If you want evidence that the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement is working, see this speech by Lawrence Summers at a Columbia forum on academic freedom last week. [Text here]. The stakes are high:

I believe that the general failure of American academic leaders to aggressively take on the challenge posed by the Boycott, Divestment, Sanction (BDS) movement represents a consequential abdication of moral responsibility.

Despite his own efforts to stop the divestment movement in 2002 when he was president of Harvard and said that divestment from companies doing business in the occupation was anti-Semitic “in effect if not intent,” Summers says that boycott “pressures have grown sharply in recent years.”

The matter is a moral question because Summers contends that it is anti-Semitic to challenge the “legitimacy of Israel as a state.” He calls the BDS movement a form of anti-Jewish persecution:

American academic community is being implicated in uniquely persecuting the world’s only Jewish state for sins that even on the least sympathetic reading are small compared to those of many other nations.

The mood of the speech is dire; Summers genuinely seems to regard BDS as the second coming of the Nazis.

For several years, at least in Cambridge Massachusetts and perhaps beyond, the divestiture movement was wholly quiescent. I may have persuaded a few people though I doubt very many. More did not want to go near anything where they could be seen as anti-Semitic…. It is my impression that there are more grounds for concern today than at any point since the Second World War. It is a sad irony that Theodor Herzl, the founder of modern Zionism, hoped that the establishment of the state of Israel would bring an end to “anti-Semitism.” On college campuses in the United States vilification of Israel has never been so great.

Throughout his speech, Summers merges vilification of Israel with vilification of Jews. In the following passage, a list of news items, he merges the SodaStream boycott at Harvard with Nazi anti-Semitism.

Harvard’s dining service — in a decision that was apparently not reviewed at any senior level — bowed to pressure from a small group of students to stop purchasing soda dispensers that had been manufactured in occupied parts of the West Bank. Anecdotal reports suggest that swastika graffiti, comparisons between Israel and the Nazis and intimidation of Jewish students has never been so great…

But Summers frames his speech as a criticism of abdications of moral responsibility; and there is not a word about the slaughter in Gaza last summer, not a word about Palestinian conditions under occupation, nothing about the statelessness of 350,000 Palestinians who have the misfortune to live in East Jerusalem, and just a glancing criticism of Israeli “intransigence” on settlements. You would never know that Israel’s actions are causing its crisis in legitimacy, and fueling the BDS movement. How can it be anti-Semitic to focus on Israel when we see Jewish writers (Henry Siegman, Noam Sheizaf, Eva Illouz) saying that Palestinians have no rights in the occupied territories or are living in a form of slavery. A friend writes:

Summers fails to offer his own moral or political statement one way or another, or any way, on the Occupation, Gaza, discriminatory laws in Israel proper, and the anti-democratic laws and bills. He does not deal at all with the subject at hand. Logically, having avoided the issue, he’s just engaged in name calling.

As BDS becomes more effective, this charge, that it is anti-Semitic, is going to become the rallying cry among Israel defenders. Roger Cohen says as much in his new book. Richard Cohen says so in the Washington Post. Richard Cohen takes it a step further into Islamophobia, saying that Arab Muslims are blaming the Jews for “their own helplessness” and unemployment.

Anti-Semitism is the most durable and pliable of all conspiracy theories… Anti-Zionism may be legitimate, but it too often seems like a way of expressing anti-Semitism. Israel’s occupation of the West Bank has always troubled me, but it is governed benevolently compared with the way China oppresses Tibet — and where are those demonstrations?

But anti-Zionism is clearly a legitimate belief. It rests on mainstream evidentiary/philosophical grounds: that Zionism has patently failed to produce a fair system after many decades of application, that societies should not legally privilege one ethnic group over another and seek to segregate and ethnically-cleanse the second-class group, that the Jewish Question should not be resolved by taking other people’s lands. Let’s have the debate without the name-calling.

Update: More on the use of the “new face of anti-Semitism” charge. The foreign ministries of Canada and Israel have signed a memorandum of understanding, in Jerusalem, to work together on public diplomacy. The memo calls for a two-state solution and says the two ministries are: