Thirty U.S. senators will vote today over whether there really are 5 million Palestinian “refugees” or just around 30,000 — a hot-button issue that has already become the subject of a vigorous international debate involving Israel and its Arab neighbors.

When the Senate Appropriations Committee takes up the fiscal 2013 State Department and foreign operations appropriations bill today, senators will vote on an amendment crafted by Sen. Mark Kirk (R-IL) that would require the State Department to report on how many of the millions of people currently supported by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees (UNRWA) are actually people who were physically displaced from their homes in Israel or the occupied territories, and how many are descendants of original refugees.

The amendment is just a reporting requirement and doesn’t change the way the United States classifies refugees or how it gives more than $250 million annually to UNRWA, about a quarter of the agency’s budget. But a battle is already raging behind the scenes over what it might mean if the State Department started separating original Palestinian refugees from their descendants, and opponents of the Kirk amendment fear the end goal is to cut off U.N. aid to millions of Palestinians.

The international boycott, divestment and sanctions campaign against Israel is a by-product of the second Palestinian intifada and the collapse of the Oslo peace process. It is essentially war by other means – a non-violent, but nevertheless extremist strategy – allied with the practice of suicide bombings and rocket attacks, and intended to coerce Israel into surrendering to Palestinian demands.

The first major manifestations of the BDS occurred in April and May 2002 when academics in Europe and Australia urged a boycott of Israeli academics and academic institutions.

The campaign was formalised in July 2004 when 60 Palestinian academic and other non-government organisations called for an academic and cultural boycott of Israel. It has three key aims: to end the Israeli occupation of lands occupied in the 1967 war, including East Jerusalem, and dismantle the security barrier; to achieve equality for the Arab-Palestinian citizens of Israel; and to support the rights of Palestinian refugees, including their demand for a right of return to Israel as implied by UN Resolution 194.

The leading Palestinian BDS advocate, Omar Barghouti, in his 2011 book BDS: the Global Struggle for Palestinian Rights, opposes a bi-national state based on parity between the two national groups. He returns to the long-dated Palestine Liberation Organisation proposal for a secular democratic state that recognises Jews only as a religious, not national, community.

The BDS campaign has had limited success. Its major drawback is that it offers no strategy for promoting Israeli-Palestinian peace and reconciliation. Rather, it is a negative and one-sided campaign aimed at demonising Israeli Jews irrespective of their political views on the Palestinian question.

The obvious answer to the BDS is a two-state solution. The Israeli government says it wants to negotiate a two-state solution, and is waiting for a suitable Palestinian partner willing to accommodate Israeli security requirements.

Back in the real world, away from Melbourne academia where being loved by the Zionist community is your highest priority, Gideon Levy explains in Haaretz why BDS is vital:

I don’t buy merchandise that comes from the settlements and I never will. To my way of thinking, those are stolen goods and, like any other goods that have been stolen, I try not to buy them. Now perhaps the South Africans and the Danes also will not buy them; meanwhile their governments have merely requested that products from the settlements be marked so as not to deceive their customers. Just as there was no need in the past to label merchandise from the British colonies as British products, so there is no need to mark products from Israel’s colonies as Israeli. Anyone who wants to support the Israeli colonial enterprise can buy them; those who are opposed can boycott them. As simple as that, and as necessary.

Israel, which boycotts Turkey’s beaches and Hamas, should have been the first to understand that. Instead we have heard heart-rending cries and angry rebukes. Not yet to the Danes, who are nice, but to the South Africans, who are less nice in our eyes. The decision was labeled “a step with racist characteristics” by the Foreign Ministry spokesman, referring to the country that waged the most courageous war against racism in the history of mankind.

Yes, the new South Africa can teach Israel a lesson in the war against racism; and yes, Israel can teach the world a lesson in racism. It has once again been proven that Israel’s chutzpah knows no bounds: Israel, of all countries, accuses South Africa, of all countries, of being racist. Is there anything more ridiculous?

It was not by chance that the South African ambassador to Israel, Ismail Coovadia, seemed both amused and embarrassed at a reception for Cameroon’s independence day, when the foreign ministry launched a ridiculous search for him, according to reports, after he failed to respond to its summons for what was described in advance as a rebuke. It is not difficult to imagine how many such reprimands Israeli ambassadors in different parts of the world deserve to be summoned to, if labeling produce from the settlements is a reason for rebuke and accusations of racism on the part of the Israeli government, which is so purely non-racist.

