Overview
Reiss frequently uses his Facebook page to
promote BDS and to
oppose anti-BDS measures. He also signed a
statement arguing that a boycott of Israeli settlements is insufficient, because Israel must be boycotted entirely.
Demonizing Israel and Promoting BDS
In April 2016, Reiss submitted a
personal statement urging the MLA to adopt a
resolution, to which Reiss was a
signatory, that would boycott Israeli academic institutions. In his statement, Reiss accused Israel of engaging in conduct that “smacked of” Nazism.
In his letter, Reiss accused Israel of using the
kidnap and murder of three Israeli teenagers by
Hamas terrorists as an “excuse for more than 50 days of attacks against Gaza, of the theft, towards the end of those attacks, of yet many more acres of Palestinian land, and of the collective punishment of the Palestinian people.”
Reiss argued that the society’s decision “to be affiliated with the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities (!!) ties us all directly to these terrorist and illegal Israeli actions.”
Reiss then wrote that “self-hatred should be the sentiment of those Jews who do identify with what Israel is doing in their name” and called Israel a “pariah nation”. Reiss also claimed that Israel "killed, tortured, robbed, imprisoned and oppressed in countless ways, and continues to kill, torture, rob and imprison" Palestinians.
During the annual MLA meeting in January 2017, MLA’s delegate council
rejected the resolution and instead voted to support
Resolution 2017-1 (2017-1), which urged the MLA to refrain from adopting BDS.
Reiss later released another
personal statement urging MLA members to vote against 2017-1, writing “I can only beg my MLA colleagues to vote NO on this terrible Resolution 2017-1”.
In June of 2017, the MLA
adopted 2017-1 by a 2-1 margin following a full membership vote. Reiss then signed a
statement condemning the MLA’s adoption of the anti-BDS resolution, which it characterized as “support for the Israeli occupation of Palestine.”
On May 24, 2017, Reiss
posted on Facebook that Israel practices “apartheid” and that "those of us who have ANY sense of history at all (sadly deficient in this country) would argue that NOT to criticize it [Israel] is anti-semitic."
On June 23, 2017, in response to a prior statement made by a lawyer who filed a
lawsuit against San Francisco State University (SFSU) for fostering an environment of anti-Semitism on campus, Reiss
commented on Facebook “How sick(ening) can these zionists get?”
Supporting BDS at NYU
In 2015, Reiss was a
signatory to
NYU Out of Occupied Palestine (NOOP), a campus coalition of faculty, students and student organizations that
calls on NYU to divest from companies that “contribute to and profit from the Israeli occupation of Palestine.”
In 2011, Reiss
signed a letter campaign, launched by
Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) at NYU, calling on the TIAA-CREF (Teachers Insurance and Annuity Association, College Retirement Equities Fund) to divest from its holdings in Israel.
BDS
The Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement was founded by Omar Barghouti in 2005 to challenge “international support for Israeli apartheid and settler-colonialism.” BDS is an allegedly “Palestinian-led movement,” although leading BDS activists have admitted [00:01:01] this is not true.
One of the demands of BDS includes [point 3] what is generally known as the “right of return,” a demand discredited as a way to eliminate Israel. Barghouti said the “right of return” is a means to “end Israel’s existence as a Jewish state.”
Barghouti has said that BDS “aims to turn Israel into a pariah state, as South Africa once was.”
In his activism, Barghouti has also said [00:05:55] regarding Israel: “Definitely, most definitely, we oppose a Jewish state in any part of Palestine. No…rational Palestinian, not a sellout Palestinian, will ever accept a Jewish state in Palestine.”
The movement has been linked to numerous terrorist organizations and received a public endorsement from Hamas in 2017.
BDS initiatives include calling on institutions and individuals to divest from Israeli-affiliated companies, promoting academic and cultural boycotts of Israel, and organizing anti-Israel rallies, protests and campaigns.
The movement’s most notable achievement has been the infiltration of university campuses through lobbying for “BDS resolutions.” In these cases, student governments and student groups, backed by their own anti-Israel members and affiliates, have proposed resolutions on some form of boycott of, or divestment from, Israel and Israeli-affiliated entities.
Boycott resolutions, although non-binding, have been passed by student governments on numerous North American campuses.
BDS activity is often aggressive and disruptive. It has been noted that universities that pass BDS resolutions see a marked increase in anti-Semitic incidents on campus. On one campus, when the student government debated a BDS resolution, reports emerged of violent threats against those opposing it.
Social Media and Weblinks
