It’s hard being a principled member of the anti-Israel Boycott, Divest and Sanction movement.
With Israel being a leader in computer, medical and other technologies, one would have to enter a time machine back to the 1950s to truly boycott Israeli products.
The Cornell Students For Justice In Palestine is a typical anti-Israel campus group, spewing half-truths and lies about the history and politics of the Israeli-Palestinian dispute.
The Cornell SJP is a big supporter of BDS. Cornell SJP, supported by many faculty, tried to stop Cornell from opening a joint campus in NYC with Israeli technology university Technion. It didn’t work, and the new campus is moving forward.
But Cornell SJP is not above using Israeli technology company Wix.com to build its website.
Wix is a successful Israeli start up that went public earlier this month, raising over $122 million. Here’s a Wix promo video:
There’s principled BDS, and then there’s plain old haters who use BDS as a tactic. Cornell SJP apparently falls into the latter column, using an Israeli company for its website because … it’s free!
Cornell SJP apparently is catching a lot of mockery for its hypocrisy.
So much so that it has seen fit to explain it’s position #SorryNotSorry: Why Boycotting the Boycott Fails on its separate WordPress blog site, of course (h/t Honest Reporting):
Since last week, Students for Justice in Palestine Cornell has been the target of a minor smear-campaign, linking the group to an Israeli company.A small number of students at Cornell University and other voices in the Twittersphere have been loudly noting the Israeli origins of WiX – the hosting company we use for one of our websites. The basic claim seems to be that any use of Israeli products hypocritically contradicts our support for the 2005 call for Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) issued by Palestinian civil society. While we hope such convoluted reasoning is evident to thoughtful people, we do not wish to dismiss these claims out of hand. Since the international campaign in support of BDS is one of SJP Cornell’s main reference points, we welcome the opportunity to clarify our position….BDS is a tactic, not a principle, let alone a call for abstention. The charge that any contact with Israeli products negates the logic of BDS can only be made by people who do not understand what BDS actually is, how it’s worked in the past, or why Palestinian civil society is calling for it now.The idea that supporters of BDS must avoid contact with anything Israeli not only misconstrues the nature of BDS, but also contorts the idea of politics in general. Politics is about making change in the world, not shying from contamination to keep oneself pure.
Got it. You’ve made yourselves perfectly clear.
Related: BDS movement distilled – when Israeli soldiers not raping Arab women is racist
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