Labeling products from the settlements should have been an obvious move a long time ago, as a guide to the intelligent and involved consumer. A boycott of settlement products should also have taken place a long time ago, as a compass for law-abiding citizens. We are not referring only to a political or moral position; this is a question of upholding international law. A product produced in the settlements is an illegal product, just like the settlements themselves. Just as there is a growing public of consumers in the world who will not buy products made in sweatshops in southeast Asia nor “blood diamonds” from Africa because of their source and the conditions under which they are produced, so it can be anticipated that there are consumers who will boycott products produced in occupied territory through the exploitation of cheap Palestinian manpower whose opportunities to work are in the settlements.

The self-righteous, sanctimonious protests of Israeli factory-owners and farmers in the occupied territories who say they care so much about their Palestinian workers, who claim a boycott could endanger their employees’ sources of income, are a cynical attempt to mislead people. Had the settlements and the occupying forces been removed, and the lands on which these enterprises arose been returned to their owners, they would have had much more dignified sources of income.

A boycott of goods from the settlements is a justified boycott, and there is no other way to define it. Labeling these products is the minimum demand that every government in the world should make, as a service to its citizens.

More than 1,000 Israelis protested this evening (Wednesday) against the African refugees and asylum seekers who have settled in South Tel Aviv in recent years. According to eyewitnesses reports, the crowd grew angry and ultimately violent, following speeches from Knesset Members, including members of the government coalition.

It was one of the most violent protests Tel Aviv has known in recent years. Confrontations were continuing between police and Jewish citizens at around 10:30 p.m. local time.

Dozens of protesters tried to move from the Hatikva neighborhood, where the rally was held, towards Tel Aviv’s Shapira neighborhood, where most African refugees live. They were stopped by police. Protesters attacked a car passing by carrying African immigrants, smashing its windows. Shops associated with the African community were vandalized. [UPDATE: As of midnight, activists in Hatikva are still reporting looting and occasional attacks on Africans.]

In light of increasing violence and harassment in recent days, activists walked refugee childrenin Tel Aviv home from school on Wednesday in order to prevent them from potential attacks.

According to Maariv’s website, the mob chased a man from Eritrea, who took shelter in a storefront and was rescued by police. At least two journalists were attacked. One fled the area and the other, whose notepad was snatched by protesters, was sheltered by the cops.

Earlier, Knesset members spoke at the event. Some blamed government inaction for the “infiltration problem,” while others heaped attacks on human rights organizations helping the refugees. Knesset Member Miri Regev called the refugees “a cancer.” Regev, a member of Netanyahu’s Likud party, said that “leftists” are preventing the state from deporting the refugees back to Africa. Knesset Member Danny Danon (Likud), who also spoke at the event, wrote in a Facebook status tonight that “Israel is at war. An enemy state of infiltrators was established in Israel, and its capital is south Tel Aviv.”

According to one of the eyewitnesses, the most inflammatory speaker was MK Michael Ben-Ari, a former member of Meir Kahane’s racist Kach party, who was a resident of south Tel Aviv himself before moving to a settlement. “The police commissioner wants to give the African jobs,” said Ben Ari, referring to a statement by Chief of Police Yochanan Danino, who urged the government to allow the refugees to work in Israel, in order to prevent the crime rate from rising. “This will bring another 50,000 people here,” said Ben Ari.

This video is shocking:

And here is Yousef Munayyer, executive director of the Jerusalem Fund, in the International Herald Tribune:

I’m a Palestinian who was born in the Israeli town of Lod, and thus I am an Israeli citizen. My wife is not; she is a Palestinian from Nablus in the Israeli-occupied West Bank. Despite our towns being just 30 miles apart, we met almost 6,000 miles away in Massachusetts, where we attended neighboring colleges.

A series of walls, checkpoints, settlements and soldiers fill the 30-mile gap between our hometowns, making it more likely for us to have met on the other side of the planet than in our own backyard.

Never is this reality more profound than on our trips home from our current residence outside Washington.

Tel Aviv’s Ben-Gurion International Airport is on the outskirts of Lod (Lydda in Arabic), but because my wife has a Palestinian ID, she cannot fly there; she is relegated to flying to Amman, Jordan. If we plan a trip together — an enjoyable task for most couples — we must prepare for a logistical nightmare that reminds us of our profound inequality before the law at every turn.

Even if we fly together to Amman, we are forced to take different bridges, two hours apart, and endure often humiliating waiting and questioning just to cross into Israel and the West Bank. The laws conspire to separate us.

If we lived in the region, I would have to forgo my residency, since Israeli law prevents my wife from living with me in Israel. This is to prevent what Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu once referred to as “demographic spillover.” Additional Palestinian babies in Israel are considered “demographic threats” by a state constantly battling to keep a Jewish majority. (Of course, Israelis who marry Americans or any non-Palestinian foreigners are not subjected to this treatment.)

Last week marked Israel’s 64th year of independence; it is also when Palestinians commemorate the Nakba, or “catastrophe,” during which many of Palestine’s native inhabitants were turned into refugees.

