I emailed Professor Mark Levine, who has been to the region, wrote about the Is-Pal situation, the Muslim world and Muslim culture in the books
Impossible Peace (about the failure of the Oslo peace process),
Why They don’t hate us: lifting the veil in the Axis of Evil (About the misconceptions of Muslims post 9/11) and
Heavy Metal Islam (about rock and hip hop among the youth in the Middle East and North Africa, how it bridges gaps and questions authority as well as break stereotypes in that region)

I really respect him and i wrote this email to him asking about the effectiveness of BDS.

He replied (copied and paste from my folders:

“hard to know. i think it hurts around the edges but israelis are used to feeling besieged and it willtake a long time to have the effectiveness as the south africa campaign back in the day because israel has many more allies, especially in the US and europe, its core markets. so i think it will help a bit but not devisively in any way. that being said, i think bds can be an effective tool, especially forraising awareness. but it also needs to be better explaiend why israel and why not china, or russia, or india, or even the US, who are all engaged in brutal occupations that involved even more people being oppressed and killed before it can become more mainstream.”

BDS is the only way I know to get through that wall and penetrate the colonialist or xenophobic siege mentality. Since the collective is not rational, behavior modification is the only tool available to possibly shock them into sanity. Yes, shock is not a nice thing to deliver. But it helped many a schizophrenic before better drugs came along, and it just might help Israel too. Carrots were already tried and failed quite miserably. Groups promoting “better understanding” were tried too. Few survived intact. Now it is necessary to show that bratiness and hubris will not go unchallenged by the world community.

Israel is unfrotunately deeply mired in the equivalent of Jim Crow’s south vis a vis the arab citizens and practices full blown apartheid with regard to the palestinians under occupation. The citizens know what they are doing. They think they can get away with it just as the south did, just as south africa did. They don’t really give a hoot about anyone else because that’s the mind frame of the deeply neurotic. BDS may just shake enough of the collective up from the stupor they fell into – enough to start considering alternatives. As a stick, BDS is the only thing that will be effective in waking up at least part of the Israeli community. They need to know that they stand to lose something if the course of action doesn’t change..

The nice thing about BDS is that everyone does what they can. Some boycott above ground, others just under the radar. However long it takes. It’s collecting steam as we speak – among the young in the US, around the world among perfectly ordinary people from all walks of life. In churches and even in synagogs. It’s making its way through labor unions and trade organizations and the first successes have been noted in universities and schools. Corporations will come along when they see it’s in their best interest as will cities and towns and eventually – who knows- entire countries. personally, I practice it as best I can through collaborations and alliances that don’t happen. Technologies not recommended and talk invitations not issued. It sounds negative, but it’s effective enough because I get to be as selective as I want to be. Just as we all are in life. Those who need to know do. Those who don’t – well – not everything needs to be advertised. Those who ask questions get answers, and inactions -like actions – spread among those who are so inclined. It’s actually quite easy to do something. Or to not do something. From each what they can.

I know that a day will come and BDS as it is carried out now will be seen as the water that wore down the rock’s hardened surface. For that day, we can all hope.

Here is an excerpt from an article by David Ottoway in The Wilson Quarterly entitled the Arab Tomorrow.

“Yet Arab leaders did respond to Bush’s call, and they proved master manipulators of democracy. They held elections, loosened press censorship, and allowed a bit more space for dissident voices on the Internet. And they quickly learned how to diffuse, divide, and checkmate even this feeble ­opposition.

Mubarak simultaneously rigged election laws to make himself president for life and allowed the birth of a ­semi­free opposition press. Algerian president Abdelaziz Bouteflika permitted many political parties and 76 independent national daily newspapers to flourish even as he altered the constitution to perpetuate his rule.”

But what does he know? He’s only a leading journalist married to a leading academic who specializes in African and Arab affairs.

So we’re ending the right of return for people who might have lived in Palestine 2000 years ago?

The right of return clarified as “any descendant of any Palestinian, regardless of what part of prospective Palestine they lived”, is a stacked deck.

To the extent that is included in the demand of BDS, it is easily exposed and easily dismissed.

Again and again, if the concerns are conditional, clear, with an actual path to actual acceptance and normalization, then they are doable.

To the extent that demands remain ambiguous, opportunistic, then remain rhetoric only, cheap reasoning, pretending to be “international law”.

We need more than high school analysis of this stuff.

I take you as seriously as I take Bill Pearlman.