As you look around the globe, what countries’ treatments of their citizens, neighbors, or minorities appall you? Perhaps it’s communist China’s oppressive regime, which forces Uighur Muslims into labor camps and offers bounties on followers of Jesus Christ. Perhaps it’s Iran’s “catalogue of shocking human rights violations, including arbitrary detention, enforced disappearance, torture and other ill-treatment.” Or maybe it’s Turkey’s international belligerence and sponsorship of terrorism. The list of the sins of the dictators, theocrats, and kleptocrats in power around the world is as long as it is disgusting.
Yet, for some, no country deserves condemnation more than Israel. Armchair revolutionaries advocate in support of a movement for boycott, divestment, and sanctions against Israel but are unable to muster any anger against the greatest criminal regimes of this century.
As such, the simplest explanation for the BDS movement’s appeal is anti-Semitism, plain and simple. Proponents don’t like a strong, independent, multicultural Jewish state. Its existence bothers them more than the atrocities committed by the tyrants of Tehran, Iran, the strongman of Ankara, Turkey, or the butcher of Damascus, Syria.
BDS supporters claim that laws prohibiting states from contracting with Israeli boycotters are unconstitutional while simultaneously acknowledging that “none of the anti-boycott bills and laws take away your right to boycott for Palestinian rights or to advocate for such boycotts.” BDS supporters are dishonest, and right now, they’re scared. They are standing upon shifting sands.
Boycotts of Israel by nations are falling. In recent weeks, we have beheld a once-unfathomable progression of peace in the Middle East. The United Arab Emirates and Bahrain are normalizing relations with Israel. Saudi Arabia is permitting Israeli flights to traverse its airspace. And the Arab League flatly rejected Palestinian efforts to condemn its members for making peace with the Jewish state.
Even before this series of events, Israelis came together and overwhelmingly embraced President Trump’s proposal for peace in the region that would guarantee Israeli security, defensible borders, and control over the holy sites they’ve protected for people of all faiths. Simultaneously, it would provide the Palestinians with a clear and unambiguous path to peace, prosperity, and autonomy, should the Palestinian leadership ever choose to end its war.
The future does not belong to those who would destroy the Jewish state, whether by bombs or boycotts. It does not belong to the maximalists. The state of Israel lives, and no Hamas terrorist or BDS activist is going to change that. The future belongs to the blessed peacemakers.
From Abu Dhabi, UAE, and Manama, Bahrain, to Washington, D.C., and Jerusalem, the old taboos, consternations, and resulting false promises are disappearing. They have been replaced with a pragmatic approach focused on peace, reconciliation, and mutual prosperity.
The time has long since passed for those who claim to be supporters of the Palestinian people to cease being a roadblock to peace in the Middle East. They must reject extremism, abandon their disdain for the Jewish state, and embrace the shining vision for peace and prosperity that has been laid before them. They must prioritize the good of the Palestinian people above the ever-shifting Palestinian narrative.
Only when they abandon their all-consuming hatred for the Jewish state will they and everyone in the region benefit, perhaps none more so than the Palestinian people they claim to be supporting.
This is the beginning of the end of BDS.
Pastor John Hagee is the founder and chairman of Christians United for Israel.
