Tobin claims “The BDS movement isn’t merely economic warfare; it is an effort to delegitimize the entire notion of Zionism & the right of the Jewish people to sovereignty or self-defense in their ancient homeland.” Actually, the BDS call is necessarily conservative & does not challenge the sovereignty of Israel at all. This allows those who oppose the military occupation, Israeli settlements, apartheid, & the bombing of Gaza to honor the boycott whilst remaining a supporter of Israeli sovereignty. It’s a contradiction but politics are full of those. As for the self-defense baloney, since Israel is one of the most sophisticated military forces in the world & Palestinians are unarmed, cry me a river.

Many BDS activists are not constrained & do want to expose Zionism as a racist, supremacist ideology & do challenge Israeli sovereignty. The Palestinian proposal for a democratic, secular state where Jews & Palestinians can live as brothers & sisters is the only real solution, the only possible solution.

BDS is fundamental to getting to that democratic society based on human rights. Build the hell out of it.

(Photo is BDS rally in Montoro, Spain from FB wall of BDS India)

Who knows why the Israeli government uses that 1860 date other than as part of inventing a history for a fabricated people? There isn’t much available information about it since it’s so obviously goofy. Theodor Herzl, the Hungarian guy who thought up political Zionism, wasn’t even born until 1860 & the decision to forcibly colonize Palestine wasn’t made till the first Zionist Congress in 1897.

One Zionist source, grasping at straws to explain that 1860 thing, says, “A total of 23,320 men & women have been killed defending the land of Israel since 1860, the year that the first Jewish settlers left the secure walls of Jerusalem to build new neighborhoods.” Why in the hell did they leave secure walls to build settlements? Did they militarily force Palestinians off their lands or just move to a new area? Or is that just another fabrication since Jewish colonialism doesn’t show up in the history books for that period?

The figure of 23,320 comes from several Israeli government sources & includes 6,373 killed in the so-called “War of Independence” in 1948–what Palestinians call the Naqba, (“catastrophe”) when 700,000 fled in terror or were forcibly expelled by those death squads. It also includes 9,967 killed between 1860 & the present in “terrorist attacks.” For death squads, resistance to colonialism is termed terrorism.

There aren’t any reliable figures on Palestinian losses but they don’t need to go back to the fictitious date of 1860. Some sources estimate Palestinian fatalities as high as 2 million since 1948 & 7 million now living as refugees. Two million may be too high but in the Naqba itself, at least 20,000 Palestinians were killed & there have been numerous Israeli massacres since at refugee camps as well as recent bombing sieges over Gaza which have killed thousands of people.

The NY Times knows all that; they don’t have a fact-checker problem. They have a political problem.

Cut through the propaganda. Build & honor the economic, cultural, & academic boycott of Israel. Buy nothing with barcode beginning 729.

(Photo by Ariel Schalit/AP)

As we know from disability rights, every human being is perfect just as they are. That doesn’t mean we don’t acknowledge the problems they face. It only means we want societies that don’t create disabilities & that don’t treat them as less than human beings by depriving them of necessary benefits, isolating them, & patronizing & pitying them.

There are all sorts of adages about how one judges the character of a society, from how it treats women to how it treats animals. All of them hold force, but how they treat children has to rank par excellence. So how do the left commentators explain child labor in Bolivia & attempts to unionize & legitimize it rather than outlaw it as an abomination of human rights for children?

How do they explain why for a few years disabled people have repeatedly marched nearly 200 miles on a highway to La Paz–facing police violence–to demand an increase in their state benefits from a paltry 1,000 boliviano (£102, $144) a year to 500 boliviano a month?

Some people age out of the fight for social justice but that doesn’t give them the right to go all Panglossian & declare this the best of all possible worlds. Not as long as millions of children are in sweatshops & fields & people in wheelchairs have to fight to survive.

This photo is the latest protest of disability activists in Bolivia who marched in wheelchairs & on crutches to La Paz.

(Photo by Juan Karita/AP)