In 1948, the Israeli brigade commander Yitzhak Rabin helped expel Lydda’s Palestinian population. Some 19,000 of the town’s 20,000 native Palestinian inhabitants were forced out. My grandparents were among the 1,000 to remain.

They were fortunate to become only internally displaced and not refugees. Years later my grandfather was able to buy back his own home — a cruel absurdity, but a better fate than that imposed on most of his neighbors, who were never permitted to re-establish their lives in their hometowns.

Three decades later, in October 1979, this newspaper reported that Israel barred Rabin from detailing in his memoir what he conceded was the “expulsion” of the “civilian population of Lod and Ramle, numbering some 50,000.” Rabin, who by then had served as prime minister, sought to describe how “it was essential to drive the inhabitants out.”

Two generations after the Nakba, the effect of discriminatory Israeli policies still reverberates. Israel still seeks to safeguard its image by claiming to be a bastion of democracy that treats its Palestinian citizens well, all the while continuing illiberal policies that target this very population. There is a long history of such discrimination.

That is to say, the historical circumstances under which Israel and the Jews exist in the world today render any non anti-Semitic criticism of Israel impossible.

But surely you don’t believe,” they always ask you, “that all criticism of Israel is anti-Semitic?” It is a noticeably patronizing question, of course, in that it is obviously an admonition that all civilized, thinking people must answer “no” or “of course not.” It is an important question, however, because of its real answer, which is unequivocally and unquestionably “yes.”

The idea that all criticism of Israel is anti-Semitic horrifies some, offends and mortifies others, and terrifies still more. The usual reaction to it is something along the lines of “how can you say that?!” Nonetheless, it is exactly what I am saying in regard to Israel and its critics.

…

It may be, of course, that some criticism of Israel will be deemed necessary in spite of the consequences, and the need for a public hearing will overwhelm the need to prevent a victory of sorts for anti-Semitism. If so, however, those doing the criticizing ought to be honest enough to acknowledge the objective consequences of doing so, whatever is said or left unsaid along the way.

So, it must be said again: Yes, all criticism of Israel is anti-Semitic. Yes, it is so because of specific historical circumstances. Yes, it is inescapable. Yes, it holds true however well-intentioned such criticism may be. Yes, it holds as true for Jewish as for non-Jewish critics of Israel.

The world changed in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, former US secretary of state Condoleezza Rice told an audience in Israel Sunday, and so did the relationship between the United States and Israel.

While Jerusalem and Washington were always good friends, after the attacks they became allies “with a common cause in the fight against people who would seek political gain by attacking civilians, parents and children,” she said.

Rice also described the first panicked minutes for the US administration on 9/11, including the moment she raised her voice to president George W. Bush.

The former secretary was speaking before a rapt audience outside Tel Aviv Sunday, during a conference on homeland security technology sponsored by Motorola Solutions. The company maintains a large research facility in Israel, said CEO Greg Brown, telling the audience of nearly 1,000 that most of the leading edge homeland security technology in use in the world today was developed in Israel.

It was 9/11 that drove this point home for the Bush administration, for which Rice was serving as national security adviser at the time. Rice told the audience in riveting detail of the first moments after the attack on the World Trade Center, recalling that she told her staff that the report of the first plane hitting the Trade Center’s North Tower was “a strange accident.” She shared that observation with Bush, who was in Florida at the time, and the president concurred.

Twenty minutes later, when the second plane hit the South Tower, there was no doubt in Rice’s mind that the US was under attack — “the first attack against civilians on US territory since the [Anglo-American] War of 1812.”

With the White House in panic mode, Rice quickly convened a meeting with staffers, and attempted to get in touch with top officials. “I called [secretary of state Colin] Powell but he was in Peru, so I couldn’t reach him. I called [CIA director] George Tenet but he had already been taken to a bunker. I called [secretary of defense] Don Rumsfeld, and they told me that his phone just kept ringing, with no answer.

“Then I saw on TV a plane hit the Pentagon,” Rice continued. “Just then I was able to get in touch with President Bush, and I did something that I had never done before, and would never do again. I raised my voice to the president of the United States. He told me that he was going to get on a plane and come home,” Rice recounted, adding that she practically yelled at Bush, urging him to stay put in Florida. “I told him that we are under attack, and that buildings were being hit all over Washington.”

It was a “moment that mattered,” Rice said, in more ways than one. First, it demonstrated how vulnerable the US really was. The attack “changed the conception of security. We were the world’s most powerful country, but we couldn’t stop a bunch of terrorists from one of the poorest countries in the world, who spent just $300,000 to mount an attack on us.”

