Sheldon Adelson looks to stamp out growing US movement to boycott Israel
The American gambling magnate and major Republican party donor Sheldon Adelson is hosting a closed-door meeting of pro-Israel billionaires and activists at his Las Vegas casino this weekend, to combat the burgeoning movement on US university campuses to boycott the Jewish state.
The gathering comes amid growing Israeli alarm at the rise of the decade-old Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) campaign in the US and Europe which the government in Jerusalem contends is antisemitic. It says the movement is intent on the destruction of the Jewish homeland because, among other things, some of its leaders support the “one-state solution” of combining Israel and the Palestinian territories into a single country with equality for Jewish and Arab citizens.
However, BDS supporters say Adelson’s involvement highlights their cause because he is a vocal supporter of a single state – albeit one in which Israel annexes the occupied territories and denies equal rights to Palestinians who he has derided as “an invented people”.
After years of dismissing the BDS movement as marginal and irrelevant, pro-Israel lobby groups have recently promoted laws against it in the US Congress and state legislatures. They include legislation to block the EU from imposing measures against illegal Jewish settlements in the Palestinian territories.
The issue was also injected into presidential politics last week as a Republican candidate, Ted Cruz, denounced the boycott movement at a dinner with Adelson.
“BDS is premised on a lie and it is antisemitism plain and simple,” he said.
Cruz, like other Republican candidates, is seeking financial backing from Adelson, who poured $150m into the Republicans’ failed effort to get Barack Obama out of the White House in 2012.
Source: www.theguardian.com