It was during a debate on the morality of BDS at UCLA pitting professors Saree Makdisi against Judea Pearl(whose son Daniel was murdered in Pakistan), that professor Makdisi revealed the hidden BDS agenda when he let slip these words: ‘What’s wrong with Jews being a minority in Israel?’ Rebuttal from Moroccan-born David Suissa in the Jewish Journal. (With thanks: Sarah)
Judea Pearl
Professor Makdisi (right) based many of his arguments on universal values such as fairness, equality, justice, and so on. Focusing on those values helped him finesse the Achilles Heel of the BDS movement– the fact that they don’t recognize the legitimacy of the Jewish state. Promoting the “right of return” of Palestinian refugees to Israel, for example, means the effective end of the Jewish state, what a panelist on the Pearl side called “national suicide.”
Makdisi took that word — suicide — and ran with it, almost ridiculing it as an example of needless hysterics from the Zionist side. You could see where he was going. What kind of just society would treat the arrival of Palestinians as a national suicide? Sure, there may be a great number of Palestinians who want to return to Israel, but what’s wrong with Arabs and Jews living side by side, in full equality, in the same state and under the same government?
Then, he got carried away and blurted out these words:
“What’s wrong with Jews being a minority?”
There was a gasp among some pro-Israel members of the audience. Pearl himself made a grimace, and commented that minorities are not treated very well in the Middle East.
I have a feeling Makdisi regretted his words as soon as he said them.
Why? Because he’s no fool. He’s a knowledgeable professor, and he surely knows what’s wrong with Jews being a minority in a country of the Middle East.
He knows that, for centuries, Jews in Arab and Muslim countries were treated as second-class citizens, or Dhimmis. He knows that many of those Jews were persecuted and expelled after the birth of Israel in 1948.
He knows that there are 50 Muslim countries in the world, but only one Jewish state.
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