ECAJ welcomes NSW Greens decision to abandon official support for BDS – calls for ‘more mature and measured attitude’
The decision by the NSW Greens to drop their earlier res­ol­u­tions calling for a boycott of Israel is welcome but does not go far enough. Their new res­ol­u­tion still refers to boy­cot­ting Israel as ‘a legit­im­ate tactic’ when events over the last 12 months have demon­strated that the BDS campaign is ulti­mately an attempt to orches­trate across-the-board hatred of all things Israeli. It is anything but legit­im­ate.
The NSW Greens’ new res­ol­u­tion is full of biased state­ments that lack nuance or an under­stand­ing that Israel and Israelis face very real threats to their existence and are entitled to defend them­selves. The NSW Greens’ sanc­ti­mo­ni­ous call on ‘the Israeli state’ (sic) to respect inter­na­tion­al law and human rights norms would be more fairly directed at those who continue to pledge them­selves to Israel’s destruc­tion and thereby per­petu­ate the basic cause of the conflict.
The blinkered one-sidedness of the NSW Greens on the whole issue reflects their current ama­teur­ish­ness and ignorance on foreign policy.
There is also a complete failure to recognise that some state­ments attacking Israel do indeed cross the line into antisemitism, and to reject and condemn such state­ments.
There is tellingly a lack of recog­ni­tion that any just and sus­tain­able peace must be based on the principle of two States for two peoples.
We can only encourage the NSW Greens to take further steps going forward to adopt a more mature and measured attitude towards this issue. I hope they do. I believe we can help them do it.