There are some muffins there if you want . . .

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effort more understandable. But it may also be important to ask, why

is it that so many left Israelis have trouble entering into collaborative
politics with Palestinians on the issue of the boycott, and why is it that
the Palestinian formulations of the boycott do not form the basis for
that joint effort? After all, the BDS call has been in place since 2005;
it is an established and growing movement, and the basic principles
have been worked out. Any Israeli can join that movement, and they
would doubtless find that they would immediately be in greater contact with Palestinians than they otherwise would be. The BDS provides
the most powerful rubric for Israeli-Palestinian cooperative actions.
This is doubtless surprising and paradoxical for some, but it strikes me
as historically true.
Its interesting to me that very often Israelis I speak to say, we
cannot enter into collaboration with the Palestinians because they
dont want to collaborate with us, and we dont blame them. Or:
we would put them in a bad position if we were to invite them to
our conferences. Both of these positions presume the Occupation
as background, but they do not address it directly. Indeed, these
kinds of positions are biding time when there is no time but now to
make ones opposition known. Very often such utterances take on
a position of self-paralyzing guilt, which actually keeps them from
taking active and productive responsibility for opposing the Occupation, making change even more remote. Sometimes it seems to me
that they make boycott politics into a question of moral conscience,
which is different from a political commitment. If it is a moral issue,
then I as an Israeli have a responsibility to speak out for or against,
to sink into self-berating or become self-flagellating in public and
become a moral icon. But these kinds of moral solutions are, I think,
besides the point. They continue to make Israeli identity into the
basis of the political position, which is a kind of tacit nationalism.
Perhaps the point is to oppose the manifest injustice in the name of
broader principles of international law and the opposition to state
violence, the disenfranchisement politically and economically of the
Palestinian people. If you happen to be Israeli, then unwittingly your
position shows that Israelis can and do take positions in favor of justice, and that should not be surprising. But it does not make it an
Israeli position.
But let me return to the question of whether boycott politics undermines collaborative ventures or opens them up. My wager is that the

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