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A Yellow Star for the Jewish State?
(Kyiv Post-Ukraine) Bernard-Henri Levy - All of the recent episodes to delegitimize Israel can be traced to the global Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement, established in 2005 by Palestinian nongovernmental organizations. BDS is supposedly a worldwide civil-society movement embodying respect for law, democracy, and human rights. If that is true, why target the only country in the region that was founded on those values, and that has continued - despite a nearly 70-year state of war - to be broadly faithful to them? Foundations in Qatar (together with Saudi think tanks) provide most of the financing for the BDS movement. In that country, 95% of the labor force consists of Asian non-citizens working in slave-like conditions under the kafala system, which is a close cousin to apartheid. The truth is that the BDS movement is a campaign whose instigators have no aim other than to discriminate against, delegitimize, and vilify an Israel that in their mind never stopped wearing its yellow star. To activists of good faith who may have been taken in by duplicitous representations of the movement, I would say only that there are too many noble causes in need of assistance to allow oneself to be enlisted in a dubious one.