inherent anti-semitism. I need to make abundantly clear that none of this is intended to excuse any of the abuses the Israeli government is engaging. Just because the well is poisoned doesn't mean that there aren't genuine atrocities being committed, and that they may well merit sanctions. But it really figures into your very last assertion: the best reason to avoid foreign entanglements is that you probably don't understand them. And picking some subset of foreign entanglements will always leave you open to incoherent actions, especially when you've picked that subset for reasons you never fully understood in the first place.