RUTHFULLY YOURS

In a move uncharacteristic of U.S. policy as it has been carried out for decades, the Obama administration recently endorsed Europe’s version of a soft Boycott, Sanctions and Divestment (BDS) campaign targeting Israeli merchandise.

In late January, the U.S. Customs and Border Protection agency changed its policy on imports from the West Bank, imposing, in effect, a sanction on such goods.

The penalty states that products must no longer be labeled “Made in Israel,” because the United States views the West Bank as territory illegitimately controlled by Israel.

Europe adopted such a labeling policy in November. Since then, the United States has chartered a zigzag course through the product demarcation debate. When asked in November if labeling constitutes a boycott, Mark C. Toner, U.S. State Department deputy spokesman, said: “It’s a—it could be—it could be perceived as a step on the way.”

Just last month, however, Toner’s boss, spokesman John Kirby, announced: “We do not view labeling the origin of products as being from the settlements a boycott of Israel. We also do not believe that labeling the origin of products is equivalent to a boycott.”

The United States, like the European Union, goes to great lengths to insist that demarcating Israeli products from the settlements is not a boycott.

For much of the second half of the 20th century, Abba Eban was one of the world’s most famous Jews. As the first representative of the fledgling state of Israel to the United Nations in 1948, and then as its ambassador to the UN and Washington, Eban shot to prominence through his eloquent defenses of the Jewish state in some of its most perilous early hours. For two decades after 1960, serving as Israel’s on-again, off-again foreign minister, he remained in the eyes of the world the indispensable “voice of Israel,” as David Ben-Gurion had dubbed him. His books on Jewish and Israeli history and a hefty autobiography were best-sellers, and Heritage: Civilization and the Jews, a 1984 public-television series in which he served as both writer and presenter, drew more than 50 million viewers.

Counting on posthumous recognition is a hazardous business. Still, it has been surprising how fast Eban has fallen out of memory since his death in 2002. This is too bad. Despite his fair share of personal flaws, most notably a pride that often slipped into vanity, Eban was one of the most interesting and impressive statesmen of the last century, and both his successes and perhaps especially his disappointments tell us much about the state of Israel.

That is reason enough to welcome the appearance of Asaf Siniver’s Abba Eban: A Biography. (An early, mainly hagiographical treatment by the journalist Robert St. John appeared in 1972.) An Israeli historian teaching in Britain, Siniver has produced an informative and well-researched if also somewhat boring account mainly of Eban’s political career. Although not so engaging as Eban’s own Autobiography, where the emphasis falls on thoughts and ideas as well as on politics, Siniver’s book does permit reflection on the central puzzle of Eban’s career.

The co-founders of the Black Lives Matter movement gave a speech at Cornell University’s annual Martin Luther King Jr. Commemorative Lecture earlier this month, where they taught students important lessons like the fact that climate change is racist.

According to an article in the Cornell Review, one of the co-founders, Opal Tometi, referred to climate change as “global anti-blackness” because six out of the ten countries on the top of the “climate change vulnerability index” are in Africa.

Co-founder Alicia Garza hit some other topics, such as how she would like to “retire” the phrase “black-on-black crime” and instead, as the Review put it, “focus instead on the violence of the state.”

Activist Janaya Kahn also participated in the talk, which, according to the Review, was filled to the school’s Sage Chapel’s 750-seat capacity so quickly that ushers had to turn people away at the door.

The Cornell Review describes itself as a “conservative, libertarian, contrarian, anti-establishment” publication.

The speech was originally covered in an article in the College Fix.

Jews have been accused of harming and murdering non-Jews since the twelfth century in England, when Jewish convert to Catholicism, Theobald of Cambridge, mendaciously announced that European Jews ritually slaughtered Christian children each year and drank their blood during Passover season.

That medieval blood libel, largely abandoned in the contemporary West, does, however, still appear as part of Arab world’s vilification of Jews—now transmogrified into a slander against Israel, the Jew of nations. But in the regular chorus of defamation against Israel by a world infected with Palestinianism, a new, more odious trend has shown itself: the blood libel has been revivified; however, to position Israel (and by extension Jews) as demonic agents in the community of nations, the primitive fantasies of the blood libel are now masked with a veneer of academic scholarship.

On February 3rd, for example, Jasbir K. Puar, Associate Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies at Rutgers University delivered a lecture at Vassar College, “Inhumanist Biopolitics: How Palestine Matters,” sponsored, shamefully, not by radical student groups but by the school’s American Studies Department and departments of Political Science, Religion, and English, and the programs of Africana Studies, International Studies, Women’s and Gender Studies, and Jewish Studies.

The lecture examined “the use of technologies of measure to manufacture a ‘remote control’ occupation, one that produces a different version of Israeli ‘home invasions’ through the maiming and stunting of population. If Gaza, for example, is indeed the world’s largest ‘open air prison’ and an experimental lab for Israeli military apparatuses. . , what kinds of fantasies (about power, about bodies, about resistance, about politics) are driving this project?” In other words, Professor Puar’s central thesis was that Israeli military tactics involve the deliberate the “stunting, “maiming,” physical disabling, and scientific experimenting with Palestinian lives, an outrageous resurrection of the classic anti-Semitic trope that Jews purposely, and sadistically, harm and kill non-Jews.