Criticism of Israel Is Not Anti-Semitism

(Community Matters) The Nation: Judith Butler’s Remarks to Brooklyn College on BDS

Boycott Divestment and Sanctions movement is a non-violent movement, the largest Palestinian civic movement.

So the first critical and normative claim that follows is that the state of Israel should be representing the diversity of its own population. Indeed, nearly 25 percent of Israel’s population is not Jewish, and most of those are Palestinian, although some of them are Bedouins and Druze. If Israel is to be considered a democracy, the non-Jewish population deserves equal rights under the law, as do the Mizrachim (Arab Jews) who represent over 30 percent of the population. Presently, there are at least twenty laws that privilege Jews over Arabs within the Israeli legal system.

Judith Butler is a Jewish American post-structuralist philosopher, contributing mostly in the fields of feminist philosophy, queer theory, political philosophy and ethics.