Boycotting Israel is Wrong is a timely short book on the BDS phenomenon by Australian academics Philip Mendes and Nick Dyrenfurth.

It combines the force of a rigorously argued polemic with the authority of a properly footnoted academic paper, and in just 205 pages manages to provide a historic overview of the changing relationship between Zionism, Israel and the Western left; useful case studies of Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) in Australia, the UK and the US; and a progressive dissection of the motives, ideology and methodology of the boycotters.

Mendes and Dyrenfurth pull no punches. They describe BDS as a ‘rather dubious moral successor’ to the anti-apartheid movement, and ‘the worst of any of the conflict resolution solutions currently on offer.’ They set out to prove that ‘at its core’ it is ‘a thinly veiled campaign to resuscitate the so-called one state solution whereby the State of Israel would give way to an Arab-dominated Greater Palestine’ and neatly do so by dissecting the superficially attractive three main aims of BDS – ending the occupation, full equality for Arab citizens, and securing the right of return – and how these are interpreted by the BDS movement in a way that is incompatible with Israel’s continued existence. They conclude that the BDS movement has constructed a ‘fantasy world in which Israel is detached from its specifically Jewish roots, and then miraculously destroyed by the political equivalent of a remote control’ thus overcoming the Left’s ‘historical opposition to racism’ and the genocidal war that would be the only real way to destroy Israel.

But the authors are themselves from the centre-left so they are not ‘Israel right or wrong’ voices. They describe the occupation of the West Bank as a ‘dangerous folly’, say settlements ‘clearly preclude progress towards a viable two-state solution,’ and attack Netanyahu for failing to promote that solution. One of their main attacks on BDS is that it strengthens the Israeli right by reinforcing a siege mentality.

Read the article in full at Fathom Journal.