Glen Weyl’s agonizing journey to boycott the country he loves

posted on: Nov 3, 2015

A week ago we picked up a landmark article in the Washington Post: two Jewish scholars at Harvard and Yale who described themselves as lifelong Zionists came out for boycott of Israel because it permanently denies rights to Palestinians. Though they seek to save the Jewish state from its leaders, the authors’ preference for “full democratic citizenship to Palestinians living in a single state” over occupation will surely be a depth charge in the Jewish community; and create space inside mainstream Jewish organizations for boycott of Israel and the growth of anti-Zionism.

On his twitter feed, co-author Glen Weyl, 30, an economist at Yale, said that he and co-author Steven Levitsky, a 47-year-old Government professor at Harvard, “spent 6 months agonizing over every word of this piece.”

As it turns out, the junior author has been on the path toward this decision for a long time– and Israel is his favorite place in the world even as it is dominated by a political culture he calls “fascistic.” Weyl is widely described as an economics prodigy, an emerging establishment figure who went from the University of Chicago to Yale this year and has a top research job at Microsoft, whose operations in Israel he opposes.

For all his mainstream success, Weyl is a sincere and open person. His Facebook posts in the last year or so tell a lot about his progress.

Weyl visited Israel before the Gaza onslaught of summer 2014. He had no comment on that war but the subsequent reelection of Benjamin Netanyahu last March staggered him, convincing him that Israeli society was on the wrong course.

“Anyone who, like me, believed my people would voluntarily choose to drink from the cup of justice has been proved naïve,” he wrote after the election, and then announced that he had joined the BDS movement:

After last night’s election in Israel I have joined the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) Movement and will be boycotting both Israeli products and trips to the country that I love to visit most in the world.
I had committed myself to this if the election returned the right to power, but thought it would be a very hard decision. In the event it turned out to be easy, given the behavior of Prime Minister Netanyahu in the last few days, as he promised that a Palestinian State would never be established under his watch and decried the “Arab droves” voting in the election. Netenyahu has now fully embraced the fascist ideology of his coalition partners.
In the Israel of David Ben-Gurion, the Israel I have loved, this behavior would have been taken as a sign of desperation and would have led to a complete rejection of such a leader. In the past days I was sure this is what would happen. But instead it led to the strongest showing for the right in many years. After this outcome, no one can doubt the choice the Israeli people have made and where they stand.
There is now an overwhelming majority of 71 seats for parties (the fascist right of Likud, Jewish Home and Yisrael Beiteinu, the ultra-religious of Shas and UTJ and the joint Arab list) that are fundamentally opposed to a democratic, secular Jewish homeland that is a member of the international community and at peace with its neighbors. This is the only vision of Israel I can support and the people of Israel overwhelmingly do not share it.
Anyone who, like me, believed my people would voluntarily choose to drink from the cup of justice has been proved naïve. Anyone who believes anything short of overwhelming international pressure will make Israel ever give even a scrap of decency and independence to those whose land its prosperity is built on must understand that the people of Israel have resoundingly rejected this path. The Israeli electorate had a clear choice and they turned out in their greatest numbers for years to choose the path to a nationalist and militarist damnation.
Now is the time to stand with the struggle of the Palestinian people in their international struggle for justice. Only clear solidarity of humanitarian Jews around the world with the cause of those who are enslaved by our elected representatives can begin to absolve us of their continuing crimes.
Please see my next post about which elements of BDS I endorse, namely its methods but not its end solution (arguably though not explicitly) of one state and an unlimited right of return.

That endorsement stirred up a lot of comment. Weyl responded that he was endorsing BDS “in solidarity with the Palestinian leadership” and spoke then of the hatred of Arabs inside Israel:

I think that the continuing relative calm despite the oppression of the Palestinians has normalized Israelis to this situation and increased their hatred of Arabs.
And I think Netenyahu very intelligently harnessed this. This is probably why the exit polls were off: people are still a bit embarrassed of these views so didn’t want to tell pollsters, but they voted that way.
He said that the same rightwing trends were visible in the U.S. but Israel is worse, and it’s the country he loves. He also commented on South Africa and the importance of doing something to alter Israel’s conduct:

I object to those things in the US, but not nearly as much as I object to the direction Israel is going. If I did, I would leave the country.