Furthermore, the attack and its ramifications — including, Rice said, the possibility that American forces might have to shoot down civilian aircraft if it appeared that other sites, like the White House, might be hit — convinced the US that it significantly needed to ramp up security, but in a way that would have as minimal an effect on the average citizen as possible.

“We realized that Israel, our good friend, was very advanced in this area. Security has been a concern of Israel’s since the day it was born.”

Israel, she added, has successfully developed many technologies and methods to fight terror and enable day-to-day life to go on, and the US turned to Israel, and companies like Motorola Solutions — much of whose technology is developed in Israel — for help.

Rice, who is now a private citizen, was in Israel as a guest of the company. Speaking earlier, Brown said that Motorola Solutions had recruited her in order to benefit from “her guidance in foreign affairs” in developing solutions for homeland security.

Israel, he said, had the manpower, the technology, and “unfortunately” the experience to prove the efficacy of the technology being developed for homeland security purposes.

This trip, Brown added, was Rice’s 25^th to Israel, making Israel one of her most-visited foreign destinations. And there was another significant connection Rice had to Israel, or rather, to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. “Secretary Rice grew up in Denver — seven houses down the street from Prime Minister Netanyahu,” who lived in the town while his father, the recently deceased Benzion Netanyahu, taught at a local university.

More here.

These numbers in Australia reveal the profound disconnect between political elite opinion and the general public:

In the EU countries surveyed, views of Israeli influence have hardened in Spain (74% negative ratings, up 8 points) and in France (65%, up 9 points) — while positive ratings remain low and steady. Negative ratings from the Germans and the British remain very high and stable (69% and 68%, respectively). In other Anglo-Saxon countries, views have worsened in Australia (65% negative ratings, up 7 points) and in Canada (59%, up 7 points).

And what do most Israelis think? A new review in the New York Review of Books by David Shulman, discussing Peter Beinart’s book The Crisis of Zionism, argues this:

How did we reach this point? Why do Israelis cling to a policy so evidently irrational, indeed suicidal? The simple—too simple—answer is: we’re afraid. We’ve been so traumatized, first by our whole history and then by the history of this conflict, that we want at least an illusion of security, like the kind that comes from holding on to a few more rocky hills. Never mind that every inch of Israel is within range of tens of thousands of missiles currently stationed in Lebanon, Syria, and Gaza, not to mention Iran, and that a few more square kilometers make no difference to that threat. We’ll still take over those West Bank hills, and we’ll even put a few rickety caravans on them for anyone crazy enough to want to live there, and we’ll station a few dozen bored soldiers on top of each of them and all around them, and we’ll connect them to the Israeli electricity grid and the water system, and we’ll build a big perimeter fence to enclose the new settlement and to provide land for it to grow on (usually many times the size of the settlement itself). The land happens to belong to Palestinians, but that, clearly, is a consideration of no relevance here.

The fears of Israelis are no doubt real enough, and a generous interpretation of Israeli policy over the last four decades would give them due emphasis. As Ali Abu Awwad, one of the leaders of the new generation of Palestinian nonviolent resisters, often says: “The Jews are not my enemy; their fear is my enemy. We must help them to stop being so afraid—their whole history has terrified them—but I refuse to be a victim of Jewish fear anymore.” He’s right to refuse. But I think the reality we inhabit and have largely created by our own actions has more to do with the story we Israelis tell ourselves about who we are—a powerfully dramatic story that, like many such mythic stories, has a way of perpetuating itself, at continually escalating cost to those who tell it. This story more and more coincides with the primitive Netanyahu narrative I mentioned earlier.

To get away from it, we need to recognize certain primary facts, however uncomfortable they may be for some of us. As has been the case in the past, there are always easily available diversions and distractions that mask the true basis of the ongoing struggle; in Israel today, the main such diversion is called “Iran.” Along with such distractions we have the Israeli refusal to see the present Palestinian leadership in Ramallah for what it is, a more than adequate partner for Israel. Those who don’t agree should be thinking about men such as Marwan Barghouti, still biding his time in an Israeli jail. He’s no saint, to be sure, but he enjoys enormous authority among Palestinians, and he knows very well what is required to strike a deal. There is good reason to believe that he wants such a deal, along the lines that are by now recognized as reasonable by a majority on both sides of the conflict and, indeed, by most other nations. He has recently published a strong statement calling for mass nonviolent resistance in the territories and an end to the farce of a negotiating “process” that has allowed Israel to stall endlessly—and to hide its deeply rooted hostility to the very idea of coming to some form of agreement with the Palestinian national movement.

…

To prolong the occupation is to ensure the emergence of a single polity west of the Jordan; every passing day makes a South African trajectory more likely, including the eventual, necessary progression to a system of one person, one vote. Thus the likelihood must be faced that unless the Occupation ends, there will also, in the not so distant future, be no Jewish state.