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European Academic Association Bends to the Will of the Anti-Israel BDS Movement
(Forbes) Evan Gerstmann - The European Network for Mental Health Service Evaluation (ENMESH) has announced that it no longer plans to hold its 2021 academic conference in Jerusalem. The organization claims that it is not making a political statement, but it has certainly done so by joining the academic boycott of Israel that is being pushed by the BDS movement. BDS demands the "right of return" of Palestinian refugees, including people who are descendants of the people who left Palestine in the 1940s but are now citizens of other nations. Today this applies to such a large group of people that, if implemented, it would turn Israel into a majority Arab nation. It also applies to descendants of Palestinians who left well before the 1948 war and who left of their own free will. The BDS movement is demanding, in effect, that the Jews turn themselves into a minority in Israel. That would mean that just as the Palestinians gain a homeland, the Jews would lose theirs. Academic boycotts that succumb to BDS pressure only further convince Jewish Israelis that their critics seek nothing less than their destruction. The writer is a professor of political science at Loyola Marymount University in California.