And there were periods during the Bush administration where I was coming close to feeling that way…but never nearly as much as I feel this way now with Israel. And I feel much more emotional about Israel than about the US, because honestly I feel much more at home there than in the US.

…they are my people, I feel closer to them than any other in the world including the US, and that is why I take their choices so to my heart.

On BDS I do not see any alternative to make a personal statement about how strongly I feel about this. And I do feel this is as bad as South Africa, and more important to me. I don’t think anything else has worked or will. Will this? I don’t know.

At that time, a commenter named Jesse Wolfson said that many Jews were coming to Weyl’s position:

Glen, thank you for posting this. It is a brave stance to take, one which I think more American Jews are coming to, and one which I hope more will come to as they consider things in the context of our moral heritage.

Weyl later amended his enorsement to make clear that his BDS was consistent with the two-state solution:

I want to clarify, given many have commented on this, that while I feel the only action I can take to show my strong opposition to the increasingly fascistic Israeli regime and support for the cause of the Palestinians who oppose it is to join the BDS movement, I do not support the end aim that some have argued it has of one state or of an unlimited right of return. I support the international consensus and widely Arab-supported peace plan of two states for two people roughly along the lines of 1967, a solution now officially repudiated by the openly racist Netanyahu government which also includes even more extreme elements from Yisrael Beiteinu and Jewish Home. In the call for BDS it is very open to interpretation whether they favor a one-state or a two-state solution; this is why I am comfortable endorsing it. However, I want to be clear on my views. Here is the statement of what they call for:
http://www.bdsmovement.net/call

“These non-violent punitive measures should be maintained until Israel meets its obligation to recognize the Palestinian people’s inalienable right to self-determination and fully complies with the precepts of international law by:

“1. Ending its occupation and colonization of all Arab lands and dismantling the Wall
“2. Recognizing the fundamental rights of the Arab-Palestinian citizens of Israel to full equality; and
“3. Respecting, protecting and promoting the rights of Palestinian refugees to return to their homes and properties as stipulated in UN resolution 194.”
This strikes me as consistent with a two-state solution

(Omar Barghouti, a leader of the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel, has lately said that Weyl and Levitsky’s endorsement is not consistent with the BDS call of 2005, for Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions).

Last May, Weyl posted an article from Haaretz about young Jews who had gone on birthright and ended up endorsing BDS, saying: “This is the journey I followed.” Among the comments that followed he stated:

I am still a Zionist and Israel is still my favorite place in the world

But this government is destroying it

He pointed to the appointment of the “truly totalitarian” Justice Minister, Ayelet Shaked.

She is unbelievable. To have a pro-genocide justice minister in a country founded on the idea of saving a people from national destruction is almost unimaginable. But it is happening.

Marshall Steinbaum then asked Weyl:

I am put off by the unchallenged reference to Israel as “the land of our ancestors.” I am American; my “ancestors” have been American for three or four generations, and before that they were European. One of my dearest and most faithfully Jewish friends is a convert, so Israel isn’t “the land of her ancestors” either, and in fact she would not be considered Jewish there since their Rabbis did not perform her conversion. It bothers me that Judaism has metamorphosed from a religion with diverse adherents from many different ethnic and national backgrounds to an ethnos with an invented common pre-history. Consider the lengths that Israeli archaeology has gone to establish the notion that Israel was a unitary Jewish state in King David’s time and thereafter. Israel now and Israel then are both modern creations.

Weyl responded:

Marshall, to a large extent I agree. My connection to Israel comes from the choice of the modern Jewish people to make it their state. But that choice comes with responsibilities which that polity is systematically refusing to accept

Last year Weyl had seemed to endorse an announcement from the liberal Zionist group J Street. But on June 4, he endorsed a Jewish Voice for Peace video that honored Jews’ desire to move to Palestine but described the Nakba and expulsion of Palestinians as a fundamental cause of the conflict.

Source: mondoweiss.net