In Australia and elsewhere, proponents
of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions ('BDS') campaign against Israel
consistently claim that the campaign is about human rights .... When their actions are described by others as "antisemitic",
their standard response is to contend that "everyone who criticises Israel
is always accused of antisemitism".....
Yet time and again, leading BDS figures are exposed for
supporting various neo-Nazi and/or Islamist thinkers because of what those
thinkers say about Jews. As occurred recently with the Free Gaza
Movement's Greta Berlin, these
incidents provoke feigned outrage from some BDS figures and indifference from
others, but never seem to cause much self-reflection.
The degree to which casual antisemitism
has become acceptable in the pro-BDS discourse is probably what led to
Australians for Palestine ('AfP') deciding that this was an appropriate image
to use on their website:
The image accompanied a news report from the Palestinian
Authority's Ma'an news
agency on the Dutch Foreign Ministry's recent recommendation that goods
produced in Israeli settlements be labelled with "product of Israeli
settlement" rather than "made in Israel".
In what may pass as some kind of sick
joke in AfP's circles, they illustrated the report on their website with an
image of oranges labelled with the yellow stars that Jews were forced to wear
under the Nazis to distinguish them from the rest of the population. The stars
have nothing whatsoever to do with Israel, they are pure Holocaust imagery.
While the image's creator may have been likening
the singling-out of Israeli products by BDS activists to the singling-out of
Jews by the Nazis, as AfP are in proponents of BDS, one can only assume that
they viewed this message as positive. Oranges in particular seem to have
resonance with Australian antisemites. In 2011, a Perth man was convicted of racial harassment for
an incident that began when he attended a rally to protest the sale of what
were supposedly Israeli oranges.
AfP is based in Melbourne, which is
also home to the largest population of Holocaust survivors outside of Israel.
This image would be extremely traumatic for the Melbournians who were
themselves forced to wear stars like the ones on the oranges. It could be that
the use of the image was inadvertent, that the AfP web editor put it there
without a second thought.This, however presents little comfort.
The image is sufficiently striking that
it should give any rational person pause. That it felt "normal" for
AfP to use it goes to show how far antisemitism has become normalised in
amongst BDS supporters.
