Clinton working against BDS

Mondoweiss

Election campaigns serve a lot of purposes, and it is increasingly obvious that Israel supporters on whom Hillary Clinton is dependent are using her campaign to put the knife in Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement. You will recall that Bernie Sanders’ loyalists on the Democratic platform committee spoke up for Palestinian rights and even BDS at an early meeting of that body, and Cornel West said the party was “beholden to AIPAC”, the leading Israel lobby group.

West was on to something. Today Jewish Insider reports that an AIPAC board member sees the Clinton campaign as a vehicle to stifle BDS:

Prominent attorney Norm Brownstein told us he was with Hillary Clinton in Denver yesterday where she spoke to him at length about how Israel doesn’t need third party intervention via the U.N. and that she will oppose the BDS movement and any other effort to delegitimize Israel in the international arena.

Brownstein opposed the Iran deal. He is a big financial supporter of Democratic political campaigns.

Meantime, a leading advocate for Hillary Clinton in the African-American community, former South Carolina legislator Bakari Sellers, has published a letter urging the Democratic Party to stick by its 2012 platform language on Israel and Palestine — no reference to occupation or settlements, and Jerusalem is forever the capital of the Jewish state, etc.– and to oppose BDS. The letter is reportedly co-signed by 60 black Democrats.

Excerpts from the letter here. Let’s stick with the status quo:

I believe that the Mideast planks of the previous platform were carefully crafted and have served us well as a party and a country. As Democrats…we would be well served to stick closely to our previous platform language and ensure that any changes…do nothing to undermine the principles that have given such strength and clarity to our previous platforms.

BDS is anti-Semitic.

…Anti-Semitism has been on the rise and it has taken a new form — the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement known as BDS. The BDS movement is an effort to bypass direct negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians and, instead, use economic and political pressure to force unilateral Israeli action on issues that must be resolved through talks.